But Assange will remain as the publisher of the organization, Mashable reports. He is being replaced by Kristinn Hrafnsson as the new editor in chief. The change is happening because Assange lost his right to use the internet at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London six months ago. In a statement, WikiLeaks explained:

“Due to the extraordinary circumstances where Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been held incommunicado ( . . . ) for six months while arbitrarily detained in the Ecuadorian embassy, Mr. Assange has appointed Kristinn Hrafnsson Editor in Chief of WikiLeaks.”

Assange has been at the embassy for six years where he has been granted asylum. He sought asylum after the Swedish government attempted to extradite him on rape charges–charges he denies. Lately, however, Ecuadorian officials seem to have grown weary of Assange’s antics. This past March, the embassy cut off his access to communication with anyone outside of the embassy because he breached the agreement he had with them not to interfere with other states.

The country’s defense ministry says it will sue Google for not blurring its satellite images of sensitive military sites, reports Reuters. The ministry said it had previously contacted Google with a request to obscure air bases and nuclear power plants in the search giant’s library of satellite imagery, but so far Google has yet to comply.

The defense ministry made the request citing national security. It’s not clear why Google has not honored that request, as it is a standard one for governments to make of the search giant, which in the past had no problem obscuring images of sensitive military sites. We’ve reached out to Google for comment and will update this post if we hear back.

Scientists at the Ruhr-Universitaet in Bochum, Germany, have discovered a way to hide inaudible commands in audio files–commands that, while imperceptible to our ears, can take control over voice assistants. According to the researchers behind the technology, the flaw is in the very way AI is designed.

It’s part of a growing area of research known as “adversarial attacks,” which are designed to confuse deep neural networks–usually visually, as Co.Designhas covered in the past–leaving them potentially vulnerable to attacks by bad-faith actors on the technology and infrastructure in our world that depends on AI to function.

In this case, the system being “attacked” by researchers at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum are personal assistants, like Alexa, Siri, or Cortana. According to Professor Thorsten Holz from the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, their method, called “psychoacoustic hiding,” shows how hackers could manipulate any type of audio wave–from songs and speech to even bird chirping–to include words that only the machine can hear, allowing them to give commands without nearby people noticing. The attack will sound just like a bird’s call to our ears, but a voice assistant would “hear” something very different.

Attacks could be played over an app, for instance, or on a TV commercial or radio program, to hack thousands of people–and potentially make purchases with or steal their private information. “[In] a worst-case scenario, an attacker may be able to take over the entire smart home system, including security cameras or alarm systems,” they write. In an example below, they show how our ears hear one string of text, while the speech recognition system hears “deactivate security camera”:

The hack takes advantage of a trick called the “masking effect.” As researcher Dorothea Kolossa explains in a presentation of their investigation, it’s based on the psychoacoustic model of hearing: When your brain is busy processing a loud sound of a certain frequency, you’re “no longer able to perceive other, quieter sounds at this frequency for a few milliseconds.” That’s where the scientists found they could hide commands to hijack any system, like the automatic speech recognition system Kaldi, which they say is at the heart of Amazon’s assistant.

It’s the same scientific principle that allows MP3s to be compressed: The algorithm judges which sounds you’re going to really hear, eliminating the rest to make the file smaller. Here, however, instead of deleting sounds, hackers can just add other sounds. Unlike human brains, AI like Alexa’s can actually hear and process everything. The way it is trained, using adversarial networks, leaves it wide open for attack because it has been designed to understand any audio command and follow it, no matter if humans hear it or not. You can hear other examples here.

The researchers’ only caveat is that they haven’t tried playing their doctored songs or chirping birds yet–they’ve only fed the device actual audio files. However, they’re totally confident that playing the attacks out loud will have the same effect. “In general, it is possible to hide any transcription in any audio file with a success rate of nearly 100%,” the researchers conclude.

The results are worrying, even if such an attack by a malicious actor hasn’t happened yet. It’s not the first time the security of voice systems has been questioned, either. In June of last year, scientists found they could “whisper” commands to Alexa that were outside of the audible frequency of the human ear. According to the scientists, such attacks are possible thanks to the intrinsic way deep neural networks are trained, since the trickery is designed based on what the system “knows” as well as its blind spots. The same weakness can fool AI-powered computer vision systems into thinking that, for instance, a picture of a stop sign is actually a yield sign.

Amazon and other voice assistant platforms could argue that users can protect themselves right now against this type of attack. You can secure critical Alexa skills like voice-activated shopping, access to banks or financial institutions, and opening your house’s door by requiring the use of a PIN. However, this PIN setting is off by default. Likewise, Alexa’s blue ring could alert you to the fact that something’s up. But who’s looking at their Echo at every second?

An Amazon spokesperson told Co.Design that they take security issues seriously, and that the company is “reviewing the findings by the researchers.” Another way to look at this problem? Whenever possible–and unfortunately, it’s not always possible–don’t use unsecured smart speakers for sensitive information until they deliver on the promise of a secure and safe user experience.

When Angelique Brunner moved to the nation’s capital two decades ago, she was shocked to find neighborhoods with no stores, no services, and burned-out buildings.

“I started asking around about what is going on here, people told me it was the riots,” she tells Fast Company. “I said, ‘Oh, what riots?’ They said, ‘The Martin Luther King riots.’ I said, ‘The riots were in 1968. So, this is why D.C. doesn’t have grocery stores, and it’s giving away houses for a dollar?'”

The local city government was, in fact, selling off long-abandoned homes for a buck to developers who had the money to rebuild. Some of Washington’s once vibrant black neighborhoods never quite recovered from the unrest in the days following the assassination of the civil rights leader and the subsequent departure of the middle class.

Brunner was stunned and, armed with her degrees in public policy from Brown and Princeton, started learning the ropes in venture capital and then real estate development—determined to make a difference.

And she is making a difference, bringing jobs, homes, and new business to once blighted streets.

As president of EB5 Capital, which she founded a decade ago, Brunner is now one of the driving forces in the revitalization of D.C., leveraging a controversial program that puts rich foreign investors on a path to citizenship in return for their investment dollars.

Founding her own company

The road to founding he own firm was paved during those first years, initially at a VC firm. “I  was the only African American female from New York to Atlanta that was in venture capital.” She later moved to Fannie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association), where she became an expert in community investing.

Related:Kushner co-ownership clouds leasing of Brooklyn’s iconic Watchtower Building

“Laypeople might assume that urban areas struggle to get development dollars because no one wants to build there. I learned through the late 1990s and early 2000s that there has always been interest, just not the financing needed to actually execute,” she says.

It was during this time that she became familiar with the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program and saw an opportunity to bring development dollars to neighborhoods that others did not want to touch. So with the gap in money needed persisting to complete urban projects, and the scars from the riots still showing, she founded EB5 Capital.

“I felt motivated to address this, which is why my second project ever was a grocery store on 7th Street in Northwest D.C. that also had an affordable senior housing component,” she says.

Since then, Brunner has helped connect foreign investors with several major D.C. gems, including City Market at O Street, bringing new residential and commercial life to a once dilapidated but beloved historic city site. Brunner is also behind D.C.’s Columbia Place development, bringing two new Marriott hotels to the downtown convention center area.

Jobs creator

Brunner sees her mission as twofold: Rebuilding the capital’s neighborhoods and bringing new jobs to people who desperately need them. And she is an unabashed fan of the EB-5 program, which is up for renewal—and reform—in U.S. Congress. Job creation is at the core of the program, which was founded in 1990 and is administered by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). It offers foreign investors green cards in return for job-creating investments in domestic development projects.

Related:How Cambridge Analytica fueled a shady global passport bonanza

“People are willing to invest in the United States for an expedited visa process. The only hitch is that you have to create jobs with the money they invest,” she says—basically 10 for every $500,000.

“We are focused on job creation, but livable cities require jobs and affordable housing,” Brunner explains. Gentrification, like the luxury apartments that now make up the O Street Market, is necessary, but there are ways to mitigate the displacement that sometimes follows.

“First, as a financier of multifamily housing developments, we are able to advocate for higher than required moderate- and low-income housing set-asides,” she says. “We work with a particularly sensitive developers committed to the mixed-income fabric of our neighborhoods.”

EB5 Capital’s latest project in Washington, D.C., has 14% of its rental units set aside as affordable housing–the District of Columbia’s inclusionary zoning program only requires between 8% and 10%.

The company also focuses on bringing living-wage employment opportunities to areas that need them. “Be it working in the construction trades or an entry-level position at one of our hotel projects, I believe jobs that present meaningful advancement opportunities, located in the areas that are being developed, are very important to strengthening the fabric of a mixed-income community,” Brunner adds.

“You can actually have financial gains in a neighborhood that don’t necessarily change the racial fabric of a neighborhood initially. To me, the only way to address the addition of economic opportunity is to consciously create mixed-income neighborhoods.”

“We’re not a manufacturing city. We’re not a place where we can easily absorb a non-educated labor population. We struggle with that, and so we have to bring retail, and we have to bring the jobs into those neighborhoods,” she says.

Preserving EB-5

EB5 Capital is now worth $500 million and has 35 employees with 12 nationalities who speak 16 different languages, and have visited more than 90 countries looking for investors. The  company’s portfolio also expands to cities like L.A., New York, and Nashville.

Brunner and her firm have an unblemished history with the USCIS, but the EB-5 program in recent years has come under increased scrutiny.  “I think our company has used the program effectively and in a way that creates a cascade of benefits for their respective cities, including new jobs, new housing, and new business opportunities,” she says.

Still, critics have called the sale of citizenship to high bidders unseemly. The AP reported that in return for nearly $8 billion in investment, the USCIS has approved 40,000 visas for Chinese nationals and their families.  A company owned by Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, came under SEC scrutiny earlier this year for its dependency on EB-5.

And just this week, more than a dozen Chinese investors in Royal Palm Beach in South Florida sued, claiming they were defrauded by American developers.

Brunner, who has testified before Congress on reforming the program, says she supports efforts to tighten accountability.

“The EB-5 industry has been advocating for new legislation for the program, and I am in full support of strong integrity measures to ensure it’s being used as intended and in a lawful manner,” she says.

I think we can all agree that gender inequality is pretty crappy. But I never thought I’d see a brand choose to illustrate that sentiment through stories about pooping. Poo-Pourri’s new campaign #GirlsDoPoop does just that with a series of hilarious real stories, breaking down the pop cultural tradition of the poop joke historically being told from the male perspective. As company founder and CEO Suzy Batiz told me, “It’s really an equality issue. Men talk about poop all the time, and good for them. But women don’t feel like we can do that for whatever reason. So we felt inspired by that, and the result was this campaign.” Onward!

Poo-Pourri “The Elevator Sh*t”

What: A new campaign about poop equality from the toilet deodorizer brand.

Who: Poo-Pourri

Why we care: I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: By acknowledging poop equality, maybe men can see women as three-dimensional, full-fledged human beings . . . who may, on occasion, shit themselves in an elevator.

Burger King “Chicken Sandwich Crossing Encouraged”

What: A hilarious spoof of the creativity of artificial intelligence in advertising.

Who: Burger King, David Miami

Why we care: I mean, “Tastes like bird.” It may be the greatest fast food tagline ever written. And tying some seriously funny ads to the hype around AI and machine learning is a double shot of culturally relevant hilarity.

Everytown for Gun Safety “Not One More: Places”

What: A new PSA campaign running in 15 key House districts this week urging Americans to vote for gun safety.

Who: Everytown for Gun Safety, Wieden + Kennedy

Why we care: It’s not telling us anything new, but the strength is in how it tells this story. Showing all of these locations, one after another after another, that should be places of fun, worship, learning, trust, all tainted by the horror of gun violence, is devastating and effective.

Steak-Umm “Twitter rant”

why are so many young people flocking to brands on social media for love, guidance, and attention? I'll tell you why. they're isolated from real communities, working service jobs they hate while barely making ends meat, and are living w/ unchecked personal/mental health problems

— Steak-umm (@steak_umm) September 26, 2018

What: A Twitter thread that is surprisingly earnest, insightful, self-aware, yet still funny, about modern life. From a frozen meat brand.

Who: Steak-Umm, Allebach Communications

Why we care: Unraveling the challenges of modern society while still managing to fit in plenty of meat and beef puns is a golden achievement in copywriting. Do yourself a favor (flavor?) and read the whole thread.

C.P. Group “Gratitude”

What: A tearjerker of a spot from Thailand corporation C.P. Group.

Who: C.P. Group, Ogilvy Thailand

Why we care: Seeing as it’s not obviously selling anything here, this is one of those ads meant to endear trust. C.P. Group is a giant company with businesses and brands spanning agriculture, food, retail, telecom and more, including licensing in Thailand for brands like 7-Eleven, Heineken, and Honda. And here it dutifully continues the Thai advertising tradition of making people cry at work.

The Problem

When Renee Wang’s three-year-old podcast listening platform, Castbox, began producing original audio content last year, the former Google advertising executive was introduced to every podcaster’s struggle: Ad revenue alone usually isn’t enough to fund a show, even if it has millions of listeners. She set out to develop a seamless way for subscribers to fund their favorite shows, while rewarding them for their loyalty.

