Internet billionaire Reid Hoffman wants to set the record straight. On Wednesday, the cofounder of LinkedIn issued an apology related to reports of his involvement in widespread disinformation during the 2017 Alabama special election for U.S. Senate.

The New York Times extensively covered the scandal in which a social media project–carried out on Facebook and Twitter–was designed to help Democrat Doug Jones edge out Republican Roy S. Moore. One part of the project included a fake Facebook page in which operators posed as conservative Alabamians, “using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore.”

In a post titled, “Truth and Politics” published on Medium, Hoffman said he was completely unaware of the issue prior to reading the Times‘s coverage. In his defense, he stresses, “The Times articles imply that I had knowledge of it and that I endorsed its tactics.” He asserts that he was not aware this money was funding the effort. The statement serves as Hoffman’s first acknowledgement of ties to the campaign.

“I categorically disavow the use of misinformation to sway an election,” writes Hoffman, adding that he deliberately funds multiple organizations “trying to re-establish civic, truth-focused discourse in the U.S.,” and that he would have refused to invest in any organization with such dishonest tactics.

He also further notes that he believes there is no place in U.S. democracy for manipulating facts or relying on blatant lies for a party’s endgame.

Nevertheless, Hoffman takes the opportunity to issue an apology on behalf of his money’s ill-fated outcome. The $750,000 he donated ultimately funded the American Engagement Technologies (AET), which carried out the effort.

“That I had no knowledge of the actions the Times describes does not absolve me of my ethical responsibility to exercise adequate diligence in monitoring my investments,” he writes. “Senator Doug Jones has called for an inquiry into this alleged operation which, from reading the Times, I agree is a good idea.”

Moving forward, Hoffman claims his team is already under way in drafting new policies to properly vet investments as well as oversee where the money goes.  The team intends to publish these politics publicly in the near future.

“I will continue working to making our political institutions more inclusive and responsive to a full range of constituents, more transparent and accountable, and more secure against the influence of those who’d like to undermine our democratic processes and commitment to truth-telling,” ends Hoffman.

‘Tis the season–for looking at your inbox and realizing you’ve got months of messages stacked up and collecting dust.

Okay, so maybe your inbox isn’t quite that bad–but if you’re anything like most people, there’s a decent chance you’re spending this December wishing it could be at least a little less overwhelming. And what better time than a new year to start fresh?

Whether you’re aiming for inbox zero or just hoping to get a reasonable handle on your email, the right set of rules can go a long way in reshaping your habits and reframing email’s role in your life. Commit to these steps for 2019, and you can say “so long” to the days of the unmanageable inbox.

Rule #1: Stop leaving your inbox open all the time

No matter how important you are or how many emails demand your attention, leaving your inbox perpetually open on your desktop is almost certainly counterproductive. Think about it: How often do you try to focus on something and find yourself inadvertently flipping over to your inbox every other minute to see if anything new arrived? It’s human nature–and yet it makes your brain less focused and effective at completing other tasks.

The solution is simple: Pick a set number of windows of time for checking your email instead of making it an around-the-clock chore. The best part about this fix is that it can be customized to work for any sort of schedule and demand: If you can get away with triaging your email three times a day–once in the morning, once after lunch, and once before the end of your workday–by all means, go for it. If you need to check your email three times an hour–at the top of each hour, 20 minutes in, and 40 minutes in–hey, that’s okay, too. Either way, you’re breaking the habit of the constant back-and-forth cycle, which is both inefficient and detrimental to your overall productivity.

With any set schedule, in fact, you’ll end up getting through your inbox and the rest of your work more effectively–and losing out on very little by not seeing every message the second it comes in.

Rule #2: Follow a smarter triage policy for your inbox

You want to know the real secret of staying on top of an ever-expanding inbox? It’s something I implemented into my own routine many moons ago, and it makes a world of difference: When an email lands in my inbox, I never open it twice.

Now, hang on: That doesn’t necessarily mean I answer every single message as soon as I see it. For most of us, that wouldn’t be practical or advisable. All it means is addressing every message in some manner on first encounter. It’s the most efficient use of your time, and it’ll do wonders for keeping your inbox from turning into a disorganized mess.

So every time you open up the ol’ inbox, here’s your plan: Look at every message once and immediately put it into one of three mental categories:

1. Something that doesn’t require any response or action
2. Something you can respond to and be finished with in a matter of minutes
3. Something that requires a response or action that you either don’t have time to deal with right away or that won’t be relevant until some later day or time

For every message in that first category, your task is easy: Archive the message immediately and get it out of your hair. For messages that meet the second condition, pound out a reply–keeping in mind that shorter emails are almost always more effective–and then archive the message. And for messages that fall into that final group, use your email app’s snooze function to send the message away to a time and day when you will be able to handle it or when it’ll be most relevant–whether that’s three hours, three days, or three weeks into the future.

The best part? If you end up needing to snooze the message again when your selected time arrives, that’s perfectly fine. What you’re ultimately accomplishing is an adjustment of how you think about your inbox–from a never-ending mess of backed-up messages into an always-organized list of tasks for any given moment. And with your newly instituted triage policy, you’re prepared to deal with that list quickly and effectively in every email-checking window.

Rule #3: Maintain a better email notification system for your phone

Smartphone notifications are the nemesis of productivity. Now that you’ve contained the counterproductive distraction of your desktop inbox and come up with a smarter method of triaging email, it’s time to do something about those incessant dings from incoming emails on your phone.

Start by going into your device’s email app, finding the section of its settings about notifications, and disabling the general new email alerts. Just like on the desktop, remaining aware of every single email that comes into your inbox is not an effective system for managing your messages–or your life. You’ll do far better dealing with email in bulk, as we covered in Rule #1. It’s a more efficient use of time and a more effective way to keep your inbox in order without allowing it to take over your day.

“But wait!” you may be thinking. “I am a Very Important Person. I get many important messages. What if something pressing comes in and I miss it?”

Well, Person, those are valid questions. And the answer is twofold: First, think about those windows you created in the first step, and think carefully about the types of messages you receive on a typical day. How many of those messages really, truly couldn’t wait until your next window of email triage begins–whether that’d mean waiting 20 minutes or waiting a few hours?

For most people, the answer is probably very few. But there certainly are exceptions–and depending on the nature of your job, you may have a small amount or a large amount of genuinely urgent messages that demand your immediate attention.

So here’s the second part of the solution: Treat certain messages as exceptions and create alerts that notify you only of those truly time-sensitive, cannot-wait emails. Both Outlook and Gmail have options that’ll limit notifications to higher-priority messages, as determined by each app’s algorithms.

If you’re using Gmail on Android, meanwhile, you can take even greater control by deciding for yourself what specific types of messages will be considered urgent enough to trigger an alert. Start by going to the Gmail desktop site, clicking the downward-facing arrow at the right of the main search box, and then filling in whatever fields are appropriate. At the most basic level, you could include emails from a particular address or series of addresses (the “or” operator is your friend). Getting more advanced, you could include all emails from a particular domain, all emails that have a specific word or phrase in their subjects or bodies, or all emails that are sent to a particular address. (Remember, with Gmail, you can create an infinite number of aliases by adding a plus sign and then any numbers or letters immediately after your username–so you might include “yourname+urgent@gmail.com” in a filter and then give that address out to high-priority senders to use as needed.)

Once you have the fields filled out, click the “Create filter” button. On the next screen, select “Apply label” and then create a new label called “Attention.” Finally, click the “Create filter” button in that box–then go back and repeat the process as needed for any additional variables you want to include.

All that’s left to do now is to go into the settings for your account in the Gmail Android app. Tap “Notifications” and make sure it’s set to “All.” Then tap “Inbox notifications” and make sure “Label notifications” is unchecked. Last but not least, tap “Manage labels” and find your newly created “Attention” label in the list. Tap it, then make sure “Sync messages” is set to “Last 30 days” and that both “Label notifications” and “Notify for every message” are checked and active.

And that’s it: Your phone’s email notifications should now be less disruptive and more useful. Just like in step #1, you’re taking back control and dictating the terms instead of allowing your email to control you.

Rule #4: Embrace the email tools in front of you

If you’ve followed all the advice above, you’ve officially reshaped your email habits and created a solid setup for organizational success. But there’s one more step to consider: thinking through all the available tools for next-level inbox management and deciding which, if any, might make your life even easier.

These tools could be wholly new email clients with inventive systems of organization, such as the ones I covered here. They could be add-ons and adjustments to Gmail, like the series of steps I outlined for bringing some of Inbox’s best features–integrated link-saving, reminders, and message-specific notes–into the Gmail website. Or they could be easily overlooked settings within your current email client; Gmail, in particular, has no shortage of such advanced options.

And with that, the foundation is in front of you. Follow the steps and stick with the plan, and watch your inbox transform from an untameable beast into a valuable productivity tool for 2019.

In America, unless you are already wealthy, the chances of you getting rich–or even just earning enough to live securely–are slim. This year, the nonprofit think tank Economic Policy Institute found that CEO pay grew by over 17% last year, while regular worker salaries grew .3% (or, adjusted for inflation, not at all). Meanwhile, even for people with jobs, necessities like housing, healthcare, childcare, and retirement are becoming more expensive to access.

It doesn’t have to be this way: Policymakers, activists, nonprofit leaders, and researchers have simple ideas that would help working people live more comfortably. Some feel revolutionary, some are on the cusp of adoption, but all are worth considering as we try to rebuild an economy where the stock market has soared and unemployment plummeted, while people still can’t save enough to afford to pay for a medical emergency. Here are just a few concepts that could change that in the coming year and beyond.

