In a remote village Bangladeshi village called Shikarpur, until recently, few people had electricity. But a new system is beginning to connect the village’s handful of solar-powered homes with neighbors who can’t afford to own panels themselves. In the peer-to-peer system, neighbors can sell extra electricity to each other.

“The aim is to create efficient and dynamic local energy markets that empower households and encourage solar entrepreneurism,” says Sebastian Groh, managing director of Solshare, the startup making the technology now in use in Bangladesh.

The startup launched when the founders realized that Bangladesh had a growing number of home solar panels–a government program in 2014 aimed to double the number of home systems–and those solar panels were generating more power in the middle of the day than residents could use and store in small batteries. Around 30% of the energy may be wasted. At the same time, when someone living off the grid in Bangladesh wants to charge a mobile phone, they can pay as much as 100 times more for the electricity than someone living on the grid in a city. Neighbors were already beginning to informally rent out power by running cables to their neighbors houses, watching how long someone used a light bulb at night, and asking for payment the next morning.

“The villagers see the results of their trading almost in real-time in the mobile money wallets and can buy their groceries with the money just earned through their solar systems,” says Groh.

When families buy the hardware, they can make micropayments at a rate similar to what they would have spent in the past to buy kerosene for lighting. It’s a system that the startup says can grow quickly, as it works with organizations that have already installed 5 million small home solar systems in Bangladeshi villages. In one project, with the local social enterprise Grameen Shakti, the company plans to create 100 tiny grids over the next 18 months. The “nanogrids” could eventually connect with the national grid and continue to provide power when the national grid goes down.

Groh, who calls the system the Airbnb of the energy world, says that the same technology could be used elsewhere as power becomes increasingly decentralized. Competitors have already tested small peer-to-peer trading systems for solar power in New York City and cities in Australia. But while those working in bigger cities are working at small scales, Solshare may be able to grow much more quickly as it works with thousands of homes in less-regulated rural Bangladesh, and soon also in India. As that technology helps rural areas leapfrog traditional power grids, it can also be tested and brought back to the developed world. “The algorithms used to exchange electricity in villages of Bangladesh will be the same algorithms, with machine learning empowered, in Bangkok, Singapore, Frankfurt, or New York,” Groh told judges at an MIT IDE Inclusive Innovation Challenge event. The company is now a finalist for the challenge’s $1 million prize. Solshare also announced an investment round of $1.75 million on September 28, led by Silicon Valley-based New Ventures LLC.

The world is still reeling from Christine Blasey Ford’s powerful testimony at Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing for the U.S. Supreme Court, but the Senate Judiciary Committee is moving forward with the vote on his confirmation.

For many, though, the fight is not over. A massive walkout and protest is planned for today (Friday, September 28) at noon ET.

Dozens of “rapid-response” protests are planned outside of U.S. senators’ offices in support of Ford and other survivors of sexual assault who have come forward with their stories. Groups including the National Women’s Law Center, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, National Domestic Workers Alliance, American Federation of Teachers, Friends of the Earth, NARAL, Sierra Club, MoveOn, and many more will be walking out and protesting today.

The protests are not just in Washington, D.C., but also planned for the local Senate offices around the country–such as Sen. Pat Toomey’s office in Philadelphia, Sen. Jeff Flake’s office in Phoenix, and a sit-in at Sen. Susan Collins’s office in Portland, Maine.

If it feels last-minute, that’s because it is: The grassroots events were organized overnight in response to Ford’s testimony in the hopes that senators will reject–or at the very least slow down–Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

It’s not that the Trump administration does not know climate change is happening. It knows. It’s just choosing to do nothing about it.

Burried in 500-page environmental impact assessment released last month by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Washington Post found the government had made the following prediction: By 2100, if current standards remain unchanged, the planet will warm by 7 degrees Fahrenheit, or 4 degrees Celsius. Little explanation is needed as to why this would be catastrophic. Scientists have already urged leaders to try to keep global warming constrained below 2 degrees Celsius–ideally 1.5 degrees–because even that slight lift could exacerbate the types of climate shifts, from hurricanes to heat waves, that are already devastating communities across the globe. Now imagine those effects doubled. Coral reefs would dissolve, large swaths of the planet would become uninhabitable, coastal cities would disappear.

Despite officials at NHTSA spelling out this future in no uncertain terms, the Trump administration’s response is to throw up its hands and say: We’re screwed anyway, so why stop now?

The environmental impact assessment was drafted as justification for the Trump administration’s rollback of Obama-era fuel efficiency standards for any vehicles built after 2020. While the administration acknowledges that the rollback will increase the supply of carbon floating into the atmosphere and causing global warming, it’s proposing that any climate action is essentially futile: The report predicts that even if fuel efficiency standards are held in place, global temperatures will still rise by 3.5 degrees Celsius before the end of the century.

As Michael MacCracken, who served as a senior scientist at the U.S. Global Change Research Program from 1993 to 2002, told the Washington Post: “The amazing thing is they’re saying human activities are going to lead to this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and society. And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about it.”

Abdicating responsibility for emissions from vehicles is just one of many ways that the Trump administration is failing the global fight against climate change: Donald Trump has also pledged to lower emissions standards for aging coal plants and oil and gas operations; he’s also withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, a global compact among world leaders to at least do their very best to keep global warming under that 2-degree threshold. And while it’s true that efforts toward mitigating climate change, whether it be accelerating progress on electric vehicles or dramatically ramping up solar and wind energy usage, may still not be enough to meet that goal, they will certainly leave us in a better place than doing nothing.

But ultimately, this latest revelation out of the Trump administration hardly comes as a shock. The president, whether in his business dealings or throughout his tenure in office so far, has demonstrated a consistent strategy of prioritizing immediate profit over long-term sustainability. Permitting unmitigated burning of fossil fuels and easing up regulations on automakers will allow those businesses to continue to profit, and indeed, players in those industries are among the few condoning Trump’s approach. With the president’s policies, now confirmed by his own administration, ushering this century toward a veritable hell scape, local leaders must double down on their efforts to advance climate action strongly enough to counteract backsliding at the federal level.

With the Senate Judiciary Committee voting on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, the controversial federal judge is getting support from Russia-linked Twitter disinformation campaigns, writes researcher Jonathon Morgan on Twitter.

We’re tracking a large Russian disinformation network at @NewKnowledgeAI. Their focus?

Syria
Trump
Iran
…and Kavanaugh. pic.twitter.com/E7ZLH1IKgG

— Jonathon Morgan (@jonathonmorgan) September 27, 2018

“The Russia-linked disinformation we’re seeing has largely avoided domestic U.S. politics, instead focusing on foreign policy issues in Syria, Israel, and Iran,” writes Morgan, the founder of New Knowledge, an Austin-based company that specializes in fighting online disinformation. “But true to form, they’re trying to sow discord by amplifying this polarizing conversation.”

Hamilton 68, a project of the Alliance for Securing Democracy that also tracks Russian online influence efforts, also listed“#kavanaugh” and “#kavanaughhearings” as its top two hashtags among accounts it tracks Friday morning. Other pro-Kavanaugh hashtags, including “#confirmkavanaugh” and “#confirmkavanaughnow,” also featured in the top 10.