The Epiphany

Wang considered using a service like PayPal to let consumers back their favorite creators directly, but she decided that the process of leaving the app and going through a middleman would be too cumbersome for users and would undercut the podcasters’ profits. But blockchain, she realized, is decentralized, meaning users could send and receive money directly in the app, without linking out or going through a third-party service.

The Execution

In June, Wang equipped Castbox, which now produces 25 original shows, including the popular true-crime documentary spoof This Sounds Serious, with a custom-built payment system that allows consumers to purchase a premium subscription without leaving the app. She also hired four engineers to expand the payment system’s abilities by creating a blockchain ecosystem called Contentbox that’s now in beta.

The Result

With Contentbox, users are able to send and receive tokens from their in-app digital wallet. Those coins, which they can purchase and, eventually, earn by consuming and sharing podcasts, can be donated to participating creators (who, in turn, can exchange coins for cash). “I want to incentivize and compensate creators who make great content, whether that’s podcasts, music, or videos,” says Wang. She hopes to eventually partner with digital media companies so that they can use Contentbox’s payment system on their own platforms.

Castbox Podcast Originals

Don’t Mess With Christine Sydelko: A weekly pop-culture talk show hosted by the viral video star

Livin’ Large With Mark Dohner: YouTuber Dohner interviews people about what it takes to make it in Hollywood

Be.Scared: Weekly horror stories—some fictional, some not—from contemporary writers

America’s housing crisis reaches across income levels and geography, but the further one goes down the socioeconomic ladder, the more dire it becomes: Currently, the U.S. is short 7.2 million homes for the 11 million residents living on very low incomes. The affordable rental market is so constrained that 71% of low-income families spend over half their income on rent. Absent any meaningful federal investment in affordable housing in the last few decades, local governments, nonprofits, and in some cases, private companies, have tried to step up, but still, the affordable housing gap persists.

The solution to this crisis–like many of America’s crises–is more and better funding toward affordable housing construction and preservation, but to date, leaders have lacked the political will to demand it, says Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is breaking this pattern. On September 26, she introduced the American Housing and Economic Mobility Act of 2018 to call for a $450 billion investment, spread out over the next decade, toward building and preserving affordable housing, and boosting rates of homeownership among low-income people. “Senator Warren’s bill would reverse decades of chronic underinvestment by the federal government,” Yentel tells Fast Company.

Warren’s proposal would funnel $45 billion every year into the Housing Trust Fund, a new federal program, rolled out in 2016, that provides block grants to states to build, rehabilitate, or preserve affordable housing for people living on incomes less than 30% of the area median income, or below the federal poverty line. While the existence of the HTF is cause for optimism, its funding is currently anemic: In 2018, it made just $266.8 million available to states. As the NLIHC reports, bringing the supply of affordable housing up to speed with demand is a project that will require billions of dollars in federal investment.

Which is why Warren’s bill is so promising: Not only would it provide substantial financial resources for ending the housing crisis, but it also includes measures designed to break down discrimination in the housing market, and the entrenched racism that has prevented many people of color from accessing homeownership resources.

Part of the funding through the Housing and Economic Mobility Act, for instance, would be made available to local governments in the form of competitive grants, for which cities could apply. In order to qualify for the funding, however, communities have to prove that they will reconfigure their zoning laws–one of the most pervasive ways of keeping people of color and low-income residents locked out of more prosperous neighborhoods–to promote equity and fairer distribution of resources. These grants could be spent on parks or public transit, proving the point that investment in housing must also extend to investment in community health overall.

On the equity front, Warren is calling for a down payment assistance program to help primarily low-income people of color purchase property, reversing decades of racism and redlining that have kept this population locked out of the benefits of homeownership. Among black Americans, homeownership rates hover around 41%, around 25 percentage points behind that of white Americans. On Native American tribal lands, where the housing crisis is perhaps most acute and overlooked, Warren proposes a $2 billion investment to build or rehabilitate 200,000 homes. The bill also would expand the Fair Housing Act of 1968 to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, marital status, gender identity, and income source.

To raise the necessary funding, Warren proposes raising the federal estate tax (often called the “death tax”) back to pre-recession levels. In 2009, any estate value above $3.5 million was taxed at a rate of 45% when it was passed down; the following year, the threshold was raised to $5 million, with anything in excess taxed at 35%. Reverting back to 2009 levels–and adding steeper taxes on estates valued over $10 million–will cover the entire cost of the program without impacting jobs or the economy, according to an independent analysis by Moody’s Analytics, which notes that “the wealthy households that will pay more in estate taxes have substantial financial resources and will not significantly change their spending and saving behavior.” And it would produce benefits for lower-income Americans, and people across the socioeconomic spectrum: Moody’s estimates that Warren’s bill could spur the creation of at least 3.2 million deeply affordable homes, and lower rents across the board by 10%.

Warren’s bill has secured the backing of the NLIHC, Matthew Desmond, the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book Evicted and founder of Just Shelter, The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the National LGBTQ Task Force Action Fund, and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, among others.

Along with a bill she introduced last month calling for greater corporate accountability and a fundamental restructuring of large companies so that wealth will be spread more evenly across executives and workers, Warren has not been hesitating to advance more progressive policies in Congress. (This, or course, has helped fuel rumors that she’s considering a presidential run in 2020, which she has not confirmed). While the Housing and Economic Mobility Act, with its heavy lean on an elevated estate tax, stands no chance of passing through the current Republican-controlled Congress, it may if the Democrats take the House (and maybe the Senate) in November. What’s incontrovertible is that the housing crisis is already at a breaking point, and this bill represents a necessarily wide-ranging and potentially viable solution to it.

In India, the torrential rains come once a year and can cause catastrophic flooding. And these floods are only going to get worse: A 2017 study found that the monsoon in northern and central India has steadily strengthened over the last 15 years, at least partially due to rising land and sea temperatures. At one metal parts factory in Mumbai, located near a body of water that forms during the rainy season, the architect Sameep Padora has designed a clever solution for when the monsoon flows and the area floods.

“This low-lying part of our site is hence a natural receiver for groundwater levels that rise up during the monsoons,” Padora tells Co.Design in an email. “We decided to retain this natural seasonal occurrence rather than keep the water out.”

The depression, nicknamed the “Concrete Void,” can hold 185,000 gallons of water, and, if it continues to overflow, the water will be routed into storm drains. A concrete passageway enables workers to cross the void with ease.

But the best part about Padora’s design is that it creates a functional, recreational space when it’s not pouring outside. The different levels act almost like an amphitheater, where employees can socialize and take breaks. Structurally, the void’s layered steps are reminiscent of India’s historic stepwells, subterranean temples built into the rock.

As storms get more intense with the impact of climate change, this kind of resilient architecture will be far more effective than simply building a wall to keep the water out.

With the tightening labor pool, companies are taking an all-hands-on-deck approach to recruiting and retaining good employees. But, ignorance or carelessness might be undermining your efforts with women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and others.

Subtle bias and “microaggressions”–brief and commonplace verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities often directed at members of marginalized groups–can create problems in the workplace, says diversity consultant Gina C. Torino, PhD, associate professor of psychology at Empire State College in Staten Island, New York, and author of Microaggression Theory: Influence and Implications. This type of bias may be unintentional, but it’s no less damaging.

Understanding the Scope

The workplace is not immune to the biases that exist in society, so it’s important to consider the issue in a larger context, says Faye Wattleton, the first woman and first African-American president of Planned Parenthood who now co-leads the corporate governance practice at Buffkin/Baker, a New York City-based executive search firm. Because people come to the workplace with the experience of dealing with these behaviors in everyday life, facing them in the workplace, too, where their livelihoods may be affected, is part of bias’s cumulative negative impact. You can’t simply isolate this as a workplace issue, she says. And because the perpetrator of the bias is often unaware that they’re acting in such a way, the person on the receiving end is left with few ways to address it without seeming like they’re overreacting.

“The psychologists say that these subtleties are more damaging because you can’t encounter them directly. You can’t confront them directly so that there’s a way of resolving the feeling that you have that may be internalized and may affect the way you function as a human being or as you function in the workplace,” she says.

The Consequences of Bias

But just because microaggressions can be vague doesn’t mean that they don’t have real costs, says former Equal Employment Opportunity Commission attorney Stephen M. Paskoff, CEO and president of Atlanta-based ELI, Inc., a training company that addresses bad behavior in the workplace. When people feel excluded, they’re less likely to speak up. Microaggressions can affect everything from the ability to listen to communication about safety issues or other problems. When some employees avoid others, either because of bias or not wanting to deal with biased behavior, productivity takes a hit, too.

“One of the questions I’ll ask groups is, ‘Who does their best work when they’re ignored, embarrassed, not listened to, made fun of, or one way or another treated differently in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable in their team or in their group?’ Those are all variations of what you might call microaggressions or could be,” Paskoff says. “We’ve groomed people to focus on the blatant and the illegal, not recognizing that this other stuff can be just as malignant in a sense.”

The immediate response to a microaggression takes up cognitive and emotional energy that could be used in the person’s work. “Dealing with that microaggression can really take up a person’s resources, because that person has to stop and think, saying, ‘Is this a slight? Did that person actually sit far away from me in the meeting because I’m black or because they just wanted to sit by that person?’ Or, ‘Did they not include me in going out to the bar after work because I’m a woman or because they already knew each other beforehand?'” Torino says. Ultimately, the person experiencing biased behavior toward them may feel excluded, unwelcome, or worse.

And that’s a problem. A 2016 survey by Ultimate Software found that 6 in 10 employees would quit a job immediately if they felt emotionally unsafe, so off-handed comments and biased behavior could affect also your turnover.

Overcoming Subtle Bias

At London-based management consulting firm EY, to help foster a sense of belonging, “we ask our leaders to reflect on with each other: Is a decision somebody’s making a preference, a tradition, or a requirement [called PTR]?And so that it can help surface the thoughts and biases that might be underlying certain processes,” says Karyn Twaronite, global diversity and inclusiveness officer. “It’s also a way to call a colleague out without calling them out.”

Here’s how it works: If she sees a colleague considering hiring someone exactly like them, she can say, “Did you pick this person because it’s your personal preference, or because of likeness and sameness, which is the ease of doing business, which is a very real thing, or is it because the person that traditionally has been in this role always looked and acted this way, and had the same skill set, or are you selecting them because they meet the requirements for the future?” Twaronite says the exercise gets people to think beyond their preferences and consider a broader picture.

Mentoring can be another important step toward fostering understanding and decreasing bias, says Kyle Emich, PhD, an assistant professor of management at the University of Delaware who has coauthored research on how women are perceived in the workplace. But, to be most effective, the mentor and protégé should be different. “What you find a lot of time is that if you look at the entrance, not in every field, but a lot of the time, minorities and women make up about the same percentage as white men at an entry level,” he says. “The problem is getting people to those leadership positions. They trickle out throughout the way.”

The experts agree that one of the most powerful actions individuals and companies can take to reduce subtle forms of bias and microaggressions is to foster awareness of the behavior. When you create an environment where people can learn about bad behavior they don’t even realize they’re exhibiting, you foster communication instead of defensiveness and resentment.

“I think it’s much easier to grapple with this difficult phenomenon when the corporation attacks it from a corporate perspective as we do sexual harassment–a consciousness-building about what can be said and what is said that often is perceived as harassment [when] people may not have encountered that kind of knowledge or that kind of perception,” Wattleton says. And when awareness is raised in the workplace, it may just have a positive benefit in other areas of society, too.

Language is freedom. One of the more insidious aspects of the dystopian hellscape glimpsed in Orwell’s 1984 is the limited Newspeak with which its residents must express themselves. Frankly, it’s a double-plus bad way of life. As copies of 1984 started flying off digital shelves at a rapid clip after the 2016 election, Dictionary.com began perfecting its approach to celebrating–and illuminating–the way we use words.

The website’s Twitter account now goes far beyond vocabulary-building blasts, seizing instead on words embedded in the public discourse–and expounding on not only their meaning but the intent behind them.

When the words “monkey this up” are used to refer to electing a man of color, that would be a blatant … https://t.co/SaLDWdlUgFhttps://t.co/r9yNl2DF4P

— Dictionary.com (@Dictionarycom) August 29, 2018

Register: To enroll on the voting rolls.

Also register: To make some impression. #RegisterToVotehttps://t.co/x1Fq0ql7jp

— Dictionary.com (@Dictionarycom) September 25, 2018

The social team at Dictionary.com didn’t plan out an elaborate strategy to becoming more socially woke. They merely started applying their voice to the trending topics of each day, and their voice came out sounding this way.

“Our decision to become more active on Twitter was a direct response to how our users were engaging with us,” says Lauren Sliter, who oversees the site’s marketing and content strategy. “We saw a need for clarification on language that we hadn’t seen before, and we wanted to be involved in those conversations.”

The site had a long relationship with words corresponding to current events. It’s how they’ve traditionally narrowed down the Word of the Year choices. (“Complicit” took the crown in 2017, to give you an idea.) It wasn’t until the 2016 presidential debates, though, that the team really registered the level of interest on social media in the words that were trending because of political discourse and other current events. Since then, they’ve purposely adapted their social strategy to include words and meanings that have taken hold for whatever reason, whether it’s from a political gaffe, Beyoncé using the word “FUPA,” or weird Twitter fads like the “In this house, we . . .” meme.

