For as long as I can remember–which would be since the days of 1991’s Word for Windows 2.0–Microsoft’s Office apps have sported icons that represent them with a letter and a bit of graphical suggestion of the work they help you do. Today, the company is unveiling a new set of icons for Word, Excel PowerPoint, OneNote, Teams, and various other components of the Office suite. The first major revision in five years, they continue with the classic elements but are a re-do rather than a refresh. (They’re debuting with Office’s mobile and web incarnations and will roll out over time.)

For the past several weeks, the air quality in California has made headlines. Raging wildfires in the northern and southern parts of the state created clouds of ash and dangerously high toxicity levels in the atmosphere. The fires created a state of emergency, but in many parts of the country, that poor air quality is a daily issue, not one created by natural disasters. Over the summer, southern California violated federal smog standards for 87 days in a row. Around 41% of people in the U.S. live with regular exposure to poor air quality.

Cleaning up the air will require reducing dependency on fossil fuels and the pollution they create. While industries like manufacturing and transportation work on these wide-scale changes, 3M has developed something of a stopgap: roofing granules that suck smog from the atmosphere.

“Roofing granules have been a part of our business since the 1930s,” says Gayle Schueller, 3M’s chief sustainability officer. “This is not a new business to be in, and it’s not a new material for us.” Traditionally, granules are used in construction to coat rooftops and provide an extra layer of protection from UV rays, which helps buildings remain cool and less dependent on air conditioning. They also make roofs more fire resistant. Around 10 years ago, 3M developed “cool roofing” granules that reflect sunlight and help buildings comply with roofing standards like the 2014 Los Angeles ordinance mandating new residential projects be built with additional rooftop insulation to keep them cool.

Instead of reflecting the sun, though, 3M’s new smog-reducing granules use it. The photocatalytic coating on these granules, designed for asphalt roofing, is activated by the sun’s UV rays. That generates radicals that bind with the chemical compounds in smoggy air, and transform them into water-soluble ions that eventually wash away.

While 3M conducted its own internal testing of the granules, they also sent samples for external validation to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which evaluated how effectively the granules absorbed different gases and pollutants. They found that a average-sized roof coated in granules removes around as much pollution from the air as three trees could. One company that sources from 3M, Malarkey Roofing, has pledged to incorporate the smog-reducing granules into all of their shingles. So far, Malarkey shingles have pulled the equivalent amount of smog from the air as 100,000 trees.

“When we innovate, we start with an understanding of where there is a problem, and we identified the issue of smog in cities,” Schueller says. Around 10% of 3M’s 90,000 person staff are scientists, she adds, and they collaborated on both developing the photocatalytic coating, and testing its environmental impacts.

The runoff from the ions, they found, does not contribute significantly to water quality issues–the impact is minimal, Schueller says, and the smog would’ve infiltrated the water from the air anyway if it hadn’t first been absorbed by the roofing granules.

This dynamic underscores the need for these granules to be seen as a temporary fix, not a solution to air quality issues. The smog-absorbing granules pull pollution out of the air–which is certainly helpful for people breathing in that air–but they don’t ultimately remove it from the ecosystem. Truly cleaning up the air and the environment in cities will require addressing the root causes of that pollution. Until that happens, innovations like these granules can help ease conditions for people in the short term.

Office Depot recently posted positive earnings for a second quarter in a rowؙ—a sign of life for a retailer that’s been crushed under stiff competition from Amazon. The reason? Not thinking like a retailer.

CEO Gerry Smith very deliberately touts his company as an omni-channel provider of business services—marketing, administrative, and technical—all under the umbrella of its Workonomy platform. Now, the company is attempting to nudge its way into the shared workspace economy with the Workonomy Hub, rentable desk and office spaces within Office Depot stores.

The Workonomy Hub’s pilot location launched in Los Gatos, California, in August. Office Depot wouldn’t share specific membership numbers, but their prices are competitive—a dedicated desk or a private office goes for $400 and $750 per month, respectively, compared to $475 and $700 per month at nearby WeWork spaces in San Jose.

The differentiating factor Smith is gunning for with the Workonomy Hub is that it will be a catchall location for business owners: office space attached to an office supply store and its services. Office Depot acquired IT management company CompuCom Systems last year for $1 billion, a clear stake in the ground of Office Depot’s commitment to moving beyond retail.

“The most important piece as we talk to customers is, they need services,” Smith says. “They need someone to help them run their services. Not very many people can go in and say, ‘Hey, I can do your copy and print for you.'”

Expanding into the collaborative workspace economy makes smart use of Office Depot’s dwindling brick-and-mortar stores. The company has shuttered around 300 locations over the past two years, so the Workonomy Hubs could be an economical solution to staving off further closures while upping the cachet of a rather ho-hum shopping experience.

That said, Office Depot has a steep hill to climb to gain traction in an industry so dominated by WeWork, which has more than 14 million square feet of space worldwide. Office Depot declined to offer any clear roadmap on how it’s going to edge its way into the market or where new locations may be. But if choosing Los Gatos is an indicator, Workonomy Hubs may be where there’s not direct competition but still considerable demand.

This morning, employees at the millennial-focused digital news site Mic were called into a meeting where its CEO, Chris Altchek, informed them that most of the staff was being laid off, according to Recode. The company had about 100 employees; reports say between 60 and 70 were let go.

This comes after news broke yesterday that Mic was trying to sell itself to the Bustle Media Group. Bustle reportedly said it would only consider taking maybe half of the company. The New York Postreports that the deal is set to be finalized today, with a price of less than $5 million–which is significantly less than the “mid hundreds of millions” of dollars valuation the company was reported to have in 2017.

