The Wing is not the first women’s-only club in the world, and now the rapidly expanding network of coworking spaces and social clubs will share stories about all the clubs that came before it. No Man’s Land is a new podcast that will celebrate the women who “were too bad for your textbooks,” stories full of murder, gangsters, mysterious disappearances, and untimely demises dug up by Alexis Coe, The Wing’s in-house historian, who also hosts the show.

In New York, women-only social clubs started out of necessity. “In the 1860s, Jane Croly and other women journalists in New York were excluded from the New York Press Club dinner honoring Charles Dickens. They were told they could listen to the speeches, but they had to do it from the kitchen with the rest of the servants, which they weren’t too happy about,” explains Coe. “They went and started their own club, which is Sorosis, which is very different now.”

Women’s clubs spread across the United States with westward expansion, providing healthcare, child care, libraries, or whatever communities needed. “Women’s social clubs founded 70% to 80% of the public library system and that has gone completely uncelebrated,” says Coe. In the new podcast, Coe works to draw a spotlight on these untold stories, celebrating women who never quite made it into the history books.

First up is the tale of Stephanie St. Clair, aka Queenie, a 1920s Harlem gangster and enterprising multitasker. Not only did she run a wildly successful organized crime syndicate, which took on a legendary Italian mobster over a numbers game, but she also mobilized her community–writing editorials on legal rights, the importance of voting, and how to fight back against police brutality.

Podcast nerds will be interested to know that No Man’s Land’s presenting sponsor is SAP, which will be integrating interviews with real fearless women into each episode, and Amazon Prime Video is promoting Season Two of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel by having The Wing’s CEO and cofounder, Audrey Gelman, divulge a different tidbit about the show each week.

The best part is you don’t even need to be a member of The Wing or a female-identifying human to enjoy the show. Simply hit subscribe here and get to know the territory known as No Man’s Land.

Okay, Sex and the City fans, grab a cosmo and gather round, because there’s a new podcast in town that tells the origin story of your favorite four-top. James Andrew Miller’s podcast Origins takes fans back to the fabulous world of pink cocktails, Manolos, and brunch for four in a nearly two-hour episode called “Sex and the City: Tutus, Tete-a-Tetes, and Taxis.” The episode was made in partnership with Cadence13, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis–better known as Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte. (It appears that Kim Cattrall’s feud with Sarah Jessica Parker means Samantha skipped this particular trip down memory lane.)

Miller interviews Parker, Nixon, Davis, creator Darren Starr and longtime showrunner Michael Patrick King to sketch out how the iconic series came to be, all while exploring all sorts of fun questions like: Can you imagine Nixon as Carrie Bradshaw? Did the show annoy Gloria Steinem? Why did they cast Chris Noth as Mr. Big? And of course, the age-old question puzzling journalists everywhere, how did Carrie afford a massive one-bedroom Upper East Side apartment and her incredible wardrobe on a newspaper columnist’s salary? It also addresses topics including where Patricia Fields got the iconic tutu that Carrie wears in the credits and what the show had in common with Greek mythology (a surprising amount, according to Nixon).

Plug into Origins here, and if you want to round out your Sex and the City podcast playlist, check out Carrie On and then try The Worst Idea of All Time, where the hosts watch a terrible film–Sex and the City 2–40 times and share their thoughts.

Over the last decade, the British department store chain John Lewis has become synonymous with Christmas. The brand, and its longtime agency adam&eveDDB, are credited with starting what has become the U.K.’s advertising equivalent to the Super Bowl in the U.S. This year’s spot, released today, keeps up with that blockbuster reputation.

The similarity with the Super Bowl ends with size and scale. If there were a John Lewis Christmas ad formula, it would look something like this: (Cute kid + adorable animal) x (many feels + nostalgia) ÷ retail experience. In “The Boy and the Piano,” instead of using the tried-and-true approach of creating a celebrity all its own–remember Monty the Penguin?–John Lewis has gone Full Superstar and enlisted Sir Elton John, crafting a version of the pop legend’s life story that fits its Christmas narrative like a sequined glove.

As with previous years, the retailer has a whole line of merchandise tied to the new spot, but this year, it has added an expanded experiential element at its Oxford Street London flagship: a 2,000-square-foot space where people can explore the dressing room, recording studio, and living room sets from the ad, interact with props, listen to Elton John’s 17-11-70 album, and have photos taken at a piano (no, it’s not Sir Elton’s).

John Lewis and adam&eveDDB have created an entire cultural moment out of the Christmas ad bonanza, with breathless news coverage anticipating what the brand will do, when the campaign will launch, and how the public might react. Within hours of its release, the spot had more than 2 million views across the company’s social channels and replaced today’s Brexit crisis in Twitter trending popularity.

It’s the perfect mix of story and celebrity, and while not official, also a pretty damned good promo for Rocketman, the upcoming Elton John biopic hitting theaters next summer.

Producer Jason Blum is making good on his promise to hire directors who aren’t white males. On Wednesday, it was announced that his film and TV production company, Blumhouse Productions, made a deal with Amazon Studios to produce a series of eight feature-length thrillers that will all be made by “underrepresented” filmmakers. That includes Asians, African-Americans, women, and essentially any demographic that veers from the typical résumé of a Blumhouse writer and director: white dude.  

The news comes a few weeks after Blum found himself in hot water over comments he made when asked in an interview about the absence of female directors in projects from his company, which include the horror hits The Purge, all three of which were written and directed by James DeMonaco; Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning Get Out; and the latest installment of Halloween, directed by David Gordon Green. 

