Apparently, the real art of the deal is denying you ever offered a deal–even if you did so in front of thousands of witnesses on camera.
Senator Elizabeth Warren’s has become increasingly poised to run for president in the 2020 election as her profile has risen over the last couple years. All the while, Donald Trump has been attacking his potential future competitor by seizing on one aspect of Warren’s life and career: that she once notified officials at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard claiming Cherokee heritage, possibly in order to improve her chances of landing teaching jobs there.
President Donald Trump, who definitely never leaned on familial connections to get ahead in any way whatsoever, found Warren’s claims dubious and saddled her with the racist nickname “Pocahontas.” He has since referred to her by that name almost exclusively, each time grinning like a Lil Rascal who’s just got away with something naughty. (Take that, PC police! Racist nicknames!)
Warren has been hesitant to rise to the bait and prove her heritage, even after Trump offered a million-dollar donation to a charity of her choice for doing so. On Monday morning, however, the senator provided DNA evidence that confirms her Native American lineage goes back six to 10 generations–with a splashy website and video. Now that Warren’s taken this step to prove the authenticity of her claim, she was understandably curious about whether Donald Trump would in fact make good on his million-dollar offer. (She would prefer the donation go to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.) When a swarm of reporters asked him about it on Monday, though, the president responded in a way that would be unusual for anybody with less of a laissez-faire relationship to reality: He denied ever making the offer.
Here, of course, is a video of Trump making the offer:
Flashback. July 5. Trump on Elizabeth Warren: "I will give you a million dollars to your favorite charity, paid for by Trump, if you take the test and it shows you're an Indian." (via Fox) pic.twitter.com/rQ8cxHGg8s
So that settles that. The press will surely hold the president’s feet to the fire, and he will magnanimously concede that he was wrong about Warren, before apologizing for constantly mocking her for the past two years. There’s no way, instead, that it will turn out like the last time Trump made a monetary offer to someone to prove their origination: when he goaded then-president Obama to provide his birth certificate and then continued to push the birther conspiracy for several years anyway. Fast Company will be waiting in a heightened state of suspense to see which way it shakes out.
UPDATE: Elizabeth Warren has since responded to Trump’s denial, in refreshingly punchy fashion, in the tweet below.
Having some memory problems, @realDonaldTrump? Should we call for a doctor?
Here’s something you won’t “forget,” Mr. President: You’re the least popular president in modern history & your allies will go down hard in the midterm elections. 22 days. Tick-tock, tick-tock. pic.twitter.com/53FV0HXGXX
I used to love soldering back in the day of hobbyist electronics. Assembling something, while learning about it and then using it, was extremely satisfying. That era has been lost to the complex engineering of touch screens and smartphones–but computer enthusiast Albert Gajšak wants to bring back hobbyist enthusiasm by releasing a DIY phone kit. It’s called the MAKERphone and it’s pretty damn cool.
For Gajšak, the process of building your own phone isn’t about nostalgia. Rather, it’s that we need to be empowered as users and creators, rather than passive consumers. He and his team want to give people the ability to create a smart-enough phone without all the time-sucking needless features, while learning about how the world around us works in the process.
MAKERphone is “hardware, wires, chips, education, and electricity,” as the group explains on Kickstarter. It builds on a previously successful Kickstarter venture, the MAKERbuino, a Gameboy-like handheld console that ran on the Arduino computer platform, a favorite of DIY electronics enthusiasts. In 2017, they shipped 6,000 MAKERbuino kits, and they’re on track to surpass that goal with MAKERphone. So far, the campaign, which originally had a $15,000 goal, has generated $85,520.
[Image: CircuitMess]MAKERphone, as its inventors explain, is not a LEGO-like kit where you simply stack components; you’ll need to get your hands dirty with soldering irons and screwdrivers. The kit comes with all the components you need to build the phone, starting with Markerphone circuit board, which is the base onto which you’ll attach the rest of the electronics needed to create this DIY thingamajig.
That includes a full-color LCD screen with a resolution of 128 x 160 pixels, comparable to the screens of early Nokias, Sonys, and other dumb phones of yore. It’s enough to display an address book and phone caller info, and of course to play games like Snake or Space Invaders. (In fact, you can play these games with dedicated gaming buttons that are included in the box.) There’s also a GSM module with a stick-on antenna that allows the phone to connect to a network to make calls or send texts, along with a main micro-computer with a dual core processor that also has Wi-Fi, and a sound module that can play ringtones, alarms, and sound effects. Finally, the kit includes a clear casing of laser-cut acrylic that acts as the bread to your electronic ham and cheese sandwich.
The kit costs $94 through the Kickstarter page but, if you choose the $119 option, you also get a cool wooden box with all the tools you need to assemble this thing: USB soldering iron, a stand for the soldering iron made of metal and a USB power brick to power it, a screwdriver, nose pliers, and diagonal cutter pliers.
If you’ve never assembled electronics, you’re missing out on a lot of fun. Plus, it demonstrates that our phones do not simply materialize from “robots and lizard people from Silicon Valley,” as Gajšak says in a video, but real people who manufacture them. In any case, the process will give you an increasingly unusual skill set today that will come in handy during the zombie apocalypse, when you have to fix the broken radio you found in an abandoned cabin in Montana.
“Employees at Google have been fairly vocal about making sure that the company upholds its pledge to not be evil,” says Liz Fong-Jones . The Google Cloud Plat form engineer has played a role in Trump-era activism by assisting the 2016 Never Again pledge. Her code made it easier to verify the identities of over 2,800 signatories who promised not to work on discriminatory or otherwise harmful projects, such as a hypothetical “Muslim database.” Fong-Jones calls it one of the first times that tech workers publicly united across companies to stand up for their ethical values in how technology is used.
But she has been standing up within Google as an inclusion advocate–for employees and users–since 2010 (two years after joining the company). “Employee organizing [in tech] is not new,” she says. “It’s just [this] public manifestation of it that is.”
Fong-Jones began with a focus on equity engineering–flagging and working to remedy cases in which products don’t meet the needs of marginalized communities. A simple example would be insuring accessibility for vision- or hearing-impaired users, but it can extend to addressing harmful technologies, as Never Again sought to do.
Liz Fong Jones [Photo: courtesy of Liz Fong Jones]Fong-Jones expanded her advocacy from customers to employees, focusing on the needs of minority populations inside Google, including her own transgender community. “Our medical coverage previously placed limits on the dollar value of coverage trans people could receive,” she says. “[People were] being forced to pay tens of thousands of dollars out of their own pockets.” That’s one of many employee issues she’s taken on, including gender pay equity, performance-review reforms, and increasing opportunities for advancement.
While her advocacy work has always subjected her to tension, the environment grew much more hostile in August 2017, shortly after James Damore’s “Ideological Echo Chamber” memo, questioning the innate ability of women to be engineers, went viral inside the company. (Damore was soon fired.)
Google has fostered an open culture, encouraging employees to discuss nearly any interest in fora like Google Groups, email lists, the Google+ social network, a meme generator, and regular all-company meetings. But institutions meant to bring employees closer together are now pushing them apart.
