Barre3, the boutique strength conditioning gym, is known for its equal attention to both body and mind. Yes, there are grueling lunges and toning squats, but there are also elements of mindfulness and accepting one’s own strengths. Its philosophy encourages individuals to go at their own pace and trust intuition–it’s centered on the idea of feeling good inside and out, versus advertising how to get skinny arms. In fact, throughout its classes, you’ll hear a sentiment echoed repeatedly: You deserve to be heard.

So it makes sense that the company, which now boasts 150 studios in 98 countries, would invest in building peoples’ voices.

During the Fast Company Innovation Festival on Monday, Barre3 cofounder and CEO Sadie Lincoln explained how two years ago, amidst a company reevaluation and a pause in expansion, she came to understand how important speech is to her business.

Lincoln began taking many Barre3 classes in an effort to discover: What makes certain classes more popular and more powerful than others? Why do certain instructors connect better with their communities than others do?

A few weeks in, she discovered one element that, quite literally, spoke volumes: “It was in their voice.”

It’s essentially Clueless talk 2.0.

The connection between voice and body, says Lincoln, was undeniable: “How we speak is really how we show up in life–just as much as our body language–but they’re connected.”

“What blew us away is that voice is so much more than inflection–it is about confidence,” says Lincoln. “Even when we believe in something–if we’re put on a stage and we’re nervous–that’s when our voice, specifically women’s, does not show up the way that our minds mean it to.”

The results were immediate, reports Lincoln. “It changed not only the instructors voices, but their lives,” says Lincoln. One told her she could now call up anyone and “get anything I want now. I’m direct, I’m clear, I’m confident.” Others said their relationships, work goals, and dating lives improved. “They have learned how to be more confident and influential communicators in the world beyond Barre3 …It was a game-changer.”

While Lincoln initially thought vocal training might make for more assured and happier employees, the coaching did far more–it affected the company bottom line. Barre3 reports higher class participation and an increase of wait-listed classes.

The experience propelled Lincoln to invest in voice training for her entire company, including home office and studio trainers. It’s now a mandated piece of on-boarding as Barre3 intends to empower employees “from within,” just like they do with attendees.

Shortly thereafter, Barre3 instituted 5-10 minutes of breathwork into its class curriculum. At the same time, the company began expanding, and now averages two new franchises a month. The two decisions go hand in hand, with Barre3 adopting the new motto, “in order to grow bigger, you need to grow better.”

Read more:3 Easy Ways To Sound More Credible And Confident

As Lincoln explains, inhaling and exhaling is just as important as flexing one’s muscles or embodying a calm mind. It’s all connected.

“It’s being aware of all those patterns and how we’re showing up,” she stresses, taking a deep sigh. “It’s healthy to breathe big.”

If you’ve not yet bought your tickets for tonight’s historic $1.6 billion Mega Millions jackpot, you can be forgiven if your FOMO has reached fever pitch.

“Get to stores early today to get your #MegaMillions tickets! Long lines are expected until tonight. Don’t miss out on your chance at $1.6 BILLION because of one line!” the drawing’s Twitter feed screams.

And everywhere you turn, you’ve been told just how AMAZING winning all that money can be.

They’re dropping celeb and sport team names–even rocket ships!

Come the 11 p.m. ET drawing tonight, you could be, if you win and take the $904 million lump sum payment:

• As rich as Jay-Z
• Three times richer than Taylor Swift
• One-third as rich as Donald Trump
• Able to fund 10 Space X rocket launches
• Rich enough to buy the Mona Lisa ($800 million)

Sweet, right?

If you win tonight's #MegaMillions#jackpot& take the cash option (est. $904 million), you'd be nearly 3 TIMES richer than Taylor Swift … with none of the work! pic.twitter.com/DwuvZdoP92

— Mega Millions (@MegaMillionsUS) October 23, 2018

If you’re a cynic—and honest—you know that none of that is going to happen, but a skeptic can dream.

So, what are the odds of winning the whole thing? About 1 in 302 million. You have a far, far better chance of being struck by lightning this year (1 in 700,000).

From the folks at Slate:

You can do the math by multiplying the size of the winnings (very large) by the probability of you winning (very low) to get the value of your ticket. For this new $1.6 billion jackpot, ignoring tax implications, the value of a ticket comes out to be $5.53—a very good deal.

They lost me at multiplying.

But, seriously, the site’s Jordan Ellenberg actually lays out complicated formulas to argue why, mathematically, you win even if you lose. (“Suppose an object might be worth either V1 or V2 dollars, and suppose the probability is P1 that it is worth V1, and P2 that it is worth V2. Then the expected value is defined to be P1 x V1 + P2 x V2.”)

Alrighty, then.

The folks at Business Insider also did math and crunched numbers based on “expected value.”

The expected value of a randomly decided process is found by taking all the possible outcomes of the process, multiplying each outcome by its probability, and adding all those numbers. This gives us a long-run average value for our random process.

They conclude: “If we take the lump sum, we end up seeing that the expected value of a ticket drops all the way to $1.23.”

But let’s be practical, people. When you wake up tomorrow and head out the door to the rock pile, we’ll all know what we already know: That ticket is worth nothing.

Here are the 5 biggest ever #MegaMillions jackpots – including Tuesday's record breaking $1.6 BILLION prize!

