New York magazine’s women’s lifestyle section, The Cut, is not one to shy away from controversy. One recent story, for instance, focused on the disturbing thoughts that haunt new parents, including feeling like you want to hurt your baby. At the same time, the site is generally supportive of women, rather than trying to tear them down with misogyny, racism, and ageism. It tackles difficult, taboo issues—all for the sake of sparking a conversation that might ultimately make women’s lives better.

But yesterday, The Cut did just the opposite: At around 5 p.m., it dropped a hugely offensive story by celebrity writer Mariah Smith that reeked of sexism, and the internet noticed. By this morning, the story had been “edited” to remove the most offensive content. And at about about 10 a.m. today, the story was completely deleted with the following editor’s note:

Upon further editorial review, we found this story did not meet our standards. We’ve removed it and apologize.

However, this brief note didn’t begin to fully address how offensive and racist the story was, nor did it explain how it managed to get through The Cut’s editors. The story in question—entitled, “Is Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas’s Love for Real?”—offered a bizarre theory about the newly married celebrity couple whose wedding set social media on fire this week. The sub-headline of the article read as follows: “All Nick wanted was a possible fling with Hollywood’s latest It Woman, but instead he wound up staring at a life sentence with a global scam artist.”

In the story, the author offered nothing to support this theory apart from the fact that Chopra is a self-made celebrity who enjoys the wealth she now has. Smith seemed fixated on Chopra being Indian. She went out of her way to describe the Indian traditions in which the couple partook–including Chopra’s wedding bracelet, the mangalsutra, and the a pre-wedding musical performance, the sangeet. But she didn’t seem to have a larger point to make, other than highlighting the differences between Indian and American customs. And in this context, it seemed as though Smith was saying that being foreign, being Indian, and being from a different culture, is somehow a negative thing in itself.

The story also highlighted the fact that Chopra is a decade older than Jonas, who is 26. The ageist implication here is that the only explanation for the pairing is that Chopra was trying to trick a younger, vulnerable man.

But the worst offenses of the story were racist and misogynistic. Smith devoted a significant part of the story to describing Chopra’s wealth, as if there was something inherently wrong with a brown woman having–and enjoying–her money. Smith linked to this video tour of her home, highlighting that Chopra has an indoor theater that she doesn’t use. A lot of celebrity journalism is devoted to covering the excesses of the rich and famous, but here, coupled with Smith’s emphasis on Chopra’s Indian background, the story reeked of post-colonial racism. In other words, when privileged white men make money and enjoy it, it is normal. But when a brown woman does the same thing, she is painted as–to use Smith’s words–a “scam artist.”

Readers–particularly those of South Asian origin–were pretty offended by Smith. But they are also holding The Cut to account. The internet wants to know how and why New York magazine published this story in the first place, and why they took it down so hastily, without offering much of an explanation.

Read some reader’s reactions here:

For a publication that “shows women’s what they are made of” @TheCut has a lot to answer for . The article on @priyankachopra was sexist , racist and disgusting. Also it’s written by a woman which is so sad. It reeks of envy and bitterness. @mRiah shame on you! https://t.co/bmbbX7LrAT

— Sonam K Ahuja (@sonamakapoor) December 5, 2018

I must add, this isn't the first time I've seen African-American woman tear down Indian/South Asian women. You can't claim to stand for #BlackLivesMatter and then use your western privilege to bring down a successful woman from global south. We need to be allies, not enemies

— Ruchi Kumar (@RuchiKumar) December 5, 2018

Your tagline reads “Showing the world what women are made of” — can you explain how this article does this or…is this just lazy editing and journalism mixed with racism, sexism, and xenophobia? Failed satire at best? pic.twitter.com/k7l1KOCQee

— kyra (@mulderareusayin) December 5, 2018

Only if I could report this article!
This is very disgusting @TheCut@NYMagpic.twitter.com/MoC4P0Pz5K

— Nitasha Rana (@nitasha_rana) December 5, 2018

We reached out to New York magazine for comment and a spokesperson pointed us back to the editor’s comment.

Quitting your day job to be your own boss, set your own hours, and make your own decisions sounds like a dream come true for anyone stuck in a job they hate. Striking out on your own sounds like the perfect solution to your workday woes. But, after the initial enthusiasm, the downside starts to sink in. Starting your own business means leaving a regular paycheck and tossing benefits aside. There’s a ton of risk. But the potential for reward can be oh so alluring.

So, how can you tell if it’s the right time to jump ship and start your own business? Try answering these seven questions to see if you’re ready for entrepreneurship:

1. Are your excuses not to do it valid?

You’ve heard it all before from would-be entrepreneurs. “I’d love to start my own catering company when my kids are older, or maybe when I have two years of living expenses saved up, or maybe when I have more time.”

Melitta Campbell, a business coach who specializes in helping women start businesses, says there’s always an endless list of reasons for not starting your business. “Most often, these are excuses, but they will feel like real, rock-solid obstacles to the person in question,” she says. “Statements like ‘I don’t have the time’ are usually hiding some other limiting belief that the person may not be aware of.”

Ask yourself whether your excuses are really valid, or whether they are just masking your fears. To get over excuses, Campbell tells her clients to think 20 years down the road and ask how they will feel looking back at the situation they’re in now. “Will you be happy or will you regret that you put the opportunity off?” she asks.

2. Are you completely obsessed with your idea?

There will always be an excuse holding you back from taking the plunge, but while Campbell says there is never truly a right time to start a new business, the time for you is always right when you have an idea that you can’t get out of your head–something you think about constantly that consumes you and becomes an obsessive passion.

Sometimes, you can feed your passion without quitting your day job. If you can do this, start the business in your spare time and grow it while you learn the ropes and gain clients, perhaps while reducing the hours at your day job as you build your side hustle.

3. Are you primed to grow?

While passion is a key ingredient for any entrepreneurial success, it isn’t enough. To be successful, you also need to have a clear vision and goal, a growth mind-set and a desire to learn as you’ll need to wear many hats as an entrepreneur.