“We’re always trying to do that,” Blum told Polygon in October, meaning hire women filmmakers. “We’re not trying to do it because of recent events. We’ve always been trying. There are not a lot of female directors, period, and even less who are inclined to do horror.” 

Blum was attacked on social media for his comments, but he quickly apologized, saying he’d been misunderstood. “I totally misspoke,” he told Variety. “I made a mistake about it. Our audience is 55% women, the executives at the company we have are 50% women. I am passionate about hiring women, and I totally made a mistake in the way I represented that. We already work with a lot of women.”

At the Fast Company Innovation Festival in October, Blum again addressed the issue–this time sitting on stage next to Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke–reiterating that he’d been misunderstood and saying that “I would like to work with more” female directors.

Salke came to his defense, interrupting him mid-sentence to say, “We have to be careful about going after people who are defenders. He’s a friend of this movement.

“I have screamed and yelled in my office at NBC when I couldn’t get female directors. They’d hand me lists of who we were going to assign episodes over the course of 12, 13 episodes, and I would say, ‘Why are there two women on the list?’ [The reply would be], ‘Oh, there just aren’t enough female directors. There’s these and they’re all busy.’

“I found myself saying many times, ‘Where are they? What is happening here?’ I think that was just the frustration, as I read it, that Jason was trying to express.”

Salke went on to say that at Amazon, as at NBC when she was head of programming there, she makes gender parity in front of and behind the camera a priority. She’s even brought over the pilot program she started at NBC, Female Forward, which creates a pipeline for female directors. Since joining Amazon earlier this year, she has inked deals with the likes of Nicole Kidman, Blake Lively, and Jordan Peele. 

No writers or directors have been hired yet for the Blumhouse Amazon series. But the idea is that all eight of them will be thematically connected and will be exclusive to the platform. They will also only be available for streaming, although Amazon doesn’t typically–unlike Netflix–give films a theatrical release. This presumably gives the films, and the filmmakers, more creative freedom, and less pressure to rack up box office grosses. 

Last month, Dish Network quietly dealt a death blow to a service called SETTV, which had been offering hundreds of streaming TV channels for $20 per month. Dish alleged that SETTV was retransmitting the satellite provider’s signals without permission, TorrentFreak reports, and a Florida court ruled that SETTV must shut down its service, turn over its domains and equipment, and pay more than $90 million in damages.

What’s most interesting about this story, however, is that SETTV had 180,398 paid subscribers before it shut down, adding up to over $3.6 million in monthly revenue. That’s not far behind some legitimate live TV streaming services, and as Cord Cutters News points out, SETTV is hardly alone in offering this kind of service.

Over the last year or so, I’ve had several readers ask me about similar offerings, which promise every conceivable cable channel at a much lower price than even the cheapest legal TV streaming services. (I usually warn them that these services, in addition to being ethically murky, can be unreliable, as they are obviously subject to lawsuits and takedown requests.)

In any case, SETTV shows that piracy isn’t exclusively the domain of freeloaders. It also appeals to people who are willing to pay–just not as much as what cable companies, satellite TV providers, and TV networks are asking.

“Young people are just smarter,” Mark Zuckerberg infamously said to 650 aspiring entrepreneurs at a Y Combinator Startup School event in 2007. His logic was straightforward–young people lead simpler lives, so they’re able to focus on big-picture problems. Now that Zuckerberg is in his thirties, I’m not sure he’d still agree–in fact, I’m confident he wouldn’t.

But this idea continues to resonate. Silicon Valley still fetishizes youth, and a lot of people probably see 22-year-old Zuckerberg as the archetype of a founder. Research confirms that many people perceive young entrepreneur to be more driven and more capable of solving significant challenges.

There’s just one problem. A substantive and growing body of data tells us this picture is dead wrong. A study released this year reveals that the average age of a startup founder is 42. Baby boomers, meanwhile, are twice as likely to start a business within the next year, as are millennials.

Public misconceptions don’t stop with age. In the U.S., immigrants are twice as likely to start businesses compared to native-born citizens. Meanwhile, women-led firms consistently bring in better rates of returns. In terms of gender, socioeconomic class and ethnicity, most entrepreneurs look nothing like the hoodie-and-sandal-wearing stereotype Zuckerberg exemplifies.

This isn’t just an image problem–this stereotype has a profound and growing economic and social consequences. Today, entire segments of the population continue to write off entrepreneurship as a career path reserved for the elite few, and stereotypes about the young, white, male founder perpetuate this myth. This needs to end, now.

Why entrepreneurial diversity matters now

The nature of work is changing. Advances in technology are shifting the way that industries function, and as a result, long-term employment opportunities with one company are becoming harder to come by. Some organizations are making an effort to help workers adapt, but for the most part, the burden is on the individual to figure out how they fit in this new landscape.

Here’s the thing–the world has a lot of problems, and more than ever, we need people who can develop solutions to those problems. While technology might have made it more difficult to pursue a traditional career path, it has also lowered the barriers to entry to starting a business. Tools and platforms like Shopify, Kickstarter, and PayPal are making it easier than ever for people with limited resources to start and scale companies without massive amounts of capital. This is a sharp contrast from the reality that my father and grandmother faced. They had to take second mortgages on their homes to bankroll their retail businesses.

But you can’t get innovation from homogenous thinking, and rarely from people who are cut from the same cloth. As Silicon Valley continues to struggle with its lack of diversity–both in terms of its workforce and the products it produces–we continue to see successive waves of copycat businesses. Whether it’s photo-sharing or meditation apps, these products target the same market, provide similar solutions, and often don’t move the needle in tackling the world’s most significant problems.