Give a basic income to people in need

This month, the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, a pilot initiative to provide 15 black mothers in Jackson, Mississippi, with an extra $1,000 a month, distributed its first checks. The program, developed by the nonprofit Springboard to Opportunities and the Economic Security Project, which advocates for basic income, is designed to address the systemic inequities that black women of color face, which can’t be solved with just traditional employment. It’s just one of several basic income programs underway in the U.S., and more, according to the ESP co-chairs Natalie Foster, Dorian Warren, and Chris Hughes, can’t happen quickly enough. “Even with the economy nearing full employment, nearly 40% of Americans had trouble meeting their basic needs last year,” the co-chairs say in a statement to Fast Company. “This year, we advocated for providing $500 a month for the poor and middle class that was reflected in proposals put forward by several congressional leaders, including Senator Kamala Harris,” they add. “That kind of income floor would move millions out of poverty and provide much-needed economic stability to hardworking Americans.”

Help the environment and the economy

The idea of a Green New Deal, championed by representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been gaining momentum in the new Congress. The proposal calls on the government to invest in shifting the economy to 100% renewable energy, and doing so by training and hiring millions of Americans to work on clean energy projects. The Green New Deal also would provide for basic income and universal healthcare to cover people who may have to transition out of work in fossil fuel industries. The whole idea of the program is to address the country’s two most pressing concerns–climate change and inequality–in one comprehensive and mutually beneficial way.

Take a equitable approach to benefits

Around one-fifth of people in the American workforce are employed on a contract or freelance basis. Because they lack a single employer, and either manage their own employment or work through a third-party contracting agency, they often do not receive benefits like healthcare, disability leave, or paid time off. A handful of solutions this year are beginning to address this gap. SurveyMonkey became one of the first tech companies to extend benefits to people who work for them on a contract basis, such as their janitorial and cafeteria staff, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance introduced a platform, Alia, on which employers of house cleaners can pay into a mutual fund that will allow workers to secure paid time off and some insurance. While universal benefits, like healthcare (and basic income would help workers, like cleaners, who often do not earn enough to make ends meet) would be the most simple solution, these ideas at least confront the difficult economic reality for many workers, and try to make it better.

Make housing affordable to all

For many Americans, rent and housing costs far outpace the income they bring home. To Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, legislation introduced in both the Senate and the House this year has a potential to change that. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s American Housing and Economic Mobility Act would raise the tax on estates transferred between the 10,000 wealthiest families in the country to build out a fund of $45 billion annually to create and preserve affordable housing. This fund is “the first new federal housing resource that is exclusively targeted to increase the supply of housing affordable to people with the lowest incomes who face the most severe impacts of the housing crisis,” Yentel says. Warren’s bill, introduced in September, now has companion legislation in the House.

Close the salary gap between executives and workers

Bernie Sanders’s Stop Bezos Act, which he introduced this September, called for an additional tax on large companies like Amazon, whose workers earn so little that they have to rely on government assistance to get by. While the bill itself is still in limbo, Josh Hoxie of the nonprofit think tank Institute for Policy Studies calls it “the fastest political victory in recent memory” because shortly after it was introduced, Amazon raised its minimum wage to $15 per hour. (An even faster way to increase its workers’ wages would be to let them unionize, as labor unions are one of the most effective means of securing higher wages for workers.) Another, says Lenore Palladino, senior economist and policy counsel at the Roosevelt Institute, again comes from Senator Warren: Her Accountable Capitalism Act mandates that large companies give employees a say in corporate decision making. Senators Tammy Baldwin and Cory Booker also have introduced bills that would limit stock buybacks–in which companies buy back their own shares to transfer more earnings to shareholders–and instead spread corporate wealth back to workers.

Cancel the debts

The average American holds around $38,000 in personal debt, racked up over a lifetime of being confronted with things that are necessary but difficult to afford: college, healthcare, housing. From the larger economic perspective, this is not a good situation, because when people have to devote so many resources toward paying off debt, they can’t contribute to the rest of the economy. Debt is a centuries-old phenomenon, argues the economist Michael Hudson, but in ancient civilizations, people could at least count on it eventually being forgiven. In his new book,  . . . And Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure, and Redemption–From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year, Hudson describes how civilizations like Babylonia would implement Jubilee Years to forgive personal debts. “The reason was quite clear: If rulers didn’t cancel the debts, the people owning money would fall into bondage to rulers or to wealthy people, and they wouldn’t be able to pay their taxes and fees for basic services, and the whole country would fall into disarray.” Debt cancellation, Hudson says, kept ancient economies viable, and it’s an idea now that’s coming back into vogue. Around 20 House Democrats have signed a bill to eliminate student loan debt.

Tax financial transactions

In addition to the estate tax that Warren wants to raise on property and money transferred in between rich families, economist Lily Batchelder (who’s also championed the idea of an estate tax), also maintains that a .1% tax on the value of each Wall Street financial securities trade could raise a significant amount of revenue–around $777 billion over the next 10 years.

As much of a bummer as the In Memoriam section of the Oscars is, it’s an important part of the show. If you’re into spicy drama, it’s always interesting to see who the Academy might accidentally (?) leave out, infuriating so many belligerent Abe Vigoda fans. But mainly, the In Memoriam suite marks a moment in time–the changing of guards, the cultural landscape shifting beneath our feet.

Since mourning what we’ve lost is part of determining who we’ll become, let us now take stock of the year we’ve just been through. We’ll be forgoing any actual eulogies, though. You’ll have to wait for next year’s Oscars, shortly before the inevitable Paddington 2 sweep, to see those. Instead, what you’ll find here are remembrances of some of the personalities, organizations, and other cultural phenomena that reached some sort of ending in 2018–an ending that will have an impact on what 2019 looks like. These aren’t biological deaths, exactly, but rather the fading of relevance, opportunity, fiscal stability, and other intangibles into the next life.

Here are 11 things we said goodbye to over the course of this year.

Kanye’s credibility

Throughout his impressive career, Kanye West has bounced back from a lot: a traumatic jaw injury, becoming the bane of all Taylor Swift fans forever, and even tweeting in defense of Bill Cosby’s (now-officially nonexistent) innocence. Somehow, Kanye was always able to win back the fans sick of his boorish public persona, by putting out incredible music. Not this time, though.

In 2018, Kanye became an enthusiastic poster boy for the MAGA movement and made some of his most despicable “controversial” statements ever, all while putting out some truly dull and uninspiring music. (He ended up postponing his promised second LP of 2018 and pretty much nobody cared.) Perhaps somebody very close to Kanye let him know just how much damage he had done to his reputation, because he recently renounced MAGA. Unfortunately for him, it’s too late. Claiming that 400 years of slavery was a choice isn’t the same kind of “controversial” as crashing an MTV Video Awards speech. Kanye played with fire and he burned down his house. Now he can look forward to a future of regularly getting roasted by Twitter.

Roseanne’s comeback

Life comes at you pretty fast, especially if you’re Roseanne Barr in 2018. One minute you’re getting congratulated by the president for the success of your rebooted network sitcom, and the next you’re on YouTube screaming “I thought the bitch was whiiiiite!” about the black woman you called an ape, a move which resulted in a TV network canceling your sitcom. Fruit flies have flourished longer than Roseanne’s comeback. At least her former costars Sara Gilbert, John Goodman, and Laurie Metcalf are still riding the wave of her show’s success without her.

Megyn Kelly’s makeover

The initial return of Roseanne was part of an industrywide flurry of networks trying to appeal to conservative viewers in the wake of the 2016 election. It was during this foggy time that NBC swooped in to hire Megyn Kelly, newly freed from Fox News, where she was famous for things like insisting Santa is white. Although Kelly never brought the ratings NBC wanted and embarrassed the network with her Alex Jones interview, she was signed to a three-year deal worth $69 million. She was too expensive to lose, no matter how low her ratings. Well, at least until she announced that she thought blackface was okay. NBC cut ties with Kelly after that November snafu, even though the network took a bath on paying out the rest of her contract. It’s unclear where Kelly will go from here, but odds are it will be in a more Fox News-like environment.

Facebook’s fig leaf

How many times have we seen a repentant Mark Zuckerberg apologize for (some of) Facebook’s privacy-violating conduct and other dirty deeds, only to be followed by yet another bombshell New York Times report outlining how it’s all even worse than anyone suspected? In 2018, the answer was: officially too many times. At one point, Facebook could maybe get some leeway for its questionable decisions because it’s the most dominant company of its kind and is figuring things out as it goes along. After this year, however, something has changed. It’s becoming ever clearer that Facebook has acted more maliciously than carelessly in its business dealings. The company is now facing its first lawsuit from U.S. regulators, along with the fact that users are starting to drop the company. Because Facebook can’t hide its insidiousness anymore.

Digital media as we know it

Let me be clear: Digital media is not entirely dead. (You may have noticed you’re reading this on your phone instead of inside a physical magazine.) However, 2018 was a year where mass layoffs were the norm and the hottest trend was unionizing; the year we lost beloved independent publications like The Awland Rookie altogether; the year we found out that the “pivot to video” that cost hundreds if not thousands of employees their jobs may have been based on a lie. (Thanks again, Facebook.) Digital media is not dead. But it will never be the same as it used to be.

Alex Jones’s platforms

Something else that will be different about the digital landscape in 2019, as distinct from the first half of this year, is the total absence of Alex Jones and Infowars from social media, Apple podcasts, and YouTube. Anyone who thinks it’s maybe not so chill to be a Sandy Hook truther has long preferred that Jones do his dangerous conspiracy-mongering from a street corner or a Klan rally or any other platform besides the most popular (privately owned) ones on the internet. Now that he no longer enjoys those platforms, Jones appears more pathetic than dangerous, a trend set to continue in 2019.

Les Moonves’s severance package

I’ve got 120 million reasons to be glad about how former CEO Les Moonves’s exit from CBS shook out.