If you have a growth mind-set and are ready to roll up your sleeves and stretch yourself, entrepreneurship may be for you. “Running your own business is an amazing opportunity to achieve more growth and fulfilment than you ever thought possible,” says Campbell. But along with this growth and development comes many uphill struggles. Entrepreneurship is a steep learning curve, so you must be able to handle the stressors as well as the pleasures of growth.

4. Can you handle uncertainty?

Being an entrepreneur means ditching the regular paycheck and embracing an uncertain future. As an entrepreneur, you’ll need to push outside your comfort zone, take risks, and, at times, experience failures. “Entrepreneurship is all about the journey and who you become on your route to success, so you’ll need to be ready to experience new things, get scrappy at times, and enjoy the prospect of figuring out how to make the impossible possible,” says Campbell.

5. Do you love to network?

Successful businesses typically don’t exist in a vacuum. “Even if you plan to be a solopreneur, you will need to build a network, connect with potential partners, build a support circle, be visible in the marketplace, and make authentic connections with your prospects and clients,” says Campbell. Even before striking out on your own, join a professional networking group, attend conferences, and shake hands with as many people as you can to build your professional network.

6. Can you support the cost?

Starting any business is usually a costly endeavour. Consider whether you have a cushion to get you through the startup phase and deal with the financial ups and downs that come with starting a new business.

7. Are your expectations realistic?

Many people believe that being their own boss and being in charge of their own hours means they’ll have more time for family and their social life. Freedom, Campbell says, is the most common reason people say they want to start their own business. “In theory you have all the time in the world when you are your own boss, but you also need to be disciplined, focused, and be a master of time management,” she says.

But running your own business means you will need to do some things that you don’t love. You may be able to hire out those tasks, but in most cases entrepreneurs have to wear all the hats until they gain momentum in their business. To find out whether your expectations are realistic, seek out a mentor or someone doing what you want to do and ask yourself whether it’s really the path you want for yourself.

Do you live in a treadmill or HIIT-loving city? Are your neighbors more or less likely to cancel a booked class? Those are just a few of the questions ClassPass answered in its annual findings report.

On Tuesday, the fitness and wellness platform shared quite a few fun facts from the more than 60 million reservations booked by its members. On a nationwide scale, ClassPass observed the following workout habits:

• Most popular day of the week to work out: Tuesday
• Most popular day of the year to work out: February 28th, 2018
• Most popular rest day: January 1st, 2018
• Most popular class times: Weekday: 5:30 p.m., Weekend: 10:30 a.m.
• Most popular fitness genre in the U.S: Strength training
• Fastest growing trend: Treadmill classes, with an 82% increase in the last year
• Time spent: ClassPass users were 33% more likely to book a class under 45 minutes (44 minutes or less) in 2018 than they were in 2017

ClassPass also took a look at the preferences of individual cities, which differed on everything from workout time to class cancellations:

• Most likely to book class at 7:30 a.m. or earlier: Columbus, Ohio
• Most likely to book class between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.: Portland, Oregon
• Most likely to book class at 7:30 p.m. or later: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• Most likely to book class in another city: Orlando, Florida
• Most likely to book class at the last minute: Las Vegas, Nevada
• Most likely to book class with a friend: Atlanta, Georgia
• Most likely to book a treadmill class–2018’s fastest growing activity: Washington, D.C.
• Least likely to miss or cancel a class: San Diego, California
• Most likely to book a class–any class: New York City

For more regional fitness observations, check out the ClassPass report.

This is the MahaNakhon Glass Tray, a glass-bottomed deck that’s perched atop the new King Power MahaNakhon tower in Bangkok. Thrill seekers can stand more than 1,000 feet above the city, separated only by glass–the latest example of a budding form of architectural tourism.

The 1,030-foot-tall skyscraper, which opened last month, looks to have been teleported from the future. In fact, its pixelated structure suggests that the teleportation was only partially successful. That’s by design, according to architect Ole Scheeren, who was a disciple of Rem Koolhaas and left OMA in 2010 to found his own office. Scheeren says over email that the building was designed to give the impression of being “in a permanent state of being unfinished and in that sense a building that reflects the idea of process.” The building, he says, is a reflection of Bangkok itself, “a city in a permanent state of flux,” where parallel forces both traditional and futuristic are at play, thus reshaping the urban fabric. For Scheeren, the incredible tension in the city, this energy, is translated into the fundamental idea of the building.

The Glass Tray, at the very top of the building, is where that “ribbon” ends. It’s part of the MahaNakhon SkyWalk, an experience that starts on the first floor of the tower for anyone who wants to spend about $85 for a ticket.

Visitors take an elevator straight up to the 74th floor in just 50 seconds in the country’s fastest elevator. There they will find an indoor observation deck with 360-degree panoramic views, and augmented reality screens that point out Bangkok’s landmarks. On the next floor, a glass elevator boarding area leads to the 78th floor, where they’re met by the “Glass Tray” and Thailand’s highest rooftop bar, which offers signature drinks and cocktails (they may need a few, before stepping foot on the deck).

“MahaNakhon is a building that is strongly embedded in the city and the public realm,” Scheeren says. “The idea of giving space back to the city is intrinsic to the project.”

“What is particular about MahaNakhon is that through this pixelated ribbon that coils along the shaft, we created highly diversified conditions in the interior of the building, and the tower actually features 200 apartments of which no two are alike,” Scheeren says. “This enabled us to play with different variations and create living spaces with completely unique conditions, and to generate a sense of individuality that is very rare in high-rise structures.”

In his day job, Jeffrey Engler runs Wright Electric, a startup designing electric airplanes. Now, in a side project, Engler wants to help cut carbon emissions before his own technology comes to market. The “Polar Bear Protection Plan,” the first project in a collaboration called LiveNoTrace, is a holiday present for the environmentalist you know who doesn’t actually want a physical gift: a yearlong carbon offset.

It’s a gift that might be in particular demand in the wake of a year of disastrous hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves, and landmark reports talking about how much worse the situation could get if we don’t make radical moves toward a low-carbon economy now. Instead of despairing, Engler says, people can do something. “There’s something nice about feeling like you can take action as opposed to just feeling bad.”