┏┓
┃┃╱╲ In this
┃╱╱╲╲ house,
╱╱╭╮╲╲ we
▔▏┗┛▕▔ recognize
╱▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔╲
gender neutral pronouns.
╱╱┏┳┓╭╮┏┳┓ ╲╲
▔▏┗┻┛┃┃┗┻┛▕▔

— Dictionary.com (@Dictionarycom) August 15, 2018

“We aim to provide [Twitterers] context and a deeper understanding of the words they see being used by celebrities, by news organizations, even by their own friends and family,” says social media editor Jeanne Sager, who came on board to manage the account in April 2017 and now does the majority of the tweeting.

Commenting on current events helps Dictionary.com be more service-y, explaining suddenly ubiquitous words like “incel” to users who may have only just heard them that day. Other times, Dictionary.com might define a word just to lightly clown on Donald Trump for seeming to not quite know it, as they did when he fumbled with the expression “con job” during a rambling press conference on Wednesday. Perhaps most interesting, though, is Dictionary.com’s way of slyly commenting on the issues of the day without actually offering a comment–just a carefully selected definition. They defined the word “stormed,” for instance, when it was used in an unflattering way to describe Monica Lewinsky’s actions in a widely circulated Time magazine article. (The subsequent outrage eventually led Time to change “stormed” to “walked.”

Stormed = Rushed angrily.

E.g. It's been reported that Monica Lewinsky "stormed" offstage after saying she was sorry she wouldn't be able to continue answering questions. https://t.co/Lmw6koF8ihhttps://t.co/NInrDJUbL1

— Dictionary.com (@Dictionarycom) September 4, 2018

Dear CNN, Startling means surprising or astonishing.https://t.co/xR0ElH55eIhttps://t.co/gk0bLoJGSE

— Dictionary.com (@Dictionarycom) August 24, 2018

“I think the words we choose to use say a lot about us,” Sliter says. “They reveal the biases we all have. And so, as a dictionary, it’s important that we not only share the literal meanings of words, but also the connotations word choice can have. Words have meanings beyond their literal definitions, and where we have that information, it is our responsibility to share it.”

Dictionary.com has also been known to tweet out a definition that isn’t one of the keywords used in a trending story, but rather a one-word takeaway the team wants to impart on its followers. When actor Geoffrey Owens was photographed while working at his side job at Trader Joe’s earlier this month, and some news outlets seemed to shame him by breathlessly reporting that fact, Dictionary.com tweeted out the definition of “classicism.”

Classism. A discriminatory attitude based on distinctions made between social or economic classes.https://t.co/brlpzRYrIxhttps://t.co/sK2arkTup6

— Dictionary.com (@Dictionarycom) September 1, 2018

“How we talk about an issue in the news may not come down to whether or not a word has been used correctly but what words we can use to talk about a situation,” Sager says. “When it came to reporting on Geoffrey Owens, people were talking about how to describe what had happened to him. We defined “classism” to provide a window into a new word that some people might apply to the situation.”

There’s no rigid protocol for deciding which news pegs to use, or which way to comment on it. Sager and Sliter aim for news stories that have a true tie to language, whether it’s a word being used incorrectly or in an interesting way, or perhaps people searching for the right words to use to keep the conversation going.

Almost no topic is off limits. Generally, the only discussions they make a point to stay away from are the ones where being too prescriptive about language would seem inappropriate to the situation.

“During tragedy, especially soon after tragedy, people should use whichever words help them cope and heal,” Sliter says. “It is not a time for us to be inserting our own words, regardless of how related they may be.”

Other than that minor guideline, the team follows its muse wherever it might lead them, whether it’s underscoring an important political point or chiming on a viral tweet of the week.

For the sake of the children, we hold that definition #4 is where the little piggy might have headed. #WeHoldOutHopehttps://t.co/2eFAieesEphttps://t.co/9mW4nISsgP

— Dictionary.com (@Dictionarycom) August 23, 2018

Occasionally, people tweet complaints at the account for being “too political,” an inevitable outcome of saying just about anything that acknowledges current events in these polarized times. There’s never been any real uproar, though; no calls for Dictionary.com to get “cancelled.” Sager and Sliter have waded this far into topical waters without ever having to delete a tweet for any reason other than typos.

Since things don’t look to be getting any less confusing anytime soon, you can expect Dictionary.com’s woke, joke-making streak to continue. Is there a word for when a public service is simultaneously informative, important, plugged in, and just a little bit silly? If there were, there’s at least one outlet that would find a fun way to define it.

Americans do a lot to celebrate and show appreciation to veterans after they return home from active service. However, the picture for them returning to employment after leaving the service has typically not been nearly as rosy. With the economy up, the jobless rate for all veterans declined from 4.3% to 3.7 % in 2017 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, that still leaves a lot of unemployed veterans. Many Americans outside of the military are unaware of the many skills and experiences that veterans acquire while in service. Misconceptions about what sort of skills one picks up while in military service abound, and some employers mistakenly believe that the skills that veterans have are not transferable outside of the military world. Adam G. Gonzales, a service veteran, started Silent Professionals to help connect veterans with employers as well as to educate employers on what veterans have to offer.

Here are 9 reasons for organizations to hire veterans:

Leadership and “Followership” Capabilities

From the time they enter service, veterans have been groomed to both become good followers and be ready to take on leadership responsibilities. In field situations, military people have to be ready, willing, and able to make quick decisions in the face of physical dangers and in ever-changing and uncertain situations–vital skills which easily translate into a fast-changing work environment.

Teamwork Ability

Military veterans are the ultimate team players, as this is something ingrained in them from the first moment they enter service. They are accustomed to thinking in terms of what is best for their team and what they can do to strengthen and improve the teams they are part of. As most of what is accomplished in the working world is based on working as part of a team, veterans are already well ahead of the learning curve when it comes to teaching teamwork.

Ability to Perform Under Pressure

Military personnel are trained and expected to be able to perform under pressure, deadlines, and trying conditions, all while judging priorities and accomplishing goals. Staying with a goal until it is completed is all part of the military’s rigorous training. This is a quality that is highly useful in any job requiring tight deadlines, and a skill that resonates well with employers.

Experience Working Within a Diverse Group

Veterans have served alongside people of various backgrounds, races, and ethnic origins. In order to accomplish their goals and missions, they have learned to trust and rely upon one another regardless of their backgrounds. They fit in and work well within a workplace that is becoming increasingly more diverse.

Goal Focus and Orientation

Veterans are accustomed to making timely assessments of situations and coming up with plans of action. After actions are taken, they typically debrief, look at what worked and what didn’t, and come up with ways to improve in the future. This ongoing form of focused improvement is what all successful organizations strive for. Veterans already have the mind-set and ability to carry this out.

Persistence and Determination

The ability to stick with a problem or situation for a period of time when no immediate solution appears at hand is an attribute that is taught in the military. This requires the ability to endure, change direction when necessary, and stick with a course of action over the long haul until results are achieved. The ability to forego immediate gratification for long-term benefit is an attribute that veterans accept and are used to.

Attention to Detail

While learning to always be aware of the big picture, the military teaches the importance of paying attention to detail–an attribute that can be difficult to find in the general population and can pay big dividends for organizations that require people who are detail-oriented.

Conscious and Safety Orientation

Safety is a major concern for all organizations, and the military ensures that safety is constantly focused on and regulations adhered to. Following rules and regulations has become second nature to veterans, and they easily adapt to and become highly aware of any dangers inherent in their new environment.

Adaptable, Coachable, and Trainable

The military environment is one in which learning, adapting to an environment in which situations change rapidly, and the ability to improvise is a constant necessity. Members are expected to be constantly learning and prove their ability to take initiative and be accountable for their actions.

This article was republished with permission from CollectorsWeekly.com. Read the original here. 

If you want to understand San Francisco’s self-inflicted housing crisis, look no further than the city’s very first zoning law, commonly known as the Cubic Air Ordinance, which set a disturbing standard for the city’s eventual missteps. Proposed in 1870, during a time of rampant real-estate speculation in a boomtown renowned for its lawlessness, the new law required boarding houses to offer a minimum amount of space per tenant. Officials claimed this would promote safer housing and improve residents’ quality of life, a noble cause for government intervention.

But the law’s true purpose—to criminalize Chinese renters and landlords so their jobs and living space could be reclaimed for San Francisco’s white residents—set an ominous precedent. With the Cubic Air Ordinance, city leaders laid the groundwork for 150 years of exclusionary zoning or land-use policy designed to protect the status quo, rather than responsibly manage growth. Often fueled by racism and greed, the dark history of San Francisco urban planning is a story that’s still being told, its latest chapter being the city’s current housing crisis.

For visitors and locals alike, part of San Francisco’s allure is its seeming incongruity: Victorian houses perch on hills near glass skyscrapers, antique cable cars clank up the same streets where new technologies debut. Few realize how profoundly the city’s physical form has been shaped by its planning department, whose best intentions have been overshadowed by efforts to appease the city’s wealthy, well-connected homeowners.

“It is no accident that land is called real estate,” Kenneth T. Jackson wrote in his influential 1985 book Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanziation of the United States. “For many centuries, ownership of land has been not just the main but often the only basis of power.” This power was on full display earlier this year, during the debate over California Senate Bill 827, which would have “upzoned” or raised height limits near frequent transit stops. Many neighborhood groups, city councils, and politicians decried the loss of “local control”— “local” being a positive, vaguely artisanal-sounding buzzword used by city progressives who derided the bill as a “one-size-fits-all” solution that would hurt low-income residents.

However, American cities have consistently asserted so-called “local control” to increase inequality, establishing exclusionary zoning laws to prevent the construction of denser multifamily housing, redevelop low-income neighborhoods, and push poorer residents from their communities. In San Francisco, residents have exploited “local control” to make development as difficult as possible by lowering building-height limits, expanding zoning regulation, and increasing the veto power of homeowners. These privileged neighbors have often appropriated low-income residents’ fears of gentrification and eviction to block any new housing, despite the fact that studies have repeatedly shown that in markets with high demand, adding housing of any kind typically helps decrease displacement.

During the 19th century, city leaders had no qualms comparing Chinese boarders to filthy hogs in order to bolster their arguments against urban tenements; in recent years, objections to dense housing are made palatable by speaking of increased traffic or the loss of “neighborhood character.” So it’s somehow fitting our national housing crisis would peak in San Francisco, since the city was one of the first to introduce this idea of “local control,” via land-use zoning, more than 100 years ago.

San Francisco’s first street grid, encompassing 12 blocks around the nascent port, was laid out by Swiss sea captain Jean Jacques Vioget in 1839 when California was still governed by Mexico. After the community, then known as Yerba Buena, was occupied by American forces and became San Francisco in 1847, the new alcalde or mayor commissioned Jasper O’Farrell to create a new city survey. O’Farrell slightly corrected the North-South Vioget street grid, establishing regular lots around 46 yards wide with their southern boundary at a new wide boulevard called Market Street, extending perpendicular from the wharf all the way to the hills of Twin Peaks.

South of Market Street—known as SoMa today—was given a separate grid with wider blocks around 92 yards each and streets running parallel to Market and the previously established route to Mission Dolores, now named Mission Street. Though no zoning regulations were established with these surveys, SoMa’s extra-long blocks of marshland, which were less desirable than the more stable ground north of Market, eventually became the default location for industrial uses like manufacturing, wholesale distribution, and warehousing.

However, the push to legally separate noxious pollution from San Francisco’s residential and business districts led to one of the country’s earliest attempts to restrict land usage: In the 1850s, city leaders created a new licensing system for slaughterhouses that forced these businesses to relocate south of Harrison Street in SoMa, with additional regulations in 1864 pushing hog yards and slaughterhouses even further south to Islais Creek.

A few years later, in 1870, San Francisco leaders passed Order 939 Regulating Lodging Houses, also known as the Cubic Air Ordinance, at the urging of anti-Chinese labor groups that formed in response to the Gold Rush immigration boom. The new law required 500 cubic feet of space per occupant of any lodging room in the city, but it was only enforced in areas housing mostly Chinese residents, resulting in hundreds of arrests.

As an editorial cartoon at the time pointed out, the city’s jails were often more crowded than legally allowed, but since the purpose was to punish those of Chinese descent, nobody at City Hall cared about the hypocrisy. “The whole point of this law was to criminalize Chinese poverty,” says Devin McCutchen, a historian who’s done extensive research on the San Francisco Planning Department and helped write its Centennial Brochure.

In the 1880s, the city made further attempts to regulate building types, ostensibly mitigating the hazards of public laundry facilities. Such laundries were banned from all wooden buildings or residential neighborhoods without the express consent of the Board of Supervisors (known in most places as the city council). However, the city’s unequal enforcement revealed these laws as blatantly racist attempts to purge Chinese-owned laundries from San Francisco. “These 19th-century stories are really telling because, on one hand, you have this idea about the desire to rationalize the use of space and to make life more pleasant for people,” McCutchen says. “But on the flip side, you have the Cubic Air and Laundry Ordinances, which are all about testing the waters for using laws about the built environment in order to penalize people and to dictate the whims of the ruling class.”