Morgan didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry from Fast Company, but he wrote on Twitter that Russians may attempt to use other high-profile sex crimes allegations to divide Americans.

“Expect to see more disinformation whenever sexual assault is front and center in future news cycles,” he wrote.

Kavanaugh’s nomination is expected to be approved by the Judiciary Committee despite the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor who alleges Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her while they were teenagers in the 1980s.

This interview originally appeared at The Behavioral Scientist.

In 2007, a year before Cass Sunstein published Nudge with Richard Thaler, two law professors from Vanderbilt University coined a term meant to bring attention to Sunstein’s astonishingly prolific nature: the Sunstein number. Modeled after the Erdos number, which gave anyone who collaborated directly with the famously productive mathematician Paul Erdos an Erdos number of 1, and anyone who wrote with one of his coauthors a number of 2, the Vanderbilt authors found 57 scholars with a Sunstein number of 1, and 768 with a 2.

Though we haven’t counted again ourselves, we bet those numbers have since skyrocketed—especially since Sunstein has written 22(!) books since Nudge. Sunstein is a potent blend of scholar and scientist—an intellectual who is perpetually testing and sharpening his own theories through the collaborative process. And that includes his theories around nudging and behavioral science in policy. This fact made him the ideal person to talk to about nudging then, now, and in the future. Plus, he just wrote another book, called The Cost-Benefit Revolution. Below is our edited email exchange.

The Behavioral Scientist: In which area of public policy do you see the greatest potential for behavioral science to have a positive impact—perhaps a place where it’s not currently being utilized?

Cass Sunstein: The reduction of poverty. All over the world, people are suffering from severe deprivation. The public and private sectors could do much more to help. Making it easier for people to obtain access to that help—educational opportunities, employment, medical care, food, even clean water—could do so much to improve people’s lives. Better choice architecture could make all the difference.

BS: What misconception(s) of Nudge do you still encounter that you’d like to put to bed?

CS: The first is that nudges are a form of manipulation. They really aren’t! (Information is hardly manipulative. Disclosure of hidden fees is not manipulative.) The second is that nudges are just tweaks and cannot do anything major. That is false. Some nudges are having massive effects. For example, millions of children are getting free school meals as a result of the direct certification program from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The third, and in my view, the most idiotic, is that an emphasis on nudges “crowds out” stronger interventions. That’s preposterous, even though some very smart people believe it. (Okay, it might have happened once, or twice, but still, it’s preposterous.)

In general, discussions of nudging are sometimes derailed because people use big abstractions (about manipulation, about the nanny state, about freedom, about tyranny) without asking about particular nudges, and seeing which, if any, offend the abstractions. My response is to this is pretty technical: aaargh.

BS: Have you ever fielded a question from a reader of Nudge that was so insightful it prompted you to rethink your theories, or sparked the idea for new research?

CS: Yes! Riccardo Rebonato wrote a terrific book called Taking Liberties that prompted me to think better and much harder about many things, including active choosing as an alternative to default rules. My book Choosing Not to Choose probably wouldn’t exist if not for Rebonato’s superb work. Individual questions from colleagues and students have also had a big impact, for example, on my efforts to do better on the ethical questions arguably raised by some nudges.

BS: You recently wrote a new book, The Cost-Benefit Revolution, that makes the case for policymakers to evaluate potential policies through the lens of facts, rather than values, intuition, and anecdotes. Tell us more about the impetus for the book and why it’s a revolution.

CS: Part of the impetus was enthusiasm for being very empirical about the human consequences of interventions—both good consequences and bad ones. In the United States, the revolution has been real, from Ronald Reagan’s presidency to the present. (This Revolution Has Not Been Televised.) At least this is so in the sense that regulatory policy is often being made with close reference to the question: What are we getting, exactly, and what are we losing? On large issues and small ones, that is the central question.

But in working with other countries, I noticed, often, an absence of careful attention to costs and benefits, even from very impressive people. This is true of the left, the right, and the center. People often think, “It is good to do this!”—even though they lack clarity on the costs and benefits of doing this. That’s so, by the way, for behaviorally informed interventions, as well as for mandates and bans.

Also—an additional impetus—many disputes are really about facts, not values, even though people think they are about values, not facts. I wanted to explore that possibility.

At the same time, I have been increasingly interested in the limits of cost-benefit analysis, and how to overcome them. Frequently, regulators don’t know enough to project costs or benefits. They suffer from a serious “knowledge problem.” (Friedrich Hayek is a hero of mine.) How can that problem be solved? Sometimes, a good quantitative understanding of costs and benefits doesn’t tell us what we need to know, which is the effect of policies on human welfare. The book explores these problems in some detail and tries to signal some paths forward. We could do so much better in the United States—and in Germany, France, Denmark, Mexico, Spain, Italy, and countless other places as well.

Read more:How Will We Police The Police?

BS: How do you take into account our current political culture, which some people have called “post-fact,” and where some factions create their own (false) sets of facts to advance policy ideas?

CS: Many governments allow a large role for specialists, who really know what they are doing. I am speaking here of democracies, which are accountable to the people, and ultimately controlled by them. At the same time, well-functioning democracies ensure that problems of highway safety are assessed by people who know a lot about highway safety, and so too for issues that involve food safety, occupational health, smoking cessation, and environmental quality. We need a larger role for experts, not a smaller one.

BS: Like Kahneman and Tversky, you and Richard Thaler have had a rich professional partnership and friendship. Why do you think you worked so well together? And what have been a couple of your favorite moments from your collaboration?

CS: We had, and continue to have, a lot of fun! We laugh together a lot. That is maybe the secret sauce. We also have complementary backgrounds. My focus is on law and public policy, with a keen interest in behavioral economics. He’s the most important figure behind behavioral economics, with a keen interest in law and public policy. That’s a perfect mix, I think.

One favorite moment was a lunch in which Thaler arrived, all excited about an idea he had, called “choice architecture.” I was skeptical and asked a ton of questions. I worried: Our book is about libertarian paternalism, which is clear and crisp (I thought!)—what’s this choice architecture stuff? By the end of the lunch, he persuaded me, and we were off to the races. (I remember this as if it were yesterday.)

Another favorite moment was a workshop we did at the University of Chicago Law School, involving a paper we wrote together with Christine Jolls (now at Yale). Thaler was the main presenter. I have never seen such hostility in a workshop. People were very angry at us. It got ugly. No one who was there will ever forget it. But it’s a favorite moment, still, because Thaler kept his cool throughout, and keep asking, in response to rude questions, about what the evidence actually said.

In general: We had lunch together a lot, just the two of us, at a little Hyde Park restaurant. Even if we never produced anything, those would be precious memories. (We talked just last night, and that was great, too.)

BS: What’s the next big question you think behavioral scientists ought to be studying?