Fong-Jones became a public target when part of a Google+ conversation criticizing the publishing of Damore’s memo was leaked to an alt-right blog. Thus began a process of targeting Fong-Jones and other Google diversity advocates both inside and outside the company. “I and seven other Google employees were publicly blamed by individuals such as Milo Yiannopoulos for James Damore’s firing,” she says. “And that resulted in death threats and harassment that have persisted to this day.”
Within Google, Fong-Jones claims that a tiny contingent of “white supremacist” and chauvinist staffers has been trolling other employees on internal networks. “There are times when people will ask kind of ‘101’ questions [about diversity and inclusion],” she says. “And it’s hard to tell whether it’s an attempt to learn or whether it’s an attempt to waste your time or if it’s a particular kind of clueless or antagonizing question meant to make you mad.”
In January, Fong-Jones felt compelled to take the company’s inclusion struggles public, with exposes in Wired and Gizmodo.
That’s not how she likes to do things. “If something spills into the media, this a failure,” she says. “We’ve been a lot more vocal . . . since January because of the fact that we realized that our ability to safely organize both on product issues and on our labor issues was at risk.”
The danger continues, she claims, with ongoing leaks and harassment. “I’ve accepted some degree of risk in being kind of the spokesperson of a group of organizers, but other people haven’t signed up for that,” says Fong-Jones.
Yet she realizes that she can’t do it all. So Fong-Jones says that she’s now “equipping other employees to fight for change in their workplaces–whether at Google or not –so that I’m not a single point of failure.”
Specificity can be your friend. I could tell you that an elephant can eat up to 600 pounds of food a day, but you’d get a clearer picture of just how much that is if I said it’s equal to about 1,200 Big Macs.
Of course the idea that major corporations don’t necessarily pay a fair percentage of tax on earnings around the world isn’t new. It’s something people and governments around the globe, including President Trump, have griped about.
But the concept gets put in a bit of a different light when we hear that Ed Sheeran paid more in U.K. tax last year than either Amazon or Starbucks.
Now, “Shape of You” is a pretty catchy tune, but still nowhere near as popular as a venti Frappuccino or Prime delivery. In 2017, Starbucks brought in about $213 million in U.K. profit, and Amazon hit $2.6 billion, while Sheeran notched profits of approximately $35 million. Yet Sheeran, who is the world’s most lucrative solo artist, paid about $6.96 million in taxes, compared to Starbucks’ $4.3 million and Amazon’s $5.9 million tax bill.
Of course, corporate tax is an entirely different animal, particularly when you’re talking about global companies, with strategies that have fun names like Double Irish and Dutch Sandwich. But in the always-on battle for good PR, getting your societal contributions unfavorably compared to a wide-grinning pop star is not a good look.
Amazon is a popular tax whipping boy stateside as well, given that it made more than $5 billion in 2017 but didn’t pay any federal income tax.
Which is probably less than Taylor Swift paid, right?
Earlier this year, FuboTV CEO David Gandler said he hopes to have a top-four streaming TV service in the United States, or even a top-three service globally. The startup still has a long way to go, though, as it’s now approaching 250,000 paid subscribers. That’s way up from 100,000 subscribers last September, but far behind Dish’s Sling TV (2.34 million as of August), AT&T’s DirecTV Now (1.8 million in the second quarter), Hulu with Live TV (1 million as of September), YouTube TV (unofficially 800,000 as of July), and PlayStation Vue (unofficially 745,000 in the second quarter).
Of course, FuboTV’s press release focuses not on subscriber numbers, but on growth, of which there’s plenty. On average, users spent 51 hours per month in the app last month, up from 11 hours in September 17, and the average subscriber revenue is now $40 per month instead of $22 per month as Fubo has expanded its lineup, raised prices, and built up ad revenue. And as I noted in my profile of FuboTV, the startup has beaten its larger competitors to certain technological milestones. For instance, it’s still the only live TV streaming service offering any sporting events in 4K HDR.
It’s still unclear what the endgame for FuboTV might be, but given that the startup has raised more than $150 million from companies like Sky, AMC, and 21st Century Fox, it still has the time and money to figure things out.
This story has been corrected to note that Fubo’s $40 per month average earnings per subscriber includes ad revenue.
A lot of my fellow tech CEOs attempt to inspire employee engagement by creating a fun work environment. You know what I’m talking about: endless snacks, ping-pong tables, on-site gyms, and bike repair shops. Don’t get me wrong–all of these amenities are super neat–but I can’t say that I’ve had an employee quit because no one filled the jar of Peanut Butter M&Ms for a couple of days.
Ultimately, I’ve found that there are two things that employees really care about: their future and the company’s future–in that order. The perks I describe above are just a bonus.
1. Does every single employee understand where the company is heading?
C-suite leaders talk about the future of the company all the time. In fact, sometimes, we talk about it so much that we forget the rest of our workforce isn’t privy to these discussions. According to Gallup, only 41% of employees understand their company’s overall direction.
That’s not high enough. Every single employee in your organization should have a clear view of where the company is heading and what objectives matter most to the business. To help your your employees understand the future and vision of the company, do the following:
Schedule a regular cadence of all-hands meetings to talk about the future, important objectives, significant changes, and (most importantly) why the company made the decisions they did or implemented those changes.
Show employees how the company is structured and why. For this exercise, visual is best.
Encourage collaboration and honesty by allowing employees to ask anonymous questions during all-hands meetings. You can have employees submit questions beforehand or use a forum-like tool where they can post comments and questions in real time.
Repeat yourself. Marketing expert Dr. Jeffrey Lant formulated the “Rule of Seven,” which states that messages don’t resonate until they’re repeated seven times over an 18-month period.
Following the meeting, distribute a summary or slide deck to all employees.
2. Do employees understand how their work contributes to larger objectives?
It’s not enough for employees to understand where the company is headed; they must also know where their work fits in the bigger picture. Most people aren’t satisfied with clocking in, completing tasks, and clocking out. And according to a survey by Harris Interactive and Franklin Covey Co., 80% of workers have no clear line of sight between their tasks and organizational goals.
Make sure your employees know that their work matters by ensuring that each person on your team clearly understands the company vision and objectives. Set goals with your team that align with them, and make sure to share your progress along the way.
Give everyone access to a real-time org chart, and use this as a tool to communicate who is responsible for what and how they fit into the bigger picture of the organization. It’s important to talk about this often, especially when things change.
To help your employees feel valued, train the managers in your company to give feedback on one-on-one meetings with direct reports. Don’t wait for quarterly performance reviews to deliver praise or constructive criticism. If your feedback is not so positive, make sure that it’s specific and actionable. As much as you can, give them the tools and support to improve. Encourage your executives to stop and comment on an employee’s work from time to time. A small comment from a member of the executive team can go a long way.
4. Are you setting your employees up for a thriving future?
A company can implement all of the tips above, yet an employee might still become disengaged. That’s because, frequently, what matters most to the employee is their own development and growth. This is why it’s critical to understand what your employees care about. If you don’t know the answers to the questions below, start asking your employees about their goals and how you can help them succeed–not only in their current position, but in future jobs as well. Here are the questions I ask my employees:
“What do you want to do after this job?” I ask this as early as the job interview because it helps me understand the person’s goals and if/how our company can help him or her achieve them
“What can I do right now to make progress towards the next step in your career?”
“What training, workshops, or programs are you interested in?”