With its 1886 decision in Yick Wo v. Hopkins, the U.S. Supreme Court found one of the laundry ordinances to be discriminatory toward Chinese business owners, violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, and struck it down. (Eventually, this precedent would be used for many major civil rights rulings in the 20th century.) But the larger idea—that city laws could regulate land use and building design—was here to stay.

A few decades later, San Francisco had a rare opportunity in the aftermath of a horrific disaster—the near-total destruction of its downtown neighborhoods by the 1906 earthquake and fire. City leaders would have the chance to rebuild the city from the ground up, imposing more order and better regulations than during the haphazard boom days of the Gold Rush. However, in their haste to get San Francisco functioning again and utilize millions of dollars in insurance claims, grandiose plans to reshape the city’s neighborhoods were forgotten, including Daniel Burnham’s 1905 neoclassical master-plan. (In fact, little was done to even strengthen seismic standards or fire codes to ensure San Francisco wouldn’t experience a repeat of the 1906 disaster.) In 1909, the city adopted a new building code that required building inspections after construction was completed, but the development process was essentially unchanged—as long as the design met these codes, a property owner could build it, regardless of height or aesthetics.

Meanwhile, other municipalities were already giving their governments more power to regulate the built environment. In 1908, Los Angeles passed the country’s first citywide ordinances establishing separate residential and industrial zones to prevent the pollution of manufacturing from dirtying neighborhoods where people lived. Though challenged, the Supreme Court would find in favor of Los Angeles’ land-use regulation in 1915. The following year, the Supreme Court also upheld a city’s rights to implement height restrictions in the Boston case of Welch v. Swasey, clearing the way for future zoning plans limiting a property’s size.

From there, cities across the country began working to pass laws that would keep industrial and commercial development, as well as lower-income residents, out of particular neighborhoods. New York City holds the distinction of creating the country’s first comprehensive zoning plan, which was released in 1916. It codified limits on building size in order to allow daylight and fresh air to reach the streets and sidewalks below.

City officials wanted to spare the outer boroughs from what they viewed as failures of regulation in Manhattan: The oversupply of office space, dark canyon-like streets, crowded tenement buildings, and a generally unstable real-estate market. In addition to requiring stepbacks, meaning a building had to recede gradually from its lot line after a certain height, the 1916 ordinance also outlined separate areas for residential and commercial buildings.

Meanwhile, the 1906 earthquake had inspired San Francisco’s leaders to begin thinking about the bigger picture and how they might encourage some activities in particular neighborhoods, whether governmental, office, industrial, nightlife, residential, or retail. Eric Fischer—a San Francisco software developer, cartographer, and urban-planning aficionado who has pored over archives about the city’s planning department—says the devastation of San Francisco’s City Hall and government buildings prompted city leaders to consider the benefits of a more organized Civic Center. “Somebody needed to make decisions about where it should be and what other government buildings should be near it,” Fischer says, “so they decided we needed a planning commission.”

Voters approved an amendment in 1912 that gave the Board of Supervisors the power to appoint a commission to “devise plans for the improvement and beautification of San Francisco.” The mayor and city supervisors were loath to give up their authority over development, so when the four-member commission was finally appointed in 1917, the group had no staff or budget to craft a citywide zoning map. “The immediate power they had was to make a zoning code,” Fisher says, “which would have the ability to regulate types of buildings and building setbacks,” meaning the distance a building must be from the public right-of-way. Business-oriented groups like the San Francisco Real Estate Board, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Commonwealth Club used their influence to support citywide zoning, particularly for the ways that it could improve property values by separating different types of land use and expanding residential development.

By 1920, the commission had completed a draft of its new zoning ordinance, establishing six major land-use categories: 1st and 2nd Residential, Light and Heavy Industrial, Commercial, and an Unrestricted category. On the face of it, the new zoning was created with a Progressive Era ideology that government should curb the ills of industrialization and improve life for its citizens.

“In theory, zoning was designed to protect the interests of all citizens by limiting land speculation and congestion,” Kenneth T. Jackson writes in Crabgrass Frontier. “In actuality, zoning was a device to keep poor people and obnoxious industries out of affluent areas. And in time, it also became a cudgel used by suburban areas to whack the central city.” Jackson points out that the most strident advocates of stronger land-use restrictions lived in suburban districts on the city’s fringe, a tradition that continues to this day. “They sought minimum lot and setback requirements [regulations that drive up the cost of housing] to ensure that only members of acceptable social classes could settle in their privileged sanctuaries.”

How did politicians justify this new regulation to the public? “The cleaned-up version was to keep the nuisances separated and segregated from homes in the name of public safety,” says Amit Ghosh, former director of the San Francisco Planning Department. “But the underlying use of zoning to segregate people and income levels is undeniable. It was part of the original intent.” While provisions excluding particular races from all residential-only zones were removed from the final version of the 1920 zoning ordinance to get around discrimination laws, the planning commission publicly acknowledged that some areas were designated residential-only as a way to prevent Japanese-owned businesses from moving in or expanding, since Japanese shops were viewed as a threat to white-owned businesses in the Fillmore area.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court had declared racially biased zoning unconstitutional in 1917, private developers and homeowners could legally establish segregated neighborhoods by inserting racist ownership requirements into their building deeds, known as “racially restrictive covenants.” Ghosh explains that while these weren’t municipal laws, they were overlooked by city officials. “They were not explicit city codes, but they were operational,” Ghosh says. “They were recognized by the banks and the people who made loans, and I believe the police looked the other way, although they were not within the city’s expressed public codes.” These racial covenants were also reinforced by the prejudice of surrounding property owners, real-estate boards, and neighborhood associations, and would eventually be upheld by a 1926 Supreme Court decision.

When San Francisco’s first zoning ordinance passed in 1921, it essentially mirrored the previously established development of San Francisco. The planning commission’s vision for future growth would ideally raise property values via land speculation—particularly on the undeveloped southern and western edges of the city—so they zoned these undeveloped areas to accommodate “desirable” new residents. “It basically said, from the get-go, the direction the city needs to take with its remaining undeveloped land is a suburban one,” McCutchen says.

As Fischer explains, the commission wanted to establish areas for single-family homes where there were no apartments; places for apartments where there was no commerce; and places for commerce where there weren’t any industrial buildings. Though the 1st Residential zone included density limits, allowing only single-family homes, no other districts had limitations on building size or height. “The magnitude of differences that were allowed within each of these categories was just mind-boggling and huge by the standard of anything that followed,” Fischer says. “If you had a property with a corner store on it, there was absolutely nothing to stop you from building an apartment building on that site, or for that matter, a 20-story skyscraper.”

In 1928, the commission finally established height limits of 40 feet for parts of the city’s wealthiest enclaves—the Marina, Pacific Heights, and Presidio Heights. That same year, the San Francisco Planning Commission gained additional power through a charter amendment, which included provisions for hiring a city planning engineer, posting neighborhood-development notices, and crafting the first citywide general plan. But the commission’s increased power did not mean more protection for city’s disadvantaged residents.

ccording to Marc Weiss’ 1988 article in Planning Perspectives, “working class areas, despite all the rhetoric about ‘protecting the whole city’ used to justify the legality of zoning, got very little protection.” Moneyed landowners continued to sway the commission’s opinions on zoning issues: While land-use was strictly enforced in wealthier residential areas and the downtown financial center, Weiss explains, the Board of Supervisors often granted zoning changes in other neighborhoods at the request of a property owner, “so long as it was accompanied by appropriate private compensation.”

During the 1930s, following years of debate over allowing gas stations in the residential zones of western neighborhoods, the Board of Supervisors granted the planning commission a new power, eventually dubbed “conditional use authorizations.” This meant the commission could approve projects that didn’t meet the established zoning code, depending on the “character of the improvements which will be placed on said property.” In other words, the commissioners could be even more subjective about projects that fell outside existing zoning laws.

Over the next decade, the San Francisco government gained further authority over planning and redeveloping portions of the city to reflect a more modern, car-centric vision. In 1942, the city formally created the planning department and hired its first director, L. Deming Tilton, whose prior planning experience was a perfect fit, since it mostly entailed suburban, auto-friendly development. At the time, a growing movement of Modernist architects and planners promoted a thorough rethinking of city design, which focused on rational plans to maximize efficiency. Groups like Telesis and the San Francisco Housing Association (SFPHA), pushed for the redevelopment of entire neighborhoods—whose residents were not consulted—in order to erase poverty and blight.

Under Tilton’s guidance, San Francisco finally created the long-awaited general plan, which was released in 1945 and envisioned the city as a machine with many older parts needing replacement, an idea heavily influenced by Telesis and other similar organizations. Those “blighted” parts the plan identified just so happened to be the working-class neighborhoods mostly populated by people of color: the Western Addition, South of Market, Chinatown, the Mission, and the Bayview-Hunter’s Point. According to the planning department’s Centennial Brochure, “The implications were that ‘blight’ stood in the way of progress, that it could spread, and that it needed to be removed before it killed the city. It was a deeply political term firmly rooted in structural racism, which relied on fears of white flight and urban disinvestment to justify the wholesale removal of communities of color.” Notably, the replacements for such “slums” were apartments, rather than the suburban, single-family homes reserved for San Francisco’s white residents.

Coincidentally, California also passed the Community Redevelopment Act in 1945, which let cities establish their own agencies to rebuild impoverished neighborhoods, often using eminent domain if property owners refused to sell. Though ostensibly separate organizations with different goals, the planning department worked in tandem with the city’s new Redevelopment Agency. “If you look at the 1945 General Plan for San Francisco, there’s a whole section indicating areas of blight, and that designation was a prerequisite for initiating redevelopment,” McCutchen says. “They were working together, clearly.”

During this time, many of San Francisco’s low-rise residential districts were still contractually limited to white residents; even affluent celebrities like Willie Mays were rejected from purchasing homes because of their skin color. If an African American family did find a homeowner willing to sell them a property, they often couldn’t get a loan because the federal government and private banks had refused to back most loans to people of color since the Great Depression.

In 1934, as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was established to insure private mortgages. The FHA’s underwriting handbook included guidelines that pushed cities to create racially segregated neighborhoods and encouraged banks to avoid areas with “inharmonious racial groups,” essentially meaning any neighborhood that wasn’t exclusively white. Meanwhile, the federally sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) had been set up to help homeowners refinance their home loans in an attempt to stop the spread of foreclosures, a widespread problem during the Great Depression. However, recipients of these low-interest, long-term loans were typically chosen based on HOLC’s residential “safety maps,” which divided neighborhoods in four categories: Green indicated the most desirable areas for lenders; blue was good; yellow was supposedly in decline; and red marked the riskiest areas. As HOLC’s racist literature explained, besides containing older building stock, red districts were under “threat of infiltration of foreign-born, negro, or lower grade population.”

The FHA endorsed this process, known today as “redlining,” as a legal way for private lenders to deny home loans—America’s primary way of building financial security—to people of color and other working-class Americans. (Redlining was officially outlawed with the Fair Housing Act of 1968, but the damage was already widespread, and the impact of withholding financial support to entire neighborhoods lasts to this day.)

While the federal government was assisting white families in seeking the “American dream” of homeownership, it was conspiring to deny the same opportunities to people of color. On a local level, San Francisco leaders engineered the destruction of the city’s thriving African American community by forcibly evicting residents and businesses in the name of urban renewal, knowing full well they wouldn’t be able to relocate in the city’s other central neighborhoods.

In its own documentation regarding the Western Addition redevelopment project, the city acknowledged that the overhaul would raise housing costs and displace most of the area’s original residents, without providing any immediate solutions for housing them, which is exactly what happened. Due to funding delays and other issues, many city blocks remained vacant for more than a decade, devastating this once-vital urban neighborhood.

A 1963 article on the project from the San Francisco Chronicle captured the callous attitude toward the plight of poorer residents, stating: “Many of those displaced felt bitter at having ceded their sleazy homes to make way for smart new modern dwellings too expensive for them.” The story also quoted Redevelopment Director Justin Herman, who made it clear he valued the project’s economic benefits over the humans being displaced: “How else can we restore long-suffering business districts to healthy economic ways of conducting business, with adequate facilities and parking arrangements?”

Although the planning department clashed with politicians, residents, and developers throughout the 1950s over how to accommodate the city’s postwar population boom, which delayed a new zoning plan for more than a decade, its powers had also been steadily expanded. One major change occurred in 1954, after a developer proposed a motel in the Sunset district. The Shriners Hospital across the street objected, explaining that current law allowed hotels in the neighborhood, but motels hadn’t been included in the 1920s code. In response, the city attorney advised the planning commission that the city had “supreme control” to issue building permits and could use its own discretion to decide whether projects were compliant.

Though the attorney called this “a sensitive discretion and one which must be exercised with the utmost restraint,” the decision was monumental, giving the commission increasingly subjective power to interpret the zoning code and laying the groundwork for “discretionary review” hearings on any project. As one commissioner who disagreed with the change said at the time, “all anyone will have to do is dredge up some feeble-minded citizen to oppose, and we will sit for a full-dress hearing.” And that’s precisely what happened: The absence of “by-right” approval meant that even if a project met all zoning requirements, anyone with enough time and money could pay to appeal the development and attempt to trigger a discretionary-review hearing, which often added months or years of delays to the approval process.