By now, you have likely seen the internet outrage over the contrast between Beyoncé’s dramatic onstage look at South Africa’s Global Summit compared to Ed Sheeran’s trademark scruffy skater uniform. The whole thing serves as a metaphor for the amount of effort expected of black women compared to white men. Or as my former colleague Rich Bellis brilliantly put it: “Imagine Beyoncé trying to be Beyoncé while dressing like Avril Lavigne. You can’t! It’s impossible!” (It should be noted that while Lavigne was at the height of her fame and commercial success during her “Sk8er” look phase, she is now considerably more glam.)

He’s right in that in order to reach Beyoncé’s level of fame and success as a woman, there seems no other option than to be spend hours perfecting a dazzling look (and probably full choreography). But like in so many other aspects of both personal and professional life, male artists simply have more options in the way they present themselves, from Chance the Rapper’s overalls to Sheeran’s rolled-out-of-bed look to Michael Bublé’s signature tux. 

Women in the public eye don’t seem to have the option to be comfortable or dress down. On the last episode of the 2 Dope Queens podcast, former first first lady Michelle Obama explained the exhaustive lengths she had to go to while in office to plan her hair, makeup, and outfits while in office: “I’ve done a little bit of everything–braids, weaves, wigs, extensions.” She noted that after any briefing for an event, she’d have to have an additional briefing about what to wear and how to do her hair.

Work ethic and talent and ambition aside, the expectations on women (and especially on black women) in entertainment, politics, and the professional world seem to start at full hair and makeup and work their way up. Part of Beyoncé’s widespread appeal is (in addition to her prodigious talent) her breathtaking showmanship. Michelle Obama, too, became a style icon. But imagine what women could accomplish if the barrier to entry was, as it is for men, simply based on the work itself.

It used to be kale, then Brussels sprouts, then avocados. Some attempted to make fiddleheads a thing. But now, in 2018, the trendiest vegetable is the humble, Charlie Brown-headed cauliflower.

The cruciferous veggie has exploded in the last two years. Whereas it was once considered the bland version of broccoli, today cauliflower is heralded for its many uses: as a chic meal centerpiece (whole roasted head), Keto Diet staple, and even as a healthier latke ingredient.

And it’s not your imagination: It really is everywhere. Nielsen data found the ingredient across 36 different grocery store categories, in everything from dried pasta to frozen foods. Sales for packaged cauliflower products grew 71% last year.

Granted, it’s part of a booming plant-based food industry that is growing at a rapid 20%, but cauliflower has excelled far beyond its farm competitors. That’s because it’s a nutrient-dense and versatile vegetable that possesses varied texture as well as an ability to take on numerous flavors. So it’s no surprise that plenty of new food startups are centered solely around cauliflower.

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A post shared by CAULIPOWER Foods (@caulipowered) on Nov 23, 2018 at 8:03am PST

Caulipower, which substitutes the vegetable for a flour crust, is now the fastest-growing pizza brand. The line is available at roughly 15,000 grocery stores, including Kroger, Walmart, and Safeway, and recently surpassed sales of 10 million pizzas.

“(With cauliflower crust pizza) I wanted to show that the concept wasn’t cauliflower as a vegetable, but revolutionizing the use of vegetables as ingredients,” Caulipower founder Gail Becker told Forbes earlier this month.

It competes against similar pizza-centric brands, including, Cali’flour Foods, Outer Aisle Gourmet, and, well, Oprah Winfrey. The icon, who also has a stake in Weight Watchers (now rebranded as WW), recently released a line of frozen cauliflower-crust pizzas topped for her brand O, That’s Good!.

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Bet y’all didn’t know I had hidden pizza talents! Been taste testing a lot of pizzas to get this just right. The crust is made with a twist of cauliflower but if I hadn’t told ya you’d never know. Pick one up at your grocery store! Link to locate in my bio. #OThatsGood

A post shared by Oprah (@oprah) on Aug 22, 2018 at 11:37am PDT

Then there are the varieties of of “cauliflower rice,” which is more or less shredded cauliflower made to resemble the popular grain. The category spans several independent brands, like Cauli Rice, but pretty much every big brand (Whole Foods, Bird’s Eye, Green Giant) rolled out their own edition of the versatile side dish. Last year, “cauliflower rice” jumped 60% jump in U.S. search queries, according to Google Trends. (It’s become so popular that the rice industry attempted to get cauliflower companies to stop using the word “rice.”)

Others, meanwhile, see cauliflower as an easy way to “health-ify” meals that have seen declining sales. Roughly 67% of Americans said they now prioritize healthy or socially conscious food purchases, according to a recent survey by Label Insight. That’s likely why Kraft, for example, added a quarter cup of cauliflower into its famous Mac & Cheese.

Cauliflower’s popularity is nothing new, but analysts believe it’s only the cusp of what’s to come. Cauliflower grew 8% annually from 2011 to 2016–up to $357 million in annual sales, and forecasters believe there’s far more opportunity beyond rice and crust. The more Americans opt for low-carb, gluten-free, plant-based diets, the more the versatile vegetable will show up in new categories.

“Expect it to move past the freezer section and into the chips and cracker aisle–typically thought of as the least healthy section of the store,” predicts Well+Good in its annual trends report.

It’s already happening: Gaea sells pouches of pickled cauliflower marinated in olive oil, lemon, and sea salt; Vegan Rob’s probiotic cauliflower puffs look just like Pirate’s Booty but are made “to support digestive and immune health; while Halen Brands’ newly released brand From the Ground Up sells cauliflower powder-based pretzels, crackers, and crisps in flavors like sea salt and cheddar.

“What we’re going after is giving you that same type of look and feel [as conventional favorites] but giving you the ingredient deck you’d always hoped you’d get out of these snacks,” Halen founder and co-CEO Jason Cohen previously told Nosh. “They haven’t changed one thing about [pretzels] since the day they were created.”

But fret not, carb-lovers. Cauliflower-based products are unlikely to replace flour, rice, or bread. As Nosh notes, it’s still a rather pricey vegetable, limited in stock. That makes it hard to mass produce, especially at a very low price point. So while super trendy, it will, at its current status, remain a rather exclusive trendy product.