It might be uncomfortable to discuss life after your company with your employees. This is a conversation best handled one-on-one between manager and employee, but make sure that this conversation starts between you and your executive team. Encourage your executives to have these types of talks with their direct reports, who should in turn discuss with their subordinates, and so on.
You will be surprised by what comes out of these conversations. Not only will you and your employees be more on the same page, but they will be more engaged at work because they know you have their back when it comes to their long term career goals.
When leaders are communicative and transparent about the direction of the company, how the contributions of individual teams fit into the bigger picture, and how they can prepare employees for their next step, employees feel valued, connected, engaged, and are much more likely to bring their best self to work.
Bill Boebel is a serial entrepreneur and the CEO of Pingboard–org chart software rebuilt for today’s modern workforce. He previously was CTO of Rackspace Email and cofounded Webmail, the largest business-grade email hosting company at the time.
Robotics startup Anki is ready to release its Vector robot helper to the world. The $250 robot is available now on Anki’s website, Amazon, and Best Buy.
Anki’s previous robot, the Cozmo, has been a hit with more than 1.5 million sales to date. But while Cozmo is strictly a toy that plays games, Anki is pitching Vector as a home companion of sorts. It’s packed with a quad-core processor and sensors for mapping its environment, and it can supposedly roll over to you without falling off tables or bumping into things. Along the way, it makes cute robotic blurps and reacts to being touched or moved.
The challenge now is building in more helpful functions. Today, Vector can answer simple questions, set timers, show the weather, take photos through its camera, and play a game of blackjack on its display. Support for Amazon Alexa voice commands is coming later this year, and Anki mentions security monitoring and messaging as future possibilities. The work-in-progress nature of Vector may explain why Anki’s marketing focuses on how non-threatening the robot is, rather than what it can accomplish.
In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Houston and poured water on the city for days, growing into the worst documented rainstorm in United States history. In the months after the storm, it became clear to the Houston Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) that the money coming in from FEMA for homeowners impacted by flooding would not be enough; it rarely is. FEMA bases how much aid it administers to a disaster-struck region on how many people apply for it, and then again, which of those applications meet the agency’s threshold for sustained damage.
This approach results in a severe underestimation of need: It fails to capture people who do not know to apply, or cannot, or whose properties sustained damage that FEMA doesn’t recognize. So Houston HCD, in November, issued a request for proposals, calling for a new, data-driven approach to identifying and quantifying need after a disaster like Harvey strikes.
“Houston’s been hit by five federally declared disasters in three years,” Tom McCasland, HCD director, tells Fast Company. “If the damage from these disasters is chronically undercounted, then we’re being chronically under-resourced for recovery. Harvey presented an opportunity to take on the problem of undercounting with this data project.”
HCD ultimately awarded the contract to the data consultancy firm Civis Analytics, which proposed a method of calculating aid based on both existing data streams that the city collects, like trash pickup locations and flood level modeling, and comprehensive community surveys and outreach. “We focused on helping them understand, at a really individual level, exactly which households were impacted by flooding,” says Amy Deora, Civis’s director of public sector analytics. The federal government agencies responsible for post-disaster relief, FEMA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, she adds, “use a basic set of standards and heuristics to estimate aid–they assume an average level of damage for each house that reports, and assign funding in that way.”
But Civis’s model showed that this method resulted in an incomplete picture of the need following Harvey–one that failed to reach 50% of Houstonians who experienced flooding, and underestimated the need for housing funding by $2 billion.
So instead of leaning on applications for FEMA assistance, Civis assessed need by first accessing property files from the Harris County Assessors’ database to get a sense of how many residential buildings existed in Houston before the hurricane, and what their value was. They then cross-analyzed that data with stats from the Census Bureau on how many people lived in each building, what their income was, and whether they rented or owned. Working with Dewberry, a company that models flood patterns, Civis overlayed the flooding impact from Harvey with the residential landscape of the city that they compiled. “We wanted to start from the ground up,” Deora says. They also analyzed metadata on emergency calls placed during the hurricane, and much more esoteric data points, like the drone footage that some residents uploaded to YouTube showing the extent of the flooding.
From this model, Civis learned that not only did the traditional way of assessing need dramatically undercount the people affected, it also perpetuated discrepancies in aid delivery along socioeconomic lines. The flooding had the largest impact in areas of high poverty, and residents in 12 neighborhoods sustained levels of damage to their buildings that amounted to more than 50% of their annual income to repair. But so far, most of the assistance has flowed to neighborhoods with high home values. Residents of lower-income communities often face barriers to accessing aid under the traditional FEMA-centric system, Deora says: They may not know to apply for FEMA assistance, or live in a mobile home, which does not qualify for aid. Around one in five Houstonians are immigrants who may not be comfortable with English, and for whom the FEMA application process is doubly daunting.
When they began developing the model in February, Deora says, the initial goal was to discover the extent to which the current aid delivery model undercounted people in need. But because the Civis model pulls from such a wide variety of data, it can also show other patterns in how a disaster affects communities: The team found that people with disabilities were disproportionately affected, and seniors sustained the most damage, dollar-value-wise, because they were more likely to be homeowners. They also noted a 15% rise in homelessness following the flood.
All of these data points, Deora says, will go toward informing the city in how it continues to source and deliver assistance. “The data will help us identify priority areas for starting our outreach for disaster recovery so that we’re prioritizing helping those people with the fewest private resources to recover,” McCasland says. Currently, Houston HCD is sourcing feedback on the new analytical model, and will use the data as leverage to raise more funds for housing rebuilding and repair projects, but also flood mitigation efforts and homeless services efforts. While the Civis model was built specifically for Houston, it’s applicable for other cities, Deora says, and could help at-risk localities identify at-risk populations–based on flooding models and residential data–before disaster strikes.
The mystery surrounding the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi on October 2 became a tech story with revelations that the journalist regularly wore an Apple Watch, which could have been used to record and transmit what really happened. The Turkish government claims it has recordings of Khashoggi’s murder inside then Saudi consulate October 12, and the Saudis say the journalist left the consulate unharmed. And Monday, CNN reported that the Saudis are about to release a report containing their version of what happened.
Here’s what we know and don’t know so far about the possible role of the Watch in the story.
Could Khashoggi have recorded the events that occurred after he entered the consulate using just his Apple Watch? Yes, via one of a number of recording apps like Just Press Record.
Could Khashoggi’s fiancee have accessed the recordings? Possibly, but with some big if’s. Khashoggi reportedly left his iPhone with his fiancée when he went into the Saudi consulate (phones are not allowed there). The Watch, a Series 3, would have to have transmitted the recordings back to the phone via Bluetooth 4.2, which has a range of only 330 feet. She would have to have been parked outside the consulate. She also may have been able to access the files if she knew Khashoggi’s iCloud username and password.
Could the Watch have transmitted the recordings any other way? The Apple Watch Series 3 has a cellular radio inside. But the Watch doesn’t currently support a cellular connection in Turkey.
What about Wi-Fi? It’s unlikely Khashoggi’s Watch would have connected to the Wi-Fi network inside the Saudi consulate, even if the network was open. The Watch tries to connect to Wi-Fi before it even tries to connect to cellular, but it will only establish a connection to networks that its paired iPhone has connected to before.
Could the Saudis possibly have accessed the recordings, then deleted them from the cloud? It’s possible, but only if they guessed Khashoggi’s four-digit passcode, and that seems unlikely. (They could not have fingerprinted into the Watch, as was reported earlier).