Read more: https://t.co/XbKwXvCXDQpic.twitter.com/hBfaW2JkPF

— Mega Millions (@MegaMillionsUS) October 22, 2018

Ever since eating Tide Pods became a thing, it’s hard to call baseball our “national past time” anymore, but fans of the sport have plenty of reason to be excited about the 2018 World Series. The seven-game series will be a battle of East vs. West, as the Boston Red Sox take on the Los Angeles Dodgers. According to the good folks at the New York Times, it’s been more than a century since these two franchises have played each other in the big competition. I’ll have to take their word on that.

Game 1 of the World Series kicks off tonight (Tuesday, October, 23) at 8 p.m. ET at Boston’s Fenway Park. The series airs on the Fox broadcasting network, which means cord-cutters may discover that finding it is a bit of a chore. If you’re looking to live stream the games on your computer, phone, or smart TV without cable, the good news is, you have more options than you used to. I’ve rounded a few of them up below. Play ball!

• Streaming services: A number of standalone streaming services offer Fox on various packages, including SlingTV, DirecTV Now, PlayStation Vue, and FuboTV. Be sure to check your zip code first to make sure it’s offered in your area. Sling TV said in a press release that it is offering a seven-day free trial, which means you can probably watch the entire series for free and then decide if you want to keep the service.
• Fox Sports mobile apps: You can access Fox Sports on its mobile apps on iOS or Android. Unfortunately, you need login credentials from a pay-TV provider
• Fox Sports online: Technically, you can access live TV on the Fox Sports website, but again, you’ll need that pesky cable or satellite TV login.

Sometimes, somehow, it just gets funny. In the same week that the Trump administration says it will leave the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia, the White House Council of Economic Affairs (CEA) lets loose with a new report called, “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism.”

Not only does the Trump administration have us hurtling back into the dark days of the Cold War, but it shows that it’s co-opted a once-respected government institution, here the normally careful and studious CEA, for use as an awkward political mouthpiece.

Voxtakes a good stab at explaining why a research report declaring the impotence of socialism and the vigor and rightness of capitalism would issue from the White House in 2018. It has something to do with the threat of socialized medicine. Suffice it to consider these priceless excerpts, which sound like they were written by a fading John Birch Society egghead pining for the good old days.

On page one, the CEA economists state: “We find that historical proponents of socialist policies and those in the contemporary United States share some of their visions and intents.” The CEA report draws some shaky parallels between the socialist authoritarians of old (Lenin, Mao, and Stalin) and the democratic socialists of today (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren), like this:

The Chinese leader Mao Zedong, who cited Marxism as the model for his country, described “the ruthless economic exploitation and political oppression of the peasants by the landlord class” (Cotterell 2011, chap. 6). Expressing similar concerns, current American senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have stated that “large corporations . . . exploit human misery and insecurity, and turn them into huge profits” and “giant corporations . . . exploit workers just to boost their own profits.”

See? They all use that “exploit” word. Twenty-first century single-payer healthcare, then, must have something in common with the starvation of the Great Leap Forward and the bloodshed of the Stalinist Purges, right?

“The socialist narrative names the oppressors of the vulnerable, such as the bourgeoisie (Marx), kulaks (Lenin), landlords (Mao), and giant corporations (Sanders and Warren).”

The report even takes a shot at French economist Thomas Piketty, whose 2013 book Capital put a thorn in the side of many right-wingers by pretty much proving the dangers of the Achilles Heel of today’s capitalist systems: That is, their habit of continually cycling capital upward to the narrowest and wealthiest echelons of society.

Piketty (2014) concludes that the Soviet approach and other attempts to “abolish private ownership” should at least be admired for being “more logically consistent.

As Vox notes, the CEA report spends a good deal of time explaining why the socialist agrarian systems of 20th Century China and Russia didn’t work. A quick word search of the report, however, finds no usages of “1928,” “stock market crash,” or “Great Depression.”

So, um, a new @WhiteHouseCEA report ostensibly written to argue against Medicare for All uses… the success of Medicare (!) to argue against it. https://t.co/irnkIlNzbhpic.twitter.com/RhndXzAHzE

— Steve Goldstein (@MKTWgoldstein) October 23, 2018

The report eventually lifts itself out of the past and attempts to dispel the liberal admiration of modern socialist systems of the Nordic countries, which seem to work reasonably well. To prove our capitalist system works better, the report points out that GDP per capita is higher in the U.S. than in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden. And to really drive the point home, the CEA economists show that it’s cheaper to own a pickup truck in Bismarck, North Dakota, than it is in Haugesund, Norway.

In a recent poll, Gallup found that the general view of “socialism” in the U.S. has evolved somewhat since 1949, when the polling firm last asked the American people about it. In 2018, the number of people who define socialism as government ownership of everything has dropped by half, down to 17%. Around 6% still view it as modified communism, and another 6% had, according to Gallup, “non-specific derogatory opinions” about the term.

Read more:For young people, socialism is now more popular than capitalism

Generally, however, Gallup documents a shift toward a “gentler, lighter” understanding of socialism. Around 23% of Americans now–an 11% increase from 1949–see socialism as a means toward greater equity among people, and 10% think it would bring about an increase in benefits like improved social services and universal healthcare.

Not surprisingly, another recent Gallup poll found that only 16% of Republicans have positive views of socialism, and they’re vastly more likely to understand it as government control of the means of production. On the other hand, 57% of Democrats say they now have a positive view of socialism.