CS: What Hayek said about planners and markets is also true for any individual’s prescriptions about what people ought to be studying: Knowledge is widely distributed in society. That means that any individual should hesitate before prescribing.

But here’s a rule of thumb: People should study what they’re excited about studying, and where they think they can add to knowledge or make a difference. I would add only that plenty of people are suffering on our planet, and if we can help our brothers and sisters, well, that’s the greatest honor there is.

Read The Behavioral Scientist’s series, “Nudge Turns 10,” and a Q&A with Richard Thaler.

Elizabeth Weingarten is an editor at the Behavioral Scientist, as well as director of the Global Gender Parity Initiative at the think tank New America and senior fellow in its Better Life Lab.

Today Facebook admitted to a jarringly large security breach. Essentially, thanks to a perfect storm of three discreet bugs, hackers were able to use a feature known as “View As,” which lets users see their profile as other users would see them, to access other users’ security tokens and take over their accounts. According to a call with the press today, Facebook began to see an inordinate amount of accounts hijacked this way, which is what led the company to investigate the vulnerability. As many as 50 million people were impacted.

To know if you were one of those 50 million people, all you have to do is go to Facebook. If you’ve been logged out, that’s a good clue that your account was potentially impacted. Then, when you log back in, Facebook will give you a message at the top letting you know. The company logged out an additional 40 million accounts as well, who likely weren’t affected but have been subject to a “View As” lookup in the last year. Facebook’s VP of product management, Guy Rosen, told reporters that the company is also shutting down the “View As” feature as an added security caution.

Facebook says it has already patched the bugs, so users don’t need to take any action themselves. Still, 50 million people may have had their accounts taken over, which is very disturbing. When asked why users should still trust Facebook with their data, given this and other breaches over the last year, all Mark Zuckerberg could say was, “This is a very serious issue–we’re very focused on addressing it.”

The company is in touch with law enforcement, including the FBI, to try and figure out who is behind this attacks. The investigation is early and ongoing.

Still, the question remains: How long will it take until users decided enough is enough?

Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday took a detour through drinking-game history—and Wikipedia was on it.

Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse asked Kavanaugh a serious of questions about something in his high school yearbook: the term “Devil’s Triangle.” Kavanaugh claimed it was a drinking game played with “three glasses in a triangle.”

When Whitehouse asked Kavanaugh to define the term, Kavanaugh asked the senator, “You ever played quarters?”

“No,” said Whitehouse, unamused. “Okay, it’s a quarters game,” said Kavanaugh, referring to the popular frat house drinking game where players bounce 25¢ pieces off a table into cups of beer.

After Kavanaugh recounted his childhood memory, someone added a new definition of Devil’s Triangle to the Wikipedia: “A popular drinking game enjoyed by friends of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.” The entry was later removed, and at least one revision appears to have been removed from the public archives. USA Today notes that there was yet another entry on the Wikipedia page showing a history of revisions that read: “Do not add the hoax about a ‘drinking game,’ especially as related by Brett Kavanaugh.”

What remains on Wikipedia now is a list of other Devil’s Triangles, including an NCIS episode, a Primitive Radio Gods song, and a sexual arrangement, which is definitely not what Kavanaugh was referring to in his high school yearbook.

Devil's Triangle (disambiguation) Wikipedia article edited anonymously from US House of Representatives https://t.co/D3poeTGMuKpic.twitter.com/oB74iOxzBS

— congress-edits (@congressedits) September 27, 2018

Which companies and industries in the Russell 3000 Index have gender equity (or even close to full representation for women)? FactSet analyzed the board and leadership makeup of companies on the market-capitalization-weighted equity index. Spoiler alert: none of the stats suggest gender diversity is coming into balance overall, however, there were some bright spots.

• The percentage of companies with zero female board members has fallen to 18%
• 47% have boards comprised of less than 15% female members
• 14 companies have female-majority boards
• 22 companies have equal male/female representation
• Although only 151 companies in the Russell 3000 have a female CEO (5.1%) this is up from 143 in March 2017

Perhaps this is no surprise, but companies with a female CEO tend to have high female representation on their board of directors. And the industry sectors with the best female representation on boards are utilities and consumer goods. Both sectors rank highest for female CEOs: utilities has women representing 11.1% of CEOs.

According to the analysis, the tech sector ranks dead last with female CEOs at only 2.4% of the companies and an average board representation of 16.1%. However, of all Russell 3000 companies, Travelzoo (TZOO) has the highest number of women on its board (80%).

If you’re planning to head over the river and through the woods to grandma’s house for the impending holiday season, Google wants to help. The internet giant has introduced a slate of tools to help you get away—whether you’re planning a trip to the in-laws or a trip to an island far, far away where there is no Twitter or images of congressmen yelling at people.

The new travel page will show wannabe travelers the best time to book flights ahead of Thanksgiving or, say, the next Supreme Court confirmation hearing, based on 2017’s price trends. Unfortunately, the results are a bit limited right now (we reached out to see if Google plans on expanding the tool), but if you’re flying one of the routes the tool currently supports, it can be useful for saving a few bucks.

The page also highlights hotel deals, so if you Google Lisbon, Bora Bora, Cleveland—or some other popular travel destination—the results page will automatically highlight hotel deals in whatever city you’re visiting. Google Search is also adding a new “hotel location score” that takes into consideration nearby restaurants, landmarks, and public transportation.

Finally, the search page also offers articles about the destination so you can be a know-it-all tourist. As Google explains in a blog post, if you search “Austin” and already booked your hotel, “you’ll see things like flight prices, weather, and events for your dates of travel, and even restaurants near where you’re staying.”

It’s slightly creepy, but also useful.

Goldman Sachs analyst Rod Hall said in a new research note that Google may be paying Apple $9 billion this year for the right to be the default search engine of Apple’s Safari mobile browser, predicting that the amount could rise as high as $12 billion next year.

Google has long paid Apple this “traffic acquisition cost,” and while the two companies never speak publicly about it, reports emerge each year speculating on the amount. What’s notable this time around is that Hall’s estimate is three times higher than last year’s estimate.

According to March 2017 numbers, roughly 700 million iPhones exist in the wild. That would mean Google is paying Apple $12.85 per iPhone for default search status. Since Apple recently said it now has a total of 2 billion iDevices out in the world–only some of which run the Safari browser–that price could be less per device, which includes iPads.

Nevertheless, if the report is true, it’s a significant chunk of revenue for Apple. For Google, the iPhone is a major source of traffic to its search engine, and every one of those searches is an opportunity to show ads and collect targeting data.

Google has come under increased regulatory scrutiny for powering its advertising business with the personal data of users.

Source: Business Insider (pay)

During the season 10 premiere of RuPaul’s Drag Race, RuPaul made his mission clear: “To take over the mother-tucking world!” And it seems that’s exactly what he’s done.