The dissident had lived in the U.S. and written for the Washington Post, often critically about Saudi Arabia’s suppression of dissent, its sanctions on Qatar, and its war in Yemen. In Turkey, where he had connections and believed himself to be safe, he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2 at 1 p.m. local time to complete some routine paperwork needed to wed his Turkish fiancée. A mysterious team of 15 men flew in from Saudi Arabia and entered the consulate a few hours before Khashoggi went in.
Now both Saudi Arabia and Turkey are investigating. The investigators hope that Khashoggi’s Apple Watch can be connected to the phone he left outside the consulate, or to some other device.
Consider how one should respond to a simple case of disagreement. Frank sees a bird in the garden and believes it’s a finch. Standing beside him, Gita sees the same bird, but she’s confident it’s a sparrow. What response should we expect from Frank and Gita? If Frank’s response was: ‘Well, I saw it was a finch, so you must be wrong,’ then that would be irrationally stubborn–and annoying–of him. (The same goes for Gita, of course.) Instead, both should become less confident in their judgment. The reason such a conciliatory response to a disagreement is often desired is reflected in ideals about open-mindedness and intellectual humility: When learning of our differences with fellow citizens, the open-minded and intellectually humble person is willing to consider changing his or her mind.
Our disagreements on a societal level are much more complex, and can require a different response. One particularly pernicious form of disagreement arises when we not only disagree about individual’s facts, as in Frank’s and Gita’s case, but also disagree about how best to form beliefs about those facts, that is, about how to gather and assess evidence in proper ways. This is deep disagreement, and it’s the form that most societal disagreements take. Understanding these disagreements will not inspire optimism about our ability to find consensus.
[Illustration: FC]Consider a case of deep disagreement. Amy believes that a particular homeopathic treatment will cure her common fever. Ben disagrees. But Amy’s and Ben’s disagreement doesn’t stop here. Amy believes that there is solid evidence for her claim, resting on the basic principles of homeopathy, which claims that pathogenic substances dissolved almost indefinitely in water can cure diseases, as well as testimony she got from experienced homeopaths whom she trusts. Ben believes that any medical intervention should be tested in randomized controlled studies, and that no sound inferences are to be drawn from homeopathic principles, since they are shown to be false by the principles of physics and chemistry. He also believes that apparently successful treatments reported by homeopaths present no solid evidence for their efficacy.
Amy understands all this, but thinks that it merely reflects Ben’s naturalistic perspective on human nature, which she rejects. There is more to human beings (and their diseases) than can be accurately captured in Western scientific medicine, which relies on reductionist and materialist approaches. In fact, applying a scientific perspective to disease and healing would distort the very conditions under which the homeopathic treatment works. It is difficult for Ben to get beyond this point: How does Ben argue for the superiority of his approach without begging the question against Amy? The same holds for her as well. Once the structure of their disagreement has been laid bare, it is as if there is no further argument that Amy or Ben can produce to convince the other because there is no method or procedure for conducting inquiry that they could both agree upon. They’re stuck in a deep disagreement.
Some of our most worrying societal disagreements are deep disagreements, or at least they share certain features of deep disagreements. Those who sincerely deny climate change also dismiss the relevant methods and evidence, and question the authority of the scientific institutions telling us that the climate is changing. Climate skeptics have insulatedthemselves from any evidence that would otherwise be rationally compelling. One can find similar patterns of selective distrust in scientific evidence and institutions in social disagreements over the safety of vaccines and genetically modified crops, as well as in conspiracy theories, which are extreme cases of deep disagreements.
[Illustration: FC]Deep disagreements are, in a sense, irresolvable. It is not that Amy is incapable of following Ben’s arguments or is generally insensitive to evidence. Rather, Amy has a set of beliefs that insulates her from the very sort of evidence that would be crucial for showing her to be mistaken. No line of argument or reasoning that Ben could sincerely present to Amy would rationally convince her. What should their response be? Should they approach the disagreement with the same intellectual humility of Frank and Gita, who rationally take the fact that they disagree as good evidence that someone’s made a mistake?
No. Ben has no reason to think that his disagreement with Amy indicates that he has made a mistake similar to that of mistaking a sparrow for a finch. And the fact that Amy trusts homeopathy is no reason for Ben to think that his reliance on the general principles of natural science is misguided. Why should the fact that Amy supports these quirky principles be a reason to think that a naturalistic approach is inadequate or mistaken? If this is right, then unlike in the case of Fred and Gita, the disagreement should not rationally compel Ben to change his mind. The same might be true for Amy.
This is a surprising result. We are used to the idea that respectfully accommodating the views of fellow citizens, whose intelligence and sincerity is not in doubt, requires some degree of moderation on our part. We cannot, it seems, both fully respect others, regard them as intelligent and sincere, and still be fully convinced that we are right and they are completely wrong, unless we simply agree to disagree. But on a societal level we cannot do that, since ultimately some decision must be made.
Examining how deep disagreements arise will demonstrate the gravity of the issue. Why do we disagree with valid, knowable facts when we all live in the same world, we have roughly the same cognitive abilities and, in the Western world at least, most people have fairly easy access to roughly the same information?
[Illustration: FC]It is because we use our cognition to support factual beliefs or value commitments that are central to our identity, particularly in situations where we feel that our identity is threatened. This makes us seek out evidence in ways that support our worldview, we remember supportive evidence better, and we are much less critical of it. Counter-evidence, meanwhile, is subjected to fierce critical scrutiny or ignored altogether. Factual beliefs can therefore become markers for cultural identities: By asserting your belief that climate change is a myth, you signal your allegiance to a particular moral, cultural, and ideological community. This might in part be the psychological dynamic that drives the polarization over climate, and similar mechanisms might have a role in other politicized social disagreements.
This affects how we can reasonably react to societal disagreement about facts. Asserting facts is not simple: It is often a way of signalling broader religious, moral, or political allegiance. This makes it harder for us to fully respect our fellow citizens when we disagree over factual matters.
As the political philosopher John Rawls noted in Political Liberalism (1993), a liberal society largely rescinds from attempting to control the flow of information and the minds of its citizens. Therefore disagreements are bound to be pervasive (though Rawls had religious, moral, and metaphysical disagreements in mind, not factual disagreements). What is particularly troubling about some societal disagreements is that they concern factual matters that tend to be almost impossible to resolve since there is no agreed-upon method to do so, all while relating to important policy decisions. Generally, theorizing about liberal democracy has focused largely on moral and political disagreements, while tacitly assuming that there would be no important factual disagreements to consider. It has been taken for granted that we would eventually agree about the facts, and the democratic processes would concern how we should adjudicate our differences in values and preferences. But this assumption is no longer adequate, if it ever was.
Klemens Kappel is a professor in the department of media cognition and communication at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. This article was originally published atAeonand has been republished under Creative Commons.
As Trump and Kanye show, a rich enough person feels confident saying anything–even with no evidence. So it’s fitting that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the solar system (with about $148 billion), has said the craziest thing about space. He told Wired, in a new article and at the magazine’s 25th Annual Wired Summit, that off-world habitats could house, “millions, billions, maybe even a trillion people.”