Yahoo will pay up to $85 million to settle a class action lawsuit over its massive data breach, reports the Recorder, a legal publication.

That includes $50 million for compensation for up to 200 million affected users plus another $35 million for lawyers’ fees and expenses.

People who had Yahoo accounts between 2012 and 2016 and experienced out-of-pocket costs tied to the data breaches will be eligible for compensation, and small businesses and other paid users will be eligible for a 25% refund for fees paid during that time period.

Everyone else who had an account during that time will be eligible for at least two years of credit monitoring from AllClear ID. People who already have credit monitoring and certify they plan to keep it for at least a year would be eligible for $100, according to the settlement.

The agreement would be funded half by Verizon-owned Oath, which acquired Yahoo’s operating business last year, and half by Altaba, which owns other former Yahoo assets, notably Alibaba stock. It still must be approved by Judge Lucy Koh of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, who is scheduled to hold a hearing on the settlement on November 29.

In the beginning of October, in the small Italian town of Troia, a pilot plant started sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere and turning it into carbon-neutral fuel. In Squamish, Canada, another pilot plant is doing the same thing. In Switzerland, a third plant is capturing CO2 to sell to a nearby greenhouse.

Run by two startups at the vanguard of the “direct air capture” industry, the plants use technology that can also be used for negative emissions–capturing carbon from the air to bury underground–something that the world will have to do at a large scale to avoid the worst global warming. (Climeworks, one of the startups, is already working in Iceland to capture CO2 that is injected underground and turned into stone.) But they also point to another opportunity. Because the level of atmospheric CO2 is equally high everywhere, capturing it and turning it into products can potentially bring back jobs to areas that have lost other industry.

A plant in Ohio or Turkey or Palau could capture CO2 to make a variety of products, from plastics to fuel. A shoe company, for example, could use it to make the materials for a new shoe says Julio Friedmann, a senior research scholar at the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and former Obama administration official who has studied direct air capture for years. “You could have a manufacturing base in the heartland, in small rural America, making whatever the community needs, potentially manufacturing it for sale nearby.”

A study earlier this year found that the cost of capturing carbon could be far less than previous estimates, at less than $100 a ton. It’s still much pricier than a barrel of crude oil, though the company expects to reach cost parity over time. But even now, carbon pricing in place in some regions makes fuel economically viable. Airlines will be able pay the same amount as they would for normal jet fuel, while Carbon Engineering can recoup the additional cost through a carbon credit or carbon tax program.

If similar policies existed for plastic–a penalty for plastic made from fossil fuels and an incentive for plastic made from atmospheric CO2–that industry could also shift, Oldham says. “If that was the case for plastics, then the plastics industry will be phoning us up straight away saying, ‘We want to buy your CO2.’ It’s really a question of policy to try and direct whatever dollars governments choose to put into decarbonizing.”

Newlight, a California-based company, already makes a plastic called AirCarbon from emissions captured at landfills and energy facilities; similar products could eventually be made directly from air. A startup called C2CNT is making nanofibers from captured carbon, which can be made into strong, lightweight carbon fiber bikes, wind turbine blades, and other products. Others are working to recycle CO2 into methanol, which can be made into medicine or perfume. Another startup turns CO2 into fish feed. Others turn CO2 into stronger, cheaper concrete that could store emissions at a massive scale. “There’s a whole host of products that can be made from CO2,” says Charles.

One startup, called Opus 12, that plans to capture CO2 emissions (from sources such as power plants, at least initially) and turn them into cost-competitive chemical products. “They will be able to make chemicals and fuels anywhere, anytime, as long as you can give them CO2 and electrons,” Friedmann says. “They have a business, and that’s where the world is heading right now.”

Corporations could also push suppliers to start sourcing products made from captured carbon. “I think what is more fruitful is when companies like Walmart or Apple just say, ‘Hey, 2020 is coming, our supply chains are going to look different,'” says Friedmamn. If suppliers have to figure out how to cut their carbon footprint or be dropped, they’ll be motivated to use new materials.

“At this point, it’s pricey and difficult, but it’s all inbound and credible,” Friedmann says. “These companies and technologies are essentially where batteries were 10 years ago and where solar was 20 years ago. The investment community can smell that. They get that this is the next thing.” And it’s something that could happen anywhere.

The lessons of Fenty Beauty and Black Panther have not yet trickled down to the world of children’s books. Apparently, the publishing industry has not yet realized that inclusiveness is not just the right thing to do morally but also financially.

As CNN reports, a mere 9% of children’s books published in the U.S. in 2017 featured African or African-American characters. Put another way, a full 91% of children’s books seem to be about what 11-year old activist Marley Dias calls “white boys and their dogs.” The CNN report puts a spotlight on Dias, who has spent the last few years collecting more than 11,000 books as part of her quest to find more young POC heroes in modern literature. Her movement, which she calls #1000BlackGirlBooks, has led Dias to donate over half of those collected books to “predominantly black and underserved” communities in the U.S., Haiti, Ghana, Jamaica, and the U.K., as well as publish her own tome, Marley Dias Gets It Done, and develop a forthcoming app for kids to find #1000BlackGirlBooks (or more) on demand.

Perhaps even more disturbing than the dearth of children’s books about African or African-American characters is the woeful lack of children’s books by Africans or African Americans. As CNN reports, according to data from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC), these groups wrote or illustrated just 3% of the overall children’s books last year. CNN attributes these low numbers to a greater diversity problem within the publishing industry, citing a 2015 Diversity Baseline Survey of staff at 34 U.S. publishers, which found an overwhelming 79% of staff to be white.