RuPaul’s Drag Race has won a total of nine Emmys, including Outstanding Reality Show Program this year. Since migrating from Logo to VH1 last year, RuPaul’s Drag Race has hit all-time highs in ratings with no signs of slowing down, as VH1 has already greenlit season 11 and season four of its companion show, All-Stars. Adding to the drag’s pop culture takeover is RuPaul’s DragCon, a bicoastal drag convention started in 2015 that’s driving major business. Collectively, DragCons Los Angeles and New York City 2017 brought in more than $8 million in floor sales with around 80,000 fans in attendance in total. And now, DragCon’s second annual New York City edition will undoubtedly have similar, if not more, successful results.

Drag has gone from a highly niche art form to a mainstream force, with RuPaul’s Drag Race alums like Trixie Mattel topping Billboard charts, Shangela starring in A Star is Born with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, and Alyssa Edwards landing a Netflix show. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, cofounders of World of Wonder, the production company behind RuPaul’s Drag Race and DragCon, have watched drag’s flashpoint success with equal parts awe and anxiety.

“I think 100 years ago when we first fell in love with drag artists, it was a twofold thing. It was being mesmerized by their artistry and then being touched by their humanity. And I think it’s the combination of those two things that makes Drag Race a success,” says Barbato. “And by extension, I think that’s what DragCon is all about. What’s exciting about watching DragCon grow, and what’s challenging at the same time, is to translate that equation into a physical experience.”

“The shift that we’re seeing culturally is that the outsider voice is the new mainstream. We live in a culture that is very consumer-driven about mass marketing, about ratings, about audience, and yet the reality now emerging is the recognition that everybody is different and unique–and how do you serve that audience?” says Bailey. “Absolutely there are things we’re missing because this is a larger cultural shift that is recognizing the individuality of people. We’re at the tipping point where the outsider voices are no longer the outlying marginal voice. It is the voice of most people.”

But are all voices being heard?

The cultural shift RuPaul’s Drag Race has caused has also unearthed some ugly truths that have long been a problem in the drag community and that also run counter to its ideology of acceptance. RuPaul caught some heat in March when he said he wouldn’t allow trans women at a certain point in their transition to compete–even though several queens either came out as trans on the show or after their season. RuPaul eventually backtracked but jumped right into another pot of boiling water during the racially charged season 10. Contestant The Vixen was praised during the season for calling out racism within the drag community and how narratives on TV are shaped in favor of white queens. At the reunion, The Vixen and RuPaul got into a contentious exchange over how The Vixen carried herself during the season, resulting in The Vixen choosing to leave the taping. Fellow black queen Asia O’Hara stood up to RuPaul for not doing enough to support another queen–let alone another black queen–in one of the season’s more powerful moments. RuPaul has yet to directly address the racism that stems from the Drag Race community, leaving many to question the reasons behind his silence. In Barbato’s opinion, issues surrounding race can be abetted by representation.

“RuPaul’s Drag Race is probably the most diverse show on television. The No. 1 way for us to address any kind of issues across the board is always visibility,” Barbato says. “I really think it’s about providing opportunities for voices. And when you provide opportunities for voices, hearing the voice is the message. Seeing the people is the message.”

It’s a disservice that there isn’t a panel at DragCon NYC this year tackling social issues like racism given the climate of the not just season 10, but of the country right now. DragCon NYC does have panels discussing body positivity and inclusivity for non-binary and gender non-conforming people. And Barbato and Bailey have made sure to address politics with the midterm elections fast approaching. Political group Swing Left is hosting a panel, along with activations throughout the convention to call or send notes to local representatives, and reminders to register and vote. RuPaul is also having an onstage conversation with New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, which will certainly veer into the political realm.

“This is a business. It’s all about ratings and demographics, and those sort of stats on a sheet. But to actually meet people and to see the extent of diversity kind of defies all those demographics. That’s been the real learning curve,” Bailey says. “I truly believe that drag is universally relatable. It doesn’t mean that everyone has to be a drag queen, but I think it’s something that everybody can enjoy. It’s just so exciting to see an audience feel that they have permission to enjoy it and to participate.”

RuPaul’s DragCon NYC is from September 28-30.

It’s been almost a year since the #MeToo movement exploded in the wake of the New York Times and New Yorker articles detailing allegations of decades of sexual assault by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. In the months that followed, dozens of men accused of sexual misconduct have fallen from prominent positions, one after another, like power-suited dominoes.

Weinstein has since been indicted on charges of rape and predatory sexual assault. Entertainer Bill Cosby, who was accused by more than 60 women of unwanted sexual contact, has been sentenced to three to 10 years in prison for drugging and assaulting Andrea Constand. Many others have lost their jobs in light of sexual assault accusations.

But not everyone has fallen so hard. Some have left with a severance in hand, like CBS head Les Moonves; others quietly continue to do business, like former venture capitalist Justin Caldbeck, who privately invests in companies as an “angel.” Still others, like Louis C.K. and Matt Lauer, have tried to stage comebacks. Their attempts have been shunned, with rare exception. Certainly, Americans are still deciding whether men who have been ousted for mistreating women and are not facing criminal charges should be able to rebuild their careers.

Looming in the backdrop of all of this is a larger question: Do we value women in this country?

Whether or not Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court will serve as an answer to that question. The outlook on that decision has been complicated by a strange turn of events. Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) stated on Friday afternoon that he would confirm Kavanaugh on the condition that a weeklong FBI investigation into the allegations against him be carried out. Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Joe Manchin III (D-WV) are supporting his request for a delay. The judiciary committee has formally requested that the White House conduct a “supplemental FBI background check,” one that would be limited to “current credible allegations” against Kavanaugh, which must be completed in a week. President Trump has since authorized the investigation.

Prior to this occurrence, Kavanaugh’s confirmation seemed like a certainty.

Two women had come forward to accuse the judge of sexual assault. Then a third filed an affidavit claiming she witnessed the judge drinking heavily and waiting for his “turn” to have sex with an inebriated woman who had been corralled into a bedroom at a house party. But only one of them, Christine Blasey Ford, was invited to give testimony ahead of a Friday vote on his confirmation. Kavanaugh, meanwhile, forcefully denied all allegations.

The rush to vote caused Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), on the eve of Thursday’s hearing, to take to the Senate floor and ask: “Do we value women in this country? Do we listen to women when they tell us about sexual trauma? Do we listen to their stories about how their lives have been forever scarred? Do we take their claims seriously? Or do we just disbelieve them as a matter of course?”

Republicans have largely ignored the women who have come forward. Even before hearing Blasey Ford’s testimony, Republicans insisted on a Friday vote. “Unfazed and determined. We will confirm Judge Kavanaugh. #ConfirmKavanaugh,” tweeted chief counsel of nominations Mike Davis on Wednesday night. During Thursday’s hearing, Judiciary Committee Chairman Republican Chuck Grassley was slightly kinder to Ford Blasey, acknowledging how hard it must be for her to come forward. He simultaneously reminded committee members how difficult the allegations have been on Kavanaugh. Then, instead of interviewing Blasey Ford themselves, Republicans hired a prosecutor to interrogate her as if she were on trial.