#MeToo momentum

Despite Moonves’s ouster and the Cosby verdict, #MeToo lost some of its power in 2018. The backlash was swift, accelerated by a poorly reported exposé on alleged sex pest Aziz Ansari. Although it didn’t kill the movement, it slowed things down. More than a year after the downfall of Harvey Weinstein, men still have a lot to lose by abusing their power, but it’s become clear that asshole men can indeed still get away with asshole behavior (Ahem, Brett Kavanaugh, ahem.) #MeToo is turning out to be not quite the bro-pocalypse the naysayers and Bari Weisses of the world feared.

Governor Cynthia Nixon

It was close. Well, not really, but closer than some detractors might have thought. But even though Cynthia Nixon didn’t win her gubernatorial race, New Yorkers can thank her for moving Cuomo to the left on, uh, certain issues. Now if he would just fix the damn subways like she wanted in the first place!

Netflix’s reluctance to cancel shows

The streamer with the reported $13 billion budget used to be famous for never canceling its shows. Weird werewolf curio Hemlock Grove stuck around for three whole seasons even though nobody watched that show whatsoever. In 2018, though, Netflix had a change of heart.

Suddenly, in 2018, sturdy performers began to look super expendable. It got rid of quirky female-driven shows like Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Lady Dynamite, along with the The Break with Michelle Wolf and Emmy-nominated American Vandal. It cut two Chuck Lorre shows (Disjointed and The Good Cop) soon after each premiered. Then there’s Netflix’s Marvel shows. First, the streamer cut its most underperforming Marvel property, Iron Fist and then the more buzzy Luke Cage. By the time it axed its most venerable Marvel series, Daredevil, many suspected Netflix was clearing the path for Marvel parent company Disney’s 2019 streaming service, Disney+. Though Jessica Jones and The Punisher are still thriving on Netflix (for now), there’s been speculation that they will likely end next year, signaling the end of the Netflix/Marvel collaboration. Although Netflix hasn’t had any trouble luring top talent to its original programming roster recently, that trend could change if creators don’t think their series will have room to grow.

Nathan For You

And speaking of shows that are no longer with us, in 2018 Comedy Central announced that Nathan Fielder is done making Nathan For You, the marketing satire that occasionally drifted into moments of existentialism and poignant beauty. As someone who recently urged TV creators not to outwear their welcome, I have to respect Fielder’s decision. However, that doesn’t mean I have to like seeing the ideas he created actually put into practice, rather than in new episodes of his show, where they belong.

René Descartes’s dog, Monsieur Grat (‘Mister Scratch’), used to accompany the 17th-century French philosopher on his ruminative walks, and was the object of his fond attention. Yet, for the most part, Descartes did not think very highly of the inner life of nonhuman animals. “The reason why animals do not speak as we do is not that they lack the organs but that they have no thoughts,” Descartes wrote in a letter in 1646.

Followers of Descartes have argued that consciousness is a uniquely human attribute, perhaps facilitated by language, that allows us to communicate and coordinate our memories, sensations and plans over time. On this view, versions of which persist in some quarters today, nonhuman animals are little more than clever automata with a toolkit of preprogrammed behaviors that respond to specific triggers.

Insects such as bees and ants are often held up as the epitome of the robotically mechanistic approach to animal nature. Scientists have long known that these creatures must possess a large behavioral repertoire in order to construct their elaborate homes, defend against intruders, and provision their young with food. Yet many still find it plausible to look at bees and ants as little more than ‘reflex machines’, lacking an internal representation of the world, or an ability to foresee even the immediate future. In the absence of external stimuli or internal triggers such as hunger, it’s believed that the insect’s mind is dark, and its brain is switched off. Insects are close to ‘philosophical zombies’: hypothetical beings that rely entirely on routines and reflexes, without any awareness.

However, there are now many signs that consciousness-like phenomena might exist not just among humans or even great apes – but that insects might have them, too. Not all of these lines of evidence are from experiments specifically designed to explore consciousness; in fact, some have lain buried in the literature for decades, even centuries, without anyone recognizing their hidden significance.

Related: Tiny houses give urban bees a place to live

Based on such evidence, several biologists (notably Eva Jablonka in Tel Aviv and Andrew Barron in Sydney), and philosophers (Peter Godfrey-Smith in Sydney and Colin Klein in Canberra) now suggest that consciousness-like phenomena might not have evolved late in our history, as we previously thought. Rather, they could be evolutionarily ancient and have arisen in the Cambrian era, around 500 million years ago.

At its evolutionary roots, we think that consciousness is an adaptation that helped to solve the problem of how moving organisms can extract meaningful information from their sense organs. In an ever-changing and only semi-predictable environment, consciousness can solve this problem more efficiently than unconscious mechanisms possibly could. It involves manifold features, but some include: a grasp of time and space; the capacity for self-recognition; foresight; emotions; and top-down processing. As the American zoologist Donald Griffin wrote in Animal Minds (1992): ‘Environmental conditions vary so much that for an animal’s brain to have programmed specifications for optimal behavior in all situations would require an impossibly lengthy instruction book.’

The symbolic language of bees

Take honeybees, who have a symbolic ‘language’ by which they can communicate about the precise coordinates of food sources in flowers. In this ‘dance language’, a successful scout bee returning from a good flower patch performs a repetitive sequence of movements in the dark hive on the vertical comb. These movements are keenly attended by other bees. The successful forager moves forward in a straight line for a few centimeters. Then she moves in a half circle to the left, back to her starting point, performs another straight run along the path of her first, and then circles to the right. The duration of the straight run tells other bees the distance to the food source (roughly one second of walking distance in the dance corresponds to a one-kilometer flight to the target). The direction of this run relative to gravity encodes the direction relative to the Sun – for example, if the run in the hive is straight up, this tells other bees to fly in the direction of the Sun (whereas ‘down’ means ‘fly in the opposite direction of the Sun’).

This discovery in 1945 earned the Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; in itself, such communication neither indicates nor requires consciousness. A decade later, however, one of von Frisch’s students, Martin Lindauer, peered into a beehive during the night and discovered that some bees advertised the locations of various foraging bonanzas they’d discovered the previous day. Before midnight, they ‘talked about’ locations visited the previous evening – and in the hours before sunrise, they discussed the locations they’d visited on the morning prior.

These bees retrieved their spatial memories entirely out of context, at a time when there was no possibility of foraging and so no immediate need for communication. The function is unclear. They might have ‘just thought’ about these locations spontaneously during the night. Or perhaps the communication is a strategy for consolidating their spatial memory. Scientists have since found that a bee’s memories of the previous day are strengthened when they are exposed to elements of these memories while in deep sleep. Perhaps bees not only think and ‘talk’, but dream?

The key implication of Lindauer’s discovery is that bees are capable of ‘offline thinking’ about spatial locations, and of linking these locations to a time of day, in the absence of an external trigger. That’s not what should happen if bees’ memories are merely prompted by environmental stimuli, combined with internal triggers such as hunger. Bees, then, appear to have at least one of the principal hallmarks of consciousness: representations of time and space.

Another elementary feature of biological consciousness is self-recognition. The ability to recognize oneself is the origin of being able to distinguish one’s self from another entity, as well as to plan, pay attention, recall memories of specific events, and take the perspective of another creature. Many animals, such as apes and corvids, display these abilities.

Related: Immune-boosting probiotics for bees

Without an elementary form of self-recognition, animals would not be capable of disentangling the sensory input arising from the external world from the one arising as a result of voluntary actions. If the image on your retina suddenly tilts by 45 degrees, you know that this is fine, as long as it’s the result of you deliberately inclining your head. But if you didn’t move your head, you might be in the middle of an earthquake, and had better run.

Animals are thought to tell the difference between these scenarios via what’s known as an ‘efference copy’: an internal signal that communicates the consequences of the animal’s own actions, so that they can distinguish sensory changes caused by their movements from changes caused by external forces. Under normal conditions, animals expect the environment to move in a predictable manner when they turn their heads voluntarily. This allows them to anticipate what will happen next, as a result of their own actions or intentions.

Amazing problem-solving skills

There is also evidence that insects have more than just a simple, internalized ‘instruction book’. Experimenters have tested this hypothesis by confronting insects with tasks that none of their evolutionary ancestors could have possibly encountered. More than 200 years ago, the blind Swiss naturalist François Huber (working with his wife Marie-Aimée Lullin and servant François Burnens) suggested that honeybees might display foresight in the construction of their honeycomb.

On one occasion, Huber’s team observed that one of several combs broke off the ceiling of the hive in winter. In the cold months, bees are usually in a quiescent state; comb construction stops, and the insects will reduce their activity to ensure that their food storage can last until spring. However, on this occasion, not only did bees become active to fortify the dislodged comb with a number of pillars and crossbeams made from wax, they also reinforced the attachment zones of all the other combs on the glass ceiling – apparently to ensure that a similar disaster wouldn’t happen again. Such foresight, should it be confirmed experimentally with modern methods and sample sizes, is one of the hallmarks of consciousness. Notably, in this case, it appears to extend well beyond just the immediate future.

In a recent study of tool use among bumblebees, the insects were required to transport a small ball to a defined location to receive a sugar reward. The bees used social learning to solve the task by watching skilled demonstrator bees: they observed that they could move one of three possible balls (the furthest one from the center) into the central reward area to obtain the reward. When later tested on their own, the observer bees did not choose the furthest ball from the center, but its closest one. They did this even when the closest ball was colored black instead of the yellow they’d been trained on. Importantly, observers had no prior experience with rolling the balls themselves (that is, no opportunity for trial-and-error learning). These results indicated that instead of simply ‘aping’ a learned technique, bumblebees spontaneously improved on the strategy used by their instructor – suggesting that they had an appreciation of the outcome of their actions (‘ball in goal’).