When Mike Schroepfer joined Facebook in 2008 as VP of engineering, his most pressing responsibilities involved “trying to keep the wheels on the bus as it was barreling down the hill,” he says. “People forget how hard it was just to scale the site and keep it running and deal with all the technical challenges therein.”

After spending half a decade on that effort, Schroepfer was named Facebook’s CTO in March 2013. That was around the same time that he and CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally felt that the service was in good enough operational order to let them think seriously about its technological future. Among the conclusions that came out of that thinking was that AI was the next great frontier, and Facebook should take it seriously. The company formed a group called Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and hired computer-science legend Yann LeCun to run it—an appointment that Zuckerberg formally announced that December at NIPS (now NeuralIPS), the machine-learning field’s major confab.

At the time, however, Zuckerberg concluded that AI was at an inflection point that merited special attention (along with a few other areas such as VR and AR, which led to Facebook’s March 2014 deal to acquire Oculus). “You want things that are out of the theoretical realm and are already at or close to providing practical value, but are still in the bottom part of the S curve,” Schroepfer says. “Meaning there’s still a lot of known and tractable issues to solve. And AI is that in spades.”

FAIR has been working on solving these problems in ways that benefit Facebook’s namesake service, as well as Instagram and other products. Along the way, it’s shared its findings and open-sourced its work, giving its work importance beyond its application in Facebook products. For instance, PyTorch, FAIR’s open-source toolkit for creating machine-learning models, competes with Google’s popular TensorFlow, and recently gained support from Microsoft, which had previously focused on its own rival offerings.

Today, “It’s no accident that we’re furthest ahead on computer vision, because that was the very first thing we worked on,” says Schroepfer. In 2013, a technological party trick such as using AI to identify photos of cats was still a bit of a mind-bender. Since then, Facebook and the rest of the industry have made major inroads: It’s possible for computers to not only pinpoint an array of objects with high accuracy and not just detect people, but also figure out what they’re doing. The company uses technology that originated in FAIR for such purposes as enhancing search, detecting various sorts of objectionable content, and automatically generating descriptions of photos for visually impaired users.

Some hard problems, however, remain hard—maybe even more so than they once seemed. In 2016, a flurry of excitement about bots—which were a key theme at Facebook’s F8 conference as well as Microsoft’s Build—led to giddy expectations that conversation might soon become a primary means of communicating with computers. But though computers can now beat expert humans at an array of tasks, from playing Go to transcribing audio, they can’t compete with a toddler when it comes to conversing.

“True dialogue systems—not things that can figure out what you’re asking for a timer or what the weather is, but can have a conversation with you and can remember what you said three utterances ago and refer to it and not sound like they have complete amnesia—are still pretty basic,” says Schroepfer. FAIR is still investing in conversational AI, but progress has been plodding, and he doesn’t expect any short-term breakthroughs.

Machines as moderators

At present, Facebook’s highest-profile challenges involve weighty matters such as fighting fake news, hate speech, and other forms of misuse of its platform that threaten not just the health of the company but society itself. In 2018, the company dramatically increased the amount of human intelligence it’s throwing at these problems by hiring thousands of additional content moderators. Though that underscores that AI isn’t a magical antidote to Facebook’s most serious problems, computers already do a vast amount of the gruntwork involved in keeping undesirable content off the network, ideally before it ever appears in the first place.

“If we didn’t have the muscle to deploy this sort of technology at the company at scale, and a bunch of the advancements we’ve made in the core technology, we would be in really deep trouble right now,” says Schroepfer. Apparently, he’s enough of an optimist to see the company’s current woes as less than a worst-case scenario.

He does admit to some frustration that the success Facebook has already had using AI to police the network isn’t better known. “The data is right in front of people’s faces,” he says, citing the company’s transparency report. Between July and September of this year, 96% of instances where Facebook took action on standards-violating content involved it taking down an item before any member had reported the item in question—a figure that Schroepfer says AI deserves virtually all of the credit for.

Related: Facebook’s fight against election tampering spans the company

Still, Schroepfer, like other Facebook executives, errs on the side of emphasizing that the company understands it has lots of work ahead when it comes to matters like protecting the integrity of elections. Rather than toiling in isolation, FAIR researchers are actively collaborating with other Facebook staffers on solutions to such issues. “That sort of interdisciplinary virtual team, combined with subject matter experts across the spectrum from AI to policy, is the way we’re going to get good at this,” he says.

Assessing content on Facebook services will always be central to FAIR’s work. But the organization continues to evolve: It’s lately been hiring robotics experts, a move LeCun has said is essential as many of the best brains in computer science dedicate themselves to the topic. FAIR engineers are even working with counterparts at New York University to investigate the use of AI to speed up MRI scanning. “If we can get a 4X to 8X reduction in time, that’s a game changer from an economic standpoint, and from reaching a larger patient population,” says Schroepfer.

Don’t take FAIR’s foray into AI-enhanced healthcare as evidence that the company wants its research arm to be an Alphabet-style moonshot factory taking on an array of the world’s big problems all at once; Schroepfer says that it will choose only a few such non-core research areas to explore. For all FAIR has accomplished in its first five years—and all the ways Facebook has changed—its original mission still has plenty of headroom.

“I don’t think anyone who’s paying attention should be doing a victory lap yet,” says Schroepfer. “We’ve made stunning progress. But we’re nowhere near done, and every time we make a small improvement, it has massive impact on our products.”

The White House is watching you.

On November 19, the U.S. Secret Service started testing a new facial recognition system that captures images of people outside the White House and then tries to match them to “people of interest.” Currently it’s just a pilot program, limited to trying to match the faces of volunteer staff members, but it does capture the image of “individuals passing by on public streets and parks adjacent to the White House Complex,” according to a filing by the Secret Service.

All the images captured during the pilot will be limited to the White House security system and will be deleted once the test ends next August, the Secret Service said. However, the program’s limited nature may not be enough to quellconcerns from privacy advocates about a growing high-tech surveillance.

“[It] crosses an important line by opening the door to the mass, suspicionless scrutiny of Americans on public sidewalks,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a blog post published Tuesday. “That makes it worth pausing to ask how the agency’s use of face recognition is likely to expand — and the constitutional concerns that it raises.”