Diverse teams create better businesses. That’s not my opinion, that’s an empirical fact. And entrepreneurs can benefit from bouncing ideas with founders who don’t look and think like them. By doing this, they will be exposed to different ideas, which allows them to empathize with a broader range of customers. And, in a virtuous cycle, the more customer empathy you have, the stronger your products become.

Repairing entrepreneurship’s image problem

The need for diversity demands that we expand our ideas about who is an entrepreneur. (Even the standard dictionary definition is woefully out of date: Google lists“tycoon,” “magnate,” and “mogul” as synonyms.) If you see opportunities and find creative ways to solve problems, you’re an entrepreneur, regardless of how old you are or what your background may be.

For aspiring entrepreneurs out there, it’s critical to identify as one. The simple act of calling yourself an entrepreneur can have profound implications. This is something I’ve witnessed first-hand. My wife, Lindsay, is a successful retail entrepreneur but initially identified as a mom first and a business owner second. To help convince her otherwise, I suggested an experiment. I encouraged her to change all of her bios on social media to include the word “entrepreneur.” Immediately, people started reaching out to her to talk shop. Once she claimed the entrepreneurial tribe as her own, a world of new connections and opportunities opened up, taking her business to another level.

The importance of paying your success forward

Those who have already found success as entrepreneurs have an equally important obligation: pay it forward. Entrepreneurship is a craft–a unique career path built on mentorship and personal relationships. That’s why it’s essential to extend that support and mentorship to individuals from diverse and sometimes overlooked backgrounds.

Entrepreneurs are the world’s problem-solvers. It’s time we apply our tools, methods, and resources to solving a critical problem in our community, and change what it means to be one of us. Women, immigrants, and people of all ages and races are making outsized contributions as entrepreneurs and rewriting outdated stereotypes. The sooner our perceptions catch up to that reality, the better off our collective future will be.

Harley Finkelstein is an entrepreneur, lawyer, and the chief operating officer (COO) at Shopify. 

Wednesday was another double-plus bad day for Facebook, the company that definitely hasn’t burrowed deeply into all Americans’ lives, like a fleet of digital chiggers, nesting with ads and election-swinging invective.

The New York Times dropped a bombshell story that shed light on the extremely troubling ways top Facebook executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg responded to the abuse of its platform by Russia and others during the 2016 election. Among the startling revelations were the fact that in October 2017, Facebook hired a veteran GOP political consultancy to secretly spread messages—including rumors about all-purpose right-wing boogeyman George Soros—and that Zuckerberg personally ordered a ban on employees using iPhones after Tim Cook threw shade at Facebook in March. Although the backlash from various organizations has already begun, the true test of the exposé’s impact will be whether Facebook’s user base begins to disintegrate.

You may have noticed friends and coworkers, but probably not your parents, dropping like flies from the platform after, say, the Cambridge Analytica leak, or when Facebook was used to incite violence in Myanmar, or learning that the company maybe uses shadow data for its ads. Or any of the other things. Transparency tends not to reveal anything positive about Facebook, but rather more reasons why it’s not worth keeping the social network in your life just because you have so many pictures on there and occasionally get Facebook invitations to housewarming parties. To that end, here is a guide to downloading your Facebook archives, just in case that’s something you want to do at this particular moment in time.

1. Log into Facebook, click the down-triangle icon at top right, and choose Settings.
2. On the General Settings page, near the top is the option: “To download your information, go to Your Facebook Information.”
3. Click the second option: Download Your Information.
4. The page with Your Information offers a date range near the top, so you can go as far back as you’ve used the service. You have the option to deselect any category (Posts, Photos and Videos, Comments, etc) that you may not want to receive.
5. Click on Create File and get ready to play the waiting game. What you do once you receive the file is up to you.

Ironically, everybody quitting Facebook at the same time is the exact kind of communal harmony Facebook could only offer in theory.

What: A comprehensive, somehow funny take on the Nazi prom photo that emerged earlier this week.

Who: Sarah Silverman

Why we care: Silverman’s Hulu show I Love You, America feels ironically titled this week, as she focuses her laser wit and ire on the dozens of American high school boys who recently gave a Nazi salute in their prom photo.

For those just catching up, earlier this week Vice journalist Jules Suzdaltsev tweeted the above-mentioned photo, asking for more information about it from students of Baraboo High School. The tweet went viral and the phrase “Nazi prom photo” roared into the public consciousness, a thing we zeigeisters now have to know for an indeterminate time. On the segment of her show devoted to the photo, Silverman seems determined not to let the photo be “just another thing” but rather a flashpoint to show how easily the banality of evil can creep into daily life.

Sarah on that Nazi prom photo. #ILYAmericahttps://t.co/CSzRLNHBBWpic.twitter.com/HI4rHS2XzR

— I Love You America (@ilyamerica) November 15, 2018

She understands that some of the students were merely goaded by the adult photographer into doing the Nazi salute ironically (????), but she questions whether the students themselves understand what they’re doing.

“I’m not too PC. I’ve dressed up as Hitler and I’ve made about 6 million Holocaust jokes,” she says, the specific number “6 million” itself a dark Holocaust meta-joke. She touts her offensiveness credentials in order to point out how pretending to be a Nazi isn’t simply an un-PC joke, but rather capitulation to evil. She explains that all it takes to let Nazis flourish are “ringleaders, followers, and dipshits,” all of which are accounted for in this photo.

Thankfully, as Silverman points out, also in the group is one student who understood what was happening and opted out. Here’s hoping that, overall, people like him far outnumber the people who, say, scream“Heil Hitler” during a performance of Fiddler on the Roof. The report about that incident doesn’t mention whether the offender was joking or not. Because it doesn’t matter.