Related:6 lessons businesses can learn from bees

Can bees not only plan, but imagine things? They can certainly learn to associate visual patterns (such as those presented on flowers) with nectar rewards; but this doesn’t necessarily imply that they have a little image of flowers floating around in their head. A 2017 study looked at artificial neural networks, modelled on bees’ brains, which deployed two simple feature detectors – that is, two kinds of neurons, each of which is especially sensitive to lines or edges that run in a particular direction. These algorithms were capable of recognizing complex visual patterns, like a circle carved into four, with stripes running at different angles in each quadrant. So, a bee could store these complex visual patterns just by memorizing the signals from these neurons – without actually storing full images in its memory.

Bees also display optimistic and pessimistic emotional states. In such tests, bees first learned that one stimulus (such as the color blue) is linked to a sugar reward, while another (such as green) is not. They were then faced with an intermediate stimulus (in this case, turquoise). Intriguingly, they responded to this ambiguous stimulus in a ‘glass half full’, optimistic manner, if they had encountered a surprise reward (a tiny droplet of sucrose solution) on the way to the experiment. But if they had to suffer through an unexpected, adverse stimulus, they responded in a ‘glass half empty’ (pessimistic) manner.

Bugs have moods

Perhaps, then, insects don’t just have minds, but also moods. Psychotropic drugs are not just the province of humans; insects can be subject to their effects as well. Volatile anesthetics, appetite-suppressing stimulants, depressants and hallucinogens are naturally produced by various plants and fungi. These are not only accidental byproducts of their biomolecular machinery, but for their own defense in deterring herbivores. Yet they don’t always deter: it transpires that bees prefer flowers whose nectar is laced with low levels of nicotine.

The molecular biologist Galit Shohat-Ophir at Bar Ilan University in Israel and her colleagues discovered that fruit flies stressed by being deprived of mating opportunities reportedly seek out alcohol, which is widely present in nature in the form of fermented fruits. This suggests that intentional ‘sensation adjustment’, or even ‘mood adjustment’, is widespread across the animal kingdom – which strongly suggests that animals have inner experiences. It will be important to rule out alternative explanations, in which behavior is modified via direct effects on neurotransmission or the digestive system. But insect psychotropics should nonetheless be a promising avenue for future research. After all, why would an organism seek out mind-altering substances when there isn’t a mind to alter?

One objection to the hypothesis of insect consciousness is that their brains are simply too small. But at the time of writing, the biological watermark of consciousness – the so-called ‘neural correlate of consciousness’ (NCC) – has not been identified in humans. So, humans can’t make arguments on the basis that insects don’t have human-type NCC. What we can say is that insect nervous systems are anything but simple. While a bee brain has only about 1 million nerve cells, compared with around 85 billion in a human brain, some individual neurons have a complexity of branching that rivals a fully-grown oak tree. A bee brain could have a billion synapses (the connections between neurons that can be shaped by experience). In terms of the diversity of building blocks of the nervous system, even the humble fruit fly has more than 150 neuron types just in its visual system; by comparison, the human retina has fewer than 100. ‘It is indubitable that the zoologists, anatomists, and psychologists have slighted the insects,’ wrote the Nobel prizewinning neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal in his early 20th-century memoir. ‘Compared with the retina of these apparently humble representatives of life, the retina of the bird or the higher mammal appears as something coarse, rude, and deplorably elementary.’

Such top-down processes are involved in attention-like phenomena. Attention allows animals to focus specifically on important stimuli (such as a familiar flower, if you’re a bee) and disregard others (such as unfamiliar flowers). The neuroscientist Bruno van Swinderen at the University of Queensland tested this by placing bees in a virtual reality environment that they could manipulate, and then measured their brain activity. His team found neural activity patterns that corresponded to paying attention to one or another object, and also found certain brain states that preceded the bees’ selection of one or another stimulus. Any activity generated from ‘within the brain’ – that is, in the absence of or distinct from external stimulation – is of particular interest in the context of consciousness.

Significantly, van Swinderen’s team also discovered that flies have several types of brain waves, including when they are asleep. Like humans, where different neural oscillations accompany deep sleep and REM sleep, flies also have different patterns in different sleep phases. The insect brain is never ‘switched off’ – as in bees, it seems that flies also have dream-like states.

The biologist Lewis Held at Texas Tech University believes that there could be a ‘deep homology’ in apparently diverse structures across species that served common functions, such as the eye. Rather than seeing these as instances of ‘convergent evolution’, where features pop up separately, Held and others have found evidence of certain shared underlying genetic scaffolds that produce these features in their various forms. For example, we did not inherit our legs and eyes from insects, or by different modifications from a common ancestor. The common ancestor of humans and flies was an unknown legless worm of the Cambrian period. Yet both humans and flies possess a head, a thorax, an abdomen, legs, and sensory organs.

A better explanation is that we inherited the genetic modules and developmental programs that account for these features, at least in part, from a common ancestor. This observation applies to the brain as well. The anatomical and functional parallels between the ‘central complex’ of the insect brain and the ‘basal ganglia’ of vertebrates are striking, and point to a common origin. Defects in both these systems produce motor problems, impaired memory, attention deficits, emotional disorders and sleep disturbance. According to Barron and Klein, the central complex could be a likely contender for mediating subjective experience in insects.

Are insects conscious?

What about the possibility of consciousness in even simpler animals – indeed, beyond animals? In the mid-19th century, Charles Darwin wrote about not only the moral and emotional feelings of nonhuman creatures, but of their appreciation for beauty and the recruitment of that susceptibility in sexual selection. Planaria(flatworms), which do have a central nervous system, must have some form of consciousness, Darwin speculated. In The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), he went on to compare the animal brain and the plant’s ‘root radicle’ or taproot. This taproot must find its way, by some form of sampling and evaluation, to the best sources of anchorage and nourishment.

Another objection needs to be addressed before we credit too many animals, and only animals, with consciousness. This is the fact that much human behavior depends on subconscious processing, of which we are often unaware. Our actions in the world rely to a surprising extent on stimuli we haven’t consciously noticed. Moreover, the experience of ‘volition’ has been found to follow our actions after a time-lag, rather than preceding them or being simultaneous with them. Some have interpreted this to mean that consciousness has no effect on behavior and is purely ‘epiphenomenal’. Instead, maybe the brain collects and weighs current environmental stimuli and data from memory, computes the best behavioral option, and makes the choice for us by initiating an action. If consciousness is causally ineffective, the argument that animals need it for living is unavailable. Or perhaps what we need consciousness for is fully automated in them.

However, these arguments do not diminish the case for consciousness being widespread in the animal kingdom. Despite the wonders of unconscious processing, it’s obvious that no human being can nourish herself, escape predation, reproduce, engage in a social life or find the way to a new destination when she is not conscious of a world outside her own body. Although there are impressive examples of ‘blindsight’ – where subjects with a damaged visual cortex can make visual discriminations better than a mere ‘guess’ – the blind sighted are not totally unconscious. Of course, sleeping and damaged brains are not doing their usual job of collecting, weighing and computing. But there is no reason to think that consciousness could be ‘subtracted’ from a brain that’s doing its usual job successfully. It is the organism with a working brain and consciousness that normally faces the challenges of the world.

Consciousness is an evolutionary invention like wings or lungs. It is useful to us; it’s therefore most likely to be useful to other organisms with traits deeply homologous to ours. They share with us the difficulties of moving, probing the environment, remembering, predicting the future and coping with unforeseen challenges. If the same behavioral and cognitive criteria are applied as to much larger-brained vertebrates, then some insects are likely to qualify as conscious agents – with no less certainty than cats or Descartes’ dog.

This article was originally published on Aeon. Author Lars Chittka is professor of sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary University of London. His book The Mind of the Bee (2019) is forthcoming with Princeton University Press. Coauthor Catherine Wilson was most recently Anniversary Professor of philosophy at the University of York and is now Visiting Presidential Professor at CUNY Graduate Center. Her new book How to be an Epicurean (2019) is forthcoming with HarperCollins.

Snap has released an interesting report predicting what it believes will be the biggest trends across multiple industries in 2019. Called Looking Forward: Predicted Trends in 2019, the report highlights what gen-Z will be into next year based on what people have been Snapchatting about in the final months of 2018.

For those not familiar with what the demographic gen-Z encompasses, it’s people who were born between the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s–in other words, Snapchat’s primary user base. So what will be the biggest hits among them in 2019? Here’s what Snap is predicting:

Gaming

• Minecraft is predicted to continue its dominance as the most popular game for gen-Z next year. No surprise there. Also of little surprise is that the next three most popular games will be Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Red Dead Redemption 2.

Tech

• Snap says that despite investors worrying iPhone sales will stagnate, Apple’s smartphone will gain even more popularity among gen-Z in 2019.
• The company also expects Apple’s AirPod wireless earbuds to have a massive year next year, with a new model expected early in 2019.
• As for apps, Snap says the money transfer app Cash App is continuing to grow in popularity among its users–growth that shows no sign of slowing down in 2019.

Slang

• Did you only just find out what IRL means? (I did.) Get ready for some new slang from gen-Z in 2019. This includes born day (meaning a person’s birthday), YKTV (short for “you know the vibes” aka acknowledgment of a mutual feeling between two people), and, On a date, kinda nervous, which is used ironically by a person to describe spending time with someone or by themselves.

Memes

• Memes will continue to be popular in 2019, says Snap. No surprise there. However, their usage will increase when people want to call out blunders (“you had one job”) or to describe intense events and their effects on the mind (“my last brain cell”).
• Interestingly, Snap’s research suggests most gen-Zs find memes “silly” or “stupid,” but still predicts they will increase in popularity.

Music

• Snap predicts several musicians will have a very big 2019. Snap says L.A.-based rapper Blueface will have a year to be thankful for.
• Other artists who will grab attention include Cardi B, NBA YoungBoy, the recently deceased XXXTentacion, K-pop boy band BTS, and alternative pop artist Billie Eilish.