“We are starting to bump up against the absolute true fact that Earth is finite,” Bezos said–which is correct. Also correct: The resources beyond Earth are really finite. Mars (Elon Musk’s top real estate venture) scarcely has any water or atmosphere, compared to Earth, but plenty of killer radiation. Earth’s moon is worse. (A new study indicates spending much time beyond Earth’s protective magnetic field could entail fatal radiation doses.)
Bezos is a devotee of his former Princeton professor, physicist Gerard O’Neill, who proposed building miles-long, rotating space stations, later dubbed O’Neill cylinders. But if Earth can’t support a trillion people (or even many more billions), how can simulated Earths–made from bits of Earth and whatever we scrounge from asteroids–support even more than our planet? Bezos is used to the exponential growth made possible by Moore’s law–itself bumping against the limits of physics. Life in space will hit those limits far sooner.
Pressure is mounting on Hollywood’s business relationships with Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the disappearance–and possible murder–of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Endeavor, the talent and media company run by Ari Emanuel and Patrick Whitesell, is trying to end a deal for the Saudi government to invest $400 million in the company. But the termination is not yet complete yet as it’s “complicated to unwind,” says one person with knowledge of the deal.
On Monday onstage at MipCom, an entertainment buying trade show, Emanuel said he was “monitoring” the situation and that he was “personally . . . really concerned,” though said he would not completely end the relationship with Saudi Arabia, which is planning on taking a 5% to 10% stake in the company.
Endeavor declined to comment for this story.
Khashoggi’s disappearance on October 2 after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul has captured the attention of the White House, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and beyond, due to the strange circumstances surrounding his vanishing. Turkish authorities have accused Saudi Arabia of brutally murdering Khashoggi, who was a vocal critic of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman.
In Hollywood, the drama has major business ramifications, as Saudi Arabia has been actively seeking investment from the entertainment industry. Last April, Bin Salman was lavishly courted by Disney’s Bob Iger and Fox’s Rupert Murdoch, a well as other poohbahs, when he visited Hollywood. Bin Salman has been praised for ushering in new reforms in Saudi Arabia, such as allowing women to drive and opening up the insular country to outside investment. Hollywood has been particularly pleased with the prince’s decision to end a 35-year ban on theatrical screenings. Analysts predict that a new theatrical market in Saudi Arabia could be worth $1 billion in ticket sales.
But in the wake of Khashoggi’s disappearance, the mood in Hollywood has changed considerably. Several prominent names, such as STX CEO Robert Simonds, Viacom’s Bob Bakish, and the Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, pulled out of the Future Investment Initiative, which will be held later this month in Riyadh. Other companies with ties to Saudi Arabia, such as AMC, IMAX, and Cirque de Soleil, have either not commented or said they were monitoring the controversy.
The Saudi investment would further Endeavor’s global expansion as Emanuel and Whitesell continue to transform the company from a traditional talent agency into a global media powerhouse. Endeavor owns IMG, Ultimate Fighting Championship, and Professional Bull Riders, among other entertainment and live events entities. Its talent agency, WME, represents some of the biggest Hollywood stars, including Oprah Winfrey, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, and Mark Wahlberg.
The investment was met with protests when it was first announced back in April. Members of Code Pink, a social justice organization, protested outside of WME’s Beverly Hills headquarters. The demonstrators were angry over a Saudi-sponsored military intervention in Yemen that has contributed to a humanitarian crisis.
You can’t summarize the work of Paul Allen—who died today at the age of 65–without starting with the fact that he cofounded Microsoft with Bill Gates. But leaving it at that scarcely captures Allen, whose autobiography—Idea Man—carried a title that was less self-aggrandizement than a simple statement of fact.
At the age of 21, Allen was a journeyman software engineer when he kicked off Microsoft’s founding story by purchasing the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics at a newsstand in Harvard Square. The issue had a cover story on MITS’ Altair 8800, a breakthrough build-it-yourself microcomputer kit. Allen and his friend Bill Gates, a Harvard student at the time, seized the opportunity to write a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair—even though they didn’t own an Altair to test it on.
Altair BASIC’s success led to the duo starting a company called “Micro-Soft” to write BASICs for other computers. Over time, the company produced additional programming languages, operating systems, word processors, spreadsheets, email apps, accounting packages, server software, CD-ROM titles, web browsers, and . . . well, you get the idea. At the start, Allen and Gates may not have set out to put a computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software—Gates, by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, says their famous mantra came along later—but the vision, over time, turned out to be even bigger than that.
Here’s Paul Allen’s pre-Microsoft resume from 1974—when he aspired to make $15K a year—as displayed at his own wonderful Living Computers museum. pic.twitter.com/MjRaTv03au
Much of that expansion came after Allen left full-time work at Microsoft in 1983, not long after discovering that he had Hodgkin’s disease—but also, he explained in Idea Man, because his working relationship with Gates had grown tense. With his sister Jody, he then founded Vulcan Inc. as a launchpad for an array of activities.
In 2014, we credited Allen and Gates with having saved their hometown of Seattle when they decided to relocate the fledgling Microsoft there from Albuquerque in 1979. Having saved the city, Allen proceeded to have an outsize impact on it over the next four decades—not just as a tech entrepreneur but also in roles such as real estate magnate, founder of museums devoted to pop culture and computers, and musical impresario. I’ve never lived in Seattle, but most every time I’ve visited, my friends have brought up Allen and his most recent activities without prompting. No single Silicon Valley tycoon has had so much local influence for so long.
Allen, who became a billionaire in 1990, was certainly involved in plenty of projects that didn’t go much of anywhere—the FlipStart PC, a tiny Windows palmtop, sticks in my mind—but that’s explained, in part, by the sheer volume of things he did. He funded companies in out-there categories such as fusion energy as well as more straightforward areas like social media, tried to turn a cable company into a next-generation communications behemoth, and pioneered private space flight. He was an exceptionally generous philanthropist in areas from ocean health to Ebola research. He’s almost as famous for owning the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers as for having cofounded Microsoft, but you could spend weeks just digging up interesting stories about his other pursuits. (Did you know he funded the team that found a lost World War II aircraft carrier?)
In the end, Allen took idiosyncratic risks, spent money on things because he found them personally interesting, and—it always seemed—had an enormous amount of fun along the way, regardless of the bottom line. He didn’t have a second act after Microsoft; he had dozens of them, and that relentless quest adds up to a sizable chunk of his legacy.
When Apple released the first iOS 12.1 beta earlier this month, it contained more than 70 new emoji–including a bagel. But the look of the most delicious bread roll in the world seemed too artificial for some. For example, here was the reaction from Grub Street:
This is an emoji that New Yorkers and bagel lovers around the world have been expecting for a long time and the disappointment is truly overwhelming. Take a look at this clearly machine-cut monstrosity with its stiff and bready interior, which couldn’t possibly be redeemed by a few minutes in a toaster.
And let’s talk about that distressingly smooth crust. What midwestern bagel factory did this bagel come out of? And is it really a bagel if there isn’t a disgusting amount of cream cheese that needs to be wiped off with a napkin before you can consume it?
Well, true bagel lovers can rest easy now. As of the latest iOS 12.1 beta (released this week), Apple has completely redone its bagel emoji. It now features rough, realistic textures and a heaping of cream cheese. Thankfully Apple nipped this in the bud quickly before we have #bagelgate or something.