While protecting the White House is a worthy goal, the government doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to identifying people without profiling them based on race, religion, or political beliefs, which should give anyone who likes the protections of the Constitution pause.

For now, those who don’t want to be in the White House’s surveillance scrap book “may choose to avoid the area,” the Secret Service said in a document published last week.

Australia, China, and Singapore have all ramped up use of facial-recognition technology recently, and the U.S. government is apparently not immune to the allure of high-tech monitoring. Customs and Border Protection already uses it at airport gates as part of its “Traveler Verification Service,” and is reportedly expanding the use in airports in conjunction with the Transportation Security Administration.

Earlier this year, indoor cycling behemoth Peloton announced it was delving into the treadmill market. And now, the connected fitness platform is pursuing less adrenalin-pumping modalities.

On Wednesday, Peloton opened a new production studio dedicated to yoga and meditation in New York City. The programming will be helmed by yoga instructors Kristin McGee, Anna Greenberg, and Aditi Shah. This will be the company’s third studio space.

“As we did with the addition of Bootcamp, Running, Walking, and Outdoor earlier this year, we are continuing to expand our suite of superior fitness offerings in order to provide our members with an ever more diversified array of options to stay fit, happy, and healthy,” Fred Klein, chief content officer of Peloton, said in a statement.

Peloton’s venture into new categories makes sense as more companies compete in the $14 billion home fitness equipment market. Startups such as Mirror (personal training, yoga), Crew (rowing), and Tonal (weight lifting) all attempt to do what Peloton did for the indoor bike. While approximately 16% of the U.S. population holds a gym membership card, a recent survey found that 54% of Americans who work out at least once a month are interested in buying an at-home fitness system.

In August, Peloton raised a $550 million round of financing led by venture capital firm TCV, bringing its worth to $4.15 billion. Peloton’s cofounder and chief executive, John Foley, said 2019 “makes a lot of sense” to pursue an IPO.

According to Foley, Peloton is on track to generate more than $700 million in revenue in the fiscal year ending next February, marking more than 100% year-to-year revenue growth rate. With its latest round of funding, you can expect far more from Peloton in the fitness technology, media, and equipment categories.

“We will have a third product in the next year or two–we’re already working on that,” Foley told Fast Company earlier this year. “And there will be more platforms to allow you to get your heart rate up.”

A cache of internal Facebook documents released by a U.K. member of Parliament show how CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives wrestled with how to monetize their valuable user data while still encouraging third-party apps to post user activity on Facebook.

In a 2012 email, Zuckerberg suggested making Facebook login and posting content on the platform free while charging “a lot of money” to read user data, like friend information, from the network. App developers would be able to pay the costs directly or offset them with other transactions, like ad buys or use of Facebook’s payment platform, he suggested. That proposal was never implemented, according to Facebook.

Executives also seemed concerned that simply enabling Facebook logins and data access for potentially competing platforms could ultimately cannibalize user activity on Facebook itself.

“Sometimes the best way to enable people to share something is to have a developer build a special purpose app or network for that type of content and to make that app social by having Facebook plug into it,” Zuckerberg wrote in 2012. “However, that may be good for the world but it’s not good for us unless people also share back to Facebook and that content increases the value of our network.”

As Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Wednesday blog post, the company limited access to data to “prevent abusive apps” starting in 2014. “This change meant that a lot of sketchy apps-like the quiz app that sold data to Cambridge Analytica could no longer operate on our platform,” he wrote.

But the documents also show discussions about giving special friend list access to particular companies, including Airbnb and Netflix, after it was no longer available by default to most developers.

“Facebook have clearly entered into whitelisting agreements with certain companies, which meant that after the platform changes in 2014/15 they maintained full access to friends data,” wrote MP Damian Collins, chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee. “It is not clear that there was any user consent for this, nor how Facebook decided which companies should be whitelisted or not.”

Facebook said Wednesday that limited data extensions were given to particular developers and that whitelists of developers allowed to use certain features are commonly used in beta testing. The company limited app developer access to lists of friends, other than those also using the same app, in most cases, according to the statement. “In some situations, when necessary, we allowed developers to access a list of the users’ friends,” according to Facebook.

I believe there is considerable public interest in releasing these documents. They raise important questions about how Facebook treats users data, their policies for working with app developers, and how they exercise their dominant position in the social media market.

— Damian Collins (@DamianCollins) December 5, 2018

In a later statement emailed to Fast Company, the company cautioned that some of the documents, which were originally turned over in a California lawsuit, could be misleading and don’t necessarily reflect actual company practices.

“As we’ve said many times, the documents Six4Three gathered for their baseless case are only part of the story and are presented in a way that is very misleading without additional context,” a spokesperson wrote. “We stand by the platform changes we made in 2015 to stop a person from sharing their friends’ data with developers. Like any business, we had many of internal conversations about the various ways we could build a sustainable business model for our platform. But the facts are clear: we’ve never sold people’s data.”

In his blog post, Zuckerberg said the company ultimately elected to provide a developer interface for free and to let them optionally buy ads.

“Other ideas we considered but decided against included charging developers for usage of our platform, similar to how developers pay to use Amazon AWS or Google Cloud,” he wrote. “To be clear, that’s different from selling people’s data. We’ve never sold anyone’s data.”

Documents released also show Facebook officials concerned with the PR consequences of the data the company collected from users. In 2015, Facebook staff discussed “a feature that lets you continuously upload your SMS and call log history to Facebook to be used for improving things like [People You May Know, a friend recommendation feature], coefficient calculation, feed ranking, etc.”

One email cautioned it could be “a pretty high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective,” and internal discussions focused on which Android permissions to request in which app upgrades to avoid causing “PR fallout” and adverse user responses.

“This specific feature allows people to opt in to giving Facebook access to their call and text messaging logs in Facebook Lite and Messenger on Android devices,” Facebook said in its statement. “We use this information to do things like make better suggestions for people to call in Messenger and rank contact lists in Messenger and Facebook Lite.”

Robyn is still processing an abusive sexual encounter she had over three years ago; Akilah is dealing with her sister’s mental instability while trying to keep her own life sane; Timothy is attempting to come to grips with his most recent breakup. These all sound like plot points in a human-driven TV drama—but they’re all real things that happened that I learned about by reading all three’s therapy transcripts.