Influencers

• As for what social media influencers gen-Z will look to in 2019, YouTuber Shane Dawson will be a hit with both males and females, while women will flock to James Charles, a YouTuber who offers beauty tips and makeup tutorials.

Beauty and fashion

• And finally, Snap says in 2019, girls will go for a more “natural” look when it comes to appearance, opting for a “clean and fresh” makeup look, and more bobs.
• Vintage clothing and color-coordinated, tie-dyed, and neon clothes will also be a hit in 2019.

Another year. Another bajillion dollars invested in branding. Some of it was good. Some of it was terrible. But in an era when every rando with a Twitter account has become a vocal critic, be sure, every rebrand was a risk of some sort.

In 2018, we saw brands invest more in their own custom typefaces to seep deeper into our consciousness. We watched as a new blue wave of politicians attempted to take back the country with Hollywood panache. And we also saw a lot of sans serif branding. I mean, a lot. Here’s a look back at some of the best and worst projects from 2018.

The best

The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaign

Uber

Google

Toys “R” Us

The Weather Channel

Avengers: Infinity War

The okay

American Express

Mailchimp

The worst

BE BEST

Coca-Cola

Blanding

The secret to capturing powerful photographs of natural disasters is to combine two perspectives. [“You have] to provide a sense of scale, but also to humanize it because it’s not just about the destruction to the things, it’s about the effect on the people,” says Pancho Bernasconi, the vice president of editorial at Getty Images.

That’s something his team gained a lot of practice at that this year, as extreme events ranging from wildfires to hurricanes, winter cyclones, and earthquakes and tsunamis ravaged cities across the globe. The challenge is matched by the fact that such catastrophic events seem to be both more intense and more frequent than several years ago.

“You know, people talk about like a 500-year flood and I feel like those are happening a lot more than once every hundred years,” he says, noting that the uptick traces back certainly to Hurricanes Katrina in 2005, and then Hurricane Sandy in 2012, not to mention Harvey, Maria, and Irma in 2017.

“This is in a way business as usual, but in other ways it’s not,” adds Getty photographer Justin Sullivan, who captured particularly memorable shots of California’s tragic Carr Fire and Camp Fires, the latter of which is the state’s deadliest on record. “I’ve been covering fires probably close to 20 years, and the way they have grown now, and how fast they blow up is unlike anything I’ve seen.”

Each news photo represents a chance to maintain awareness about just how much the world is changing, how nearly everyone is vulnerable to being affected, and just how many people may still be in need. What we do with that information is up to us. Above are Bernasconi’s picks for the most memorable images of the year.

In today’s cities, inequality is embedded in concrete. The 21st century city is defined by the disparity between the rich and poor, which shapes the urban fabric itself. This year, a range of photographers trained their lenses on the modern city–capturing both stunning and horrifying images of urban dwelling in 2018.

The Rich and Poor of Silicon Valley

Inequality is certainly visible at street level in many cities, but it’s even more stark when viewed from above. Photographer Johnny Miller used a drone to expose the dramatic differences between rich and poor in places like Silicon Valley, Detroit, and Seattle, all from the air.

A portrait of eviction

A collection of photos on display at the National Building Museum this year took the opposite approach to Miller by portraying the people impacted by the housing crisis so rampant in many urban areas. Captured by photographers Michael Kienitz and Sally Ryan, the images depict the human cost of inequality through the heartbreak of being evicted.

The Luxury Condo Racket

On the opposite side of the housing spectrum, luxury condos remain a potent symbol of how many big cities have become playgrounds for the wealthy. In his series Metropole, photographer Lewis Bush tries to expose these luxe developments for the dystopian nightmare they are, using double exposures to create disorienting images of high-rises in mid-construction.

Trumps’ Atlantic City

Atlantic City, New Jersey, illustrates what happens when luxury development goes bust. A photo series by Brian Rose follows the plight of the city through the lens of Donald Trump’s failed real estate and casino ventures–a fascinating portrait of a place impacted by our president’s ineptitude. Let’s hope the rest of America doesn’t look like this when he’s through with it.

Life on Hong Kong’s Rooftops

When space is at a premium, you get creative. Photographer Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze captured the the secret communal rooftop lives of city dwellers in Hong Kong, which is one of the densest cities in the world, in his series Concrete Stories. The images reveal a slice of city life only visible from above. The series is a testament to how adept humans are at making the best of what they have.

The Copycat cities

A recent urban development trend caters to tourists who can’t visit the real thing, instead offering up new cities that look exactly like the old ones, but in a different place. In Tianducheng, China, there’s a replica city of Paris, complete with mini Eiffel tower and Versailles-style park. A photo series called Paris Syndrome by the photographer François Prost puts images of tourists and buildings in both places side by side–and you really can’t tell the difference.

The inescapable sameness of instagram

Have you ever noticed how people tend to take the same pictures of the same things, over and over? An interactive called Multiplicity by researcher and data viz artist Moritz Stefaner shows dozens of Instagrams that look nearly identical. As a result, the complex nature of urban places gets distilled digitally into just a few pervasive images–simplifying cities into just their stereotypes.

Noir Tokyo, 30 years later

Some cities look more stereotypically dystopian than others. Take Tokyo. Photographer Tom Blachford photographed the city at night for his series Nihon Noir, deliberately choosing to shoot scenes reminiscent of the 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner.

The lost secret cities of the former USSR

What does a failed techno-utopia look like? Look no further than this series by visual artist Danila Tkachenko, who documented the secret cities of the former Soviet Union and their dead buildings, satellites, and monuments. The eerie images contain echoes of today’s metropolises, defined by futuristic architecture and skyward-looking infrastructure. Perhaps our cities will look like this one day, if climate change reduces them to ruins.

As you put pen to paper–in your new bullet journal–and commit your resolutions to memory, you may be newly optimistic. In past years, you might have fallen off the wagon and lost hope. But this year, you tell yourself, will be different; you’ll start waking up earlier and working out daily.

The reality is only about 8% of Americans reportedly keep their New Year’s resolutions. So if you want 2019 to be the year your resolutions stay intact, here are some of our best tips for setting goals you can actually meet and planning ahead for when you might fall off track.

1. How I got a promotion, ran a marathon, and saved 20% of my income this year

One of the mistakes people make when writing resolutions is not being specific enough or setting unrealistic goals. Our own Anisa Purbasari Horton explains how focusing on attainable “habit goals” helped her achieve milestones that were not even resolutions–such as running a marathon.

2. The Secrets To Keeping Your New Year’s Resolutions

Another key to unlocking your goals is repetition–in other words, tricking your brain into creating a new habit. Writing down your resolution once at the beginning of the year may not do the job. Jot down your resolution daily or read it out loud every morning to keep it top of mind.

3. Four Ways To Trick Your Brain Into Keeping Your New Year’s Resolutions

This may seem simple, but visualizing what you want to accomplish helps familiarize your brain with your resolution. That way, your brain is less likely to perceive that as a “threat” to your usual routine or habits. (A vision board can help do this as well, if you’re so inclined.) The key is to start by visualizing the most difficult resolutions on your list, which will take more willpower–and brain power–than the rest.

4. Six Secrets Of People Who Keep Their New Year’s Resolutions

It’s possible you aren’t meeting resolutions because you are not tailoring your approach to your personality type. An “obliger,” for example, excels at meeting outside expectations–but not necessarily internal ones. If you need external motivation, you could recruit your friends or family to help hold you accountable, whether that means sharing your professional goals with a group of peers or finding a gym buddy.

5. This Is When Your New Year’s Resolution Will Fail

It’s safe to say you won’t meet at least one of your resolutions. In fact, about half of us reportedly throw in the towel just one month into pursuing a new resolution. But one of the best ways to keep yourself on track is to not quit, even if–or more realistically, when–you stray from your goal.

6. Why You Should Make An Anti-Resolution List (And What To Put On It)

If you have never successfully met a resolution, it could be worth reframing your goal for 2019 as an anti-resolution. Sometimes, resolutions can feel daunting because they may address what you think you should be doing, rather than what you genuinely want to be doing. An anti-resolution, on the other hand, is more likely to tackle issues you have mulled over and want to change. “Making an anti-resolution list gives you an opportunity to identify some of the ways you’ve been making your own life harder, and then use that awareness to stop doing (at least one of) those things,” personal development coach Kate Hanley told Fast Company.

7. This Entrepreneur Traded Her New Year’s Resolutions For A Yearly Mantra

So you want to scrap traditional resolutions altogether? Entrepreneur Reshma Chamberlin recommends setting an annual mantra rather than resolutions. To arrive at that mantra, Chamberlin suggests that you listen to your “inner monologue” and take stock of how you want to better yourself. “It’s not a single objective, like going to the gym every day,” she said. “Your mantra is a conscious choice to take control of your life.”

If you’re the type to start your day with bacon sandwiched between two Brown Sugar and Cinnamon Pop-Tarts (DON’T YOU JUDGE ME), followed by a pizza bagel at your desk for lunch, accompanied by a handful/bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, only to balance it all out with a healthy vegan dinner, Purple Carrot has a humble suggestion for you. Since it was founded in 2014, the vegan meal kit company has focused on offering easy-to-prepare dinner options. Now, it’s expanding to offer customers healthy options for breakfast and lunch, too.

“Our subscribers have relied on us for the past four years to provide them with healthy, convenient, delicious plant-based meals for dinner,” says Andy Levitt, the founder and CEO of Purple Carrot. “Over the past six to 12 months, we’ve been hearing more and more requests to expand our offerings to address other day parts to give people more ways to eat plant-based foods through the day.”