It’s been a week since the deadly, massively destructive Camp Fire started in Northern California, and in a huge swath of the state, the smoke-filled air is still unsafe to breathe. If you live in San Francisco, or in Sacramento–where the air quality index reached 235 yesterday, well into the “very unhealthy” category–and you’re wondering how bad the pollution is in your neighborhood, an app called Blueair Friend will tell you in real time.

The company Blueair manufactures air purifiers; the Friend app connects with the company’s indoor monitor, which measures levels of particulate matter pollution inside an apartment or house. But it also shares detailed, global data about air quality based on outdoor sensors, and it’s free for anyone to use.

The app also shares pollution data in real time, whereas the government site is a couple of hours behind–and because air quality tends to quickly change, old data isn’t as useful. The app is powered by Breezometer, a company that uses algorithms and machine learning to analyze the government’s sensor data–combined with air dispersion models, weather data, traffic conditions, satellite data and more–to precisely estimate air quality to the resolution of a city block, in real time.

It’s available everywhere. When I last checked, New Delhi, one of the most polluted cities in the world, had air quality index of 165. My corner of Oakland had an AQI of 182. In Beijing, where the government is working to cut smog, the AQI was 40.

Download the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Getting let go stinks. Sure, you might wind up with a generous severance (if you’re lucky), or maybe you hated your job anyway. But, the sting of being laid off is pretty much unavoidable, especially if you actually liked your job.

Feeling sad, angry, or embarrassed in the wake of a layoff is perfectly normal. So is feeling like you have no idea how you’re going to share this news with your family, friends, and network. But leaning on your inner circle for support will help you get through the tough days ahead. And turning to your network might help you land your next job.

Here are a few ways to get productive conversations started–without making things awkward.

How to lean on your friends and family

You might start with a tearful phone call to your mom or a trip to get ice cream with your best friend to get all your emotions out and let off some steam with someone you know you can trust.

But once the initial shock wears off, and you’re feeling calm and collected and ready to talk to the rest of your inner circle, start each conversation by letting the other person know you have upsetting news to share. You might say something like, “I want to talk to you about my job, this isn’t easy for me, and I’m still sad about what happened.”

Then, tell them what you need–because these are the people you’re closest with, it’s okay to be more up front about your request. For example:

• “I’m looking for a shoulder to cry on.”
• “I need your support.”
• “I want to vent.”
• “I’d love your help eventually finding a new role, but for now I just want to process it.”

Setting expectations from the start will help ensure that you get what you need from the conversation. Often, the most well-intentioned people in our lives tend to want to fix things for us (or, worse, give us unsolicited advice) when really all we’re looking for is someone to listen.

It’s possible you won’t have the energy to talk to every one of your closest confidantes in person, so sending a group text to your circle of pals is also totally acceptable. You can keep it short and sweet by sending a message like:

Hey friends–I wanted to share some bad news with you. I got laid off yesterday. It was unexpected, and I’m still processing everything. I’ll send everyone an email once I figure out what I want to do next. For now, if anyone wants to meet up, my schedule is wide open!

Be prepared for lots of questions, offers to help you find a new job, and happy hour invitations to follow. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s okay to tell your friends that you’ll be happy to share details next time you see them in person and that, for now, you simply wanted to keep them in the loop.

How to reach out to mentors and professional contacts for advice

Getting laid off can understandably trigger a wide range of emotions. You may feel antsy to find a similar job right away, excited to take a little time off, or inspired to make a major career pivot. Whatever you’re feeling, it wouldn’t hurt to ask your mentors and career allies for advice.

Depending on your relationship, you can reach out over the phone or via email. You might say something like:

I was unexpectedly laid off from [Company] and am giving serious thought to what I’d like to do next. I’ve always valued your advice, so I wanted to ask if I could take you out for a cup of coffee and chat with you about my next steps?

When you feel ready to jump back into the job search for real, you can send an email to former colleagues, acquaintances, and extended family asking for more concrete help.

It might look something like this:

Hi [Name],

Hope all is well!/How are you doing? It’s been so long since [last time you interacted].

I’m reaching out because I’d love your help. As you may have heard, I’m no longer with [Company] and am on the lookout for a new job. I’m targeting [types of roles] with companies in [career space], and am specifically interested in working for organizations like [Company 1], [Company 2], or [Company 3].

If you happen to hear of any opportunities in [field], or if you know anyone who works at these companies, I’d love a referral or introduction! You’ll find a quick summary of my experience below, and I’ve attached my resume for reference.

I really appreciate your support! And, if there’s ever anything I can do to help you in your career, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Thank you!

[Your Name]

[Short professional bio]

You can decide how much you share about the circumstances of your layoff when you share the news with your network. It’s perfectly fine to tell someone that you’re simply no longer working for your former employer–they’ll most likely understand and not ask questions. However, in some cases, explaining your layoff gives the person context and helps them better tailor their advice for your situation.

How to share the news with your network on social media

This will probably be the last piece of the puzzle, and the reason for doing it isn’t to embarrass yourself further or make light of your circumstances. It’s about notifying your extended network–including your friends and contacts on social media who you otherwise wouldn’t reach out to via email–so they can help you in getting a job lead. If you need proof of how well this works, you should read this story about someone who posted about their layoff on LinkedIn.

You can keep your announcement short and sweet:

After [X years] with [Company], I’m now on the lookout for new opportunities! I’m excited about continuing to expand [skillset] in a [type of role] in [career space]. Message me if you know of any jobs that might be a fit!

Or:

I’m on the lookout for new opportunities! If you hear of any roles in [field] in [location], I’d love to hear from you. I have experience in [areas] and am excited to pursue [type of role/responsibilities].