I reached out to both Altchek and Bustle for comment and will update if I hear back.

This turn of events could very well be considered the climax to the “pivot to video” media strategy we’ve been witnessing for almost two years. Mic was once one of the buzziest and fastest-growing digital media brands out there. It had a voice that catered to the younger generation, and it purported to be focused on the social platforms that attracted these millennial eyeballs.

Mic’s strategy was especially dependent on Facebook and video. It produced its own shows, did live programming, and reallocated resources so that most of its content would exist with social platforms in mind. For a short time, this seemed like a way for media companies to stay alive: Facebook was wooing these publishers with big dollar amounts to create native content. Companies like Mic, meanwhile, began laying off editorial staff in the name of bulking up video content. The idea was that this would give rise to new media consumption patterns; people preferred videos! Not long, boring articles!

But that’s not what happened. Facebook soon began pressing the brake pedal, no longer willing to finance these operations. And the companies that put all their resources into this media began to see a decline in their engagement numbers. Mic isn’t the only one to fall at the wayside because it took Facebook at its word. Others like Vocativ, Upworthy, Little Things, and even bigger operations like Vice Media have all been hit hard.

Mic‘s ultimate sin was its platform reliance. Facebook presented itself as the place where Mic could meet its audience. But the publisher never bargained for what would happen if it lost the platform’s support.

We’re now entering into another era of digital publishing: the post-pivot world. Publishers are still struggling, and they’re always looking for new ways to bring in a quick buck. But as Mic proves, submitting to the whim of another entity, one whose interests don’t align with yours, will only lead to ultimate catastrophe down the line.

Of course, the people most hurt by today’s news aren’t the founders. Instead, it’s the dozens of workers who were laid off. Altchek and his cofounder, Jake Horowitz, made the choice today to fire the entire team while they stay on and try to rebuild what’s left. (Reports say both will continue working for the company after the sale.) Many media pundits will surely focus on the business’s demise, but the real tragedy is the people who lost their steady paychecks.

Two and a half years ago, a creative agency and a craft brewery issued a challenge to the beer world: If plastic six-pack rings can end up in the ocean and kill wildlife, why not shift to a different type of packaging? They proposed a new type of ring that would biodegrade if it reached the water–and that could even be safely eaten if a turtle or fish mistakes it for food.

Corona will now be the first global beer brand to pilot the new plastic-free rings, beginning in small tests in Mexico and the U.K. next year. “We’re at that moment in time when the consumer is ready, and you have the writing on the wall that you have to do away with plastic,” says Marco Vega, cofounder of We Believers, the creative agency that spun out a startup called E6PR (“eco six-pack ring”) to produce the new product. “I think Corona saw that.”

Saltwater Brewery, the Florida-based craft brewery that originally worked on the idea with We Believers, started using the new rings earlier this year. The product is now in more than 500 stores in Florida. To date, Vega says, it’s performing well, both for consumers and for retailers who have to handle the six-packs. Other craft breweries in the U.S., Australia, Scotland, and South Africa are also beginning to use the packaging. The next step will be to begin to get Big Beer on board, beginning with Corona.

The company will be looking at how the packaging performs in tests of its durability in different conditions, handling, and how the rings interact with their factories. “For any solution like this to be considered for rollout at a regional, national or global scale, it needs to go through a variety of tests to ensure we are providing the environmental benefit without sacrificing the consumer experience,” Corona said in a statement. “The goal is to prove that achieving both is possible.” It could be the beginning of a shift throughout the industry. Carlsberg, the Danish brand, is beginning to use a new type of glue instead of plastic six-pack rings. And Vega says that E6PR has been approached by every major beer company.

Delta Air Lines promised it would open the country’s first all-biometric terminal before the end of the year, and it has delivered. Starting December 1, customers flying Delta through the Atlanta airport’s Terminal F will be able to use facial recognition technology“from curb to gate” as a way to make it easier to fly through the airport.

For the biometric terminal, Delta worked with the Customs and Border Protection and the Transportation Security Administration to let travelers check in, drop bags, pass through TSA checkpoints, and board their flights–all using facial recognition systems powered by in-terminal cameras to verify their identity. The airline already lets some customers use their fingerprint as a boarding pass.

“We’re removing the need for a customer checking a bag to present their passport up to four times per departure–which means we’re giving customers the option of moving through the airport with one less thing to worry about, while empowering our employees with more time for meaningful interactions with customers,” Gil West, Delta’s COO, said in a statement promoting the airline’s effort.

The airline estimates that passengers could save nine minutes per flight with the new technology. While that’s not a lot of time, nine minutes behind someone in a TSA line as they slowly remove their shoes or guzzle an entire bottle of cognac instead of throwing it in the bin, can feel like a lot. The option will be available to international passengers flying nonstop from Atlanta on Delta’s partner airlines Aeromexico, Air France-KLM, or Virgin Atlantic, and they are already planning to expand the service to their hub in Detroit in 2019.

Of course, passengers can still check in the old-fashioned way if they prefer, but what’s a little friendly government biometric monitoring if it makes getting through the airport a little easier?

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated that Clear powered the technology at the terminal. 

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty Thursday to charges that he made false statements to Congress about his role in Donald Trump’s efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, referred to in court documents as the “Moscow Project.”