Purple Carrot subscribers who sign up for the “extras” can look forward to breakfast options like overnight mango chia parfait with cacao nibs, seeded avocado toast with radishes and cucumbers, and apple cinnamon overnight oats with almond butter and sunflower seeds. The lunch menu includes kale caesar salad with roasted tomatoes and whole grain croutons and chickpea mezze bowls with avocado and tart cherries.

If you’re planning to kick-start a healthy diet in 2019—or you’re part of the 600% increase in people willingly identifying as vegan in the last three years—these breakfast and lunch options could make it easy to eat a superfood-packed, plant-based diet for three meals a day (and save the Pop-Tarts for late-night snacks).

As for Purple Carrot, the addition of breakfast and lunch could be healthy for its bottom line, too. The meal-kit company says it has seen 330% growth between 2016 to 2018, and it is expecting to double it in 2019, fueled in part by the addition of these new meals.

Elon Musk has filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought against him in September by a British cave diver who sued for defamation after Musk publicly called him a “pedo guy” and “child rapist.” Musk’s lawyers claim that his “over-the-top insults are not statements of fact.” The crux of their argument is that Twitter–where Musk frequently rage-tweets and fires off petty missives–is a platform tailor-made for spats and hyperbolic statements. (Not untrue.)

The cave diver in question, Vernon Unsworth, was part of the team that rescued members of a boys’ soccer team from a cave in Thailand earlier this year. Unsworth dismissed Musk’s attempt to help with the rescue–which took the form of a mini submarine that was deemed “not practical”–as a PR stunt. Musk’s motion tries to posit that his outbursts were simply a response to Unsworth’s “indefensible and baseless attacks,” and that he was defending his companies and the employees who had “given up their days and nights” to work on the submarine.

“The public knew from the outset that Musk’s insults were not intended to be statements of fact,” the motion reads. “The reasonable reader would not have believed that Musk–without having ever met Unsworth, in the middle of a schoolyard spat on social media, and from 8,000 miles afar–was conveying that he was in possession of private knowledge that Unsworth was sexually attracted to children or engaged in sex acts with children . . . In short, the reasonable reader would distinguish Musk’s statements from those in which factual information about child sex abuse is conveyed.”

Tell that to Musk’s legion of fanboys, nearly 24 million strong on Twitter, who hang on his every word.

This morning, Instagram appeared to be rolling out–or at least testing–a new feed that could have you tapping and swiping rather than scrolling. A number of users reported seeing a horizontal feed that, like Instagram Stories, would require you to tap or swipe through posts.

The Instagram feed is a sideways swipe now pic.twitter.com/kqPsUvDQ5t

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) December 27, 2018

It looked like the new feed would display one post at a time and include a scroll bar at the top to indicate how far you have swiped. The design would presumably make it more difficult to scroll mindlessly through your Instagram feed—though countless users seem to have no problem swiping mindlessly through Instagram Stories.

In any case, you won’t have to weather a vertical feed just yet–or at all. Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri has since clarified that Instagram accidentally rolled out the test to more users than intended.

That was supposed to be a very small test that went broad by accident. Should be fixed now. If you're still seeing it simply restart the app. Happy holidays! ????

— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) December 27, 2018

Instagram’s statement: “Due to a bug, some users saw a change to the way their feed appears today. We quickly fixed the issue and feed is back to normal. We apologize for any confusion.” It’s still testing tap-to-advance with a small % of users in Explore.

— Josh Constine (@JoshConstine) December 27, 2018

But many Twitter users, as they are wont to do, had opinions on the potential change.

I know it seems awful but it is interesting to think about what a post-feed Instagram experience is like. Feeds are hell and cause us misery! Maybe the Scroll Era is ending and we’re in a Tap World now ????????????

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) December 27, 2018

NO ONE ASKED FOR THIS @instagrampic.twitter.com/VHCXrVupbr

— Paul Griffin (@PaulGriffin) December 27, 2018

Why kill the feed? In part people are tired of it on Instagram and FB (though some of this is algorithmic overkill IMHO). Also, easier and bolder ad environment = more $. Will that mean better user experience? Probably not.

— Noah (Suckers Says Steel Slats) Mallin (@NoahMallin) December 27, 2018

????instagram
|
|
| _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
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????a chronological feed option |
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ __ _ _ _|
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????making unnecessary updates

— Shahbaz Khan (@ShahbazMKhan) December 27, 2018

Instagram clearly trying to figure out what to do with the main feed now that Stories are taking over

— Alex Fitzpatrick (@AlexJamesFitz) December 27, 2018

If you started fantasizing about living in Vermont last May, when the state passed a new law offering to pay remote workers up to $10,000 to relocate, the time has come to make your maple-syrup-coated dreams a reality. Applications open on January 1.

To get a grant, remote workers will need to move to Vermont first–the program offers reimbursements, not money in advance. But for those who relocate this year and can prove that they have full-time remote jobs, it’s possible to get paid back for moving expenses, internet bills, or membership in a coworking space like Study Hall, a sunny loft with exposed brick walls in a 1890s building in downtown Burlington. The program offers up to $5,000 a year for two years.

For the state, the program is one way to try to address its shrinking population. “We’re the second-to-smallest state in the nation, and we’re also getting older, so we really need to make sure there’s more of a workforce here,” says Joan Goldstein, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Economic Development, which is running the Remote Worker Grant Program. The entire state has a population of a little more than 600,000, roughly the size of Louisville, Kentucky.

Vermont also recognized that a growing number of Americans work remotely–nearly two-thirds of companies today have remote workers, and one recent survey found that hiring managers think it will continue to become even more common–and that many city dwellers elsewhere are struggling with rent on increasingly overpriced apartments.

“If you’re into a smaller way of living–getting to know your neighbors, and being involved in your community–[Vermont] may be appealing to you,” she says. It’s also affordable. The median home value in Brattleboro, roughly two hours from Boston, is less than $200,000; a one-bedroom apartment a short walk from the local co-op (and a small coworking space) goes for $850 a month.

The state also recently launched “Stay to Stay,” a program that encourages weekend visitors to spend an extra day in Vermont to meet with local employers and real estate agents as an attempt to help find workers to fill vacant positions. The new grant for remote workers won’t go very far–the budget for 2019 is $125,000, and will be given out on a first-come, first served basis. But the fact that the program exists may convince some others to move anyway. The state heard from some people who decided to move in 2018, even though they wouldn’t be eligible for a grant, and from someone who decided to relocate his business to Vermont after seeing articles about the idea.

“We’re not going to be able to satisfy everybody because we have a limited amount of money, but I think this is a very good indicator that people are interested or would be interested in moving to Vermont, and it might have been off their radar, but this has brought it prominently to the forefront,” says Goldstein. The idea also may be inspiring others to go even further: A nonprofit in Tulsa, Oklahoma, announced in November that it would offer remote workers or entrepreneurs who try living and working there for a year $10,000 in cash, plus a free coworking membership, a discount on rent in a high-end furnished apartment, and free utilities for three months.

A new McClatchyreport says Donald Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen was indeed in Prague in the summer of 2016, the setting in which the notorious Steele dossier says Cohen met with Russian officials to talk about their collusion in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Of course the Trump people have vigorously denied the legitimacy of the dossier, and Cohen’s legal team and spokespeople have denied he ever visited Prague.

The McClatchy report cites four anonymous sources saying Cohen’s phone had connected to cell towers in the Prague area during the late summer of 2016. At the meeting, the dossier suggests, Cohen discussed with the Russians ways of hiding the Russians’ work to help the Trump campaign.

The report also says “an Eastern European intelligence agency” intercepted a call between Russian officials on which one said Cohen was in Prague, citing two anonymous sources. Special prosecutor Robert Mueller has been informed of both the cell tower pings and the eavesdropped call between Russian officials.

Cohen has already pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about Trump’s attempts to build a Trump Tower Russia, as well as to bank fraud, tax fraud, and violating campaign finance law.

A new trailer for the next episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror tech-dystopia series is up. And the next episode is special because not only is it a feature-length film, it also includes just over five hours of additional video, which will reportedly be offered to viewers as “choose-your-own-adventure” content.

Bandersnatch is set in 1984, and follows a young programmer who begins to question reality as he adapts a fantasy novel into a video game “and soon faces a mind-mangling challenge.” Check it:

The film premieres Friday, December 28, on Netflix.

Nine years ago, Unilever announced that it planned to cut its environmental footprint in half by 2020. If you look at the company’s website today, that goal has quietly been pushed back to 2030. Hundreds of other companies, cities, and countries also set key environmental goals for 2020. With only one year to go, here’s a brief look at how a few of them are faring.

194 countries: Protecting the world’s most threatened ecosystems

At a time when the world may be entering the sixth mass extinction–with a current rate of extinction more than 100 times the rate throughout geological time–we’re not doing enough to protect wild ecosystems. In 2010, 194 countries agreed to 20 conservation goals that they each planned to achieve by 2020. Most countries are making some progress; there are now many more marine protected areas, for example. But as of a 2016 report, only 5% were on track to meet their goals. In the meantime, populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians have dropped by an average of 60% since 1970.

Scotland: 100% renewable electricity

For decades, most electricity in Scotland came from coal. But the country shut down its last coal plant in 2016, and has rapidly ramped up wind power–including a new wind farm with enormous, 626-foot-high turbines that can power a house for a day in a single spin, and the world’s first floating wind farm. It’s a testing ground for tidal power that harnesses energy from ocean waves. And though it’s too early to say that Scotland will meet its ambitious goal of running on 100% renewable electricity in a little over a year, reports in 2017 suggested that it is on track.