If you were let go due to a well-publicized layoff, feel free to reference that, as it’s an easy way to explain why you left. You can share an article or press release about the layoff along with a brief line about being in the market for a new job:

Unfortunately, I’m one of the many people who was impacted by the recent layoffs at [Company]. I’m sad to be leaving but excited about what’s to come. I’m now officially on the lookout for [target job] roles in the [target industry] space. If you know of anything that might be a fit, send it my way!

But generally, the goal here isn’t to dwell on the layoff itself but to focus on finding a great new job.

The only thing harder than getting laid off might be breaking the news to others. It’s okay to feel a mix of emotions in this situation. But knowing that you have a strong support network cheering you on is sure to brighten your spirits and help you plot your next move.

This article originally appeared on The Muse and is reprinted with permission. 

More from The Muse:

• 5 career lessons you only learn from being laid off 
• 5 painful but important things to do when you lose your job 
• 6 steps to a successful job search (when you’re blindsided by losing your current role) 

Tinder is making it even easier for lazy people to find love. The matchmaking app just announced that it is testing a new feature called Swipe Surge, which will send out a notification to users when there is a spike in Tinder usage in their area. That means you can just be chilling on your couch in your Slanket watching Riverdale when your phone will light up with an even better way to spend your free time.

According to Tinder, when activity is surging, your matchmaking potential is increased by 250%, and you may meet your new favorite time-killer 33% faster than swiping during those business-as-usual hours. So if you’re looking for love–or a great excuse to get out of the house when you’re home for the holidays–turn on your push notifications and wait for the Swipe Surge to come calling.

Tinder says it’s testing the feature on iOS devices in “select cities.”

The Knight Foundation wants to make the world a more beautiful place. To do that, it announced today a $435,000 investment in four new arts technology projects to not only doll up this planet of ours, but also help create a strong future for digital arts makers.

Before making their donation, the powers-that-be at the Knight Foundation surveyed the digital art world and found that while it’s full of creative minds ready to hatch genius ideas, the scene as a whole lacks a strong network of support to build sustainable careers. The Knight Foundation chose projects that it hopes will help create a foundation for artists and institutions as they navigate the new digital frontier.

“As technology takes over almost every aspect of our lives, from news and information to the ways in which we interact with each other, we need to create new avenues for artists to permeate these spaces and establish a lasting mark,” Chris Barr, the Knight Foundation director for arts and technology innovation, wrote in a blog post.

The projects receiving support are:

• Gray Area Foundation for the Arts ($150,000): To develop a playbook for creating immersive digital art installations in a pop-up museum format.
• University of Denver ($150,000): With this grant, the university will establish the Clinic for Open Source Arts, to improve the long-term viability for open-source technology for creative expression by working with experts in the arts, technology, and academic communities.
• Processing Foundation ($67,800): The funds will be used to develop an outreach program focused on promoting the use of art and technology tools at a community level through a free and open-source software platform.
• School for Poetic Computation ($62,400): Since 2013, the School for Poetic Computation has offered learning opportunities and community for artists exploring the intersection of art and technology in New York City. It is now expanding to Detroit for a 10-day workshop for local artists to learn software, hardware, poetry, and critical theory for artistic expression.

Soon, SpaceX will have more satellites circling the earth than anyone else. The FCC just gave Elon Musk’s company permission to launch more than 7,000 satellites (or for fans of specificity, 7,518 satellites) into space. The satellites will fill the night sky as part of the company’s Starlink program, which aims to provide satellite-based broadband internet.

According to Bloomberg, since there are currently fewer than 2,000 operating satellites, SpaceX’s new additions will dominate space. That will help the company create its “constellation of satellites” to provide internet services to rural locations, but it will also create a lot of traffic in the stars. So much traffic that FCC Chairman Ajit Pai had no choice but to reference the 2013 film Gravity in which the world lost George Clooney due to space junk. To help fight a space junk traffic jam, while approving SpaceX’s applications, the agency also voted on a variety of space-related matters, including debris rules.

The FCC’s approval of the plan isn’t particularly surprising. Back in March, it made SpaceX the first U.S.-based company to receive a license to construct, deploy, and operate its own satellite constellation. SpaceX has said it plans to begin launches next year, and soon we’ll all be able to wish upon a satellite (for faster internet).

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is set to launch a used Falcon 9 rocket this afternoon in what will be the spaceflight company’s 18th mission of 2018,  just one mission short of a new record. Cargo includes an Es’hail-2, a communications satellite for Qatar. The launch window is scheduled to begin at 3:46 p.m. ET and will last through 5:29 ET. It’s all happening from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida–weather permitting–and viewers can live-stream the launch via SpaceX’s YouTube page and on the SpaceX website. I’ve also embedded the video below. Enjoy the fireworks!

Even Mark Zuckerberg is acknowledging that social media hasn’t been all good.

“The past two years have shown that without sufficient safeguards, people will misuse these tools to interfere in elections, spread misinformation, and incite violence,” he wrote in a blog post Thursday. “One of the most painful lessons I’ve learned is that when you connect two billion people, you will see all the beauty and ugliness of humanity.”

Speaking to media on Thursday, the Facebook CEO and other executives appeared to take an increasingly humble tone, conceding that the social network may always face challenges with undesirable and misleading posts–an issue Zuckerberg compared to real-world crime–and even pledging to allow an “independent body” to review the site’s rulings on content.

“There’s no perfect solutions here and these really aren’t problems that you ever fully fix,” said Zuckerberg. “No one expects crime to be eliminated completely, but you expect that things will get better over time.”