In the 17th century, when India was ruled by Mughal sultans, artisan communities sprung up in the northern city of Lucknow to create beautiful things for the royal family. They spun gold thread and used it to embroider gowns, robes, and jackets. They adorned cushions and blankets with embroidered flowers and peacocks.

Three hundred years later, some of this craftsmanship still lives on, passed on from father to son, but it’s dying out. Afshan Durrani has seen it happen. She’s spent nearly two decades working closely with these artisans, and has just launched a new startup called Complete Unknown that employs them to create chic, modern handbags embroidered with scorpions, tigers, and wasps. Over the years, she’s watched the sons in these families leave this work behind for more stable, lucrative careers in bigger cities. (She says women aren’t often taught the craft, since the apprenticeship takes many years, and daughters are expected to become homemakers after they get married.)

“It takes years to learn how to embroider by hand at this level,” Durrani says. “I think it’s a shame that the next generation is leaving the craft behind, because eventually, there won’t be anyone left who knows how to do this work.”

Since 2002, Durrani has owned a New York-based textile company called Lost City Products that employs between 50 and 125 Lucknow artisans at any given time to create custom fabrics for interior designers, who use them when designing the homes of their clients in America. Creating these fabrics is time- and labor-intensive. It can take two dozen workers a month to make a bolt of embroidered silk, followed by another week of washing and trimming the material. Some of the most expensive fabrics in her collections can cost $1,000 a yard.

Durrani–who grew up in Kashmir, India, before coming to New York to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology–launched her company with the specific goal of helping to support these artisans and, in doing so, preserve their craft, that has been perfected over centuries.

Although Durrani commissions many traditional motifs and patterns for her clients, she also has a passion for creating her own contemporary designs. One collection, which she calls “forensics,” involves patterns that evoke drops of blood, strands of hair, and fingerprints. “It’s this total mash-up of this ancient craft with modern art,” Durrani says. “I love this idea of helping to bring this art into the modern world by creating designs that resonate with today’s consumers.”

In many ways, her newest venture, Complete Unknown, springs from this unusual mix of modern design with ancient craftsmanship. Unlike Lost City, which works with designers, Complete Unknown is a direct-to-consumer brand that sells products on a website. The brand’s introductory line consists of handbags embroidered with deadly creatures: angry-looking wasps, scorpions, tigers, and wolves. Some bags are lined with studs, making them look even more threatening.  “I love this idea of finding beauty in these dangerous creatures, ” she says. “But in traditional Indian society, you would never want these animals on your bag. They’re considered inauspicious.”

Durrani’s whole line is totally rock-and-roll, which is exactly what she is going for. After all, she named her brand after a Bob Dylan lyric from the song, Like A Rolling Stone. And the bags seem to capture the current zeitgeist, which is focused on animalia: Gucci’s recent collections have featured snakes, scorpions, and bees, while Birdies’ recent collaboration with Ken Fulk features leopards and peacocks. “My own taste is inspired by streetwear, punk, and goth culture,” she says.

It’s complex work designing and producing these bags. Durrani draws out each of the patterns, then teaches them to the artisans, who use their traditional techniques to sew them onto the bags. And she’s also played with tradition in other ways. For instance, some designs feature reverse embroidery. It results in exposed threads, which allows you to see how the craftsman went about sewing the pattern. The bags are at a luxury price point, with clutches starting at $325, and cross-body bags going for between $575 and $750, depending on the complexity of the design.

While Durrani deliberately leads with the punk aesthetic of her bags in her marketing, she’s also focused on building a brand that is as sustainable as possible. This is why she’s chosen to avoid using leather–which often uses highly polluting chemicals in the tanning process and also produces a lot of carbon dioxide in the farming process. Instead, she imports high-quality polyurethane (PU) from Italy into India, which is free of any polluting solvents. Any glues used are water based. “It took me two years to introduce the PU to the workshop in Lucknow,” she says. “It took time to teach them how to use it, and to create the same results you would get with leather.”

Currently, Durrani employs 25 artisans to make the Complete Unknown bags, but she hopes to employ more as the business grows. And perhaps more importantly, her goal is to help breathe new life into an ancient art, and make it seem hip to today’s consumers. “Preserving Indian embroidery doesn’t necessarily mean being stuck in the past,” she says. “It can mean giving it a new life in the modern world.”

The second day of keynote events kicked off this morning for our Fast Company Innovation Festival, and anyone who cares about the illusive nature of creativity and collaboration is not going to want to miss Pharrell Williams, who will discuss the topic along with Illumination’s Chris Meledandri at 1 p.m. today on our main stage in New York City.

It’s actually a great topic for the age of YouTube and Instagram, where anyone with a smartphone and a little bit of personality can become a celebrity without collaborating with anyone. I confess I sometimes fear collaboration is becoming a lost art. Hopefully, Pharrell will tell us otherwise.

You watch a live stream of the keynote at this link or via the video embed below.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, your LinkedIn profile picture is worth a lot.

Sure, you may have invested a lot of time capturing job descriptions, collecting solid recommendations, and identified tangible (and impressive) professional achievements. Those things are all critical and definitely showcase your professional track record. However, your profile photo also contributes to the first impression you make on a potential employer, recruiter, investor, or partner.