Before you call the cops on me, it’s not because I was snooping through their medical records. Robyn Kanner, Akilah Hughes, and Timothy Goodman are all friends—as well as writers and creators—who decided last year to try out texting therapy services and then publish their experiences with them. The fruits of their labor are being released this week under the name Friends With Secrets. It’s a website that offers the back-and-forth text conversations that each person had with their therapists. Every day, a new session is uploaded. Friends With Secrets intends to release five sessions that span their experiences during the first few months of 2018.

Kanner describes the project to me as an exercise in radical vulnerability. The three came up with the concept in 2017, when they were all feeling generally bad. “We were all going through a difficult time,” Kanner says. The idea was, “You know what—what if we can just, straight up, say, ‘Here is our heart’? How vulnerable is that?” So all three made the pact to start doing text-based therapy for four months—and they stuck to it. “We wanted to follow through and do the actual process of going through therapy for four months and documenting that,” explains Goodman.

And that’s exactly what Friends With Secrets is—part diary, part script, part mental health manifesto. The reading experience is especially unique; it’s both voyeuristic and intimate. None of the creators hold back when talking to the therapists. They name names and talk about the murky and extremely tenuous elements of human relationships. That was a necessity for the project, says Kanner. “I got more comfortable [with the idea] that people were going to read this and see it.” In fact, that became one of the points of pride. “This is my life,” she proclaims. “I’m going to talk about a trans woman who had a relationship and it went south.”

Friends With Secrets talks about delicate private issues and extremely heavy material (drug abuse, self harm, mental illness, etc.), and its colloquial tone is sometimes reminiscent of diary-like personal essays of the mid-2000s. I ask them about how they approached these topics while avoiding the self-confessional blog-post trap. As Kanner points out, the fact that it’s dialogic in form makes the final product something entirely different (she’s right, too). “The only way to give it enough nuance was for it to be a conversation,” she says. “It would be impossible if this were a one-off personal essay on xoJane.” This allows for a different type of reader engagement, she adds: “You can see me process it in the exact moment, but not ask for your sympathy or empathy.”

Hughes takes this idea a bit further. “My intention was not, ‘Look at my pain’,” she says. That sort of pain porn content engenders a kind of voyeuristic fascination with another person’s (usually someone who’s non-white, non-male) personal experience. They generate clicks and therefore advertising revenue. Friends With Secrets is something categorically different. (An important addendum is that the creators aren’t being bankrolled by a large media conglomerate.)

Kanner, Hughes, and Goodman believe the Friends With Secrets project to be a way of destigmatizing certain topics and making people feel more comfortable with discussing mental health. “By processing and sharing these traumas, it helps me and can help you,” says Goodman. “The greatest stories are the ones that kind of act as activism.” He goes on to say that if a reader finds the website and considers seeking mental health help, “That’s only a positive in my book.”

For Hughes, she’s just proud that she was able to finish the project and speak her truth. “I feel like I succeeded in the dare,” she jokes.

As Kanner sees it, Friends With Secrets became one way to retain personal and psychic autonomy in an ever messed-up world. “It’s 2018,” she says. “This is the most radical thing I can do.”

In a medical first, a woman born without a womb was able to become a mother, thanks to an organ transplant from a deceased donor. While there have been 39 womb transplants using live donors—including mothers donating their wombs to their daughters, which have resulted in 11 babies—the success rate for wombs donated from deceased donors has been far less successful. Ten previous transplants from dead donors have either failed or resulted in miscarriage. This case, reported in The Lancet, is the first time a womb transplant via a deceased donor has led to the birth of a healthy baby.

The transplant, fertility treatments, and eventual birth all took place at the Hospital das Clinicas, University of São Paulo School of Medicine in Brazil. The donor was a 45-year-old woman who had three children before dying of a stroke. Her womb was transplanted into the soon-to-be mother who still had her ovaries and had undergone a round of IVF prior to the transplant. Six weeks later, she started having periods. After seven months, the fertilized eggs were implanted. She had a normal pregnancy and gave birth to a 6-pound baby girl delivered by cesarean section on December 15, 2017. (Medical miracles take a while to become public knowledge, apparently.) Scientific Americanreports that the baby girl, who is about to celebrate her first birthday, is healthy and developing normally.

“The first uterus transplants from live donors were a medical milestone, creating the possibility of childbirth for many infertile women with access to suitable donors and the needed medical facilities,” Dani Ejzenberg, the transplant team’s lead doctor, said in a statement. “However, the need for a live donor is a major limitation, as donors are rare, typically being willing and eligible family members or close friends.”

The use of a womb from a deceased donor could radically expand the pool of women who could give birth this way. Have you signed up to be an organ donor?

On Wednesday, Jeffrey Katzenberg announced more news about his upcoming mobile video service, Quibi. In addition to landing projects with Guillermo del Toro and producer Jason Blum (The Purge, Halloween), Quibi has inked deals with Stephen Curry’s Unanimous Media as well as director Catherine Hardwicke, both of whom will create shows that will stream on Quibi in 10-minute increments. 

Hardwicke’s series is called How They Made Her and is a thriller about an AI character. Curry’s will be a documentary about a the St. Benedict’s Preparatory high school basketball team in Newark, New Jersey, Katzenberg said at Variety‘s Innovate summit in Los Angeles. The series will be developed and produced by Whistle. Katzenberg was onstage with Quibi CEO Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of HP. 

Quibi has been making headlines due to the star power of its top execs—Katzenberg was a founding father of DreamWorks and DreamWorks Animation—as well as the money it has lined up and is paying out to creators. The company has a $1 billion war chest and is paying up to $6 million an hour for some of its shows, Katzenberg said on Wednesday. According to a person who has met with Quibi, the company’s strategy is to start with premium content from A-list creators and then eventually lower the bar to create the amount of content Katzenberg is promising: up to 5,000 bytes of content in the year following its launch in either late 2019 or early 2020. In meetings, Quibi executives show a pyramid graph to illustrate the model. Their main message, this person says, is: Come back to us with a big star attached to your project. 