“Almost everything now has a discretionary review, and that’s a terrible thing,” former San Francisco Planning Director Allan Jacobs explained to McCutchen for the San Francisco Public Library’s oral history of the department. “One of the things I found out over time about discretionary review is if there is a disagreement, the force or the party that usually gets its way is the party with the most power. The party with the most power is usually, in this society, the party with the most money.”

However, many citizens were rightfully growing frustrated with the department’s actions, particularly decisions to bulldoze thriving neighborhoods to better serve suburban commuters. Beginning in the 1940s, the planning department had drafted citywide traffic plans that featured a network of freeways crisscrossing several neighborhoods, including parts of Golden Gate Park. Many residents were not happy to see their communities wrecked by these enormous elevated freeways, and in 1959, citizen activists presented the Board of Supervisors with a petition with more than 30,000 signatures demanding for most of these projects to be halted.

“This fear that change was being directed by some powerful external forces came to a head as the freeways started to completely rupture neighborhoods,” Ghosh says. “These big new planning ideas—about accommodating cars and street space, moving people here and there and everywhere, filling up the bay, and doubling the size of places like Sausalito—all those things came together, and people said ‘Look, this juggernaut needs to be stopped.'” In a major victory for community organizers, the Board of Supervisors halted work on the Embarcadero Freeway in 1959, simultaneously cancelling several other planned freeway projects that had not yet begun construction. (Damage to the elevated Embarcadero Freeway during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake hastened its demise, and the 1.2 mile stub was finally torn down in the early 1990s.) “Once citizens succeeded in stopping the freeways, that confirmed the power of the people in a place like San Francisco,” Ghosh says.

The new grass-roots groups pushing back against unlimited development also included a growing coalition of environmentalists. “Environmentalism, in its early phase, was a really big tent,” McCutchen says. “You had a definition of environmentalism that included open-space preservation, the preservation of views, and the preservation of natural, wild systems. But historic preservation was also seen as an environmental issue. Creating laws to restrict the explosion of advertising signs around on the city, that was an environmental concern.”

The city finally approved a new and highly detailed zoning code in 1960, which catered to white-flight fantasies of the era by encouraging single-family homes in the newer, mostly white neighborhoods around the city’s fringe while allowing relatively unlimited growth in the downtown core. Fischer believes the larger motivation behind the 1960 code came from national politics, “this idea that there was an urban crisis and we need to rebuild our cities—to tear down whole neighborhoods and build them anew,” he says. Amid hand-wringing over the unrest of the Civil Rights Movement and fears of inner-city crime, federal policies in the 1950s and ’60s supported redevelopment, but prevented urban centers like San Francisco from receiving funds without explicit rules for future construction. “If they did tear down whole neighborhoods but new neighborhoods weren’t carefully zoned, they would just get new anarchy replacing the old anarchy,” Fischer says, “and they did not want anarchy. They wanted precise, detailed planning.”

In 1962, the planning commission passed the Sign Ordinance, which limited the placement of advertising and billboards to protect San Francisco’s appearance, which showed the growing power of neighborhood coalitions over the wealthy developers and businesses that had dominated the planning process in previous decades. During the late 1960s, San Francisco also adopted ordinances allowing the designation of historic buildings and districts, just as hundreds of Victorian-era structures were being demolished by the city’s Redevelopment Agency in the Western Addition neighborhood. The city also released its first Housing Inventory Report around this time, using computers to try and simulate future growth.

Meanwhile, environmental demands were also seeping into statewide development policies: In 1970, the state passed the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, which mandated that developers create an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for projects requiring discretionary approval, and in 1973, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors established its own code to implement the law. The result was even greater public input and potential appeals than ever before, beginning with the landmark case Friends of Mammoth v. Board of Supervisors of Mono County in 1972. Friends of Mammoth filed the suit to challenge Mono County’s approval of a condominium project in the Mammoth Lakes area and won, thus expanding CEQA’s coverage to include private projects “for which a government permit or other entitlement for use is necessary.”

Fischer points out that while discretionary review gave the San Francisco Planning Commission the power to keep projects in limbo, CEQA lawsuits were something anyone could file. “In the pre-CEQA regime, if you wanted to protest a project, you had to persuade the planning commission that they should review it,” he says, “whereas with CEQA, anybody can directly challenge it.”

Ghosh agrees that the environmental law was often twisted to stop growth of any kind by tying up building projects in the slow-moving court system. “CEQA was a well-intentioned, publicly motivated piece of legislation,” he says. “But once the process was laid out, a whole industry of lawyers and environmental activists developed around it, making the process more arcane. In the end, CEQA became a tool to just stop development. If there is one change that I would like to see made right now, it would be to take the courts out of CEQA.”

As the threat of litigation became a new constant, the San Francisco Planning Department slowly began to craft a new approach to development. The city’s 1971 Urban Design Plan was the first to codify the shift in values from the Modernist freeway-and-tower model toward a greater respect for San Francisco’s unique neighborhoods and their human-scale features. The plan focused on preserving and expanding existing neighborhood character, and was influenced by a coalition of environmentalists, affordable-housing advocates, and preservation groups who recognized the power of zoning to limit change, for better or worse. For example, its guidelines for building size suggested that new development should mirror the “height and character of existing development.” Notably, many of the plan’s proposals to increase livability, such as greening public spaces and improving street safety, mostly omitted the city’s densest, lower-income neighborhoods like the Tenderloin, Chinatown, and South of Market.

However, the plan also identified 11 areas for taller residential buildings, which local activists immediately fought as the “Manhattanization” of San Francisco. In the face of these criticisms, the department revised its plan after a series of public hearings, resulting in the removal of these high-rise zones.

But the largest legislative achievement of this emerging anti-growth coalition would be the Residential Rezoning of 1978, a project to implement stricter controls across all of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. In addition to creating 40-foot building-height limits for most residential areas, the legislation included new setback rules (regulating how far a building could be from the public right-of-way), low-density requirements (limiting the number of housing units in a given building), and overall design guidelines aimed at preserving entire neighborhoods in amber. The decision to adopt these new limits included a lengthy EIR and public-hearing process, featuring speakers both for and against such exclusionary zoning. For example, several homeowners echoed the sentiments of Ms. Marie Potz, who said she was perfectly happy with her street’s height limit being lowered after someone had built “a huge three-story monstrosity.” Potz made the unfounded claim that there was no housing shortage and asserted that the city had overproduced apartments. “What we need,” she said, “is more single-family houses.”

In sharp contrast to these kinds of aesthetic complaints, many residents, homeowner associations, and community groups spoke forcefully against the rezoning and the inevitable rise in housing prices at a time when San Francisco was already short on affordable housing. Ed Lawson, representing the Richmond District Council, said the zoning was too restrictive and would harm low-income residents the most. Jerry Horowitz of the San Francisco Planners Network explained that the rising cost of housing was already changing the makeup of neighborhoods. “While well-prepared groups concerned with preserving the character of their neighborhoods have had their demands for lower densities heard, low-income residents have lacked the organization to speak up for their own housing needs,” he said. Jenny Lew of the Chinatown Neighborhood Improvement Resources Center pointed out that the EIR didn’t investigate the impact of rezoning on the city’s low-income households, and lamented the use of discretionary review to stop low- and moderate-income housing from being built, a process that continues to play out today. “These delays only succeed in encumbering massive cost increases, often threatening, if not destroying, the entire economic feasibility of a project even before it gets through the review process,” Lew explained.

Sam Schneider, a building-design engineer, said the legislation would increase the cost of construction and the tighter rental market would create hardships for the elderly and others with limited income. “Let’s remember that this shortage of new housing has an effect on rents of all housing, such that all housing rents must go up,” Schneider said. Quentin Kopp, Supervisor for the West Portal neighborhood, was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the proposal a “disaster” for contributing to the existing housing shortage and pricing the middle class out of the city.

The planning department’s own EIR estimated that the zoning changes would eliminate around 180,000 legally buildable units from the city, or about a one-third drop in the city’s potential for growth. In July of 1978, the San Francisco Chronicle also reported that even Rai Okamoto, director of the planning department, had reservations about downzoning the city, echoing fears that it would raise housing costs and force middle-income residents out of San Francisco.

It’s clear that many San Franciscans were well aware this rezoning would lead the city toward a housing crisis. The planning commissioners, however, were not moved. Their testimony throughout the hearings made it clear they valued maintaining the city’s predominately suburban layout over affordability. In response to a homeowner who was unhappy that his property would be downzoned to allow fewer units, commissioner Sue Bierman gave a quintessential anti-growth response—countering that San Franciscans were concerned about parking, traffic, and sunlight reaching their backyards, embracing a shift toward zoning that would preserve “more comfortable neighborhoods.” Instead of listening to those folks worried about becoming homeless, the commissioners focused on the single-family homeowners worried about shadows on their yards and parking for their cars.

In the final minutes of the June 27, 1978, meeting, San Francisco’s planning commissioners prepared to approve the EIR, along with its damning final clause, which explained that the project would reduce the amount of housing that could legally be built in San Francisco. “As a result the cost of housing may increase, and that with increasing housing costs, some population groups may find it difficult to live in San Francisco. The proposed zoning will affect the low- and moderate-income households more than any other group and mitigation measures are proposed to help alleviate this impact.”

But commissioner Bierman said she was “troubled” by this statement, and commissioner Nakashima agreed, complaining that it wasn’t the solely the planning department’s fault if housing prices continued to rise. Commissioner Rosenblatt suggested removing the clause entirely—and that’s exactly what they did, erasing their acknowledgement of the plan’s disastrous effects from the document moments before approving it.

To make a bad decision worse, the 1978 rezoning was adopted less than a month after California voters had passed Proposition 13, a now-infamous law that fixed property taxes at the 1976 rate with yearly inflation of no more than 2%, along with a reassessment whenever a property changed hands at 1 percent of the new sale price. Prop. 13 further incentivized homeowners to remain in their homes as long as possible, to oppose new housing construction so their own property value would increase, and to pass their property tax breaks onto their children rather than sell their homes.

San Francisco’s new zoning left most of the city restricted to buildings under 40 feet in height with no more than three residential units allowed. The legislation also gave implicit support to homeowners seeking to block construction of apartment buildings, even if they were allowed under existing zoning. Just as Kenneth T. Jackson explained in Crabgrass Frontier, yet again, “zoning was used by the people who already lived within the arbitrary boundaries of a community as a method of keeping everyone else out. Apartments, factories, and ‘blight,’ euphemisms for blacks and people of limited means, were rigidly excluded.”

As a result, new residential development began creeping into the city’s industrial zones, particularly South of Market, replacing vacant lots, warehouses, and factories with new apartments. “Wherever they found the dirtiest land, they would build housing because that was the cheapest,” Ghosh says. These areas mostly lacked parks, schools, grocery stores, transit, and other infrastructure needed to support this growth—a legacy that neighborhoods like SoMa and Mission Bay are still grappling with today—but they were the primary areas where dense construction was legally permitted. “We were plunking people down to live in terrible industrial areas with no human services,” Ghosh adds.

The zoning changes also encouraged a wave of smaller buildings in low-density residential areas that maximized the size limits on each lot. These generic boxy buildings came to be known as “Richmond specials,” after the neighborhood they frequently appeared in, and were seen as an ugly scourge by their neighbors, who used public appeals to try and halt them. “Every project became a discretionary review,” says Ghosh. “And based on that, we said, ‘Look, we need to make rules for what’s acceptable so the building would be permitted without question.'” But even after adjusting the regulations, San Francisco residents and the planning commission continued to abuse the power of discretionary review. “People were coming and arguing about their petunias being shaded by somebody’s deck,” Ghosh says. “So the planning commission began taking this type of appeal, invariably invoking discretionary review.”

Both of these areas were eventually redeveloped, but the public battle between evicted elderly residents of the International Hotel and their corporate landlords crystallized the resistance to urban renewal projects and the grassroots support of slow-growth policies. During the 1970s and ’80s, activists like Alvin Duskin and the city’s alternative newspaper, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, pushed for ballot initiatives that would limit construction heights downtown and stop the expansion of the city’s high-rise district. Though these initiatives failed, they did convince city leaders to implement more restrictions on commercial development, including a cap on the annual growth of office space beginning with its 1985 Downtown Plan.

One neighborhood that managed to fend off dramatic gentrification and stabilize many lower-income residents while retaining its dense, mixed-use character was the Tenderloin. After three high-rise tourist hotels were planned for the neighborhood’s border with Union Square in 1980, activists managed to convince the city to establish new zoning controls that would retain the area’s residential buildings and limit new growth to between eight and 13 stories. In contrast to the suburban downzoning of wealthier neighborhoods, the Tenderloin’s residential density was prioritized in order to maintain affordability.

Soon after, nonprofits like the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation began buying up land and buildings to keep more than a quarter of the area’s housing permanently affordable, and the city passed legislation to prevent the destruction of single-room occupancy hotels, or SROs. (Sometimes called “residential hotels,” these buildings typically include very small studio apartments with shared bathrooms and kitchens.) The battle with tourist-hotel developers also led to some of the city’s first “community-benefit laws,” or those requiring funding for neighborhood needs, with a percentage of hotel-room rates going toward the city’s affordable housing fund.