A new app called Donald Daters makes it finally possible for Donald Trump-loving individuals to find each other and procreate. The service launched yesterday, with a bit of fanfare–including, of course, Fox News. But it seems the people behind the app weren’t so careful when it came to user security. Within a day, a security researcher was able to download and share the entire user database.
“All your personal information is kept private,” the app’s website proclaims. But the researcher, Baptiste Robert, was able to unearth names and profile pictures, as well as potentially a way to read their private messages. According to Motherboard, the issue is a “misconfigured database,” which allowed Robert to go into it.
Motherboard writes that it seems that not too many people are using the program just yet–another report says about 1,600. There even appears to be messages from users who also notice too few people on the site and lament shelling out the cash for it.
The app was made by Emily Moreno, who was a former campaign aid to Marco Rubio. Multiple news organizations contacted her about the security incident, and she did not respond. For good measure, I reached out too. If I hear back, I’ll update this post.
For now, poor Trump-loving singles will either have to risk having their data breached, or just have to wade through the liberal muck that is Tinder.
Last October, almost a year to this day, the United States men’s national soccer team, then ranked 28th, was outplayed and ultimately defeated by a Trinidad and Tobago outfit ranked 99th in the world. The 2-1 loss, coupled with final results from two other qualifying games, eliminated the USMNT from World Cup contention for the first time since 1986.
In the wake of the embarrassment, the entire U.S. soccer system has been given a thorough autopsy by analysts, journalists, fans, and even national team players themselves. The USMNT’s failure to qualify has been attributed to a host of issues, from naive tactics to poor player development that led to a lost generation of young sporting talent.
Over the past decade in the United States, overall youth participation in sports has declined–soccer has been the sport hardest hit. The fact is, fewer kids play soccer in America since its peak a decade ago, even when you include casual fans and kids who touch a soccer ball once a year. And the people who still do play are self-selecting, indicating another, more deeply rooted issue: Well-off kids have a much easier time making it in the soccer world.
[Source Images: monticelllo/iStock, BullpenAl/iStock, Oleh Svetiukha/iStock]A new project launched this summer, known as 26×26, is trying to tackle the entrenched issue of accessibility, while also building up a new culture of sports in the country. Led by global charity Lionsraw and the New York-based nonprofit Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), 26×26 is a $30 million initiative that will help empower a million kids across North America by building 26 community soccer fields by 2026, when the United States will cohost the World Cup with Canada and Mexico.
“We want to use football and the engagement of the community to create hope for change through formal or informal education or though healthy activities–anything that can bring self-belief and confidence and social skills to an individual that gives them an opportunity to change,” Jon Burns BEM, president and CEO of Lionsraw, tells Fast Company. “That’s why we all exist, that’s what we do.”
After the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, Lionsraw volunteers broke ground with four building projects in the Valley of a Thousand Hills outside Durban, including a local football pitch with changing rooms, a four-bedroom house for a children’s home, and a two-classroom primary school complete with a block of flush toilets. In Brazil, after the 2014 tournament, nearly 300 volunteers teamed up to build an education and after-school complex offering music classes, soccer training, and academic tutoring to underserved children outside host city Curitiba.
The organization hopes to fix the fact that many young players, especially those from low-income communities, are being priced out of the sport. According to a Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA) study published this year, the majority of outdoor soccer participants have a household income of over $75,000, with the highest participation rates coming from families earning more than $100,000 a year. Perhaps that’s no surprise: It’s not uncommon for a single family to spend more than $10,000 enrolling their child in organized youth soccer, when you combine league and team fees, equipment, apparel, travel, and more.
“American soccer executives simply don’t care about Hispanic talent, which is worse than being incompetent,” SB Nation soccer editor Kim McCauley wrote in January. That’s a sentiment echoed by Brad Rothenberg, cofounder of Alianza de Futbol, an organization that runs free-to-play soccer camps and other events aimed at Hispanic youth.
But it’s not just Hispanic players who are getting left behind or forgotten (Jonathan González, anyone?), either.
“While soccer has boomed in the U.S., becoming a staple of suburban life, it has barely made a ripple in African-American communities,” Washington Post reporter Les Carpenter writes in the Guardian. “One of the world’s most democratic games, played on streets and in alleys around the globe, would seem a natural fit for America’s predominately black inner cities, where basketball thrives on playground courts. Instead, it’s almost nonexistent.”
Indeed, according to SFIA, only about 7.5% of youth outdoor soccer players are black–a lower rate than those seen in basketball (nearly 25%), tackle football (almost 14%), or baseball (just under 10%).
[Source Images: monticelllo/iStock, BullpenAl/iStock, Oleh Svetiukha/iStock]
The details for the rollout are still scant, but 26×26 program director Ben Astin says that all 26 sites are being decided by 2022, with programming attached to help boost soccer’s popularity. The initiative’s current plans, Astin says, project 20 fields in the U.S. and three each in Canada and Mexico.
“We want to bring programming that’s sustainable over at least 10 years,” Astin says. “We want to bring the right organizations to these communities, or at least engage with an already established local leader that’s going to use the field in the right ways. That’s what will contribute to not only the popularity of the sport, but also the development of the soccer talent that’s out there.”
Key in the development of 26×26’s programming is the expertise of LISC, which, over the past 20 years and with $50 million in investment from the National Football League, has built and rehabbed close to 350 fields in underserved communities across the country. For example, this year in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one of the most segregated cities in the United States, LISC partnered with the NFL Foundation and the Green Bay Packers to install a new multipurpose field at Casimir Pulaski High School, a public school with 93% minority enrollment (the artificial turf field is used by the school’s soccer team, too).
After about 20 minutes of discussion with Lionsraw, LISC CEO Maurice A. Jones jumped at the chance to get involved with 26×26.
“One of the great challenges of high schools, particularly in urban areas, is that they don’t have quality fields to practice and play on,” Jones tells Fast Company in a phone interview. “The pride that [the Pulaski Rams] have now, and the ability to play home games, which a lot of us take for granted–it’s hard to place a monetary value on that, but it’s huge.”
The costs aren’t always hidden. Today, access to field space comes at a premium, even in progressive cities like Seattle. The metro area is a hotbed for soccer in America, but fields are quickly “snatched up by wealthy, mostly white clubs who [have] the money and expertise to navigate the city’s leasing process,” writes Les Carpenter, in another story for the Guardian.
Without local field access, families, disproportionately those from communities of color, are forced to spend hours driving to the closest quality training center (a fact curiously applauded by American commentators during a recent U.S.-Mexico friendly). “The result,” according to Villanova sociology professor Rick Eckstein,” is a system more attuned to identifying the best payers than the best players.” Those who can’t pay dropout: Around 4 in 10 youth soccer players leave the sport after the age of 13, and there are now reports out of California that top U.S. prospects are heading to Mexico in search of opportunity.
None of this is breaking news, really, and the issue of diversity has been brought up time and time again for the better part of the last decade And for years, an indictment of the U.S. soccer development system was the number of USMNT players raised in the youth systems of other countries–a divide which caused some tension on the team. So what has changed now, one year after U.S. Soccer’s darkest hour and a half? Whether you’re talking about curbing declining youth participation rates or tactical changes on the professional pitch, the answer is: not a lot. Carlos Cordeiro was elected U.S. Soccer Federation president in February, but the team still hasn’t named a new manager–and fluency in English is the only coaching qualification the federation has advertised publicly. That didn’t stop U.S. Soccer from declaring, in a 198-word aspirational-sounding but mostly empty statement, that the “future is here.” (There’s a new hashtag, too.)