The idea behind Quibi, which is short for “quick bites” of video, is to be the Netflix of short-form content, and to create high-quality videos that people consume during the in-between moments of their day: standing in line at the supermarket, clearing your head during a lunch break, etc. Yet other attempts to follow this path—YouTube’s original channel initiatives with celebrities and stars, and, more recently, Instagram’s IGTV—have hit hurdles, in part because of ingrained behavior. Most people prefer to scroll through Twitter or Instagram during those in-between moments. When they sit down to watch something, it’s more likely to be a show on Netflix or an episode of Last Night Tonight with John Oliver on HBO Now. 

As one digital executive put it: “People are willing to bet on Jeffrey, but when you talk to people behind closed doors, there’s a healthy skepticism as to whether there’s a white space here for a reason.”  

Yet one agent counters this, saying, “I think Katzenberg is right on this front. Only so many people are willing to sit down for an hour and watch an episode of TV—especially younger generations. They’re way more inclined to watch a 10-minute episode of something. It’s all about short bursts. They’re bouncing around between umpteen things. This is a mobile generation.” 

Katzenberg himself has playfully admitted a healthy dose of self-deprecating skepticism about the project. “Doing this falls somewhere between improbable and impossible,” he said in October. Referring to himself and Whitman, he said, “We’ve been to the rodeo a whole bunch of times. That play, between improbable and impossible, that’s my home address.” 

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, which has received far less fanfare then its similarly named competitor Virgin Hyperloop (née Hyperloop One), today announced a joint venture with a German logistics and transportation company that runs container terminals. Together the two companies will bring HTT’s technology to the Port of Hamburg. Which is to say, the first real use of a hyperloop will be to move freight around a shipyard. Not terribly sexy!

Of course, this was always going to be the first use case for this still largely untested transportation method. While many hyperloop hopefuls, including Tesla CEO and all-around loud tech guy Elon Musk, have been pushing the idea that hyperloops could make travel across large distances into a trivial commute, the more immediate reality is that hyperloop technology will be used to make shipping and logistics more efficient.

Unlike that of its more traditional competitor, HTT’s development has been crowdsourced from over 800 collaborators; workers volunteer hours in exchange for equity. In April, HTT began work on a 320-meter track in Toulouse, France, which will ultimately carry both freight and people. It also has plans for a 1,000-meter track in 2019. The first installment of the Port of Hamburg track will be a 100-mile cargo route that will shuttle freight in a capsule.

Meanwhile, Virgin Hyperloop has conducted a series of tests at its Nevada track. It also signed a commitment with Saudi Arabia to bring its technology to the region.

Facebook’s head of PR Elliot Schrage defended his company’s decision to use a Washington, D.C., firm with GOP ties to dig for dirt on Facebook critics and opponents. Facebook’s use of the oppo research group Definers Public Affairs was perhaps the most talked-about revelation from a blockbuster New York Timesinvestigative piece published last month.

Schrage said it was his comms and policy team that retained Definers. Definers asked a number of reporters to search for and write about funding ties between billionaire investor George Soros and anti-Facebook groups like Freedom From Facebook.

After Soros said critical things about Facebook at the Davos conference earlier this year, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg requested that Definers dig for evidence that Soros’s negative comments might have been driven by a desire to short Facebook’s stock.

Here’s an excerpt from Schrage’s comments at the Atlantic’s Free Speech (Un)Limited conference in San Francisco today:

“I believe that the best way you get accuracy and understanding in civil and tolerant debate is by having an honest and transparent exchange of ideas. And I think part of that honest and transparent exchange of ideas is understanding people’s motivations. And understanding who is doing what and why. And at least explaining that. So I absolutely am not here to defend all of the things that every consultant has done for Facebook … But I think the principle that somebody who is a critic of yours, who is an investor, and who is making statements criticizing you in a public debate on a public issue, if they are entering that public fray and they’re making statements, I don’t think it is all illegitimate.”

Schrage emphasized twice during the interview that his company’s use of Definers was not the most important issue raised by the Times piece. “I don’t think that’s either relevant to a conversation on the future of speech on the platform, or relevant to the management, because that is how the organization is run.”

Hiring opposition research firms is a tactic often used by political campaigns, but rare in tech and business circles.

Facebook’s retainer of Definers was part of a larger story about how Sandberg and CEO Mark Zuckerberg were slow to deal with the fact that Facebook had been weaponized by Russian trolls to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The reign of Millennial Pink–that literally and figuratively cool hue whose blue undertones flattered no one–seems to be coming to an end at last. In its place? We have Living Coral. It’s Pantone’s Color of the Year for 2019, following the company’s annual, wide-ranging analysis of color trends across culture. Living Coral is comforting and energizing at the same time, a color meant to serve as a salve in a time of global uncertainty.

“Just as coral reefs are a source of sustenance and shelter, we see this color giving us assurance and buoyancy in an environment that’s been continuously shifting for 10 years,” says Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute. “With technology, and all the [political] unrest around the world, our global culture has continued to accelerate this shift.”

If you buy into all of Pantone’s color psychology, it’s hardly a leap to interpret Living Coral as the color for a society that needs reassurance in the face of rising authoritarianism–the complement to the Blue Wave. As Pressman explains, Living Coral has roots in the 1950s and ’60s, where you could see it in cars, accessories, and fashion. Pressman says there’s “almost a retro feeling” to this color of Americana, which evokes “simpler times” without the patriotic baggage of red, white, and blue.

“That’s comforting!” says Pressman. “Because the more things try to push us forward, the more people reach back to what was, because they’re looking for terra firma. It’s scary! So you want things that make you feel safe, happy, that bring you comfort and warmth.”

But it’s more than sociological theory. Living Coral is also a very functional color that bridges the gap between our screens and real life.

As Pressman points out, Living Coral has a lot of functional attributes that have made it increasingly popular over the past few years. With an orange rather than pink base, its warmth complements most skin tones. In interior design, it’s surprisingly versatile, and can actually be pulled in and out of many color schemes almost like a neutral. On smartphone screens, it’s a super-saturated, vibrant option that can pop on social media–but because it’s found in nature, it bridges the gap between the real and hyperreal. Even when it appears in digital content, it has ties to the natural world.