Multiple companies: zero net deforestation

Over the last two years, the world lost an area of rain forest roughly the size of the entire country of Vietnam. That’s despite the fact that hundreds of major companies, from McDonald’s and PepsiCo to Procter & Gamble–the companies that buy ingredients, like beef and palm oil, that drive forest loss–have made commitments to get to zero net deforestation by 2020. But at the current rate of deforestation, “no sector is on track to actually achieve that goal–and likely will not,” says Shyla Raghav, climate change lead for the nonprofit Conservation International. To get to the goal, she says, will require “reducing perverse incentives, scaling green finance, increasing supply chain transparency, and strengthening governance in sourcing regions.”

IKEA: renewable energy

The flatpack furniture giant has ambitious sustainability goals–by 2030, it plans to be “climate positive,” reducing more emissions than its products and operations generate. That includes, among other things, using only renewable and recycled materials in its products, moving to electric delivery trucks, and changing the food it serves. By 2020, the company, which owns more wind turbines than any other retailer, had said it aimed to produce as much renewable energy as the total energy it consumes globally. It’s on track to meet that goal.

San Francisco: sending zero waste to landfill

In 2003, San Francisco set the goal of sending zero waste to landfill by 2020. At first, the city made progress: It was the first in the U.S. to make both recycling and composting mandatory. By 2012, 80% of waste was diverted from landfills, more than any other U.S. city. But some San Franciscans still aren’t recycling as much as they could, and some items, like disposable diapers, still have no option other than the trash. The city says that manufacturers need to redesign some products for recyclability. It’s going to miss the 2020 goal; in September, it set a new, smaller goal: to reduce waste per citizen by at least 15% by 2030.

China: cutting emissions

China is the world’s biggest polluter. But it’s also been moving quickly to change, adding a record amount of new solar power last year (installing 53 gigawatts in a year, more than has ever been installed in the U.S.), rolling out electric cars twice as fast as the U.S., and launching a new emissions trading scheme. Earlier this year, the Chinese government announced that it had reached its 2020 goal for cutting emissions three years early. There’s still a long way to go–China cut emissions per unit of GDP (46% below 2005 levels), but total emissions are still growing, and the country doesn’t plan for them to peak until 2030.

Germany: cutting emissions

Germany was an early adopter of solar power–despite its relative lack of sunshine–and in the first half of 2018, the country produced enough renewable energy to power every household for an entire year. German car companies are investing billions in electric vehicles. But despite progress, the country is likely going to miss its goal to cut emissions 40% by 2020 compared to 1990 levels. The government blamed a strong economy and population growth when it announced that it was off track earlier this year. Now it’s aiming for a target of a 55% cut by 2030.

Facebook: 100% renewable electricity

Facebook has a big carbon footprint–last year, the social network emitted 979,000 metric tons of CO2, largely driven by the energy it takes to power and cool its data centers. But it’s moving aggressively to ramp up its use of renewable energy. By 2020, the company is on track to buy as much renewable electricity as it uses globally, and cut its emissions by 75%. Google reached 100% renewable electricity in 2017, and Apple did the same in 2018.

Global goal: carbon emissions need to peak

Some companies might have chosen 2020 as a deadline because it’s a round number. But for the climate, one 2020 deadline is real. The Paris climate agreement aims to keep global warming “well below” two degrees Celsius–something that’s necessary to limit the most catastrophic effects of climate change, from the destruction of coral reefs to deadly heat waves, and to avoid irreversible tipping points like the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which holds enough ice to eventually raise sea levels by around 23 feet. There’s only a limited amount of emissions that the world can still emit before two degrees of warming is inevitable, and to get to a zero-emissions economy will take time.

To keep warming well under the two-degree threshold, scientists say, global emissions need to peak in 2020, and then start to fall. It’s a massive goal. Every coal plant in the world would need to be on the way to retirement. Deforestation would have to drastically decline. Electric vehicle sales would have to grow far faster than they are today. After a few years of global emissions remaining flat, from 2014 to 2016, they started to climb again in 2017, and rose again this year. The chances of peaking in 2020 are vanishingly small–but also staggeringly important. There’s a year left to get it right.

In 2018, the biggest proof of being a Serious Media Company That Totally Gets the Future And Is All Over It was to announce a streaming service. From the newly formed WarnerMedia to Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Quibi to, of course, Costco (!), everyone threw their hat in the ring vowing to create the next Netflix.

Why wouldn’t they? Linear TV watching remains on a steady, downhill incline. Even my mother knows what Netflix is and has become one of the 137 million people to sign up for the app. Anyone under the age of 18 spends most of their time on mobile devices. In this environment, it’s not all that hard to drum up a couple hundred million–or, if you’re Katzenberg, $1 billion–just by saying the words “streaming platform.”

Herewith is a look back at the key moments and trends that shaped the 2018 streaming arms race.

1. The Year of Anticipation 

So everyone says they’re getting into streaming and will be launching a hot new service in “late 2019”–maybe early 2020 if they can’t quite pull everything together by then. That much we’ve unanimously agreed is the right time to turn into Netflix (at which time Netflix will have somewhere north of 150 million global subscribers). What’s less clear–much less clear–is what that actually means. 

That’s because none of the streamers-to-be companies have come out and announced a cohesive strategy or plan for their services. Rather, each has slowly dripped out details over the course of several months–a tea leaf here, an executive hiring there–leaving observers and news outlets to piece things together and draw their own conclusions as to how, exactly, these apps are going to fulfill their owners’ mission of competing with behemoths like Netflix and Amazon.

Disney has been playing this game longer than anyone. It announced in August of 2017 that it was pulling its content off Netflix in 2019 and launching a new entertainment app that would be built by BAMTech, in which Disney is a majority stakeholder. It wasn’t until this past November that the service was given a name, Disney+, and a few more contours to round out the picture: Content would be divided by brand (Marvel, Disney, Pixar, Nat Geo, Star Wars) and have exclusive movies and TV shows, including a new Star Wars series starring Diego Luna as Rebel spy Cassian Andor, following his adventures leading up to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. 

WarnerMedia’s new app seems to be coming together more quickly; the company has only existed, after all, since June 2018 when AT&T acquired Time Warner and birthed the company. That said, AT&T has had since at least October 2016, when it announced its intent to buy Time Warner, to develop a streaming strategy. But it still seems to have gotten only so far as having a plan to have a plan. Since being announced last summer, all we know at this point is that it will be a three-tiered service, not unlike AT&T’s data plans; content will come from HBO, Time Warner, and Turner (which anyone could have guessed); Turner exec Kevin Reilly will be heading the content strategy; and Friends, one of the crown jewels in the WarnerMedia library, will not be exclusive to the service at launch.

Then there’s Quibi, Katzenberg’s billion-dollar, short-form, mobile platform, which promises to have 5,000 episodes of “quick bite” content in the year after its launch next year, even though at this point it’s not fully staffed. Not to mention Apple, which is sinking $1 billion into a slate of high-profile press releases announcing deals with A24 and stars like Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston. 

How much will any of these services cost? What will be exclusive to these services and when will it appear on them? How much content will actually be offered at launch? Who knows?! Those are late-2019 problems. What seems to have mattered most in 2018 was staking out ground in the increasingly crowded streaming universe and stating your intent not to be left behind in the digital revolution.

2) The year of go big or go home

The streaming game of 2018 was also defined by scale. If you’re not going to try to be as big as Netflix, why bother? This philosophy led WarnerMedia to shutter two of its niche streaming platforms not long after the AT&T and Time Warner merger: FilmStruck, the classic movie subscription app that combined films from the Turner Classic Library and the Criterion Collection; and DramaFever, a VOD service geared toward Korean dramas. The company also shuttered SuperDeluxe, Turner’s youth-focused digital media company that created short- and long-form programming for TV and social media. 

These smaller spigots had to be turned off now in order to feed content into WarnerMedia’s bigger hose–i.e., its forthcoming app–and to, as the company said in regards to SuperDeluxe, “redirect this investment back into our portfolio.”

If you’re a corporate accountant, this strategy makes perfect sense. You’re not going to compete with rivals like Amazon, Disney, and Netflix with a battalion of micro-targeted apps. FilmStruck, for example, had 100,000 subscribers. Netflix has more than 130 million.

But what is lost in this shift are passionate fan bases, the kind that are crucial to word-of-mouth and longevity as subscribers (as opposed to the types that churn through OTT subscriptions based on wanting to see and binge a new show and then cut bait until the next one). Indeed, the news that FilmStruck was closing set off an outcry of horror–and an online petition to keep it alive–among the brand’s small but vocal following. 

Will WarnerMedia be able to retain that group when it launches its new multi-tiered app next year? To do so will require threading a needle of sorts–appealing to both these niche audiences along with the bulk content buyers that are its ultimate target. In other words, WarnerMedia’s new app will have to be for lovers of both Casablanca and Harry Potter. Netflix has proven this is possible. Can WarnerMedia?

3) The Year of the Nine-Figure Show Runner

In 2018, deep-pocketed streaming companies, Netflix in particular, began directing their resources not just at big-budget TV shows, but at the people who make them.

After Netflix started this process back in 2017 with its $150 million overall deal with Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal creator Shonda Rhimes, the streamer has followed suit this year with a $300 million deal for Glee and American Horror Story showrunner Ryan Murphy and a $100 million pact with Kenya Barris, the mind behind Black-ish. 

With that, a talent arms race was underway, with even non-household-name scribes getting fat overall deals. Warner Bros. signed Jessica Jones (a Netflix series) scribe Melissa Rosenberg with an eight-figure deal. Marti Noxon, who created HBO’s Sharp Objects and has written on a number of big shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mad Men,  and Glee, got similar treatment from Netflix. 