Here’s what we know about the project and Trump’s longtime efforts:

• Cohen at one point discussed traveling himself to Russia as they sought government approval for the project. He briefed the Trump family about the status of the plans, according to court documents. He even discussed with then-candidate Trump the possibility of Trump traveling to Russia while the 2016 campaign was underway, prosecutors say.
• The ultimately failed effort to “pursue a branded property in Moscow” was just the latest in decades of efforts by Trump to get into the Moscow real estate business. As The Atlanticpointed out last year, Trump mentioned talks to build “a large luxury hotel across the street from the Kremlin in partnership with the Soviet government” in his 1987 book The Art of the Deal.
• In the mid-1990s, The New York Times has reported, Trump announced ambitions to build Trump Tower and Trump International buildings in Moscow, though the plans never came to fruition. Trump would continue to sporadically announce plans for a Russian tower well into the current decade, including at the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.
• In 2015, BuzzFeed Newsreported in May, Cohen met with sometimes Trump adviser Felix Sater about the possibility of licensing the Trump name for a massive tower in Moscow, potentially the tallest building in Europe.
• Cohen falsely told Congress that plans for a Moscow tower ended in January 2016, before “the very first primary” of the election cycle. In fact, he continued working on the project at least through June of that year, even discussing the possibility of Trump visiting Russia after the Republican National Convention, prosecutors say.
• According to BuzzFeed, Sater knew the deal had fallen through when Trump tweeted in July 2016, writing “For the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia.”

Google Assistant now offers a feature for teaching kids some manners. With “Pretty Please,” Assistant will provide positive reinforcement when it hears “please” and “thank you” in voice commands. Amazon offers a similar feature, called “Magic Word,” for Alexa devices.

Both features arose from the idea that kids might be learning poor manners by bossing their virtual assistants around. But as Fast Company’s Mike Elgan argued earlier this year, teaching politeness toward machines might have unforeseen consequences. By treating Alexa and Google Assistant like humans, children might be forming bonds that could eventually inhibit their skepticism of these assistants and their makers. Josh Golin, executive director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, recommends keeping these politeness features disabled.

Pretty Please is one of several Assistant features that Google is flipping on today or in the near future. Assistant now supports notes and lists, “read-along” stories from Disney, lyrics for Google Play Music songs, and two-way communication with Nest Hello doorbells, and calls to Santa. Later this year, users will be able to view and respond to one-way broadcast messages on phones, share photos from smart displays (such as the Google Home Hub), and create quick alarms on smart displays by swiping up from the home screen.

The list of solutions to climate change usually focuses on technology: solar power, electric cars, devices that suck carbon out of the atmosphere. But one impactful solution is often overlooked.

At TEDWomen, TED’s conference focused on women and girls, environmentalist Katharine Wilkinson explained why gender equity is a critical piece of addressing climate change. “Gender and climate are inextricably linked,” said Wilkinson, one of the authors of Project Drawdown, a book that takes a deep dive into the most effective ways to fight global warming, and found that empowering women and girls was one of the top solutions.

Women and girls face more risks as the climate changes, from higher odds of being killed during a natural disaster to a greater risk of being forced into an early marriage or prostitution if prolonged drought or floods destroy a family’s finances. But improving gender equity can also directly impact emissions.

In lower-income countries, female farmers grow most of the food on small farms. But women don’t have the same access to resources as men who farm–from credit to training and tools. “They farm as capably and efficiently as men, but this well-documented disparity in resources and rights means women produce less food on the same amount of land,” said Wilkinson. When farms are less productive, that leads to deforestation, as farmers clear more land to grow the same amount of food. If women had the same tools as male farmers, Project Drawdown calculates that they could grow 20-30% more food on the same amount of land. That translates into 2 billion tons of emissions that could be avoided between now and 2050.

Gender equity in education also matters for the climate. One-hundred-thirty million girls still don’t have the right to attend school. When girls go to school, it changes many things–their health, their financial security, and their agency. But it also means that they’re more likely to marry later and choose to have fewer children. Family size is also obviously impacted by access to contraception; hundreds of millions of women say that they want to decide when to have children, but aren’t using contraception. If women have the right to choose to have smaller families, it could lead to one billion fewer people inhabiting Earth by midcentury, and dramatically reduced demand for food, electricity, and other basic services. That could mean avoiding 120 billion tons of emissions.

“If we gain ground on gender equity, we also gain ground on addressing global warming,” Wilkinson said.

Everyone knows they need to manage their stress. When things get difficult at work, school, or in your personal life, you can use as many tips, tricks, and techniques as you can get to calm your nerves.

So, here’s a science-backed one: make a playlist of the 10 songs found to be the most relaxing on earth.

Sound therapies have long been popular as a way of relaxing and restoring one’s health. For centuries, indigenous cultures have used music to enhance well-being and improve health conditions.

Now, neuroscientists out of the UK have specified which tunes give you the most bang for your musical buck.

The study was conducted on participants who attempted to solve difficult puzzles as quickly as possible while connected to sensors. The puzzles induced a certain level of stress, and participants listened to different songs while researchers measured brain activity as well as physiological states that included heart rate, blood pressure, and rate of breathing.

Related: What Music Does To Our Brains

According to Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson of Mindlab International, which conducted the research, the top song produced a greater state of relaxation than any other music tested to date.

In fact, listening to that one song — “Weightless” — resulted in a striking 65 percent reduction in participants’ overall anxiety, and a 35 percent reduction in their usual physiological resting rates.

That is remarkable.