Digital marketing agency Digital Third Coast and risk mitigation specialists JDP recently collaborated to study 2,000 LinkedIn photos across 11 industries. After analyzing technical execution, style, facial expressions, and attire, they found a large percentage of LinkedIn users consistently fail to meet certain quality standards with their profile pictures.

To create a positive first impression with your LinkedIn photo, avoid making these three common mistakes:

Mistake one: using a low-resolution photo

When I first got more active on social media over a decade ago, I was somewhat shy about sharing a picture of myself in the public domain. I found it unsettling to have an image of myself online for anyone in the world to see.

I realized, however, that I am personally suspicious of someone without a profile image who reaches out to me online–even if that message is coming through a professional platform like LinkedIn.

According to Andy Kerns, creative director at Digital Third Coast, “when a picture doesn’t meet a certain standard of high resolution, the enlarged version looks even worse.” This doesn’t exactly leave a positive impression with recruiters, hiring managers, or potential partners when they click on your picture.

Solution: don’t use a selfie

According to LinkedIn, the minimum size for profile photos should be 400 x 400 pixels. Make sure your LinkedIn profile image is sharp with high enough resolution to look good on any screen and larger sizes. Avoid selfie shots taken with your smartphone camera. Those rarely work as well because front-facing cameras often have a worse resolution.

Mistake two: cropping your face from a group shot

Some of my favorite photos of myself are not from posed headshots, but of candid shots that catch me during natural moments when I’m not even looking at the camera. If you’re like me, your favorite pictures of yourself are the ones you have with your good friends when you’re feeling happy, at ease, and most like yourself.

Solution: Get a professional headshot

Use a photo of yourself taken for the purpose of being a profile headshot, not one cropped from another photo you happen to have. Use a background that doesn’t distract. Anything in the frame that isn’t your face should help support the overall professional image you’re trying to convey as part of your personal brand.

Mistake three: ignoring lighting

I admit that don’t always think about things like lighting or shadows whenever I’m trying to find a photo of myself to use on social media. My focus tends to be on my attire and my facial expressions.

Solution: Make sure to use a high-quality camera

Invest the effort and money into hiring a professional photographer who can take a uniformly lit shot specifically for the purposes of a headshot. Alternatively, you could even just ask a friend who’s good with cameras to take a picture of you with one of the latest smartphone cameras with high-quality portrait modes.

Attention to detail can go a long way

Hiring a professional photographer might seem like a big investment, but when you think about the professional payoff, you’ll probably realize that it’s not at all.

Kerns also suggests that in addition to following all the tips above–you should always have a warm smile. “A full smile projects confidence, energy, enthusiasm, and approachability–all hallmarks of a great candidate for an open position.”

Ultimately, your profile is an important part of your online personal brand, so keeping these things in mind when creating your profile photo will help you make the most positive first impression you can when it matters most. Don’t let a photo ruin a great professional opportunity.

Joseph Liu is a keynote speaker, career change consultant, and host of the Career Relaunch podcast featuring stories of career reinvention. Follow him on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

Here’s what we know so far about a wave of suspicious packages reported this week:

• A pipe bomb was found in billionaire financier George Soros‘s home mailbox by a caretaker on Monday. The caretaker alerted law enforcement, who safely detonated the device.
• Additional explosives were intercepted en route to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on Wednesday. They’re said to be similar to the bomb in Soros’s mailbox.
• Another suspicious package was found at CNN’s newsroom in Manhattan’s Time Warner Center Wednesday morning. The newsroom and other nearby businesses were evacuated, with New Yorkers getting alerts on their phones to shelter in place if on that block while the apparent bomb was transported to an NYPD site. The package was reportedly addressed to former CIA director John Brennan (now a contributor to CNN rival MSNBC).
• Reports of another bomb being sent to the White House were false, the Secret Service has said.
• Another suspicious package was reportedly found at the Sunrise, Florida, office of Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, former chair of the Democratic National Committee. The office was evacuated. The package was apparently sent to former Attorney General Eric Holder with Wasserman Schultz’s address as return address, then returned there when it couldn’t be delivered to Holder at the address given. The package sent to CNN also had Wassserman Schultz’s return address.
• The offices of the San Diego Union-Tribune and other businesses were briefly evacuated after suspicious packages, described as Priority Mail boxes near a pump, were spotted outside the building. The building also includes a WeWork facility, the paper reports. The boxes were later found to be innocuous.
• A suspicious package was also sent to the Manhattan office of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, the governor said Wednesday.
• Police intercepted a suspicious package mailed to Rep. Maxine Waters, ABC News White House Correspondent Tara Palmeri tweeted Wednesday.

This is a developing story . . .

CLARIFICATION: At this time the Secret Service has intercepted TWO suspicious packages – one in NY and one in D.C. Reports of a third intercepted package addressed to the WH are incorrect. We refer media to our statement: https://t.co/lJdTn04KmI

— U.S. Secret Service (@SecretService) October 24, 2018

Show business is changing–traditional audiences are shrinking, viewing patterns are shifting, new technology is disrupting old industry rhythms. It follows that what it takes to be successful in entertainment is changing too.

At the Fast Company Innovation Festival, industry veterans Jennifer Salke and Jason Blum sat before a packed crowd and discussed this transformation. Salke is the former NBC Entertainment president who’s now head of Amazon Studios, and Blum is a producer and the founder of Blumhouse Productions. The two chatted with Fast Company senior writer Nicole Laporte.