For her part, Blasey Ford offered a powerful account. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she recalled of her assault. “The laughter between the two and their having fun at my expense.” As the hearing wore on, Republicans grew increasingly uncomfortable. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) could not contain himself, at one point calling the allegations against Kavanaugh a political smear campaign. “What you [the Democrats] want to do is destroy this guy’s life, hold this seat open, and hope you win in 2020,” he said.

While Blasey Ford testified that she received death threats and that she and her family have been forced to move out of their home, she says she has received far more support. No doubt: some 1,600 men said they believed Blasey Ford in a full-page ad in the New York Times. Another 1,000 alumni from Blasey Ford’s high school, Holton-Arms, signed a letter in her favor. Following Blasey Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s testimony, Democrats, the American Bar Association, and several Republican governors called for a hold on the vote, pending an FBI investigation into the claims.

Until today, the White House and Republicans have repeatedly denied this request and pushed for a vote. 

“Instead of getting the facts, instead of even wanting the facts, they try to dismiss this as a smear campaign,” Gillibrand said to her colleagues, noting that Anita Hill got a more serious reception in 1991 when she accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. 

An FBI investigation would doubtless surface a lot more information about the alleged incident. Agents are likely to interview not only the people who were supposedly at the gathering described by Blasey Ford but also their families, friends, and neighbors at the time of the incident. Furthermore, it would force those who have so far only submitted written statements to actually be interviewed, fully aware that lying to a federal agent is a crime.

While yesterday’s testimony provided little additional insight into whether Kavanaugh sexually assaulted anyone, it did put Kavanaugh’s character—the very thing that the judiciary committee is ultimately trying to understand—on display. “Is he an honest person, is he trustworthy?” asked Gillibrand in her Wednesday speech to her fellow senators. “Can we trust him to do the right thing for decades? Rule on women’s lives for decades to come, can we trust him to do that right?”

Notably, Kavanaugh said he did not listen to Blasey Ford’s testimony—a perfect metaphor for this whole proceeding—because he was too busy preparing his own remarks. 

Over the course of his testimony, the judge appeared hot-headed. Under strain, he seemed petulant and rude. He also downplayed his drinking, contradicting stories he himself has told about the way he likes to party. Furthermore, he was uncooperative, denying every allegation against him and often misrepresenting the statements of the party’s alleged participants, in which they claimed not to remember the event, as outright denials. His testimony stood in stark contrast to Blasey Ford’s poise and served as a reminder of how we often give a pass to to men who lash out in public while criticizing women for doing the same.

Of course, not everyone sees Kavanaugh that way. They see a man who is upset because he’s being unfairly accused of something that may never have happened.

The push to advance Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is full of mixed messages. On the one hand, it sends a message that so many of our elected leaders are willing to let women speak their minds, but not ready to give weight to their testimony. They are not ready to see male entitlement when it stands right before them. They are not ready to understand that men can have upstanding professional careers and also be capable of sexual assault and dishonesty. They are certainly not willing to investigate these possibilities until the pressure becomes politically unbearable. On the other hand, Flake’s request for an FBI investigation and the committee’s decision to agree, even if it is just a formality to pacify Democrats, shows that maybe women are finally being heard.     

Regardless of what the FBI investigation yields, it is still extremely likely that Kavanaugh will make it to the Supreme Court. Republicans hold the majority, after all. But there is still some hope that change is coming. When Anita Hill’s testimony was ignored in 1991, more women than ever were emboldened to run for office—and win. History is likely to repeat itself during the 2018 midterm elections. Change does not come as swiftly as we’d like, but it comes.

Last week, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, asked me to come and see a project he has been working on almost as long as the web itself. It’s a crisp autumn day in Boston, where Berners-Lee works out of an office above a boxing gym. After politely offering me a cup of coffee, he leads us into a sparse conference room. At one end of a long table is a battered laptop covered with stickers. Here, on this computer, he is working on a plan to radically alter how all of us live and work on the web.

“The intent is world domination,” Berners-Lee says with a wry smile. The British-born scientist is known for his dry sense of humor. But in this case, he is not joking.

This week, Berners-Lee will launch, Inrupt, a startup that he has been building, in stealth mode, for the past nine months. Backed by Glasswing Ventures, its mission is to turbocharge a broader movement afoot, among developers around the world, to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it. In other words, it’s game on for Facebook, Google, Amazon. For years now, Berners-Lee and other internet activists have been dreaming of a digital utopia where individuals control their own data and the internet remains free and open. But for Berners-Lee, the time for dreaming is over.

“We have to do it now,” he says, displaying an intensity and urgency that is uncharacteristic for this soft-spoken academic. “It’s a historical moment.” Ever since revelations emerged that Facebook had allowed people’s data to be misused by political operatives, Berners-Lee has felt an imperative to get this digital idyll into the real world. In a post published this weekend, Berners-Lee explains that he is taking a sabbatical from MIT to work full time on Inrupt. The company will be the first major commercial venture built off of Solid, a decentralized web platform he and others at MIT have spent years building.

A Netscape for today’s Internet

If all goes as planned, Inrupt will be to Solid what Netscape once was for many first-time users of the web: an easy way in. And like with Netscape, Berners-Lee hopes Inrupt will be just the first of many companies to emerge from Solid.

“I have been imagining this for a very long time,” says Berners-Lee. He opens up his laptop and starts tapping at his keyboard. Watching the inventor of the web work at his computer feels like what it might have been like to watch Beethoven compose a symphony: It’s riveting but hard to fully grasp. “We are in the Solid world now,” he says, his eyes lit up with excitement. He pushes the laptop toward me so I too can see.

On his screen, there is a simple-looking web page with tabs across the top: Tim’s to-do list, his calendar, chats, address book. He built this app–one of the first on Solid–for his personal use. It is simple, spare. In fact, it’s so plain that, at first glance, it’s hard to see its significance. But to Berners-Lee, this is where the revolution begins. The app, using Solid’s decentralized technology, allows Berners-Lee to access all of his data seamlessly–his calendar, his music library, videos, chat, research. It’s like a mashup of Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Spotify, and WhatsApp.

The difference here is that, on Solid, all the information is under his control. Every bit of data he creates or adds on Solid exists within a Solid pod–which is an acronym for personal online data store. These pods are what give Solid users control over their applications and information on the web. Anyone using the platform will get a Solid identity and Solid pod. This is how people, Berners-Lee says, will take back the power of the web from corporations.

A new revolution for developers?

Berners-Lee believes Solid will resonate with the global community of developers, hackers, and internet activists who bristle over corporate and government control of the web. “Developers have always had a certain amount of revolutionary spirit,” he observes. Circumventing government spies or corporate overlords may be the initial lure of Solid, but the bigger draw will be something even more appealing to hackers: freedom. In the centralized web, data is kept in silos–controlled by the companies that build them, like Facebook and Google. In the decentralized web, there are no silos.

Starting this week, developers around the world will be able to start building their own decentralized apps with tools through the Inrupt site. Berners-Lee will spend this fall criss-crossing the globe, giving tutorials and presentations to developers about Solid and Inrupt. (There will be a Solid tutorial at our Fast Company Innovation Festival on October 23.)