Equally remarkable is the fact the song was actually constructed to do so. The group that created “Weightless”, Marconi Union, did so in collaboration with sound therapists. Its carefully arranged harmonies, rhythms, and bass lines help slow a listener’s heart rate, reduce blood pressure and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

When it comes to lowering anxiety, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Stress either exacerbates or increases the risk of health issues like heart disease, obesity, depression, gastrointestinal problems, asthma, and more. More troubling still, a recent paper out of Harvard and Stanford found health issues from job stress alone cause more deaths than diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or influenza.

In this age of constant bombardment, the science is clear: if you want your mind and body to last, you’ve got to prioritize giving them a rest. Music is an easy way to take some of the pressure off of all the pings, dings, apps, tags, texts, emails, appointments, meetings, and deadlines that can easily spike your stress level and leave you feeling drained and anxious.

Of the top track, Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson said, “‘Weightless’ was so effective, many women became drowsy and I would advise against driving while listening to the song because it could be dangerous.”

So, don’t drive while listening to these, but do take advantage of them:

10. “We Can Fly,” by Rue du Soleil (Café Del Mar)
11. “Canzonetta Sull’aria,” by Mozart
12. “Someone Like You,” by Adele
13. “Pure Shores,” by All Saints
14. “Please Don’t Go,” by Barcelona
15. “Strawberry Swing,” by Coldplay
16. “Watermark,” by Enya
17. “Mellomaniac (Chill Out Mix),” by DJ Shah
18. “Electra,” by Airstream
19. “Weightless,” by Marconi Union

I made a public playlist of all of them on Spotify that runs about 50 minutes (it’s also downloadable).

There’s also a free 10-hour version of “Weightless” available if you want a longer listening experience.

This article was originally published on our sister publication, Inc., and is republished here with permission.

Australian journalist Asher Wolf has been in near constant chronic pain since 2016, and since being diagnosed with a list of conditions including fibromyalgia, she has written extensively on her experiences navigating the health care system. Yesterday she tweeted, “Alright, I’m going to live tweet this ER experience because it’s already horrible.” Twitter responded with a glib joke. And when I say Twitter, I don’t mean it in the catch-all “Fox canceled Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Twitter is angry” way.

I mean, Twitter, the actual company and host of the platform Wolf was communicating on.

screenshot pic.twitter.com/ddNevwuyCg

— Cockatoo Drag Queen ♿ (@kittenlikeacat) November 28, 2018

What possibly could have inspired whoever had their fingers on the social platform’s feed at that moment to think that making light of someone’s ER experience was the cool-kid move here? Let alone someone with more than 60,000 followers?

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

— Twitter (@Twitter) November 29, 2018

You’re right, @Twitter: There are no words.

The tweet was quickly deleted after it became clear that the joke did not land. Twitter also apologized to Wolf, tweeting,“We’re sorry for making light of a serious situation, and hope everything is ok. Our sincere apologies for the inappropriate reply in what’s clearly been a tough day.”

Mmhmmmm

— Twitter (@Twitter) November 27, 2018

Mmhmmm. But this should not be the end of that and onto the next outrage. This wasn’t some random mistake but rather a logical extension of a recent–and entirely conscious–personality adjustment of Twitter’s house feed. It’s a makeover overwhelmingly influenced by Brand Twitter (aka Corporate Twitter, or whatever you choose to call all the brand accounts desperately trying to appear hilariously human on the platform). Denny’s, Burger King, Moon Pie, Steak-Umm–take your pick of restaurant chain or grocery-store staple with a Twitter Personality. They’re all trying to dunk on each other with cheeky one-liners tossed off to elicit the ol’ “Brands, they’re just like us!” squeees from a general public so barraged by mind-numbing ad garbage at every turn, that something even remotely resembling a funny quip is treated as if Bill Hicks himself wrote it.

Wow, that's big. pic.twitter.com/j97g551KGg

— Twitter (@Twitter) November 29, 2018

Back in September, a company spokesperson told The Verge, “We’re listening and learning a ton, and the team is having a blast. Goal is to have fun, bring everyone into the conversation, and celebrate the best of Twitter. It makes the world feel a little bit smaller.”

(I reached out to Twitter, and the company declined to comment further.)

Thoughts?

— Twitter (@Twitter) November 21, 2018

So far, Twitter’s version of the Best of Twitter is a lot of one-word and non-sequitur tweets and some oh-so-meta exchanges with CEO Jack Dorsey himself.

I am https://t.co/qP9BX1Vhdi

— jack (@jack) September 18, 2018

Whether you like that latest Moon Pie joke, or enthusiastically retweet when Mr. Peanut tweets at Burger King–or if it all gives you a sudden, irrepressible urge to Google “eye rabies”–this isn’t about the effectiveness of Brand Twitter.

This is about the Twitter brand.

Did you just see that?

— Twitter (@Twitter) November 16, 2018

Let’s be frank: If a platform is grappling with serious issues of abuse that makes Twitter a toxic place for way too many people, perhaps it should think twice about trading quips like a snack cake.

To name two of, I don’t know, infinity examples:

Pick a number, any number.

— Twitter (@Twitter) November 15, 2018

In September, Christine Blasey Ford was repeatedly doxxed on Twitter, leading her to have to go into hiding after receiving death threats. The company’s response was seemingly half-hearted, and tweets containing Ford’s information were deleted only after Slate reported on their wide availability. The company was also recently criticized for allowing personal death threats to be posted by suspected pipe bomber Cesar Sayoc, including one to political commentator Rochelle Ritchie. Ritchie had reported the threats and Twitter replied that it had found “no violation of the Twitter Rules against abusive behavior.”