“The Tenderloin rezoning was done to take action against the encroachment of downtown into our valuable stock of residential units,” Ghosh says. “In the following few years, the Downtown Plan was adopted, which included a very powerful tool, the transfer of development rights, to direct new growth to where we wanted it to occur. We didn’t want the impact of growth to destroy the precious fabric of San Francisco.” In response to such citizen-led pushback, the planning department began working to establish new public-benefit requirements for downtown development, such as providing public art, building privately-managed public open space, constructing new housing in correlation with job growth, and preserving historic buildings. The department’s work with the Tenderloin and its Downtown Plan showed how zoning could help stabilize low-income residents and protect vital, mixed-use neighborhoods.

Yet the preservation of low-income housing in the Tenderloin did not lead to a citywide embrace of apartment buildings, particularly in the city’s protectionist suburban enclaves. In the 1980s, the planning department began developing specific neighborhood plans for several mixed-use districts to help preserve affordable housing and a diverse mix of small businesses. Since then, most of the city’s neighborhoods have received detailed plans for the future, though unfortunately, vocal homeowners have often succeeded at codifying anti-growth goals in these plans. “Density was demonized, and we need to stop that,” Ghosh explains. “Density is a good thing for the city. You have to have density in order to provide diversity, and not just diversity of people—it’s also the diversity of urban amenities that should be accessible to people.”

Many beloved historic apartment buildings throughout San Francisco’s residential neighborhoods would be illegal under today’s zoning limitations, since the planning department has prioritized space for single-family homes versus multifamily housing affordable to working-class residents. “The 1960 code basically still stands,” Fischer says. “There have been a lot of changes in detail, but the structure of it is still present.”

As part of the 1978 rezoning that limited new housing in most residential areas, the planning commission made several recommendations for ways to counteract this constraint on growth—such as consolidating the review and permitting process, particularly for subsidized or affordable projects—though most of these ideas still haven’t been implemented 50 years later. In 2008, San Francisco’s planning department finally began the process of reforming its discretionary review policies, but nearly a decade later, the proposals have not been adopted. (The department has since removed the details of these reforms from its website, and did not respond to requests for comment on its failure to implement them.)

“I don’t think that the planning commission has ever given up any power over the course of its evolution,” Fischer says. “Discretionary review has been available since the 1940s, but it was something that only happened in especially egregious cases. You can no longer say that it’s a ‘rarely exercised power’ because basically every project has a discretionary review.” During interviews for the San Francisco Public Library’s oral history of the planning department, several former staffers and department directors also bemoaned the use of discretionary review to block any new development, including projects that complied with current zoning.

Because of the recalcitrance of municipal leadership to take on San Francisco’s absurd approvals process and its legacy of exclusionary zoning, California’s state government has finally begun to preempt these problematic policies with laws designed to expedite the creation of new housing, like Scott Wiener’s SB-35, which was adopted in 2017 and demands that cities actually meet their regional housing goals. The bill is a reminder that land-use laws can be a force for good, with zoning used to protect vulnerable residents from the fallout of profit-obsessed property owners.

“When I was first started doing this research a decade ago, I was really dissatisfied with the dominant narratives about planning and development policy in the Bay Area,” McCutchen says. “I felt like all we had were stories about these evil, rapacious developers who wanted to bulldoze neighborhoods and plow in the Bay and put freeways through every block. Then, there were these valiant neighborhood activists who fought for more humane values.

“I also find there’s this new narrative coalescing in our current political moment,” he continues, “which basically says the environmentalists were self-serving, shortsighted, and fundamentally just didn’t want to see change. It corrects flaws of the older narrative, but it also oversimplifies them and does it a disservice. Different waves of people have tried to reform the city, reacting in very rational ways to their present crises.”

In fact, many San Francisco residents who fought against multifamily buildings in the past have slowly come around to the disasters of endless sprawl and benefits of denser, walkable neighborhoods. As Alvin Duskin, the original face of San Francisco’s battle against tall buildings, said in a 2009 interview with SFGate, “We really didn’t understand the consequences of mindless suburban sprawl. The environmental and psychological damage of spreading out like that is so severe … the problem for planners is to raise the city’s density without creating a destructive environment. We need cities for people, not cars.”

Other anti-growth organizers regret the impact such suburban zoning has had on affordability and accessibility. Howard Strassner was a neighborhood organizer who helped craft the 1970s-era zoning that restricted new development on West Portal Avenue to a single story. From today’s vantage point, Strassner recognizes the benefits of taller apartment buildings, particularly for older folks on fixed incomes who can’t manage stairs and need apartments with elevators, calling the height limits he once advocated for “silly” in a 2016 interview with the San Francisco Examiner.

Instead, anti-growth residents continue to sink development projects, ranging from an all affordable senior-housing complex to a downtown high-rise development that would cast a partial shadow over a condo building’s courtyard pool. The city’s planning department and planning commission (whose members are overwhelmingly homeowners in a majority-renter city) remain complicit in obstructing all kinds of new housing in order to preserve most of the city’s neighborhoods exactly as they are, crisis be damned.

And yet, while many residents fight to maintain the San Francisco’s exclusionary zoning, there are signs of a growing opposition, particularly among younger generations who’ve been almost entirely priced out of the market. The city’s recently elected Mayor London Breed was endorsed by local Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) groups, in part because Breed supported Wiener’s proposal to upzone neighborhoods near transit, regardless of opposition from homeowners. Major publications like the San Francisco Chronicle are using their voices to call for more housing construction and the removal of red tape. Local companies are even proposing to build their own multifamily housing developments to help ease the crisis for employees.

Despite the endless opposition to nearly any project, from the largest towers to the smallest bathroom renovation, Ghosh says that for him, the growing involvement of San Franciscans in the city’s planning process did have a silver lining. “As a bureaucrat in the planning department, I was always irked by community groups being a pain the butt,” Ghosh says. “But at the same time, that movement kept planners honest and gave us meaning in what we were doing. They made you strive for better things. In other places I’ve worked as a planner, nobody really cared what you did. But here, I felt like what we did mattered.”

On January 11, 2017, a week before Trump’s inauguration, two powerful men huddled together at the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in the Seychelles, off the coast of east Africa: a fit, 6-foot-tall middle-aged American, with a military bearing, and a slightly younger Russian man, balding and bespectacled. They each nursed a beer and spoke quietly, so that the pair of Arab-looking men in dark suits standing nearby didn’t even try to eavesdrop. Every few minutes, the American checked his watch, a rescue-beacon-equipped Breitling Emergency.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has reportedly zeroed in on the hush-hush meeting, gathering evidence that shows it may have been one of the first efforts to set up a covert line of communication between Trump and Putin. But amid the scrutiny of Trump’s ties with Russia–and on meetings like the one in the Seychelles–another important story has been overlooked: the attempts by the United Arab Emirates, many successful, to influence the Trump administration, especially concerning its archrival Qatar.

The de facto ruler of the UAE, crown prince of Abu Dhabi Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, or “MBZ” as he’s known, has met with members of the Trump coterie in two informal circumstances that we know of: in December 2016 in New York with campaign advisers Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and on January 11, 2017, in the Seychelles. There, MBZ arranged for the drink between Erik Prince—the Breitling-wearing founder of the now-defunct paramilitary firm Blackwater and brother of Trump secretary of education Betsy DeVos—and an associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

And a surprising number of useful American connections were also at hand for the 57-year-old crown prince. Among them were his adviser, Lebanese-American businessman George Nader, Republican lobbyist Elliott Broidy, whose security company had hundreds of millions of dollars in UAE contracts, and Trump inauguration committee head Tom Barrack, whose real estate business has profited handsomely from Emirate deals.

Meanwhile, despite bipartisan protest, the Trump administration has supported a three-year-old Saudi and UAE-led military assault on Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, which last month included an errant missile attack that killed schoolchildren on a bus. More than 16,700 civilians have been killed or injured during the siege, which has fed what the United Nations says is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

None of this, by the way, is meant to endorse Qatar or other rivals of the UAE or their agents of influence in the slightest way. But all of the Emirati efforts need more attention, before the U.S. is dragged into a pointless Middle East conflict.

Erik Prince and the Russian at the bar

Prince told the House’s Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in November 2017 that he was invited to the Seychelles by “one of the members of the Royal Court” to discuss everything from “security issues to mineral issues to even bauxite.” The Emirati customers “mentioned a guy I should meet who was also in town to see them, a Kirill Dmitriev from Russia, who ran some sort of hedge fund.”

Dmitriev is the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, or RDIF, the state’s $10 billion sovereign wealth fund. RDIF’s close links with the Kremlin may have led the U.S. to sanction the fund. It also boasts tight links with Abu Dhabi: The UAE sovereign fund Mubadala has co-invested with RDIF in 40 investments in Russia since 2013.

Prince–a former Navy SEAL whose Blackwater firm was implicated in a massacre of civilians in Iraq in 2007–has been described by other attendees at the meeting as presenting himself as an unofficial envoy for President-elect Trump. But in sometimes testy and arrogant responses to the committee, Prince insisted he was not acting on behalf of Trump and denied that the meeting had anything to do with a Russian backchannel. The encounter with Dmitriev was an impromptu introduction, Prince claimed: The Russian official just happened to be at the hotel, also meeting Emiratis.

“I remember telling him,” Prince recalled, “that if Franklin Roosevelt could work with Joseph Stalin to defeat Nazi fascism, then certainly Donald Trump could work with Vladimir Putin to defeat Islamic fascism.”

According to a memo reviewed by the Daily Beast and first reported on Wednesday, Prince and Dmitriev discussed a range of possible collaborations, including a military effort to take out specific ISIS leaders in Syria, nuclear and chemical nonproliferation, and a perplexing plan for RDIF to invest money in the U.S. Rust Belt, “creating real jobs for hard hit area with high employment.” The proposals echo ideas that have been raised by Moscow more officially.

Why did MBZ broker the meeting? In part, U.S. and European officials say, it was to determine if Russia could be persuaded to withdraw its support of the Assad regime in Syria, an aim of Saudi Arabia as well as the Trump administration. Such a move would have probably required the U.S. to take the unlikely step of lifting sanctions imposed on Moscow over its actions in Ukraine.

But if MBZ aimed to establish a backchannel between Trump and Russia, he was motivated by a range of other self-interested reasons, including obtaining Trump’s support against Qatar and possiblyweaning the militant group Hamas from Qatari influence.

That year, Prince began building a private army for MBZ for a reported $529 million and helped train a Somali anti-piracy force funded by the UAE. Through a post-Blackwater company R2, founded in the UAE in 2010, Prince has also trained mercenaries who fight under the UAE flag in Yemen. In 2012, when Prince launched a private equity firm, FRG (Frontier Resource Group), eventually listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the investors included both the UAE’s Sheikh Tahnoun bin Mohammed Al Nahyan and Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Court.

Apart from his sister, Prince’s strongest link to the White House was through former campaign chairman and top adviser Steve Bannon. Prince told lawmakers that he spoke periodically with Bannon and sent him unsolicited policy papers during the 2016 campaign. Bannon also hosted Prince frequently on Breitbart’s radio and website, where Prince aired anti-Hillary Clinton stories during the campaign.

In 2016, Prince and his mother donated $150,000 to the Super PAC Make America Number 1, one of Trump’s biggest supporters. And Prince is taken seriously by the Trump administration as a foreign policy guru: The White House is currently reviewing a plan by Prince to privatize the war in Afghanistan that has gained little support in the Pentagon.

Prince may have also introduced former Trump adviser Steve Bannon to MBZ. The crown prince met with Bannon, along with Jared Kushner and General Michael Flynn, in New York in December 2016; in a breach of protocol the UAE didn’t notify the Obama administration of the visit in advance. Prince told the House committee that the former Breitbart CEO said the meeting concerned Iran and Syria, and that the Emirati ruler “is a great guy.”

Bannon, Kushner, and Flynn all have close connections to Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct company part-owned by the U.K.-based SCL Group Ltd. Infamous now for its misuse of Facebook data on behalf of the Trump campaign, in December 2016 this U.S. subsidiary of SCL was basking in its triumph. Within a year, SCL would be waging a clandestine influence campaign against Qatar on behalf of MBZ. According to federal filings, SCL Social Limited was hired for $330,000 in October 2017 to run a #BoycottQatar social media campaign for the UAE. When asked in October about the SCL work against Qatar, Bannon said he had nothing to do with it.

George Nader: a princely adviser with ties to Russia and the White House

We still don’t know, and we may never know, everyone who was at the now notorious rendezvous in the Seychelles and what they discussed. Apart from MBZ, Prince, and Dmitriev, the UAE’s spymaster Hamad al Mazrouei and another adviser to the crown prince, Palestinian politician Mohammed Dahlan, may have also attended, the Daily Mail reported.

Also present was George Nader, who helped organize the meeting. Nader, a longtime MBZ adviser with ties to the Kremlin, has contradicted Prince’s characterization to the House committee. According to sources close to the Special Counsel’s investigation, Nader–who first met Prince while representing his security contractors in post-invasion Iraq–reportedly told investigators that one of the primary goals of the meeting was to establish a line of communication between the Kremlin and the incoming administration, and said he had met Prince a week before the Seychelles meeting to brief him on Dmitriev.