In contrast to Facebook’s pledges in years gone by to simply “make the world more open and connected,” and long-held tech industry assumptions that good speech will triumph over bad in the marketplace of ideas, Zuckerberg agreed that sensationalist, damaging posts can engage more users than positive content. He also acknowledged that the company must take a role in shaping what spreads across its network. And despite past insistence that Facebook is “not a media company,” Zuckerberg compared the sensational content on the site to cable news and tabloid newspapers.

“One of the biggest issues social networks face is that, when left unchecked, people will engage disproportionately with more sensationalist and provocative content,” he wrote. “This is not a new phenomenon. It is widespread on cable news today and has been a staple of tabloids for more than a century. At scale it can undermine the quality of public discourse and lead to polarization.”

In addition to issues with U.S. election manipulation and misinformation, Facebook has faced criticism that posts on the site ignite already-raw tensions in many other countries–fanning the flames of genocidal violence in Myanmar, for instance. The company recently agreed to let French regulators study its approach to stopping hate speech.

Zuckerberg said Facebook is continuing to develop artificial intelligence tools to spot content that violates its rules, from nudity to violence and hate speech, and either automatically take it down or bring it to a human’s attention.

“In the case of a post where someone is expressing thoughts of suicide, this could even mean the difference between life and death,” said Guy Rosen, a Facebook vice president for product management. In the past year, the company has helped first responders reach about 3,500 people who needed help, according Zuckerberg’s post.

An independent body

The company plans to create an independent body that will review appeals of decisions to take down content, after a “consultation period” to determine how it should work. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms have long faced criticism for choices on what content to take down and what to allow to stand.

“In the next year, we’re planning to create a new way for people to appeal content decisions to an independent body, whose decisions would be transparent and binding,” Zuckerberg wrote. “The purpose of this body would be to uphold the principle of giving people a voice while also recognizing the reality of keeping people safe.”

Facebook says it’s spotting more objectionable posts automatically, before users complain about them. More than half of hate speech posts are now taken down before complaints come in, along with 97% of points removed for “violent and graphic content,” according to a newly released Facebook Community Standards Enforcement Report. And 99% of the 8.7 million posts taken down for child nudity or sexual exploitation were taken down before complaints were received.

In the third quarter of this year, Facebook “took action” on 15.4 million pieces of graphic and violent content, more than 10 times the amount in the final quarter of last year. Actions taken included removing content, putting warnings before it’s shown, disabling accounts, and contacting law enforcement. Facebook also took down 800 million fake accounts in the second quarter and 754 million in the third, according to the company.

“We will continue making progress as we increase the effectiveness of our proactive enforcement and develop a more open, independent, and rigorous policy-making process,” Zuckerberg wrote. “And we will continue working to ensure that our services are a positive force for bringing people closer together.”

Let’s rewind to October 2017. Kate McClure, a New Jersey woman, ran out of gas on an interstate ramp outside of Philadelphia. Johnny Bobbitt, a homeless man, was allegedly panhandling nearby, and used his last $20 to buy McClure enough gas to get home. In return, McClure and her boyfriend, Mike D’Amico, took to GoFundMe, asking givers to help them raise $10,000 toward rent, a car, and a few months of basic living expenses for Bobbitt. The fundraiser went viral. In all, over 14,000 donors eventually contributed to the goal-shattering total of $402,000.

At the time, the story read like a miracle of human generosity, but a year after the fact, we’re now learning that it was, in fact, perfectly orchestrated to tug on heartstrings in the way that it did. McClure, Bobbitt, and D’Amico are now reportedly all under arrest for fabricating the story, and facing charges of conspiracy and theft by deception. In short, they made the whole thing up.

Suspicions about the GoFundMe, called “Paying it Forward,” began to swirl this summer. As the Philadelphia Inquirer first reported in August, the couple initially told donors they’d set up a trust for Bobbitt to manage his money. That’s where things started to get weird. Bobbitt hired a pro-bono attorney, who announced that instead of the full $402,000, Bobbitt only received $75,000, which he used for a camper and an SUV, instead of actual housing.

What happened to the rest of the balance? Bobbitt reportedly believed the New Jersey-based couple was spending it on themselves, citing recent lavish trips, a new BMW, and some gambling. McClure and D’Amico denied that, telling the Inquirer they’d withheld a large share of it because Bobbitt was spending irresponsibly and had a drug problem, something Bobbitt has worked to beat and not disputed.

In late August, a New Jersey judge settled the matter by ruling that all remaining GoFundMe donations should be deposited in a trust overseen by Bobbitt’s legal team. But then McClure and D’Amico changed their story, stating through legal counsel that there was no money left. In early September, the Burlington County prosecutors and Florence Township police obtained a warrant and searched the couple’s New Jersey home for clues, while a judge ordered them to appear in court and properly explain the money trail.

These investigations ultimately led to the current criminal complaint first obtained by NBC Philadelphia. “Investigators say the three deliberately prevented donors for their GoFundMe campaign from gaining information ‘that would affect their judgment about solicited contribution to that fundraising effort,'” the station reports.

For GoFundMe, the entire case was already a test of its broad online guarantee that protects both donors and recipients who might get defrauded. “In the rare case that something isn’t right, we will refund your donation,” notes one disclaimer. “If funds aren’t delivered to the right person, we will donate the missing amount,” says another.

Before the new allegations came to light, a GoFundMe spokesperson previously told Fast Company that Bobbitt would be “made whole and we’re committing that he’ll get the balance of the funds that he has not yet received or benefitted from.” This included an immediate delivery of $20,000 in stopgap funding so that Bobbitt wasn’t penniless as things were being sorted out.