“What’s great about having a startup versus a research group is things get done,” he says. These days, instead of heading into his lab at MIT, Berners-Lee comes to the Inrupt offices, which are currently based out of Janeiro Digital, a company he has contracted to help work on Inrupt. For now, the company consists of Berners-Lee; his partner John Bruce, who built Resilient, a security platform bought by IBM; a handful of on-staff developers contracted to work on the project; and a community of volunteer coders.

Later this fall, Berners-Lee plans to start looking for more venture funding and grow his team. The aim, for now, is not to make billions of dollars. The man who gave the web away for free has never been motivated by money. Still, his plans could impact billion-dollar business models that profit off of control over data. It’s not likely that the big powers of the web will give up control without a fight.

When asked about this, Berners-Lee says flatly: “We are not talking to Facebook and Google about whether or not to introduce a complete change where all their business models are completely upended overnight. We are not asking their permission.”

Game on.

Every year, I meet with thousands of college students across the country, learning about what they hope to gain from their first job. In previous years, some of the most common questions that they asked in job interviews involved core responsibilities and professional benefits–like the chance to work on a marquee client. Now, however, I find that recent grads are increasingly asking questions centered on what an employer might be able to offer them. Is there mobility? Flexibility? Upskilling opportunities? Professional development?

The shifting nature of these conversations represents the evolving mind-set of young professionals who are entering a job market tilted in their favor. According to a CareerBuilder survey from earlier this year, the number of companies planning to hire college grads in 2018 was up nearly 80% from 2008. The unemployment rate also remains close to the lowest it has been in a decade. So, for recruiters and hiring managers, this means that they have to work even harder to make their companies attractive to job seekers.

HR professionals are preparing for gen Z’s arrival by learning about the unique abilities and challenges they bring with them to the workforce. As a recruiter or hiring manager, you should continue to use best practices to vet candidates–but you also need to be aware that they are now in a position to turn the tables and ask you–what more can you offer me?

Here are 4 questions that you should be prepared to answer before heading into the room with a recent college grad.

1. Who will I work with, and how will we work together?

Despite the fear that technologies such as AI are taking over jobs, humans are attracted as ever to work with innovative people that challenge and motivate them to do their best work. At EY, a recent survey of our gen Z summer interns found that more than 90% prefer to have a human element to their team.

We also found that gen Z wants to work with people of a similar age, with 77% preferring a millennial manager over a baby boomer or gen X. Of course this doesn’t mean that younger workers aren’t able to thrive under the supervision of baby boomers or gen Xs, but it does put the burden on employers to create a work environment and train their managers to empower their recent college grads to thrive–and provide them with opportunities and support to advance in the organization.

2. What professional development can you offer me outside of the workplace?

Recent job interviews have led us to believe that the newest working generation is gritty, curious, and craving opportunities to venture outside of their comfort zone and learn new skills beyond their day-to-day activities. In fact, our interns cited the potential for professional development opportunities as a top priority when they look for an employer.

To stay competitive, employers recognize that employees are looking for opportunities to explore various specialties and interests. At the same time, they’re also interested in professional development opportunities and what career tracks they might be able to pursue after gaining some on-the-job exposure. At EY, we recently rolled out EY Badges, a program that allows our more than 260,000 employees to invest in their careers by earning digital “badges” when they learn future-focused skills like data visualization, RPA, and blockchain.

3. How can I give back through my career?

One of the key motivations for younger workers today is to do work that gives them meaning and purpose. Recent college grads are looking for employers who are in tune with this mind-set, and this means being a purpose-led organization that offers opportunities to do meaningful work and give back to larger communities outside of the workplace. At EY, we encourage recently hired college grads to participate in programs like College MAP, where we mentor students in underserved high schools, empowering them to gain access to college, or our Earthwatch Ambassadors program, where young professionals donate time to international, entrepreneurial-based projects.

We know this young generation is looking for places where they can grow not only professionally but also personally. Companies should keep this in mind as they inquire about ways to get involved in philanthropy and corporate responsibility efforts.

4. How will I know if I’m succeeding?

As employers focus on providing all employees with as much opportunity as possible, they are also making a concerted effort to understand and balance the larger, yet changing, needs between multiple generations. We’ve learned that gen Z workers tend to be receptive to receiving feedback on an ongoing basis or after completing a large project or task.

This means that candidates are likely to ask smart questions during the job interview about what an organization is doing to ensure they understand the “why” behind what they are doing, and whether conversations about performance, feedback, and career aspiration happen frequently and collaboratively.

Of course, organizations will continue to face challenges they might not yet know about. To remain attractive to today’s college grads, companies need to see new challenges as opportunities to innovate and evolve their approach to talent attraction and engagement, and communicate that viewpoint to job candidates. Organizations also need to show their continued progress by implementing, supporting, and measuring the success of new initiatives, and report this progress across the organization.

A company’s success is dependent on its people. For employers to attract the best talent, they need to be aligned with their employee’s current and future needs. For employers who are looking to hire college grads, they can start with thinking about how their workplace can answer these four questions.

Natasha Stough is the Americas Campus Recruiting Leader at EY.

Narcissism is defined as excessive self-love or self-centeredness. In Greek mythology, Narcissus fell in love when he saw his reflection in water: He gazed so long, he eventually died. Today, the quintessential image is not someone staring at his reflection but into his mobile phone. While we pine away for that perfect Snapchat filter or track our likes on Instagram, the mobile phone has become a vortex of social media that sucks us in and feeds our narcissistic tendencies. Or so it would seem.

But people have long used media to see reflections of themselves. Long before mobile phones or even photography, diaries were kept as a way to understand oneself and the world one inhabits. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as secular diaries became more popular, middle-class New Englanders, particularly white women, wrote about their everyday lives and the world around them. These diaries were not a place into which they poured their innermost thoughts and desires, but rather a place to chronicle the social world around them–what’s going on around the house, what they did today, who came to visit, who was born, or who died. The diaries captured the everyday routines of mid-19th-century life, with women diarists in particular focused not on themselves but on their families and their communities more broadly.

Diaries today are, for the most part, private. These New England diaries, in contrast, were commonly shared. Young women who were married would send their diaries home to their parents as a way of maintaining kin relations. When family or friends came to visit, it was not uncommon to sit down and go through one’s journal together. Late 19th-century Victorian parents would often read aloud their children’s diaries at the end of the day. These were not journals with locks on them, meant only for the eyes of the diarist, but a means of sharing experiences with others.

Diaries are not the only media that people have used to document lives and share them with others. Scrapbooks, photo albums, baby books, and even slide shows are all ways in which we have done this in the past, to various audiences. Together, they suggest that we have long used media as a means of creating traces of our lives. We do this to understand ourselves, to see trends in our behavior that we can’t in lived experiences. We create traces as part of our identity work and as part of our memory work. Sharing mundane and everyday life events can reinforce social connection and intimacy. For example, you take a picture of your child’s first birthday. It is not only a developmental milestone: The photo also reinforces the identity of the family unit itself. The act of taking the photo and proudly sharing it further reaffirms one as a good and attentive parent. In other words, the media traces of others figure in our own identities.