Blum took the time to clarify a quote of his that stirred up controversy last week. In an interview, he lamented that there are “not a lot of female directors, period, and even less who are inclined to do horror.” This caused considerable backlash, and Blum took to Twitter to apologize. At the festival, he acknowledged the mistake and said he misspoke. “What I meant to say,” he explained, “is I would like to work with more [women directors].” He went on to say that he is actively focused on signing more women directors. “We’re going to make it happen,” he said.

The conversation took place following the stellar opening weekend of Blum’s latest hit, Halloween. Made for a reported $10 million, the movie grossed $76 million over three days. Keeping costs low—being stingy—is the secret, according to Blum. “I really love low-budget movies,” he said. Not overspending is a plus for any producer, but Blum pointed out that it also encourages the studios releasing his films to take bigger risks. If you have a crazy idea that costs only a few million dollars to make, it’ll be easier to convince executives to greenlight it than a $100 million film. That’s how Blumhouse’s Get Out came to be. “It was the weirdest thing we ever read,” Blum said.

Salke agreed and added that at Amazon, she and the various creative teams are allowed to think in more fluid terms that push the boundaries of what streaming programming can be. If someone has an idea for new project, Salke usually asks, “Should this be a movie? Six episodes?” The deciding factor in making those decisions, she said, is story.

So what’s preventing the rest of Hollywood from understanding—and jumping into—the changing tide? According to Blum, it’s greed. “Hollywood is just addicted to money,” he said. Studio executives want to spend big in the hopes of landing a blockbuster, rather than focusing on smaller projects that could move the needle in surprising ways. This thirst for money, said Blum, is “so built into the system.” He noted that the accepted model of success for a filmmaker—break out with a low-budget Sundance indie, score a $10 million feature, then pursue studio projects with increasingly hefty price tags until they land a tentpole—makes no sense. “That, to me, is just so silly,” he said. “The bigger the budget is, the more compromises you have to make. The less it really is yours.”

“It’s such a smart strategy,” Salke agreed. “You have to have restraint.”

The world isn’t spending enough on climate change. But as government and corporate investments fall short–we spent around $280 billion globally last year, $2.1 trillion short of what a recent landmark climate report says is necessary–a new startup suggests that crowdfunding could begin to fill the gap.

“The reality is that when you read the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report that says we have 12 years to save the world, and the world needs to invest $2.4 trillion every single year to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius . . . it really makes you feel helpless and powerless and like there’s nothing you can do,” says Aoi Senju, CEO and cofounder of the startup Jumpstart. The startup is designed to point people to concrete action, with clean energy investments targeted at areas where the grid lacks renewables and other sources of funding.

“We wanted to make it more flexible for people to contribute to clean energy and actually make it possible for people to contribute to meaningful clean energy around the world,” Senju says. The startup also wanted to focus on markets that lack widespread access to electricity and are getting less attention from the clean energy sector, and where developers have less access to funding.

The website also plans to crowdfund some individual residential solar projects in communities that can’t afford solar panels on their own. In Texas, where some recent immigrants haven’t built up enough of a credit history to get a standard loan for solar panels, Jumpstart plans to use machine learning to evaluate potential customers’ creditworthiness itself. “We see that as being a very big market,” says Senju. “[There are] a lot of customers who want to go solar, but just haven’t had the financing opportunity to do so.”

As some governments pull back from action–the frontrunner in Brazil’s presidential election has said that he wants to follow Trump’s lead and withdraw from the Paris climate agreement–and others move slowly, the site aims to give everyone else a way to act now. “We just really want to give people hope again,” Senju says. “You don’t need to be a Google or a Facebook or the president of the United States to support clean energy.”

Most of us, regardless of what type of negotiation we are in, have the same assumption about how it should go: We want to maximize what we get while minimizing what the other person gets. But that’s all wrong, says Art Markman, psychology professor and Fast Company contributor. Speaking at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York on Tuesday, he said that many negotiations should be mutually beneficial.

Figuring out how you should approach a negotiation starts by considering what type of relationship you want to have with the person you’re talking to. As Markman explains, all of our relationships fall into one of three categories: family, neighbors, and strangers. With family, you do anything for them without keeping score or expecting to get paid back. (Parents don’t present their children with a bill for raising them, for example). The next group is neighbors. These are people with whom you have a relationship of familiarity and mutual benefit. (You do something for them, like pet-sitting for a vacation, and they will, at some point, do something for you, like pick your kid up from school when you are running late.) The last group is strangers. Most people in the world, of course, fall into this category. (Every interaction is in the moment; it’s a contract that has to be fulfilled.)

According to Markman, if you want to work with this person again, which you likely do, you should approach it as if you are standing side by side, trying to reach the same destination.

To do that, you likely need to give away more information than most people do in a negotiation. In a competitive approach to negotiation, you minimize the amount of information you give, but if you are trying to solve a problem together, then you tell the other party what you need, what your ultimate goals are, and work on a way to get there together. There can be room, then, for a lot more sharing of resources, and both parties can walk away feeling like that got something they wanted, rather than one person “winning” and one person “losing.” A lot of times, the real negotiation isn’t the thing you are talking about, it’s about the bigger goal, which can be easy to lose sight of.