It’s unclear if that money still exists or has been returned to the company. Early on, GoFundMe reportedly collected around $30,000 in fees from the campaign because at the time it took 5% per transaction and another 2.9% for payment processing as a standard business practice. The company has since changed models, allowing donors to leave tips for the service during campaigns.

As for the 14,325 total people who were deceived, it’s time to make good on that corporate refund policy. “All donors who contributed to this GoFundMe campaign will receive a full refund,” says GoFundMe spokesperson Bobby Whithorne in an email to Fast Company. “GoFundMe always fully protects donors, which is why we have a comprehensive refund policy in place.” The exact timeline for that isn’t clear but will be “in the coming days” ahead.

“While this type of behavior by an individual is extremely rare, it’s unacceptable and clearly it has consequences,” he adds. “Committing fraud, whether it takes place on or offline is against the law. We are fully cooperating and assisting law enforcement officials to recover every dollar withdrawn by Ms. McClure and Mr. D’Amico.”

In general, Whithorne says that platform issues of “misuse” affect “less than one tenth of one percent of all campaigns.” As the current situation clearly demonstrates, that can still cost donors a lot of money. Until today, the original GoFundMe campaign was left on the site so that anyone wondering what the heck happened could retrace it. But criminal activity was the death knell for the campaign’s place on the GoFundMe website. “It’s simply standard policy to remove fraudulent campaigns from the platform,” Whithorne says.

It’s too early for this crap.

Or at least that’s how it felt today to much of the northeastern United States, where residents were rudely greeted by a mid-November snowstorm that caught many by surprise. Not-so-cute hashtags like #SnowDay and #FirstSnow were trending on Twitter earlier amid reports that a wintry mix of ice and snow was causing travel nightmares and power outages along the I-95 corridor.

Given that it’s been a warmer-than-usual fall in many areas, it’s easy to understand why folks might feel not quite ready for this sudden turn of events. Also, the sad reality is that climate change has probably made us collectively less tolerant of snowstorms.

Well, if you were wondering if it really did snow too early—or if it just feels that way—wonder no more. NOAA‘s National Centers for Environmental Information has produced an interactive map that reveals exactly when the first snowfall typically happens in your area. Sourcing data from the historical climate record, the map shows the date by which there is a 50% chance of at least one inch of snow on the ground. Just zoom into your area and click on the dot closest to your zip code. The map is powered by Esri.

For fun (or torture), I zoomed into New York City and discovered that the earliest snowfall in Manhattan typically happens on November 18, which is three days from now. So yeah, it’s officially too early for this crap.

Facebook held a conference call with journalists today, in part to address damning revelations in Wednesday’s New York Times story about the company’s slow response to the hijack of its social network by Russian operatives.

Under pressure to soothe Wall Street and Washington, CEO Mark Zuckerberg answered some questions about the investigation squarely, but he struggled to answer others. He opened the call by saying the NYT piece was wrong in implying that Facebook was not interested in finding the truth about the Russian infestation. “To suggest that we were not interested in knowing the truth, or that we were hiding the truth, is not true,” he said.

Zuckerberg was asked several times on the call if people from Facebook had been fired over the mishandling of the Russian election meddling, or if they would be. “I just generally don’t talk about that,” he told one journalist during the extended Q&A session that took up most of the hour-plus call. “Managing personnel … is an important part of company management, and it’s ongoing,” Zuckerberg said.

Who is accountable?

Asked whether the Times story’s main character, COO Sheryl Sandberg, might be fired, he said: “Overall, Sheryl is doing great work, and she will continue to be my partner in the work,” Zuckerberg said. “We have made great progress, and she’s a big reason for that.”

One of the main contentions of the NYT story is that both Zuckerberg and Sandberg delegated, or were not aware of, major strategic decisions related to its response to the Russian hijacking of its network to influence the 2016 election.

“When you run a company of 10,000 people there are going to people out there that are doing things you don’t know about,” Zuckerberg said in response to a question about whether he is still the right person to run the company. “[J]ust like when you are running a social network that connects 2.2 billion people, there will be content out there that you don’t know about.”   

Another  troubling reveal in the NYT piece was that Facebook had retained a GOP opposition research group called Definers Public Affairs to do general PR work, but also to plant news stories critical of Facebook critics and tech rivals like Apple and Google. Its staffers wrote and published the stories at a conservative news site called NTK Network, which, it turns out, is an affiliate of Definers.

Facebook responded to this revelation in a blog post Thursday:

“The New York Times is wrong to suggest that we ever asked Definers to pay for or write articles on Facebook’s behalf – or to spread misinformation. Our relationship with Definers was well known by the media – not least because they have on several occasions sent out invitations to hundreds of journalists about important press calls on our behalf.”

And yet Facebook’s relationship with Definers wasn’t known by the CEO. “I just learned of this company yesterday,” Zuckerberg said repeatedly on the conference call. Nor could he say who at the company retained the firm, or whether or not Facebook knew Definers had its own news site affiliate in NTK Network.

Asked why Facebook thought the “opposition research” done by Definers was a good strategy, Zuckerberg clearly had no answer. After a moment of dead air, he said “this type of firm might be normal in Washington” but it’s not the kind of firm we want to do business with. Facebook says it terminated its relationship with Definers Thursday night.

Definers also encouraged journalists to look at the financial relationship between anti-Facebook groups like Color of Change and right-wing boogie man George Soros.

“The intention was not to attack an individual,” Zuckerberg said on the call. “I have a tremendous amount of respect for George Soros.”

One questioner asked why users should trust Facebook after everything that’s happened.

“People need to trust our intention to learn and to get things right and to not make the same mistakes over and over,” Zuckerberg said. He said his company will win trust by getting better and better. “We’re going to get to the point where, if we’re not already, we’re the best at this.”