By comparing old technologies with new technologies that enable us to document ourselves and the world around us, we can begin to identify what is really different about the contemporary networked environment. Building on a 20th-century broadcast model of media, today’s social media platforms are, by and large, free to use, unlike historical diaries, scrapbooks, and photo albums, which people had to buy. Today, advertising subsidizes our use of networked platforms. Therefore these platforms are incentivized to encourage use of their networks to build larger audiences and to better target them. Our pictures, our posts, and our likes are commodified–that is, they are used to create value through increasingly targeted advertising.

I don’t want to suggest that, historically, using media to create traces of ourselves occurred outside of a commercial system. We have long used commercial products to document our lives and to share them with others. Sometimes even the content was commercialized. Early 19th-century scrapbooks were full of commercial material that people would use to document their lives and the world around them. It’s easy to think that once you buy a journal or scrapbook, you own it. But, of course, the examples of sending diaries back and forth, or of Victorian parents reading their children’s diaries aloud, complicate notions of historical singular ownership.

Commercial access to our media traces is also historically complex. For example, people used to buy their cameras and film from Kodak, and then send film back to Kodak to be developed. In these cases, Kodak had access to all of the traces, or memories, of its customers, but the company didn’t commodify these traces in the ways that social media platforms do today. Kodak sold customers its technology and its service. The company didn’t give it away in exchange for mining their customers’ traces to sell ads targeted at them in the way that social media platforms use our traces to target us today.

Instead of social media merely connecting us, it has become a cult of notifications, continually trying to draw us in with the promise of social connectivity–it’s someone’s birthday, you have a Facebook memory, someone liked your picture. I’m not arguing that such social connectivity isn’t meaningful or real, but I believe it’s unfair to presume that people are increasingly narcissistic for using these platforms. There’s a multibillion-dollar industry pulling us into our smartphones, relying on a longstanding human need for communication. We share our everyday experiences because it helps us to feel connected to others, and it always has. The urge to be present on social media is much more complex than simply narcissism. Social media of all kinds not only enables people to see their reflections, but to feel their connections as well.

Lee Humphreys is an associate professor in communication at Cornell University. She is the author of The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life (2018). This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

When Ben Gomes joined Google in 1999, the company was a search-engine insurgent taking on entrenched giants such as AltaVista, Yahoo, and Excite. Its founding insight—that you can tell a webpage matters if other webpages link to it—was still its principal asset, and Gomes’s early responsibilities involved ensuring that this original “PageRank” algorithm could scale up past its initial index of 25 million web pages.

“I had the challenge of taking it from one machine to a whole bunch of machines, and they weren’t very good machines at the time,” he says, laughing at the memory. PageRank proved scalable and Gomes stuck around. Last year, he was named to run Google search, putting him in charge of the company’s first—and still most iconic—business.

I spoke with Gomes at the press event which Google held on Monday in San Francisco. Though timed to help mark the company’s 20th anniversary–which it officially celebrated on Thursday–the event served as the launchpad for the most substantial set of new search-related features that Google has announced in a long time. (Gomes began his onstage presentation by pointing out that Google deployed more than 2,400 improvements to search last year, but a high percentage of typical changes are subtle if not downright invisible.)

Related Video: Over its 20 years, Google has revolutionized the world

At its event, Google introduced new Activity Cards that appear when you repeat a search and show you the pages you visited the previous time. It previewed an updated version of Collections, a bookmark-like feature with a Pinterest-esque look. It showed a new type of element that intelligently organizes results into subtopics that vary depending on the nature of the query.

Other new features include Discover, a fancier version of the Google feed that fills the Google home page with information and content you might like before you’ve searched for it; improvements to Image Search such as Snapchat Stories-like multimedia shows; and a job search tool that now incorporates information about local training opportunities. Google is even attempting to use search to help people deal with natural disasters by rolling out an AI-infused feature that forecasts floods, starting in India.

When I asked Gomes which of these changes he thought was most important, he cheerfully declined to play favorites. “I wouldn’t be able to pick one particular thing,” he said. “To me, it’s the guiding light of serving the user and using technology to do that. That’s common to all the announcements. And that theme means a lot to us.”

One step at a time

For all that’s changed about Google search over the years–and will change as these new features arrive–the basics of searching Google have remained remarkably consistent over two decades. You type in words. You press a button. You skim a variety of results until you find what you were looking for.

The familiarity of that experience can obscure the fact that features we take for granted–or don’t even realize are there–once required heavy lifting on the part of the company’s engineers. Once upon a time, for instance, Google couldn’t deal with misspellings, which meant that search queries with typos–around 10% of all queries–only found pages that contained the same errors. Addressing that “was not an easy problem,” says Gomes. “You can’t just go to a dictionary–they’re words that aren’t in the dictionary.” That forced Google to handle typos algorithmically, which had the benefit of being language-independent. “I was involved in launching it for German, French, Italian, and Spanish and I didn’t know any of those languages,” remembers Gomes.

More about Google’s 20th anniversary:

How I went from Google intern to the head of Google Maps

As Google turns 20, it can’t take our goodwill for granted

What eight Google products looked like when they were brand-new

These 16 Google search queries will produce easter eggs to remind you it’s 2018

The Google Doodle is even older than Google itself

At the time the first version of the knowledge graph debuted, Gomes says, it was clear that people were going to do an increasing percentage of their knowledge-seeking by talking into their phones rather than typing, a scenario that naturally led them to phrase queries as questions. (Today, they can do that using the Google Assistant, which is also part of his portfolio.) Answering such queries requires Google to understand entities and their attributes, and to be able to parse the way people talk about them when asking a question. “There’s a reference back to some earlier part of the sentence that you first you have to solve before you can solve the data part,” he explains. “And you can only do that if you have an underlying deep representation of the information.”

The rise of voice may have made the knowledge graph a priority, but “Larry [Page] talked to us years before that about how he wanted to have entities in our system,” says Gomes. “It took us several years to figure out ‘How are we actually going to do this?’ Larry’s always visionary, and he convinced us that was a problem worth attacking. We just didn’t know the means.”

Similarly, the new functionality Google unveiled this week “has been the product of a lot of work over several years, actually,” Gomes says. “This has been part of our internal version of where search should go, and today we’re talking about it externally.” With search, there are always new problems worth attacking–and for Gomes, finding the means has turned out to be his life’s work, with more to come.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said Saturday that it reached a proposed settlement of securities fraud charges against Tesla Chairman Elon Musk that would force him to resign his position from the board chairman and levy $40 million in penalties.

Tesla’s stock has been in a free fall since Musk teased, via Twitter, that he was taking the company private—statements the government said were false and damaging to shareholders. Musk, who will remain CEO, has insisted he had a gentleman’s agreement with the Saudis that fell through. Musk will not leave the board entirely.

“As a result of the settlement, Elon Musk will no longer be Chairman of Tesla, Tesla’s board will adopt important reforms—including an obligation to oversee Musk’s communications with investors—and both will pay financial penalties,” said Steven Peikin, co-director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division, in a statement. “The resolution is intended to prevent further market disruption and harm to Tesla’s shareholders.”