Awkward

— Twitter (@Twitter) November 19, 2018

Indeed. Though with tens of thousands of users biting its cheeky bait, Twitter’s newfound whimsy does seem to be working for a subset of its audience. It just depends on your definition of the word “working.” Are these likes and retweets the measure of brand success when at the same time bot and non-bot generated racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, you-name-it-ism, is still so pervasive on the platform?

It’s a bit like if there was a plane crash and Delta was spending time during the investigation messaging everyone, “S’up?”

A subtweet

— Twitter (@Twitter) November 14, 2018

Twitter’s own apparent success with its new social formula illustrates the dichotomy between Fun Twitter and Real Twitter, between Jimmy Butler memes and death threats. For the company, it’s resulted in a split-personality which any brand expert will tell you isn’t a good thing. Twitter isn’t Moon Pie, so it shouldn’t be acting like Moon Pie or chasing the same Like/Retweet dopamine as any other brand on its platform.

When it does, it comes off like playing violins on the deck of the Titanic. Except instead of a string quartet, it’s just some asshole playing a kazoo.

Twitter, do your thing.

— Twitter (@Twitter) November 12, 2018

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its latest data on mortality rates this morning, and the news is not good. For the second time in three years, life expectancy declined in the United States, driven by increases in suicides and drug overdoses that remain stubbornly prevalent throughout much of the country despite efforts by regulators, law enforcement, and public health officials to tackle these issues head on.

Nationwide, life expectancy at birth was 78.6 years in 2017, a decrease of 0.01 years compared to 2016 levels. Broken down by gender, life expectancy remained the same for women at 81.1 years and ticked downward for men from 76.2 years to 76.1 years, the CDC reports. The agency compiled the statistics and published them in a detailed analysis via its National Vital Statistics System.

In an effort to visualize some of these grim statistics on a local level, spatial analytics company Esri sourced county-by-county health rankings for age-adusted mortality rates and put them into an interactive map. The map identifies areas where the rate of deaths remains high even when controlling for the age of the population.

As you can see in the map (linked here and embedded below), the areas most affected by high rates of death are concentrated in the Southeast and parts of the Southwest. Some of the states in those regions–Kentucky, Tennessee, and New Mexico, for instance–also face notably higher mortality rates for drug overdoses, when compared to a CDC map released earlier this year. At the same time, there are plenty of areas where the maps don’t align. Pennsylvania had one of the highest overdose rates in 2016, but it comes off looking relatively well off on the age-adjusted mortality map.

Regardless of what’s driving the trend, it feels especially dire in a country as rich as this one. “Life expectancy gives us a snapshot of the nation’s overall health and these sobering statistics are a wakeup call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable,” CDC director Robert Redfield said in a statement.

Because it’s apparently not enough to have parents ordering cereal and watching The Man In The High Castle on Amazon Prime, the retail behemoth has been marketing a new-ish service called Amazon Teen to encourage youngsters to make their own purchases through their parents’ Prime accounts. In a comprehensive Twitter thread, Atlantic writer Taylor Lorenz breaks down how Amazon has been using Snapchat to target teens with a gaggle of teen-related tropes.

Amazon is apparently aggressively spamming kids on Snapchat with ads for "Amazon Teen" trying to get them hooked on Prime early https://t.co/LOauDpXidopic.twitter.com/riJMDUoT3Z

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) November 29, 2018

Just skateboarding to prom like an average teen pic.twitter.com/PyEkcMbMOL

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) November 29, 2018

The teen shop is all heavily curated products from influencers pic.twitter.com/R9l1aVpVKf

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) November 29, 2018

As a teenager (turning 18 in 3 weeks) I can confirm that this is ALL over Snapchat. Who's parents are gonna let their kids use their card to buy crap on Amazon?

— ????™️ (@beveragegod) November 29, 2018

The Amazon Teen homepage says the service–which lets teens and parents keep their purchases separate–is only available for kids between 13 and 17, which brings up the potential regulatory minefield of advertising to children. The U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority, for example, considers anyone under 16 a child and has strict rules regarding how companies can market to them.

Related: How Amazon Helped Cambridge Analytica Harvest Americans’ Facebook Data

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment about its Snapchat campaign.

As Facebook struggles with one piece of bad news after another, Instagram has been–relatively speaking–a peaceable domain within a troubled organization. The company seems to have its mind on making sure that the imagery-sharing service stays that way. It recently took steps to discourage the use of bots that aim to boost an Instagram user’s profile through fake follows, likes, and comments. And now it’s launching a new feature that could help keep its popular Stories feature feeling authentic rather than devolving into a form of status-seeking broadcasting.

Called “Close Friends,” the new option lets you specify a group of people who are, well, close to you. From then on, you can choose to share any given Story only with those folks, potentially allowing you to be more open than you’d be if they were visible to the teeming masses.

Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg requested opposition research on billionaire George Soros from a Washington, D.C., opposition research firm, a new report says. Sandberg had previously denied knowledge of the firm. The new information comes from internal Facebook emails described to Ryan Mac of Buzzfeed News.

Sandberg’s initial denial came in response to a bombshell New York Timesstory saying, among many other things, that Facebook had retained the public relations firm Definers to collect information on the company’s opponents and critics, as well as plant news stories containing negative information about them.

Facebook has now acknowledged that Sandberg directly requested the oppo research on Soros. This happened just after the billionaire called Facebook and Google “internet monopolies” and a “menace” to the world, during a speech at World Economic Forum. The email accessed by Buzzfeed News story suggests Sandberg was looking for evidence that Soros’s comments were financially motivated–that he might, for example, be trying to push down Facebook’s perceived value, and then short the stock.

Here is Facebook responding to the Buzzfeed News story Thursday night.