After Nintendo released the NES Classic Edition in 2016 and the Super NES Classic Edition last year, a Nintendo 64 Classic seemed like the next logical step. But speaking to Kotaku, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime suggested that it’s not going to happen soon, if ever.

“I would not ever rule something out,” he said, “but what I can tell you is certainly that’s not in our planning horizon.”

Fils-Aime explained that Nintendo viewed the previous retro consoles as “limited time opportunities,” which gave the company some new hardware to sell as it wound down the Wii U and ramped up the Nintendo Switch. In September, Nintendo launched its Switch Online service, which for $20 per year includes online multiplayer for Switch games and access to a library of original NES games. Fils-Aime said that service will be the main place for people to play classic Nintendo games in the future.

Still, the company has a lot of work to do to expand the NES library, let alone add games from later consoles. And yet, Nintendo has gotten more aggressive about taking down sites that distribute unauthorized ROM software for playing those games.

Here’s an often-cited fact about wealth disparity in the United States: The top 1% of the country owns more wealth than the bottom 90% does combined. But let’s put some faces to the numbers, shall we? To begin with, the three wealthiest people in the United States–Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett–own more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined. Equally concerning: Three families–the Waltons, the Kochs, and the Mars–own a combined fortune of $3.487 billion, more than 4 million American families who possess the median wealth in the country.

The super-wealthy, self-made men of the Bezos variety, are representative of the pernicious way that capitalism funnels money toward people who need it the least. The inherited wealth of people like the Waltons show that this is something that has been happening over time, and has yet to be broken.

Dynastic wealth and the disturbing inequities it perpetuates are the subject of a recent report from the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, which is appropriately titled, “Billionaire Bonanza 2018: The Role of Dynastic Wealth.”In compiling the report, coauthors Josh Hoxie and Chuck Collins dove into the Forbes 400 list, and found that one-third of the members have inherited wealth from previous generations. The 15 wealthiest families (who each have multiple members on the Forbes 400 list) account for a combined wealth of $618 billion.

When reading “Billionaire Bonanza 2018,” it’s difficult to know where to start. Do you talk about the fact that the wealth of the Walton family alone increased from $690 million in 1982 to $169.7 billion in 2018–an unfathomable leap of 9,257%, and one of the few times I’ve spelled out a percent change with a comma? Or do you look to Jeff Bezos, whose individual fortune of $160 billion is now nearly equivalent to that of the entire Koch family?

The key, ultimately, is to understand all of these facts in context. “Intergenerational wealth is one of the least talked about, but probably one of the most important drivers of inequality in the U.S.,” Hoxie says. Over the decades, wealthy families like the Waltons and the Kochs have accumulated wealth through their businesses. Reduced taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, as well as the growing practice of stock compensation, have enabled such families to hold onto their wealth, “and shield their assets from society,” Hoxie says. The same system is buffering Bezos’s steep wealth trajectory–and will enable him to transmit it to his children, beginning a new wealth dynasty. Meanwhile, these same systems that benefit the wealthy–tax breaks and shareholder returns–are trapping regular, working class people. Median household wealth in the U.S. has actually declined 3% since 1983 (as the Walton’s wealth reached nearly five-digit percent growth). Income growth across that same time period, for non-1%-ers, has also flatlined.

A big issue is that in this current economic landscape, young people entering the workforce stand very little chance of outperforming their parents economically. That used to be a given: A kid born in 1940 had a 92% chance of earning more than their parents. Now, someone born in 1980 has just a 50% chance–despite the fact that worker productivity has risen 77% since 1973. “The question I come back to is always: Where do all those economic gains go?” Hoxie says. The answer: To the people already at the top, who are then able to transfer their wealth down to their children and keep the cycle going. Inherited wealth in the U.S. is not taxed, so wealthy families are essentially able to maintain a pipeline of funding for their future generations without having to contribute any of it to society.

Calling for a change to this dynamic is the underlying point of the “Billionaire Bonanza 2018” report. “There are programs that we don’t have that we should have that would directly address this problem,” Hoxie says. The report outlines two of them. One solution is a direct tax on the top 0.1% of households in the U.S. The Institute for Policy Studies calculates that a 1% tax on this upper echelon, with a wealth of over $20 million, would generate $1.899 trillion in revenue over the next decade.

The other is a tax on wealth transferred between generations. The report cites the work of New York University professor Lily Batchelder, who has estimated that inheritances make up around $4 out of $10 of all household wealth. She proposes extending income taxes (with an additional surcharge of 15%) to capture inherited wealth. Even if the first $2.1 million a person inherits is kept tax-free, the proposal could generate around $200 billion in a decade. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), similarly, has proposed strengthening the inheritance tax specifically to address the affordable housing crisis in the U.S.

“The worst possible takeaway from reading this report is the sense that this is just how the economy is, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” Hoxie says. What “Billionaire Bonanza” makes clear is that there is more than enough money out there in the U.S. economy to address our most pressing concerns, from housing affordability to good public education to everyday pressures on people who haven’t seen their wages rise in years. Right now, though, it’s concentrated in the hands of people so sheltered from the stress of existing in the contemporary economy that they see no reason to change the system.

The U.S., the “Billionaire Bonanza” report reminds readers, has a strong tradition of breaking up concentrated wealth. Theodore Roosevelt famously said: “Of all forms of tyranny, the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy,” following the first Gilded Age. Now that we’re well into the second, we need bold policy solutions to redistribute the country’s vast economic resources in a way that benefits everyone from the bottom up, not just those already sitting at the top.