This wasn’t the only high-powered meeting that the 59-year-old consultant arranged for MBZ in recent years. In mid 2015 Nader helped convene a yacht meeting in the Red Sea that included the crown prince, his Saudi counterpart Prince Mohammad bin Salman, President Sisi of Egypt, the crown prince of Bahrain, and the king of Jordan. The objective, according to sources who spoke with the pro-Qatari Middle East Eye, was to curtail the influence of Turkey and Iran. It’s not known what was discussed at the meeting, which took place after Trump announced his candidacy that June, but these were the countries that, with the exception of Jordan and the addition of Libya, would form an anti-Qatar alliance in 2017.

Nader’s entrée to Trumpworld started with Prince. The Blackwater founder arranged an August 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York between Nader, Donald Trump Jr., and an Israeli social media specialist, Joel Zamel. At that encounter–two months after a notorious Trump Tower meeting at which a Russian attorney offered damaging material on Hillary Clinton–Nader told Trump Jr. that the princes who led the UAE and Saudi Arabia were eager to help his father win the election. Zamel pitched Trump Jr. on a multimillion-dollar social media manipulation campaign run by his company PSY-Group, which employed several former Israeli intelligence officers.

It isn’t clear if such a campaign was initiated–Trump Jr.’s lawyer has said that his client wasn’t interested–but Nader was subsequently embraced as an ally by the Trump campaign. In his capacity as an adviser to MBZ, he met frequently with campaign advisers, including Bannon, Flynn, and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. At some point after the election, Nader paid Zamel up to $2 million, reportedly for a presentation about the significance of social media in political campaigns. Mueller is also said to be investigating this payment.

Nader achieved a remarkable amount in the months that followed the Seychelles meeting, after Trump’s inauguration. Nader would also become a conduit for Emirati money used to influence Trump’s circle. He would make frequent trips to the White House in the early months of the administration, meeting with Bannon and Kushner to discuss Middle East issues ahead of Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia in May 2017. In an Oval Office meeting, Nader would pressure Trump to fire Tillerson after the secretary of state had intervened to stop the proposed invasion of Qatar by UAE and Saudi Arabia. And Nader would get a big fish on the line: former RNC finance chairman and longtime fundraiser Elliott Broidy.

Elliott Broidy, a security contract, and a stealth lobbying campaign

Broidy is very close to Trump. In June, the Department of Justice and Federal Election Commission were asked to investigate if Broidy made a $1.6 million payment to an “ex-Playboy model” on behalf of Trump. As a result, Broidy resigned his position as deputy finance chairman for the Republican National Committee.

(Like Nader, who has been convicted on charges of child molestation and child pornography, Broidy has previously run afoul of the law: In 2009 the 61-year-old fundraiser plead guilty to paying New York pension fund officials almost $1 million in return for $18 million in management fees. In 2012, the conviction was reduced to a misdemeanor in return for Broidy’s cooperation and restitution of the $18 million. Broidy is now under investigation for influence peddling in China and Malaysia, the Washington Post reported in August.)

Around the time of the Seychelles meeting in January 2017–it isn’t clear whether it was before or after–Nader met Broidy. Nader then introduced Broidy to MBZ and helped Broidy obtain $200 million in UAE contracts for his obscure private security and intelligence company, Circinus.

It all happened very fast, even before Trump’s first visit to Saudi Arabia that May, which is generally thought to be the start of the UAE-Saudi campaign against Qatar. By February 7, Broidy was busy doing MBZ’s work, writing to a congressional staffer about an anti-Qatar bill.

A trove of leaked emails between Broidy and Nader obtained by the Associated Press in May revealed that Nader and Broidy orchestrated an anti-Qatar influence campaign without registering as foreign agents as required by federal law. They also lied about the source of their funding and links to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. At one point, Broidy bragged to Nader of his closeness to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, saying that he could “educate” Mnuchin on adding Qataris to U.S. sanctions lists.

On April 24, 2017, the Wall Street Journal published an anti-Qatar op-ed signed by a retired Air Force general, Charles Ward. It turned out that Ward was part of the Circinus team that had pitched Saudi Arabia for security work. And Broidy had sent a draft of the piece to Nader three days before publication.

That May, Broidy, who sometimes referred to Qatar as “the snake,” persuaded a U.S. think tank, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, to hold an anti-Qatar conference at the Fairmont Hotel in Washington. Broidy told the foundation’s CEO that the money for the conference did not come from a foreign government and that he had no contracts in the Gulf.

The same day as the conference, the UAE was behind a series of hacks targeting Qatari news and social media sites. The Washington Post reported that disinformation was posted and attributed to Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani–including false reports that the emir called Iran an “Islamic power” and said, “Hamas is the representative of the Palestinian people.”

As Qatar’s Al Jazeera reported, citing research from the University of Exeter, a well-orchestrated bot campaign “began spreading sectarian, anti-Iranian, and anti-Semitic rhetoric, while heaping praise on Trump” and “began framing the discussion of ‘extremism’ towards criticism of Qatar for being a ‘servant of Iran’ (while being paradoxically close to Israel), and for its alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and others.” At the end of May, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Egypt cited the false news reports as the reason for a ban on Qatari media. They broke relations with Qatar and imposed a trade and diplomatic boycott.

In early June, the email of Yousef al-Otaibi, the UAE’s high-powered ambassador to the U.S., was hacked and offered to U.S. media outlets. One of his emails, to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, was especially embarrassing, as Otaiba had sent Gates greetings from MBZ. Gates had been a speaker at the anti-Qatar FDD conference in May.

A month later, in July, Broidy sent George Nader a spreadsheet outlining a proposed $12.7 million campaign against Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood. And between 2017 and March of this year, Broidy gave $600,000 to members of Congress backing anti-Qatar legislation. In October, Broidy helped arrange another anti-Qatar conference at the Hudson Institute in D.C., featuring a keynote by Steve Bannon.

The UAE’s payments for the Broidy-Nader work were designed to obscure the origin of the funds. As the AP discovered, a Nader company in the UAE sent two payments totaling $2.5 million to Xiemen Investments Limited, a Canadian company belonging to a friend of Broidy, in April 2017. From there it entered a Broidy bank account in L.A.

Still, neither Nader nor Broidy registered under FARA as UAE or Saudi lobbyists. Violating the federal law carries a maximum fine of $10,000 or up to five years in prison. Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Rick Gates all failed to register under FARA, only doing so retroactively. Last month, campaign consultant Sam Patten pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent during the election, paying $50,000 in cash from an unidentified Ukrainian oligarch to the Trump inauguration committee, for which Broidy was vice chairman.

Broidy’s activities in 2017 suggest that in addition to the Prince-Dmitriev introduction in the Seychelles, MBZ was already strategizing the anti-Qatar campaign before and during the meeting, with the idea of using Nader and Prince to get to the president’s inner circle and members of Congress.

Tom Barrack, the prince-linked donor who helped keep Jared Kushner out of bankruptcy

On June 5, 2017, the Saudi-UAE led coalition announced its blockade of Qatar. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson quickly intervened in an effort to calm the situation. He succeeded, but reportedly infuriated Crown Prince MBZ as well as members of the Trump White House. During an Oval Office meeting that October, Nader urged the President to fire Tillerson, “but only at a good time, politically,” as Nader recounted in a memo to Broidy. Tillerson would depart on March 31, 2018.

Tillerson was also undermined by Trump himself, who, after the blockade was announced, called Qatar “a funder of terrorism at a very high level.” At the time, Tillerson’s aides thought that Emirati ambassador Otaiba might have written that line for Trump.

Otaiba already had enough influence in Trumpworld that this suspicion was plausible. Jared Kushner was introduced to Otaiba by real estate financier and GOP donor Tom Barrack. Barrack, 71, whose parents are Lebanese-Catholic, is a native Arabic speaker and has had long ties in the region. He also had many business connections with Otaiba, and had even dealt with Otaiba’s father.

In 2009, Barrack worked with Otaiba to sell a Beverly Hills hotel for $41 million to a joint venture half owned by the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. In 2012 Otaiba himself invested $1 million in a fund Barrack set up. Last year, a state investment fund controlled by MBZ invested $70 million in one of Barrack’s real estate partnerships, a landmark office tower in Los Angeles.

In spring 2016, Barrack introduced Otaiba and Kushner, telling Otaiba, who was skeptical of Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric, that the candidate “also has joint ventures in the U.A.E.!” Kushner’s introduction to Otaiba quickly led to a connection to MBZ himself. Reportedly, Kushner spoke directly with UAE Crown MBZ and the Saudi Crown Prince through WhatsApp, bypassing the State Department in an astonishing breach of procedure.

“Thanks to you, I’m in constant contact with Jared,” Otaiba wrote Barrack in an email obtained by the Times.

Otaiba was also close to Trump’s 2017 deputy national security adviser, Egyptian-American Dina Powell, whose entrée to the White House came through advising Jared’s wife, Ivanka Trump, during the campaign. The relationship was such that Otaiba forwarded to Powell an email exchange he had with a Politico journalist who criticized Egyptian President Sisi.

The Trump administration was also good for Barrack. His real estate fund Colony Northstar has received $7 billion in investments since Trump’s nomination, a quarter of which has come from the UAE or Saudi Arabia.

A $450 million Leonardo and a bargain golf course

Some Trump-Emirates links suggest MBZ is managing financial ties with Trump companies directly. One example is his bidding in the November 2017 auction of a Leonardo painting belonging to Dmitry Rybolovlev. In 2008, the Russian billionaire curiously overpaid Trump $50 million for an oceanfront Palm Beach estate he never visited; the house sat empty for years before being demolished.

Rybolovlev sold “Salvator Mundi” in a Christie’s auction that set a new world record price of $450 million. The price of the 26-inch painting–valued at around $80 million the year before–was driven high by a bidding war between a representative for Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince bin Salman and the UAE’s MBZ, each of whom claimed they mistakenly thought they were bidding against the Qataris. MBZ was trying to buy it for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Saudi Arabia “won” the painting, but then gave it to MBZ in exchange for the crown prince’s $450 million superyacht, the Topaz. (MBZ has donated it to the museum, where it was scheduled to be have been unveiled in September, but in what one report termed “a shock move,” its exhibit has been delayed.)

But was it really a bidding war at all? Or was it a way to funnel UAE funds to the Russian tycoon? While it’s unlikely the painting sale–which made Rybolovlev over $320 million–was related to the Palm Beach purchase, or that he waited nine years to be reimbursed for doing Trump a good deed, it is plausible that these two deals are part a larger number of transactions we don’t yet know about between Trump and Rybolovlev, in which the UAE rewards Trump indirectly for his support.

There is a UAE link straight to Trump’s business holdings, too. As Trump prepared to run for president, MBZ would have known that in April 2014, Trump bought the Turnberry golf course in Scotland from Leisurecorp, a UAE state-owned enterprise, for what was termed at the time a “bargain price,” in a £35.7 million ($63 million) “cash deal.” The UAE had put a total of £92 million into the property, which it bought in 2008. Leisurecorp paid £52 million for the resort–which comprises three courses, a golf academy, a five-star hotel, as well as lodge and cottage accommodations–and then proceeded to spend a further £40 million on renovations.

It’s unclear why the UAE effectively made a £58 million gift to Donald Trump in 2014. But this is one of many questions about the Trump-Emirates relationship that needs more attention, especially before that relationship drags the U.S. into more dangerous adventures in the Middle East.

Ann Marlowe (@AnnMarlowe) is a writer and consultant in New York. The author is indebted to the reporting of Wendy Siegelman for many insights, including the importance of the Bannon link and her research on the UAE ties of Cambridge Analytica and its successor companies.

If you were watching the confirmation hearings of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and, for no particular reason, were wondering if it was possible to remove a Supreme Court justice after he was confirmed to his lifetime appointment, the answer is yes. The framers of the U.S. Constitution included a process to do just that. That said, it has never really been done successfully. Yet.

Section 1 of Article 3 of the Constitution says:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services a Compensation which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.

This means that the justices hold office as long as they choose and can only be removed from office by impeachment. The only Justice to be impeached was back in 1805, when Associate Justice Samuel Chase–who was appointed by President George Washington–was accused of allowing his political views to interfere with his decisions and “tending to prostitute” the court and his position. (You can read the riveting account on the U.S. Senate’s website.) The House of Representatives passed Articles of Impeachment against him, but he was acquitted by the Senate.

However, the threat of impeachment proceedings has led to the resignation of a justice: In 1969, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas resigned before he could be impeached for taking $20,000 a year for life from the family of a Wall Street titan in jail for SEC violations.

As a 2010 story in the Washington Post points out, people on both sides of the political spectrum have for years called for justices to be impeached–from Chief Justice Earl Warren to Justice Clarence Thomas to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Sonia Sotomayor. None have succeeded.

That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t give it the old college try, though, when the situation calls for it.

We’ve seen how large-scale 3D printers can be used to “print” structures like army barracks and even houses. But at MIT’s Mediated Matter Group, researchers are developing a new–and very cute–kind of construction robot.