Pantone chose the color before Apple unveiled its most recent iPhones, and the company was surprised to find that Apple chose the same color to put on the backside of its latest iPhone XR–reinforcing its power to bridge technology and people.

But if any tech company deserves credit for kicking off the Living Coral trend, Pressman says it’s Airbnb, which introduced coral as part of its 2014 brand redesign: “What people may have called questionable the time [was] prescient.”

Lyft has filed confidential paperwork with the SEC for a proposed public offering, the company announced. The disclosure follows news in August that the company had hired  Class V Group LLC to manage the process with a March or April offering date in mind.

Uber also has plans to launch an IPO in 2019, or so the company’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, has previously said. As of July, Lyft had 28% of U.S. market share, according to Second Measure. For the majority of its existence Lyft has been stuck in Uber’s enormous shadow. Unlike its competitor, Lyft has not gone global (though it is in Canada), hasn’t ventured into as many business arms, and has been slower overall to expand.

But its slower growth seemed to pay off last year when Uber began to implode. In 2017, Uber was caught evading law enforcement, engaging in dubious ethical practices, and having an overall toxic work environment. Lyft emerged as an alternative. The climate allowed Lyft to grow its share of the market rapidly, from 15% to 26% in one year.

Also in the last two years, Lyft has grown its business beyond simple ride sharing. In 2017, it announced it would develop autonomous car technology through a partnership with tier-one automotive supplier Magna, putting it in competition with Uber and Google. Lyft also expanded into bike sharing through its purchase of Motivate, which operates major programs like Citi Bike and Ford GoBike.

Lyft is currently valued around $15 billion and surpassed $1 billion in revenue in 2017. Uber, meanwhile, earned nearly $3 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2018 alone and recently raised money at a $72 billion valuation. And Wall Street is hot for Uber. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company has received proposals estimating Uber’s worth to be as much as $120 billion value in an IPO. Uber has also indicated it wouldn’t be profitable for three years, per the report.

For Lyft, that means going public earlier could give it an opportunity to shine in its own right.

Rob Metzger, professor at Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois, says there are advantages to being first to go public. If one company goes first and there are problems during its time as a public company–for instance, regulatory issues or other potential friction points for the business model–it could dampen the potential valuation for whoever goes public second. “If we’re smaller, but we’re better run and our operating metrics are strong, I’d rather be first to tell that story so that I’m not–from a valuation perspective–in the shadows of the other one,” Metzger says.

Smartphones settle a lot of dinner table debates nowadays. We argue about this or that, until somebody finally pops out a phone and Googles it. It really takes the fun out of being an adamant know-it-all who frequently turns out to be wrong.

Doing these little fact checks is even easier using a voice assistant. In fact, asking questions is one of the main uses for digital assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, or Apple’s Siri. The problem is there’s just no way a digital assistant can know the answer to every question under the sun. So Amazon is going to crowdsource the answers to some of them.

The company is opening a new program–called Alexa Answers–in which it will invite some Alexa users to help answer questions. It’s something similar to the way Amazon shoppers help answer common questions under product listings in the marketplace.

“While Alexa can answer the vast majority of questions customers are asking every day,” writes Amazon VP of Alexa Information Bill Barton in a blog post today, “every once in a while, customers throw curve balls at us with questions like ‘Where was Barbara Bush buried?’ or ‘Who wrote the score for Lord of the Rings?’ . . . or ‘Where do bats go in the winter?'”

Actually, Amazon has been running an internal beta of the program over the past month. Amazon employees (Amazon isn’t saying how many) added more than 100,000 question responses, which have been given to real Alexa users more than a million times, the company says.

Now real users will start contributing answers. Amazon will start sending out invitations to participants today. Those who get an invite (Amazon declined to say how many that will be) will be directed to a special Alexa Answers website, where they can log in with their Amazon credentials to see lists of available questions (organized by subject area) and choose which ones they want to answer. The questions that show up at the Alexa Answers site are ones that lots of Alexa users have asked, but for which the assistant currently has no answer. Consumers have to answer the questions in 300 characters or less–this is not Wikipedia. After a question has been answered it will disappear from the site, Amazon says.

When a user submits their written answer, the information is turned into a voice response that can be spoken by Alexa. The assistant will say “According to an Amazon customer…” before saying the user-provided answer.

Amazon says Alexa users will be able to vote answers up or down as a measure of their accuracy and usefulness. Answers that get too many down votes will be removed from Alexa’s knowledge base.

“Our vision has always been that Alexa will be able to answer all questions in all forms, from anywhere in the world,” writes Amazon’s Barton.

As the Alexa Answers program expands to more people, the company may have a reasonable shot at approaching its goal.

M.C. Escher fans, rejoice: You can now stay inside a hotel that brings the artist’s trippy visual illusions to life through its interior design.

The hotel, called The Other Place in Guilin, China, tapped Chinese architecture firm Studio 10 to renovate two guestrooms in Escher’s style–and the photos don’t disappoint. Images show staircases coming out of the walls, making it hard to tell the difference between the floor and ceiling. One room, called Dream, is painted faint colors like pale pink, minty green, and white, while the other, called Maze, is a vibrant forest green with gold accents. Stairs sprout from the walls of both rooms, leading nowhere. Each feels like the iconic game MonumentValley, incarnate.

To ensure that the spaces feel as otherworldly as possible, the architects hid all of the practical elements of each room–like outlets and light switches–behind small doors. Opening one might make you feel like you’re in Wonderland, even if it only reveals the mini fridge.

The spaces feel almost as though they were built for Instagram. It’s certainly not the first space that’s designed to look good on on social media; see the many other projects, from treehouses and luxurious glamping tents to other tiny hotels that play into the same trend. Tourism is being reduced to getting the gram, which has proven destructive for some natural places that are now swarming with people on their phones. There are even New York City lofts specially made for influencer photo shoots.

As for The Other Places’s architectural optical illusions, the space itself probably doesn’t feel as confusing as it looks in images. But for all those Instagram-scrollers with wanderlust, this hotel certainly seems like the perfect place to escape reality.