To really make the U.S. into an international soccer powerhouse will require fixing the development system, which Justin Brunken, VP of the American Outlaws, the premier 25,000-member-strong U.S. Soccer supporters group, describes as a mess. 26×26 offers hope that some of America’s best young athletes will have access to a soccer field as the place to realize their potential.
“As fans, we can help people love the game more, which I think is healthy,” he says. “Giving people the ability to play, and helping more and more young kids be passionate about it through local community efforts, will only have positive effects on how many kids are potentially going to be professional soccer players on the national team.”
[Source Images: monticelllo/iStock, BullpenAl/iStock, Oleh Svetiukha/iStock]
It’s not just fans (including many American Outlaws) who are getting involved, either: 26×26 has already locked in participation from UNICEF USA and attracted high-profile ambassadors in American soccer stars Landon Donovan and Kyle Martino (who ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Soccer president) as well as soccer broadcasters Kay Murray and Rob Stone.
Of course, 26 fields won’t change the system. But that’s why the 26×26 initiative will rely on a request for proposal process (basically a competition to select the best ideas and sites). Jones says that at every field site, 26×26 will make sure that a local partner, like the Green Bay Packers in Milwaukee, puts financial resources on the table. That’s been the winning formula on the NFL side, Jones says, in elevating fields from basic green space to true assets for under-resourced communities.
It’s worth noting that Major League Soccer has 20 teams in the United States and three more in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. It’s easy to imagine, say, DC United (which just opened a new 20,000-seat arena in somewhat isolated and underdeveloped the Southwest Washington) or Atlanta United FC joining the cause and assisting a local community development corporation or charter school in getting a field constructed, keeping it maintained, and sponsoring programming on an ongoing basis.
That would be a welcome departure from the traditional sporting development model in American cities, in which hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on new stadiums and convention centers in the name of urban “revival,” projects that often leave low-income and nonwhite residents behind.
“The challenge in the U.S. is to make sure that all of our talent, in all of our communities, has the kinds of investment needed to prepare to compete at the highest level,” says Maurice Jones.
“What we have in this country is an imbalance in the placement of assets. When we address that imbalance, by the way, it’s great for the community and it is great for the country. We can’t afford to leave any talent on the sideline. And what we’ve found in our 40 years is that there is great talent everywhere. The question is whether they have the opportunity to develop, and that’s what this is about.”
CEO Sundar Pichai made the admission onstage on Monday at the Wired 25 Summit. The censored search engine is known internally as “Dragonfly” and has been in testing since last year. Once it rolls out, when a user in China uses Google’s search, websites banned by the Chinese government will automatically be filtered out of results.
Google famously left the Chinese market eight years ago because it was no longer willing to have search results censored. But the Google of today is very different than the Google of eight years ago. As Pichai noted, “[China is] a wonderful, innovative market. We wanted to learn what it would look like if we were in China, so that’s what we built internally. Given how important the market is and how many users there are, we feel obliged to think hard about this problem and take a longer-term view.”
New Zealand surfer Paul Barron was laminating a board a decade ago when he accidentally spilled resin on his sweater. It gave him an idea: What if he built a surfboard shell out of wool? Traditional foam boards are typically housed in resin and fiberglass for structural integrity. But fiberglass can be harmful to workers and isn’t easily recyclable; board makers have long sought a greener alternative. This month, the Carlsbad, California, company Firewire Surfboards is releasing Barron’s WoolLight board–showcasing a technological advance that could change how other products are designed, from yachts to cars.
Why Wool
Living in a country with six times as many sheep as people, Barron was familiar with the benefits of wool: It’s recyclable and biodegradable, and it doesn’t require much energy to manufacture. But wool also absorbs water and is porous and flimsy when woven. To refine his idea, Barron partnered with the New Zealand Merino Company, an organization that incubates new uses for wool and connects local producers to retailers, such as the cult shoe brand Allbirds.
How It Works
The wool sheared off a sheep is up to 3 inches thick, with fibers flaring out in all directions. Barron developed a vacuum-pressure technique that converts this bulky material into a thin wool-and-bioresin composite, with a compression strength that rivals that of fiberglass and polyurethane. According to Firewire CEO Mark Price, the process reduces CO2 emissions by 40% and VOC emissions by half, compared with traditional construction. And because wool bends easily, the WoolLight is more flexible, which reduces vibrations when catching waves, Barron says.
What’s Next
Firewire is initially manufacturing 500 boards to introduce the concept to surfers. But the material innovation has the potential to reshape other sectors that depend on fiberglass. New Zealand Merino Company CEO John Brakenridge cites applications in boating, housing, and the automotive industry. “What [Firewire] is doing is part of a movement,” he says.
Channing Dungey entered the spotlight this past May when she abruptly canceled ABC’s wildly successful reboot of Roseanne after its star tweeted an offensive slur about former Obama administration adviser Valerie Jarrett. The incident drew attention to Dungey and the network at a critical juncture: It’s fending off streaming giants like Netflix—which recently poached two of ABC’s top showrunners, Shonda Rhimes (Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal) and Kenya Barris (Black-ish)—while attempting to attract new viewers.
Fast Company: You renewed Roseanne earlier this year, canceled it following racist tweets from Roseanne Barr, and then quickly green-lighted a spin-off. Do you have any regrets?
Channing Dungey: When we first thought about rebooting Roseanne, it was for all the right reasons. We talk a lot about diversity and inclusion [at ABC], and we try to walk that walk both on-screen and behind the cameras. But when I looked at our slate of programming, particularly in the wake of the 2016 election, I realized that one audience that we were really not serving was working-class Americans. [After we canceled the show], the only thing keeping me up at night was thinking about the cast and crew—and the writing staff that had come back to play in that sandbox and tell those great stories—and feeling disappointed that it wasn’t going to be able to continue. So I was really elated that it was able to come back together [with the Roseanne spin-off, The Conners].
FC: Are you more cautious now about vetting talent?
CD: People have a right to express their opinions in a private forum or a public one. It’s not our job to be the police. But at the same time, we try to hold ourselves to certain moral and ethical standards, and we expect the people who work for our company to do the same. I don’t know that anyone has the perfect solution yet. It’s something we’re all trying to work toward.
FC: You’re going up against streaming companies that put up an entire season of a series all at once and throw money at showrunners, and you’re trying to woo audiences who are now accustomed to binge-watching. How do you position a network to compete?
CD: It’s an apples and oranges conversation. These are two different [kinds of] businesses, and they serve two different needs. For us it’s not about competing with Netflix. Streaming is something you do for you, which is why Netflix has your profile, your husband’s profile, your kid’s profile. Broadcast is something people tend to do together, whether it’s families watching comedies or friends who watch The Bachelor and drink wine and talk to the screen. I’ve made the decision in this role to look for shows that can be watched together. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to bring American Idol back: It hit that sweet spot of something that you can watch live, you can watch as a family, and that you can [turn into events] with live shows.
FC: How do you keep showrunners from decamping to streaming services?