They’re called Fiberbots: small robots that work as a group to wind fiberglass filament into large structures, from buildings to art installations. These digital agents can be paired to work together as a team in order to build complicated, organically-shaped three-dimensional structures as high as 15 feet tall. Check them out in action:

Announced earlier this week, each Fiberbot consists of a winding arm and a motorized base. The winding arm is connected to a tank on the ground by a tube. The tank contains fiber and resin, which the winding arm sucks to mix it in its nozzle, creating a filament that gets spun by the arm around the entire Fiberbot’s body. Once it’s done building this small segment around itself, the robot turns an ultra-violet light that cooks the fiberglass filament in place, solidifying it. Then the robot uses its base–which has a small electric motor that moves small wheels–to move up to the segment it has hardened, where it repeats the same fiberglass winding operation. According to the researchers, the robot can change directions by angling itself little by little as it builds, letting it achieve complex curves in 3D.

Each of the bots is autonomous and fully aware of each other’s position–they communicate using Wi-Fi–which ensures they don’t collide.

The spectacle of watching them work is almost as interesting as the technology itself. They look like alien worms growing from the Earth, twisting and writhing as they rise.

The MIT  researchers envision the ‘bots building structures in extreme situations, like after natural disasters. Just airdrop a few of these into position, give them the mission to build a bridge over a river, and wait a few hours.

“Tell me, I’m standing right here in front of you,” said a woman to Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who just announced his intention to vote to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court Justice. She, along with a large group of other sexual assault survivors, stopped him at an elevator and demanded he give them an answer for why he is voting to not delay the vote.

He did not have an answer.

Flake’s staff members seemed to try to get the group of people to stop asking him questions, but they continued. “Saying thank you is not an answer—this is about the future of our country,” the woman said. Flake stood there motionless, cornered in an elevator, speechless.

Here’s a video showing the exchange:

WATCH — Sexual assault survivors confront Jeff Flake on the elevator moments after he says he will vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh pic.twitter.com/2d3ABs0s2H

— J.D. Durkin (@jiveDurkey) September 28, 2018

This happened one day after Christine Blasey Ford gave an emotional testimony before the Senate, describing being sexually assaulted when she was 15 years old. She alleges that Judge Kavanaugh was the assaulter, something he denies. Her hours of thoughtful answers weren’t enough for the Republican politicians, however. Now members like Flake are moving forward with the nomination.

The people in the video want to know: What’s the rush? And so do many others around the country.

Thursday’s SCOTUS hearing on the sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh was a study in contrasts.

On one side, there was the accuser, Christine Blasey Ford: calm, collected, credible. On the other, there was Kavanaugh: screaming, dissembling, and unabashedly partisan. (At one point, he described the allegations against him, bewilderingly, as “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.”)

As we pointed out yesterday, Kavanaugh’s entire performance (and women’s reactions to it) could be summed up in one image. As much as that photo of an infuriated Kavanaugh said on its own, a lot of Twitter users had something to add to it, giving us a meme that zeroes in on the hypocrisy of the whole sham hearing in which a white man from a privileged socioeconomic background who’s been accused of sexual assault yelled and deflected his way through several hours of questions, openly disrespecting at least one (female) Democratic senator. There’s nothing remotely funny about Kavanaugh’s likely confirmation to the Supreme Court. But the meme at least gives those of us who are feeling our own anger and disbelief today an outlet.

Here are our favorite examples of the Kavanaugh rage meme (along with one casting suggestion for future films). Some of them use explicit language, others make inside jokes. All are preferable to actually hearing Kavanaugh scream.

I am a WHITE MAN, GODDAMMIT! The United States Constitution was WRITTEN FOR ME!! pic.twitter.com/6hSJc9MoLq

— Rebecca Shuri She Ready Carroll (@rebel19) September 27, 2018

I AM A VIRGIN WITH A CALENDAR pic.twitter.com/bkgiOE2tAV

— Noah Garfinkel (@NoahGarfinkel) September 27, 2018

I DRIVE A DODGE STRATUS! pic.twitter.com/8BGOPRRhBI

— Olivia Aguilar (@aguilarolivia) September 27, 2018

I HAVE NOT RAPED EVERY WOMAN IN MY LIFE. I HAVE FEMALE LADY KIDS. I CAN LOOK AT A CURVY TREE WITHOUT CUMMING. pic.twitter.com/TAF5KahmWy

— Hana Michels (@HanaMichels) September 27, 2018

MILK IS TOO GODDAMN SPICY!!! pic.twitter.com/vI21gytE0r

— Kashana (@kashanacauley) September 27, 2018

Bob Odenkirk with his head in his hands, groaning, "I'm gonna have to play this asshole someday, aren't I."

— April Wolfe (@AWolfeful) September 27, 2018

The impartial umpire not motivated by politics has logged on pic.twitter.com/4AZ891B1US

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) September 28, 2018

IT WAS BEACH WEEK!!!! pic.twitter.com/qrxITkIJRR

— Alex Blagg (@alexblagg) September 27, 2018

Just let him have Pee-Wee’s bike, and maybe he’ll go away. #KanavaughHearingspic.twitter.com/mmGO2TgcuS

— Shannon DeVido (@shannondevido) September 27, 2018

Tfw you’ve never been held accountable for your actions pic.twitter.com/20qOsUTZa8

— Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) September 27, 2018

Hundreds of actors and supporters picketed outside ad agency BBH Los Angeles’s West Hollywood offices yesterday, bringing the strike the union has held since September 20 to the agency’s Melrose Avenue front door. At issue is the agency’s withdrawal from the union agreement after two decades, citing cost and an evolving media landscape.

Among the protesters on Thursday was legendary actor Elliott Gould, who started his career as a child acting in commercials. “I support my brothers and sisters of SAG-AFTRA, and organized labor in the United States,” Gould told The Hollywood Reporter.

On September 4, the agency posted a letter to its website announcing that it would no longer be a signatory to the SAG-AFTRA Commercials Contract, which requires ad agencies and brands to cast only union actors in ad campaigns. In its letter, the agency cited shifting market realities that make being a signatory a competitive disadvantage:

In short, we are hired to operate in the best interests of our clients, and part of that is being able to deliver the greatest level of flexibility and value for the work we do. We are simply looking to level the playing field for all of us. The current contract was put in place nearly 20 years ago, when the internet was in its infancy and the advertising world was a vastly different place, with vastly different economics. The cutting-edge work we do at BBH US across all mediums is not well-served by a contract that was designed for a traditional media landscape. The need for speed, agility, and greater efficiencies in how we produce work has become increasingly important in today’s market. Many of our peer agencies are not signatories, making it hard to compete sustainably in a way that benefits our clients.

@sharonlawrence and @sagaftra LA Executive Director Ilyanne Morden Kichaven on the picket line fighting for fair wages! #StrikeBBH#unionstronghttps://t.co/pDr1ahC8cUpic.twitter.com/RdlVJpkXKH

— SAG-AFTRA MOVE LA (@SAGAFTRAMOVEla) September 27, 2018

The union counters that it has made allowances for more digital work with its Low Budget Digital Waiver that excuses agencies from paying minimum union rates on productions under $50,000. BBH has called it“an unrealistically low budget threshold, which severely limits when it can be used.”

The agency also competes with plenty of agencies who have never signed a contract with the union, such as Anomaly, 360i, 72andSunny, R/GA, and Droga5.

As humans, we are hardwired to feel pain when we get rejected. And when we feel that pain, it triggers fear–whether that’s anticipated, perceived, or real. Early humans who developed sensitivity to rejection were more likely to pass on their DNA, so evolution rewarded this trait. Even in modern society, the pain of rejection teaches us how to act appropriately in public, how to work in groups, how to make friends, and how to fit in.

But here’s the thing: Most of us confuse rejections with other reactions. Objections, for example, are not rejection. They are signs of confusion, concerns, the sorting out of options, subconscious cognitive biases, risk aversion, cognitive overload, and the fear of change. They are a natural part of the human decision-making process. In most cases, an objection is a sign that your prospect is still engaged–so you shouldn’t give up hope or write off getting the outcome you were hoping for.

Others also confuse questions (or even a negotiation attempt) as rejection. Sure, tough questions can be hard to hear, but customers and prospects often need to know this information before they can move forward. Negotiation is also not a rejection. If someone wants to negotiate with you, that shows that they’re engaged and willing to take your proposal seriously, and that they are willing to collaborate on a mutually beneficial deal.

Here’s what objections, questions, and negotiation might sound like sound like:

• “I don’t know; I’m going to need to think about it.” (Objection)
• “I need to run this by my boss (wife, husband, friend, etc.)” (Objection)
• “Before moving forward, we’re going to need to get our ducks in a row.” (Objection)
• “I don’t have time right now.” (Objection)
• “We’re not interested.” (Objection)
• “I’d like to explore other options.” (Objection)
• “Why does that option cost so much?” (Question)
• “Why can’t we get delivery sooner?” (Question)
• “Why does it work that way instead of this way?” (Question)
• “How is your software different than your competitors’?” (Question)
• “Can you work with me on the price?” (Negotiation)
• “Can you get this done faster?” (Negotiation)
• “Is there a way we can lower the setup fees?” (Negotiation)
• “I really want to do business with you, but . . .” (Negotiation)

When someone rejects you, they often don’t give you an opportunity to argue.
Rejection, on the other hand, is the outright refusal to accept an idea or request. It is a flat no that at times may be delivered with a harsh and deliberate tone. In rare cases, people hurl rejection at you as a personal insult.

Here’s what a (severe) objection might sound like:

• “Get the hell out of my office, you moron!” (Rejection)
• “Take me off your list and don’t ever call me again!” (Rejection)
  “You and your company suck!” (Rejection)
• “I wouldn’t do business with you if you were the last person on Earth!” (Rejection)
• “Go screw yourself!” (Rejection)
• Click or slam—phone being hung up or door being shut in your face (Rejection)

Why we conflate these emotions together

You might be reading this now with a clear understanding of the differences between questions, objections, negotiations, and rejections. The problem is, in the moment, when your emotions are reeling, it can be difficult to tell the difference.

At the purely emotional level, rejection and objections can and often do feel the same. This is because rejection can be real, anticipated, or perceived. An anticipated rejection is where you worry about the potential of it happening, which kicks off a wave of disruptive emotions. A perceived rejection is where an objection, question, or attempt to negotiate for real rejection can produce a natural emotional and neurophysiological response that feels like being rejected.

Of course, I could attempt to rationalize this with you, just as I did in the previous section, by illustrating the difference between an objection and a rejection. In sales training rooms across the globe that is exactly what gets done. Trainers address sales objections with an appeal to your rational brain. They admonish you not to take objections personally–and just let them roll off your back.

Likewise, sales experts pound on the table and tell you to toughen up or tap out. But this noise is mostly ineffective. If telling salespeople to suck it up and not take objections personally worked, we’d all be champions at asking for what we want and getting past no. I believe it is completely disingenuous to tell you that you can just snap your fingers, detach from rejection, and let it roll off your back.

To overcome rejections, you need to train yourself to process (and face) your emotions

There is no doubt that you can become inspired and motivated enough to run headlong into rejection following a motivational speech or strong message. The problem is that this type of motivation is temporary at best. Without sustainable techniques for gaining control over your disruptive emotions, you’ll rapidly revert to a more natural state in which you meander around the outskirts of rejection or avoid it altogether.

Talking at you about why you shouldn’t take objections personally doesn’t remove or negate the emotional pain you actually feel. Unless you are an emotionless psychopath, rejection hurts and objections sting.The real truth, that no one ever tells you, is the pain you feel in response to rejection–anticipated, perceived, or real–is as much biological as it is emotional.

You may be able to avoid this pain in the short term by steering clear of anything that even feels like rejection. But being unable to provide for your family, missing your mortgage payment, working in a dead-end job, getting fired, failing to reach your true potential, or feeling regret (the only emotion that cannot be resolved) hurt far worse over the long run.

To be successful, you’re going to need to ask for what you want and learn strategies to face whatever responses come your way–whether it’s a question, attempt to negotiate, objection, or rejection. Remember, even if it is a rejection, there is usually a way to turn a no into a yes. And if there isn’t, you can be confident that the more nos you get, the closer you are to getting a yes.

This article was adapted from Objections by Jeb Blount. It is reprinted with permission from Wiley. Copyright (c) 2018 by Jeb Blount. 

Months after Ikea recalled a product that killed two dogs from its first line of pet furniture, Ikea announced a sweeping recall of a popular ceiling lamp that has a tendency to fall off by surprise above unsuspecting people (and their pets), showering them with dangerous glass shards and “posing impact and laceration hazards.”

The recall of the lamp–which has a surprisingly pronounceable name free of Swedish-inspired epithets with too many consonants, Calypso–follows 19 complaints filed to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, the independent government agency that develops safety standards and tries to protect buyers against unreasonable risks. The reports describe the $34.99 Calypso’s frosted glass shade detaching from its steel base plate at random, crashing to the floor (or unfortunate passersby).

The reports include three minor injuries. Fortunately, that only means a few bumps and cuts. The affected lamps, which have an average rating on Ikea’s U.S. site of two stars out of five over 30 reviews, were sold from August 2016 to July 2018 (I’ve reached out to Ikea and will update this post if I receive more information.)

If you have a Calypso you can check out the manufacturing codes on the base plate: If it’s between 1625 and 1744, you have a killer lamp. If you do, approach with care, try not to startle it, capture it carefully, and take it to your nearest Ikea for a refund or a replacement.