We researched potential motivations behind George Soros’s criticism of Facebook in January 2018. Mr. Soros is a prominent investor and we looked into his investments and trading activity related to Facebook. That research was already underway when Sheryl sent an email asking if Mr. Soros had shorted Facebook’s stock. Sheryl never directed research on Freedom from Facebook. But as she said before she takes full responsibility for any activity that happened on her watch.

Facebook began paying Definers in 2017 to uncover negative information about its rivals and critics. Definers then used the information as the basis of news stories it attempted to plant in the media. Facebook wanted to deflect some of the mounting criticism it faced after both providing the vehicle for Russian agents to disrupt the U.S. 2016 presidential election and leaking the personal data of millions of users to the Trump campaign consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

Definers, the Times reported, had asked reporters to investigate the financial links between Soros’s philanthropy organization and the Facebook opposition group Freedom from Facebook.

In a Facebook post responding to the Times’s original story, Sandberg said she had no knowledge of Facebook’s work with Definers and that she “should have” known. She wrote another post a few days later saying that she actually had seen Definers’ work. “Some of their work was incorporated into materials presented to me and I received a small number of emails where Definers was referenced,” Sandberg wrote.

Firms like Definers usually work to find dirt on the opponents of political candidates or causes, not tech companies. This news suggests we still may not know Sandberg’s real role in the “dark PR” work Facebook was doing in Washington.

A source with knowledge of the Facebook’s Washington, D.C., office told Fast Company that Sandberg was closely involved in the office’s political influence work. The person said it would be very surprising if Sandberg wasn’t directly involved with Facebook’s work with Definers.

Prioritizing what’s important is challenging in today’s world. The split focus required to maintain a career and a home, not to mention a Facebook feed, can feel overwhelming.

Enter the science of what to prioritize, when.

For over 75 years, Harvard’s Grant and Glueck study has tracked the physical and emotional well-being of two populations: 456 poor men growing up in Boston from 1939 to 2014 (the Grant Study), and 268 male graduates from Harvard’s classes of 1939-1944 (the Glueck study).

This morning Marriott disclosed that its Starwood guest reservation database had been breached by an unauthorized account since as far back as 2014. According to the hotel chain, as many as 500 million guests were potentially impacted. This attacker, says Marriott, “copied and encrypted information.” The company says it was subsequently able to decrypt and learn what the party had accessed.

Marriott gave a rundown of what the hackers likely accessed:

• Around 327 million guests had the following information breached: “some combination of name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, Starwood Preferred Guest (‘SPG’) account information, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences.”
• For some of those guests, that included both credit card numbers and expiration dates. Marriott says it does encrypt that data; however, the company has been unable to determine if the attackers were able to access the two components needed to decrypt them.
• The other guests impacted had their names and perhaps their addresses breached–along with “other information.” It’s unclear what that other information could mean.

Marriott says it is working with law enforcement and is now informing regulatory authorities.

Beginning today, the company will be emailing customers who were impacted. It’s also set up a dedicated website and call center. In addition, Marriott is offering impacted customers access to the WebWatcher service for one year, so that they can monitor their personal data as more becomes known about this breach. “We deeply regret this incident happened,” said CEO and president Arne Sorenson in a statement.

Overall, this is an extremely severe situation–it seems to be on a larger scale than the Equifax breach from 2017. It’s becoming more and more commonplace for large companies to be hacked. The real victims continue to be the hundreds of millions of customers who put their trust in these organizations.

For now, we know very little about exactly what happened and how the company plans to react. We’ll see if Marriott is able to respond adequately to this highly disturbing announcement.

Kettal, a furniture company based in Barcelona, Spain, has focused on outdoor furnishings since 1996. But the company’s latest collection puts its 22 years of experience in organizing outdoor spaces to good use indoors–fixing the hell that is the open plan office, which reduces productivity, enforces sexism, and alienates workers, just so companies can save money on real estate.

The company’s Office Pavilion series offers five different types of “pavilions,” or structures that can better organize open workspaces. There’s the Kiosk Pavilion, designed to create cafeteria spaces, and a Coworking Pavilion, which offers more secluded spaces to work within a bigger, open plan. The Office Meeting Pavillion has whiteboards in lieu of walls, as well as standing desks, while the Conference Room Pavilion looks like an elevated conference room with glass walls and a bookshelf wall. There’s even a bike parking pavilion, which can be placed outside of the building.

And while the company doesn’t provide any scientific materials to support the effectiveness of these areas to solve the problems of open office spaces, it does kind of makes sense. Especially considering the DIY ways employees are dealing with those problems already.

In 2015, Tim Reed was a 24-year-old unemployed, college dropout. Money troubles had forced him to put his electrical engineering degree on hold at Morgan State University before a failing grade at the Community College of Baltimore County put another halt in his education plans.

Reed had no choice but to move back into his parent’s home. Needless to say, he needed to make some moves.

It was around this time that he came across a vague Craigslist advertisement that read: “Get paid to become a software developer” with mention that 20-weeks of training would be provided at no cost to the jobseeker and a guaranteed job would be waiting upon completion.

Reed thought the ad was a scam and moved on with his job search. That was until he saw the same ad on job search site Indeed. He still wasn’t convinced.

“It took me a week to fully, in my spirit, to say ‘just go for it,'” he says.

One day, when the house was empty and his siblings were at school, Reed completed the required assessment, which took nearly three hours. He says thought he wouldn’t get an offer because he was stumped by a few calculus questions.