CD: The advantage we have in broadcast is reach and scale. Showrunners want stories to be heard by the people who need to hear them. I’ve had people come in and say, “This is a story that I want to tell, but I don’t want to do it in an echo chamber.” For a series like last year’s The Good Doctor, we had 18 million viewers. It’s hard to do that in streaming.
FC: Before you became head of ABC entertainment in 2016, you spent most of your career as a development executive, overseeing shows including Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy at a very granular level. What was it like to step into a less hands-on role?
CD: I think of myself as a creative partner. It’s my job to [point out] aspects of a story that aren’t landing for the audience. The best writing comes from the head and the heart. So you have to acknowledge what it took to get those words on the page in the first place. If I do a good job of identifying the problem, then it’s going to spark something new in the writer. I try not to intercede too often. When I do, I want to make it count.
Dungey’s progress
FC: What’s your advice to producers?
CD: It’s important to make sure that the network, which is basically your client, is happy—and at the same time to not compromise. Because that happens: You have a showrunner who doesn’t have a particularly strong point of view, and they’re anxious to be helpful and collaborative, so they try to address all the notes [they get from the network]. It’s like trying to make a stew and putting in every single ingredient in your kitchen. It ends up tasting like nothing. So the question is, Where do you draw the line in terms of making compromises [and] delivering a quality product?
FC: Network television is so dependent on ratings. Have you ever fought for a show despite its poor numbers?
CD: The first season of Scandal was only seven episodes, and it did okay. Creatively, it was terrific, but it just hadn’t quite connected with the audience. There was talk of canceling it. I believed in Kerry Washington, and I was extremely proud of the fact that we had the first African-American female lead on a series in something like 37 years. In front of the leadership at that time, which was [former president of Disney/ABC Television] Anne Sweeney and [Disney CEO] Bob Iger, I said, “As a black woman sitting at this table, I think it’s important for us to be making this show.” I argued vociferously for it. There are moments where you have to say, Look, I know the data doesn’t support it. But if it’s something you believe in, you owe it an opportunity.
FC: Thanks to Time’s Up and #MeToo, there’s a lot of talk about getting more women involved at networks and studios across the entertainment industry. Most of your direct reports are women. Is that something you’ve consciously fostered?
CD: When I was [ABC’s executive VP of] drama, I was sitting next to a female head of comedy, a female head of casting, a female head of marketing. It’s been that way for a little while. But then you look at the stats and [realize] that there’s a lot further we have to go, particularly in terms of making sure the right people are getting promoted. I think it helps when you have senior-level women like myself who are working moms. It gives people confidence that this is a company that’s open to and supportive of people who are starting a family.
FC: As the first-ever African-American head of a major network, do you feel the burden of representation?
CD: If having this job is going to inspire other young women of color to think that they can sit in this chair, then that’s a huge responsibility that I take very seriously. But outside of that, I’m just trying to be the best person at this job that I can be.
Just as Fast Company covers the most creative minds out there, it’s our mission to continually innovate our brand as well. With the release of our November print edition, I’m excited to announce that we’ll be launching a new design for Fast Company.
Why a redesign?
In the past five years since our last redesign, the intersection of business and design has changed dramatically. A half-decade ago, Fast Company focused on the tidal wave of technology from companies such as Google, Uber, and Twitter, which changed the flow of our everyday lives.
In 2018, culture has adjusted to the fact that technology is intertwined in our daily lives. As a result, the focus of our journalism has turned back to the people–to those driving larger change in the areas of diversity and inclusion, at companies both big and small. Given this new emphasis on the people in tech, I wanted the new visual design of Fast Company to better understand our end user, and create a stronger emotional bond with them.
A grown-up logo
Research is the first part of any design job. (Side note: I call these “design jobs” because my favorite old-school teachers at Pratt Institute, including the mighty Bob Gill, cofounder of Pentagram, used that phrase.) As the Fast Company brand progresses into its 25th year, I wanted to signify this sea change in business, but also our history leading up to it.
When Alan Webber and Bill Taylor launched Fast Company in 1995, their goal was to marry Harvard Business Review‘s insights with Rolling Stone‘s energy. They tapped magazine logo legend Jim Parkinson–whose resume includes Esquire, the Wall Street Journal, and, yes, Rolling Stone–to design the brand. Jim crafted a classic serif logo for Fast Company, but gave it some personality through a quirky small cap “A” and “O.”
More than two decades later, those little letters have become a welcoming signature of the Fast Company brand, and I wanted to lean into that legacy. Working with Portuguese type designer Rui Abreu, we set out to create a new logo that felt more mature than the previous iteration, but maintained its playfulness. Think of it as wearing a blazer with a T-shirt, a staple of many creative directors (including myself). I wanted a wordmark that was still rock ‘n’ roll–heavy metal, even.
The wisdom of the Fast Company brand is achieved visually through the extreme vertical contrast of our new letterforms, a strong characteristic of neoclassical typefaces. The new logo is modernized through the sharp triangular terminals on the letters, a technological achievement not possible in the earlier days of old-style serif type, which is what the original Fast Company logo was modeled after.
The demands of a logo in 2018 are greater than ever. Our new logo needed to live across a variety of platforms, from desktop to mobile websites. Such a high-contrast logo posed a problem for scalability, because if you shrink it down to mobile size, the thin areas of the letters would disappear. To solve that problem, we created two smaller sizes, where the thin areas have been progressively thickened for smaller applications. In addition, we have a new FC monogram, which has been custom drawn to live as our avatar for social media, where it’s legible even when it’s as small as 20 pixels high.
New type for a new world
In my research about Fast Company, I found that we have one of the most even gender splits of any business publication out there. Type forms the DNA of a brand, and I wanted ours to feel gender-neutral. If you put our typography on a sliding scale between ESPN and W magazine, I wanted to be smack in the middle.
The backbone of our new suite of typefaces is Grifo, which was used to create our new logo as well. We selected Grifo for its versatility–depending on the weight and width of a chosen piece of text, Grifo can look elegant, bold, or even downright radical. Its name derives from the Portugese word for Griffin, the mythological half-lion, half-eagle creature with sharp talons–thus the sharp serifs of the typeface. Heavy metal, for sure.
Our sans serif font is Centra, which derives its humanist design from the classic typeface, Gill Sans. It follows the rigid Bauhaus approach to geometric type, yet bends the rules when necessary in favor of legibility. The result is a very readable typeface, accessible by all.
We have two other typefaces in the supporting role: our condensed font, A2 Beckett, and our monospaced font, Simple. Think of the previous two typefaces as our salt and pepper, and these two as the spices.
Images galore
With our new design, we have a stronger commitment to visual narratives. To be inclusive of all types of audiences, we’ve embraced a mix of both written and visual storytelling. You’ll see a wider variety of portraiture and environmental photography–inviting readers into the minds and work spaces of the people we cover.
You’ll find more surprising photo essays, like this month’s feature on the inclusion of male cheerleaders in the L.A. Rams. We are also emphasizing infographics, including a full spread on the features of the newly completed Tencent building in Shenzhen, China. Finally, you’ll notice a greater use of illustration to convey the nuanced facets of our subjects.
But just as the companies that Fast Company covers are never complete in their mission to innovate, neither are we. I’m excited for this new step in Fast Company‘s legacy, but even more excited for what’s to come.