Instead, say: Here’s what I need, and here’s what you need, and how can we figure it out? The people who are most successful in the long run, Markman says, are the people whom you get something out of every time you interact with them–even if you have to give something up. That is what makes you want to keep working with them.

“We influence the relationships we have though every interaction,” he says. “Do you want everyone to be strangers? You want to create negotiations that are just because I win, it doesn’t mean you have to lose.”

This approach to negotiation, Markman says, strengthens your relationships, bringing more people into your neighborhood. After all, none of us succeed on our individual strengths. It’s about who you bring together.

If you’re looking for the perfect person to hit up for your daughter’s Girl Scout cookies sale, or you need an angel investor for your genius new pet spaw (geddit?) idea, check out Zippia’s new list of the wealthiest person in each state.

The West Coast is easy. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is the wealthiest person in Washington, Nike’s Phil Knight gets the title in Oregon, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg tops the list in California. Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett keeps his title of the Oracle of Omaha in Nebraska.

A lot of money is all in the family. The Walmart family fortune put Alice Walton and Jim Walton at the top of the list in Texas and Arkansas, respectively, while the Koch Brothers, owners of Koch Industries, the second largest privately owned company in the U.S., also keep it in the family, with David the No. 1 seed in New York and Charles at the top in Kansas. Billionaire business-owning brothers James and Thomas Duff share the top billing in Mississippi, and grandmother and granddaughter candy bar heirs Jacqueline and Victoria Mars take the titles in Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Two less famous billionaires have crept into the top 10. Florida’s Thomas Peterffy earned his bucks in brokerage, and Sheldon Adelson, a Nevada casino investor, helped put Donald Trump in the White House. (It’s worth noting that there are a lot of wealthy conservatives willing to get involved in politics, including the Kochs, Adelson, Waltons, and Knight.)

Eleven women are the richest in their states, including the Mars family and Walton; W.L. Gore & Associates heir Elizabeth Snyder in Delaware; Utah Jazz owner and business leader Gail Miller; New Orleans Saints owner Gayle Benson; Maine billionaire Susan Alfond; Cargill heir Pauline MacMillan Keinath; JAB Holdings heir Andrea Reimann-Ciardelli; CEO Anita Zucker; and Massachusetts is topped by Fidelity Investments CEO Abigail Johnson, who is the ninth-wealthiest female billionaire by net worth in the world.

You can check out the full list here, along with a handy map.

If you’ve ever gotten discouraged trying to find exactly where in Google’s menus to view and edit your search history, Google hears you.

The company will now let you access search-related privacy settings directly from a search page or app, rather than having to navigate through your account settings to find your stored search history and delete embarrassing entries. Google says in a blog post it will also provide speedy access to other privacy-related settings as you search, like letting you access ad privacy settings.

The new privacy links will appear in web search pages today and in iOS and Android apps “in the coming weeks,” according to Google. The company also plans to add quick privacy options to Maps and other services starting next year.

Google is also releasing new YouTube videos explaining its privacy options.

“We all carry things in our pockets that are proven to make us unhappy. The nature of the human mind probably hasn’t changed yet the technology we’re carrying around has changed.”

Speaking from the 2018 Fast Company Innovation Festival, David Gelles, New York Times reporter and author of Mindful Work: How Meditation Is Changing Business From The Inside Out, tells the audience that the prevalence of technology in modern-day life has resulted in a sense of “personal sense of disconnection.” We’re so used to a “hamster wheel loop of dopamine hits,” Gelles said, that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be alone with ourselves and our thoughts.

The problem with pursuing happiness

America prides itself on pursuing happiness–so much so that the founding fathers codified it in the declaration of independence. Yet looking at the United Nations’ World Happiness Report, the U.S. ranks just No. 18, down 4 places from last year.

“As a generation, we’re not necessarily happier, but we’re more aware of it,” says Marah Lidey, cofounder and co-CEO of Shine. And Ben Schiller previously reported for Fast Company, technology isn’t the only thing making people less happy. Economist Jeffrey Sachs attributed the decline in happiness to fewer people feeling like they’re in control of their lives, fewer people feeling like they have people to count on in times of need, and fewer people trusting politicians and public figures. This generation–despite expecting more–is also earning less money than previous generations, Lidey says.

Acton Smith urges the audience to shift their focus from pursuing happiness, to striving for purpose. “Happiness comes from purpose and often purpose beyond just ourselves. That’s when I know I’m making a person happy.”

AT&T’s television fortunes suddenly reversed last quarter, as DirecTV satellite subscriptions plummeted and DirecTV Now streaming subscriptions failed to pick up the slack.

DirecTV Now gained just 49,000 subscribers in Q3 2018, while AT&T’s traditional TV business (including DirecTV and AT&T U-Verse) shed 346,000 subscribers. That adds up to a net loss of 297,000 customers last quarter. Two quarters ago, AT&T gained 80,000 TV customers, with 342,000 new DirecTV Now subscribers offsetting a loss of 262,000 subscribers in traditional TV.

Why the sudden shift? In July, AT&T raised DirecTV Now prices by $5 per month across the board in hopes of making the service profitable. More importantly, AT&T also stopped offering incredible device deals to new subscribers. Until this summer, new customers could get a free Roku Streaming Stick (regularly $50) with a month of $35 prepaid service, or a free Apple TV 4K (regularly $180) with three months of prepaid service at $105. There was nothing stopping customers from signing up, immediately canceling, and walking away with a new streaming device at far below retail prices.