What Reed didn’t know at the time was that the calculus questions were meant to induce anxiety to screen test-takers for their cognitive agility and problem-solving abilities under pressure. In short, while Reed was taking the assessment, the technology was watching how he was taking the test.

When the test isn’t about the questions

Exactly what is being measured here? Keystrokes to measure against the thousands of variables that the AI and predictive analytics system will later use to spit out a probability score to determine potential. For instance, to test for grit, the technology watches how an individual reacts in stressful situations. Do they open multiple browsers when they’re stuck on a problem, which signals that they know where to go even if they don’t initially know the answer? Or when the test-taker is provided more information in a later question, do they then go back to an earlier question to change their previous answer? The company says if they do, this shows cognitive agility.

The reasoning for the assessment is to identify potentially high-performing engineers who are often overlooked for opportunities because of cultural markers and outdated hiring practices.

An “onshoring” model to improve chances of upward mobility

Catalyte is the company behind the proprietary artificial intelligence and predictive analytics.

The idea was planted in Michael Rosenbaum’s head almost two decades ago while he was an advisor in the Clinton White House. At the time, the Clinton administration was encouraging the private sector to grow in low-income communities to solve for untapped market potential. Rosenbaum, a Harvard economics and law fellow, argued that the bigger opportunity is that underserved urban populations held untapped labor markets.

In the late 1990s, manufacturing jobs were going overseas, yet the internet boom meant there was an influx of opportunities for people who could do simple HTML coding.

Rosenbaum had an idea: What if we could move people from the side of the economy that’s contracting to the side that’s growing? That is, the tech industry, particularly high-demand software engineering jobs. By 2020, the U.S. Department of Labor projects there will be 1.4 million job openings for computer and technology specialists, yet only enough graduates to fill 29% of those openings. These realities, along with the recent push to outsource domestically so that software teams are closely tied with the business and customers, resulted in an “onshoring” model that is quickly shifting the long-standing IT services outsourcing one.

Rosenbaum believes that enabling people can change the trajectory of entire families through the transformative opportunity for upward socioeconomic mobility. If there was a way to test for potential, then someone who grew up in generations of poverty can break the chains and make six-figure salaries within a handful of years (the national average salary for a software engineer is $115,462, according to Glassdoor). If the model is successful, the wage gap narrows and desolated, post-manufacturing cities forgotten about after their industries collapsed, can start rebuilding themselves.

Fast-forward 18 years since Catalyte’s inception in 2000 and the company now has development centers in Baltimore, Portland, and Chicago. Catalyte claims it’s a hyperlocal model, meaning the workforce in the development centers reflects the demographics in the area. For example, the Baltimore metro area is 28% African-American and the development center in that city employs 26% African-American engineers. According to the company, its model is scalable and it plans to have 20 centers up and running by 2020, including the Denver and Dallas centers projected to be open for business by the end of the year.

“One of our biggest missions is improving social mobility, so we look at places that have big socioeconomic inequalities,” says CEO Jacob Hsu. Other factors include metro areas where there’s a large pool of local talent and “a big anchor client” that commits to a number of people they want to bring on locally.

Ending resume pedigree with predictive analytics

About a month after Reed completed Catalyte’s assessment, he was asked to come in for an interview at the development center located in Baltimore’s Federal Reserve Building. Next, Reed was invited to complete 20 weeks of in-person training, which would cover the ins and outs of coding required of a full-stack enterprise software developer, while also being groomed with the soft skills needed to be a successful consultant for Catalyte’s Fortune 500 clients, including Under Armour, Aetna, Microsoft, and AT&T.

As the ad promised, there is no cost for the training bootcamp but full-time attendance, from Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., is required. A stipend is offered in the last six weeks of the program. Needless to say, additional financial support is needed for aspiring developers to complete Catalyte’s program, and may be one of the reasons why 25% of the people who start do not finish. The vast majority drop out early on.

Reed worked odd jobs in recycling and truck driving to make ends meet and graduated alongside 12 of the 20 he started the program with. Upon completion of the program, graduates receive a salaried full-time offer with benefits, health insurance, and an annual stipend with Catalyte. The condition is that they stay with the company for two years and, to cover training costs, salaries during this time are around $40,000–less than half the salary of an entry-level software engineer. If the individual breaks the two-year contract, there is a monetary penalty, which according to this Glassdoor review from February 2018 and this one from September 2014, is $25,000.

If hires decide to stay with Catalyte after the completion of their two-year contract, a market adjustment is made in the third year, which takes into account factors like individual skill-sets and performance in client work. At this point, “[most people] go from right around $40,000 to the average $75,000 salary,” says Paige Cox Lisk, Catalyte’s chief people officer.

According to Rosenbaum, not everyone can be a great software developer, but great software developers can come from anywhere. Graduates from the program come from a spectrum of industries: construction workers, baristas, even PhD and MBA degree holders who are looking for a career change. The youngest test-taker who passed was a 17-year-old high school senior and the oldest person was a 72-year-old retired civil engineer. At Catalyte, developers look like Reed, who is the first engineer in a family working mostly in skilled trades jobs. Or Nastassia Pishchykava, who immigrated from Belarus and couldn’t get an entry-level engineering job, despite having the degree for it, because she needed experience first. Or Rob Winkler, who previously worked at the United Postal Service before leaving to make a career change. In Winkler’s third year working at Catalyte, his salary increased by 60% from when he started. Today, the company employs about 300 full-time people, with 60% coming from its training program.