From the SEC statement:

• Musk will step down as Tesla’s Chairman and be replaced by an independent Chairman.  Musk will be ineligible to be re-elected Chairman for three years;
• Tesla will appoint a total of two new independent directors to its board;
• Tesla will establish a new committee of independent directors and put in place additional controls and procedures to oversee Musk’s communications;
• Musk and Tesla will each pay a separate $20 million penalty.  The $40 million in penalties will be distributed to harmed investors under a court-approved process.

“The total package of remedies and relief announced today are specifically designed to address the misconduct at issue by strengthening Tesla’s corporate governance and oversight in order to protect investors,” said Stephanie Avakian, co-director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division.

The settlement is subject to court approval, which is expected.

Would he or wouldn’t he? That was the question that kept net neutrality advocates in California–and nationally–awake at night since the state’s ambitious bill passed both chambers of the legislature on August 31 and went to Governor Jerry Brown’s desk for signing. Throughout months of intense debate and heavy lobbying, the outspoken four-term governor remained silent on the issue of California’s attempt to restore in state law the extensive protections from the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission (FCC)–which were rescinded under Trump’s FCC.

Brown’s decision in favor of the bill came almost down to the wire–just before the deadline to sign or veto bills at midnight on September 30. With his signature today, the law is due to take effect on January 1, 2019.

His silence and was a marked contrast to net-neutrality debates in other states. On the day of the FCC’s repeal vote (December 14, 2017), Washington State Governor Jay Inslee appeared on TV with state legislators, the attorney general, business, and nonprofit leaders announcing his intent to take any measure to restore net neutrality protections. Washington’s bill passed on February 28 and was signed by Inslee five days later.

Brown watchers weren’t entirely surprised, though, noting his penchant to study legislation extensively before making a decision. “He’ll suddenly call five people up to get their opinion on something,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation Legislative Counsel Ernesto Falcon at a San Francisco rally in favor of the bill on September 19 (at which top House of Representatives Democrat Nancy Pelosi stumped for the state effort).

The bill’s passage will certainly be opposed by the FCC, which proclaimed its ability to preempt state efforts when it repealed the old regulations. “California’s micro-management poses a risk to the rest of the country,” said Chairman Ajit Pai earlier this month. State advocates, however, say that Pai gave up that right with the federal net-neutrality repeal, which rejected the FCC’s authority to regulate internet service providers. “If an agency wants to pre-empt states from regulating an industry, it has to have authority to regulate that industry,” says Ryan Singel, a fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

Telecom and cable companies will certainly sue as well. (AT&T and Comcast were particularly active in lobbying against the California bill.)

California’s law will go beyond other state measures, which typically ban blocking and throttling a customer’s access to websites, apps, services, or classes of service, as well as banning the speeding up of sites, apps, and services whose owners pay for better-than-typical service (aka fast lanes).

In addition, the California law will ban ISPs from:

• Throttling content providers’ access into the ISP network and/or charging providers for access (aka circumvention of net neutrality at the point of interconnection).
• Providing access free of data caps for select sites or apps. California’s law allows so-called “zero-rating” for entire classes of content–for example, as T-Mobile does for video with its Binge-On program. But it prohibits zero-rating for specific services, as AT&T does for DirectTV, which it happens to own.

It looks like the next step for California will be the courts. Shortly after Brown signed the law, the Federal Department of Justice announced its intention to file a lawsuit blocking the measure. “I’m pleased the Department of Justice has filed this suit,” said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in a statement. “The Internet is inherently an interstate information service. As such, only the federal government can set policy in this area.”

This story has been updated with information about the federal lawsuit.

SoulCycle is beefing up its cult-favorite brand by adding a few new unexpected elements, including live music. On Monday, the boutique fitness company announced that its newly formed media division is releasing a new program that further amps the brand’s dedication to music.

Fans have come to associate SoulCycle with thumping, dance-inducing music, which is often the hallmark of the $34 cycling classes. This has traditionally meant curated high-energy playlists of Top 40 hits peppered with some old-school Britney. Starting this month, however, attendees will experience live concerts in tandem with instructors. A rep confirms that the format will resemble a traditional SoulCycle class in which instructors provide direction and motivation throughout the class, with music mixed in.

The first event will kick off in New York City with electronica duo Louis the Child before expanding to Las Vegas in November and across several U.S. cities in 2019.

Rounding out SoulCycle’s dedication to music, the company will also release in-class concert tracks, playlists, and original audio–i.e, motivational speeches from instructors–on Apple Music. Social media is getting some love too: SoulCycle plans to add new video programming across its social platforms, with an emphasis on Instagram. It will be a mix of instructor takeovers, footage from theme rides, and videos from musical artists. The content is meant to “give audiences a boost off the bike so that whatever they’re moving through, they can find a positivity fix,” reads a press release.

SoulCycle’s hybrid concert bike rides are another example of the fitness industry further committing to experiential events. ClassPass recently announced “Getaways,” daylong wellness experiences in collaboration with spas and gyms across the country. A number of boutique gyms, such as Barre3 or Taryn Toomey’s The Class, offer year-round retreats and seminars (that sell out within days). There are now even entire festivals dedicated to fitness and wellness.

SoulCycle announced its new media division in June in an effort to engage customers beyond the gym’s four walls. The New York-based company hired three media industry veterans–Gregory Gittrich (formerly at Mashable), Laurel Pinson (formerly at Glamour), and Angela Bowers (formerly at Vox). In a press statement, SoulCycle CEO Melanie Whelan said, “Their combined digital, product, and media experience will allow us to serve our riders in new and unique ways, as well as deliver meaningful and transformative experiences around the globe that complement our studio experience.”

SoulCycle is currently in 15 markets, with 88 studios across the United States and Canada. In the last year the brand announced its expansion into non-cycling pursuits with SoulAnnex, a studio focused on cardio, yoga, and HIIT. It also added to its current SoulCycle offerings with SoulActivate, an on-the-bike class that heavily incorporates high-intensity interval training.

“We say internally that it’s never been about a bike,” Whelan previously told Fast Company.“It’s always been about our rider and creating an experience for them. The bike was just the vessel.”

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2018 was awarded to two scientists who figured out ways to use the body’s own immune system to fight cancer. James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo will share the 2018 prize and its $1.01 million cash reward for their parallel discoveries in “cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation,” which constitutes a “landmark in our fight against cancer,” according to a statement Monday from the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute.

Allison, of the University of Texas, studied a protein that acts as a brake on the immune system and the potential of releasing that brake; over in Japan, Kyoto University’s Honjo worked on stimulating the body’s immune system’s ability to attack tumors, discovering a new protein on immune cells and eventually found that it also acts as a brake. For years scientists have tried to conscript the immune system into the fight against cancer, but Allison’s and Honjo’s work are true breakthroughs that “revolutionized cancer treatment” and fundamentally changed how cancer is treated.