DirecTV Now is still in second place among live TV streaming services, with 1.86 million subscribers, but the stalled growth means it probably won’t overtake Sling TV’s 2.21 million subscribers this year. For now, AT&T says it will focus on “improving profitability” by retooling its channel lineups and beta testing a new streaming device with DirecTV Now built in.

The news that Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull is retiring, which Disney and Pixar announced late Tuesday, underscores the degree to which 2018 marks the true end of an era at the fabled animation company behind such hit films as Toy Story, Cars, and Inside Out. 

Catmull’s departure is not surprising. Sources say he has been talking about retiring for years now and that if anything, the Lasseter debacle, which began last fall when Lasseter initially stepped down for a leave of absence, delayed his plans. Disney has not announced a successor for Catmull. Instead, Pixar president Jim Morris and WDA president Andrew Millstein will continue to oversee their respective studios.  

A tech wunderkind who earned a doctorate in computer technology from the University of Utah and then worked for George Lucas as the head of Lucasfilm’s computer division, Catmull cofounded Pixar in 1986 with Lasseter and Steve Jobs. He and Lasseter formed a leadership yin and yang at Pixar–and later WDA, which they began overseeing when Disney purchased Pixar in 2006–with Lasseter handling creative and Catmull overseeing the business from behind the scenes. Their combined creative and technological visions helped build a company whose films are defined by their cutting-edge artistry and old-fashioned soul. 

Catmull, who grew up Mormon (he’s said that he no longer practices), and is known for meditating in his office, also brought a groundedness to the company. “They made a really good synergistic team because Ed could be that voice of reason and John could be that voice of passion,” Craig Good, a camera artist who worked on several Pixar films, including Finding Nemo and Monsters, Inc., told me earlier this year. “Director Jonathan Nolan came to Pixar once and gave a little talk. He gave the best description of Batman I’ve ever heard. He said that Batman is a normal human whose superpowers are money and rage. Batman was two people. So if you leave the world of money and rage and go into the world of creativity and management, that’s John and Ed. They complemented each other in that way.”  

Catmull turned his ideas about creativity and management into a book, Creativity, Inc., that he co-authored with Amy Wallace. In the book he says that he had two heroes growing up: Walt Disney and Albert Einstein. The latter, he writes, “dared to bend the implications of what we thought we knew.” Pixar sources say he frequently spouted ideas and philosophies from the book at meetings.

But some sources say that as Pixar grew beyond its mom-and-pop origins, and as it began to weather criticism for being a boy’s club and supporting misogynistic behavior, the culmination of which was the Lasseter situation, Catmull was not proactive enough about steering the company in a new direction.  

“He didn’t grasp the issues with John,” says one insider. “He would seem to get it, but then he’d be in front of small groups of leaders and he’d go off on tangents about one of his philosophies. He was not addressing the problems of the day. He seemed to be more philosophical than tactical about what the studio was going through.” 

But another source disagrees with this characterization, saying that Catmull organized a number of “notes days” at Pixar, where “we took a day and he made us all go in different rooms and talk about things we didn’t like about the company. There was no fear of reprisal. He was looking for ways we could improve the company. That was Ed’s doing. He was always looking for ways to improve the culture.” 

Going forward, Pixar’s culture will be in new hands, or at least not the hands of its founders. The animation community, and beyond, is eager to see what that means. 

A horrifying Category 5 typhoon is bearing down on islands in the Western Pacific and will pass dangerously close to the U.S. territories of Saipan and Tinian.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said today it is monitoring Super Typhoon Yutu and coordinating with local authorities. According to the Weather Channel, the eye of the storm has now pushed west of islands in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, about 120 miles northeast of Guam. At last check, the storm had sustained winds of 180 mph, making it the strongest typhoon on record to pass near Saipan and Tinian, per the Weather Channel. It’s also the strongest storm yet in a very busy year for hurricanes.

Satellite images from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and others paint an ominous picture for the region:

Check out the eye of Super Typhoon #Yutu in the western Pacific, seen today from #Himawari-8. The ferocious Category 5 storm is packing 180 mph winds and quickly approaching the U.S. territories of Saipan, Tinian and Rota. More imagery: https://t.co/naIsWtiBevpic.twitter.com/mo7PW10PaP

— NOAA Satellites (@NOAASatellites) October 24, 2018

Closer view of Super #Typhoon#Yutu passing directly over #Tinian and #Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands with sustained winds of 155 KTS (178 MPH), gusting to 190 KTS (219 MPH). (JMA Himawari imagery) pic.twitter.com/K8mu7uRmw4

— NASA SPoRT (@NASA_SPoRT) October 24, 2018

One of the strongest storms ever recorded in the U.S. and its territories is hitting the Northern Mariana Islands, including Saipan and Titian, as Category 5 Super Typhoon #Yutu rolls through with 180-mph sustained winds https://t.co/JjpqOkou7Ipic.twitter.com/EYR3HVWFBN

— Weather Underground (@wunderground) October 24, 2018

Super Typhoon #Yutu slams N’rn Marianna Islands of Saipan & Tinian (north of Guam) as catastrophic storm w/180mph winds. Yutu went from 50mph tropical storm to 180mph winds w/gusts to 220mph in 48hrs. Another huge rapid intensification cycle & nearly most perfect eye at landfall. pic.twitter.com/AsSLSYKLyt

— Rob Perillo (@robperillo) October 24, 2018