In the last three years, a lot has changed at Catalyte. The company survived its first major layoffs, which hit Reed in the middle of his first year working for the company in 2016. “I was hurt, disdained, angry,” Reed says of the experience. “There was no real explanation behind [the layoff] except for performance…both the company’s and mine. About six months later, Catalyte rehired most of the people it laid off, including Reed. Inside company walls, the layoff is referred to as “the Red Monday.”

In January 2017, Silicon Valley executive Hsu joined the company as CEO. Shortly after, Catalyte was among the first investments for the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund raised by AOL cofounder Steve Case’s D.C. venture firm Revolution. The $150 million seed fund was created to invest in local companies outside major tech havens, with the idea being that without access to funding, these communities are forgotten and sometimes left to die a slow and painful death (75% of VC dollars in 2016 were invested in companies in only three states: California, Massachusetts, and New York).

Earlier this year, Catalyte used some of the $27 million in funding it received to acquire Surge, a Seattle-based software development company that provides senior-level engineers, who will now work on a 1099 basis for Catalyte and handle specialized projects.

Recently, the company hired Tom Iler as its chief product officer, a 20-plus year veteran in IT who was attracted to Catalyte’s model because he’s long hired people for aptitude and attitude, instead of skills and experience. In fact, he tells Fast Company this approach is his “secret to success” because “you can train them to do just about anything” if they have the right aptitude and attitude. Under Iler’s guidance, Catalyte’s assessment, aside from testing for an individual’s innate ability to grasp technical concepts and cognitive agility, will also measure an individual’s emotional quotient, or EQ.

“Think about how powerful it would be if we could identify the personality traits in our most successful developers,” says Cox Lisk, “and weave it back into the assessment.”

The company is currently working on an alumni study to track how the program has fared for all Catalytes–the 1,700 people who have graduated from the program–whether they stay or leave the company after completing their training and apprenticeship.

In three to five years, if Catalyte is known as “the largest software development service company in the world,” Hsu says it would’ve failed: “We would’ve missed the boat because our ultimate ambition is to change the way we connect opportunity to potential. We want to kill pedigree. We’re proving it now with software developers. Our goal is to do this across industries so that we can make a much more diverse, egalitarian workforce, where everybody gets a shot if they can prove that they have the potential.”

Aside from convincing financial decision-makers that success can come from anywhere and look like anybody, Catalyte’s model, if successfully scalable, can also prove this to those at the base of the economic pyramid. Reed, now an application developer (who has since received his Associate’s degree, paid for by Catalyte), says he has friends who have witnessed his success, but are too afraid to take the plunge themselves.

When asked why, he says: “I think it’s the image of a software engineer. The positive is Bill Gates, Microsoft, and Google. The negative image is of a hacker. But both of those pictures are a form of higher intelligence…some super-smart people do that. [My friends] can’t imagine themselves being those people.”

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the number of participants who complete the Catalyte program. 

When WeWork announced that the company was going meat-free earlier this year to improve its environmental footprint–and employees could no longer expense a burger or steak on business trips–it was a radical statement for a corporation. The move earned it widespread press coverage and a “Compassionate Business Award” from the animal rights organization PETA. Now, the company is launching a new partnership with Sweetgreen, where startup employees, freelancers, and others who rent coworking space from some WeWork offices can order lunch via Sweetgreen’s app and get free delivery to a kiosk inside the office. With the partnership, WeWork could have continued its impressive meat-free policies and fundamentally changed how tens of thousands of its coworking members eat lunch. But it hasn’t gone quite as far.

On the app, anyone ordering from WeWork will see a flag to warn them when a salad has meat–in theory, a nudge that may encourage them to make another choice, but not the radical solution that it could have taken as an organization that just won a second award from PETA (Company of the Year, “for sparking a global conversation about the fact that ditching meat is the best thing that everyone can do for animals and the environment”).

For Sweetgreen, choice is critical. “For us, it’s not about saying don’t eat meat, it’s about making vegetables more appealing,” says Jonathan Newman, cofounder and CEO of the salad chain. Working with the chef Dan Barber, for example, the chain created a salad that starred a new, specially bred variety of squash. “It’s how do we highlight the vegetables at the center of the plate and make people want to eat more vegetables rather than saying you can’t eat meat. We think that way we can start to change tastes and change behaviors.”

The restaurant is working to design a few custom meat-free salads specifically for WeWork to tempt workers further away from meat. But it does already have (delicious) vegetarian options. For WeWork, it might have been an opportunity to offer a tailored menu that wasn’t just healthy and convenient, but meat-free. The company already pulled beef jerky from its public snack kiosks earlier this year.

The company calculated that its no-meat policy for employees and company events will prevent around 445 million tons of CO2 emissions over the next five years. But because it has far more members than employees (more than 260,000 members, as of August), the potential impact of changing members’ diets would go further. It raises a question: At a time when there’s a tiny window of opportunity to limit the worst impacts of climate change, how far should companies go to influence what people eat at work? Is it arrogant paternalism to go as far as possible to dictate food choices, or smart climate policy for a company that aims to be carbon neutral by 2023? Should companies with cafeterias, in the same way, go farther than subtle attempts to limit meat consumption and actually take it off the menu?

WeWork doesn’t police what people carry inside for lunch, and few people would argue that it should. Its “meat-free” commitment only extends to how it spends company funds. But when it carved out office space for Sweetgreen deliveries–a step that was hugely popular as it began piloting the program in New York City and Los Angeles this fall, with nearly a third of members using the service, and 33% growth in the first three months–it could have decided what to allow inside, while still allowing anyone who wanted a different option to walk outside to get lunch elsewhere. The program will expand to 50 offices in seven cities, reaching thousands of other workers who could also be convinced to have meat a little less often.