Netflix’s motivation is to pad itself with brand-name talent, who will attract brand-name talent, who will, in turn, theoretically at least, woo subscribers. Ultimately, that’s the company’s only real mission and business. It’s also a way to deal blows to traditional media and weaken its competitors as Netflix evolves into its own television network. Rhimes and Barris were two of ABC’s biggest showrunners, and it’s not entirely coincidental that the Rhimes deal was announced just weeks after ABC’s parent company, Disney, said that it would be pulling its content off Netflix in 2019 in order to keep it for Disney+. The Ryan Murphy deal came two months after Disney agreed to acquire Fox, which had been Murphy’s home base.

The question for 2019 is: How much longer can this extravagance continue? Netflix is operating on borrowed cash, after all. At what point does spending on big names become a liability, or at least an incredibly risky game, especially given that at this point most people are tuning in to the service to watch Rhimes’ old shows, like Grey’s? The headlines generated by the deals have certainly captured the media’s attention. But will the actual shows? 

4) The year Amazon grew up 

Yes, some of the best streaming-world drama actually took the form of great programming! This was the year that Amazon proved its TV chops, or at least revived itself after a years-long, post-Transparent slump. That show, which debuted in 2014, established Amazon as a buzzworthy competitor to Netflix, along with other critically acclaimed titles like Mozart in the Jungle. But Amazon never fully leveraged its Transparent edge, nor did the show about a transgender patriarch played by Jeffrey Tambor ever reach a very broad audience despite getting awards love. (Its final season was announced earlier this year in the wake of sexual harassment allegations against Tambor.) Mozart, too, always felt like a small show embraced by cultish fans. 

Today, Transparent feels like a cocktail hour that paved the way for Amazon’s real coming-out party. Led by The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which took home eight Emmys this year, including best comedy series–a category that has long been dominated by HBO’s Veep–Amazon’s lineup this year is a deep bench of quality shows that have connected with the zeitgeist. Among them are: Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan with John Krasinski; the adaptation of the popular Gimlet podcast Homecoming, starring Julia Roberts; and the drama series A Very English Scandal, with Hugh Grant and Ben Wishaw. The only blatant miss: Matthew Weiner’s much-anticipated mini series The Romanoffs, which left viewers scratching their heads. 

When the SAG nominations were announced last week, Mrs. Maisel nabbed four; Jack Ryan received two; and King Lear, the TV movie starring Anthony Hopkins, and A Very English Scandal each garnered one. 

Expect the turnaround to accelerate under Jen Salke, the Amazon Studios head who joined the company from NBC earlier in the year. Within weeks of her appointment, Salke was reaching out to talent like Nicole Kidman and Jordan Peele to make deals. Salke is promising to do the same on the film front, which is still steadying itself in the wake of executive departures that preceded her. 

5) The Year of Netflix growing pains

Media Darling, Critics Darling, Consumer Darling, Wall Street Darling–Netflix has been all of the above for years now, or at least since the 2011 Quikster debacle (but who remembers that?)! In 2018, though, the streamer hit some stumbling blocks, the result of its ever-escalating scale as well as an identity crisis of sorts, as the company that has always prided itself on being Disruptor Numero Uno, began adopting some of the Hollywood practices that it is desperately trying to usurp. 

Case in point was the rollout of Roma, Alfonso Cuarón’s sweeping memoir of his childhood nanny that quickly emerged as a Best Picture contender following its premiere at the Venice Film Festival last August. After vowing publicly that the film would debut in theaters the same day it dropped on Netflix–as has been its policy–the company then reversed this decision and gave the film, along with a few other awards contenders, a brief exclusive run in theaters. The move revealed internal confusion at the company and raised the question: Is Netflix indeed a tech disruptor or a Hollywood sheep dressed in disruptor’s clothing? 

Then there was the bungled press rollout of Norm MacDonald Has a Show, which saw the former SNL comedian embark on a bender of gaffes–he described Louis C.K. and Roseanne as victims and then, in an attempt to recuse himself from the comments, said “You’d have to have Down’s Syndrome to not feel sorry” for those who’ve been subject to sexual misconduct. Not to mention the graceless cancellation of Michelle Wolf’s talk show: Employees of the show found out their gig was up via a Twitter post from Netflix. 

Netflix itself became embroiled in a political correctness scandal when its former head of communications, Jonathan Friedland, was fired after using the N-word in a marketing meeting. The drama was the subject of one of two lengthy pieces in the Wall Street Journal that shed light on Netflix’s “unique” company culture, which, we learned, is replete with its own, cultish lingo; endorses strenuous acts of transparency such as allowing all employees to look up how much everyone in the company earns; and has its own “churn” approach to staffing.   

But hey, the Queer Eye reboot has been fun.

Looking ahead to 2019, we say to Netflix: Better luck!

Toward the end of the Disney film Aladdin (1992), our hero’s love rival, the evil Jafar, discovers Aladdin’s secret identity and steals his magic lamp. Jafar’s wish to become the world’s most powerful sorcerer is soon granted, and he then uses his powers to banish Aladdin to the ends of the earth.

What follows next is a lingering close-up of Jafar’s body. He leans forward, fists clenched, with an almost constipated look on his face. He then explodes in uncontrollable cackles that echo across the landscape. It is an archetypical evil laugh.

Such overt displays of delight at others’ misfortune are found universally in kids’ films, and many adult thriller and horror films, too. Just think of the rapturous guffaws of the alien in the first Predator film (1987) as it is about to self-detonate, taking Arnold Schwarzenegger with it. Or Jack Nicholson’s chilling snicker in The Shining (1980). Or Wario’s manic crowing whenever Mario is defeated.

A recent essay by Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen in The Journal of Popular Culture asks what the psychology behind this evil laugh might be. Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, a communication scholar at Aarhus University in Denmark, is well-placed to provide an answer, having previously used evolutionary psychology to explain the behaviors of heroes and villains in fiction more generally.

In that work, he argued that one of the core traits a villain should show is a low “welfare trade-off” ratio: They are free riders who cheat and steal, taking from their community while contributing nothing. Such behavior is undesirable for societies today, but it would have been even more of a disaster in prehistory when the group’s very survival depended on everyone pulling their weight. As a result, Kjeldgaard-Christiansen argues, we are wired to be particularly disgusted by cheating free-riders–to the point that we can feel justified in removing them from the group, or even killing them.

However, there are degrees of villainy, and the most dangerous and despised people are those who are not only free-riders and cheats, but psychopathic sadists who perform callous acts for sheer pleasure. Sure enough, previous studies have shown that it is people matching this description whom we consider to be truly evil (since there is no other way to excuse or explain their immorality) and therefore deserving of the harshest punishments. Crucially, Kjeldgaard-Christiansen argues that a wicked laugh offers one of the clearest signs that a villain harbors such evil, gaining what Arthur Schopenhauer called “open and candid enjoyment” from others’ suffering–moreover, fiction writers know this intuitively, time and again using the malevolent cackle to identify their darkest characters.

Part of the power of the evil laugh comes from its salience, Kjeldgaard-Christiansen says: It is both highly visual and vocal (as the close-up of Jafar beautifully demonstrates) and the staccato rhythm can be particularly piercing. What’s more, laughs are hard to fake: a genuine, involuntary laugh relies on the rapid oscillation of the “intrinsic laryngeal muscles,” movements that appear to be difficult to produce by our own volition without sounding artificial. As a result, it’s generally a reliable social signal of someone’s reaction to an event, meaning that we fully trust what we are hearing. Unlike dialogue–even the kind found in a children’s film–a sadistic or malevolent laugh leaves little room for ambiguity, so there can be little doubt about the villain’s true motives.

Such laughs are also particularly chilling because they run counter to the usual prosocial function of laughter–the way it arises spontaneously during friendly chats, for example, serving to cement social bonds.

There are practical reasons, too, for the ubiquity of the evil laugh in children’s animations and early video games, Kjeldgaard-Christiansen explains. The crude graphics of the first Super Mario or Kung Fu games for Nintendo, say, meant it was very hard to evoke an emotional response in the player–but equipping the villain with an evil laugh helped to create some kind of moral conflict between good and evil that motivated the player to don a cape and beat the bad guys. “This is the only communicative gesture afforded to these vaguely anthropomorphic, pixelated opponents, and it does the job,” he notes.

There are limits to the utility of the evil laugh in storytelling, though. Kjeldgaard-Christiansen admits that its crude power would be destructive in more complex storytelling, since the display of pleasure at others’ expense would prevent viewers from looking for more subtle motivations, or the role of context and circumstance in a character’s behavior. But for stories dealing with black-and-white morality, such as those aimed at younger viewers who have not yet developed a nuanced understanding of the world, its potential to thrill is second to none.

Kjeldgaard-Christiansen’s article is certainly one of the most entertaining papers in a long time, and his psychological theories continue to be thought-provoking. It would be fun to see more experimental research on this subject–comparing the acoustic properties of laughs, for instance, to find out which sounds the most evil. But in my mind, it will always be Jafar’s.

This article, originally published on Aeon, is an adaptation of an article originally published by The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest. David Robson is a science journalist specializing in the extremes of the human brain, body, and behavior. A feature writer for the BBC, his first book is The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Stupid Mistakes and How to Avoid Them (forthcoming, 2019).

If you have blown a paycheck (or two) on the BB creams, face masks, serums, collagen ampoules, and 10-Step Korean Skincare Regime, you may have Charlotte Cho to thank. Soko Glam, the Korean beauty company she cofounded in 2012 with her husband, Dave, is at the forefront of the movement to bring Korea’s “skin-first philosophy” to the U.S. Making sure her customers are always the first to have the Next Big Thing in skincare keeps Cho busy, jetting between New York and Seoul.

Here, Cho reveals her tips and tools for getting the most out of every day.

What’s a product that you are currently in love with?

Hot Tools Professional Curling Iron. It’s only $30 bucks, but it’s the best curling iron for that effortless, beachy wave hair look. I used to get blowouts all the time, but that took up so much time, money, and energy. I taught myself how to achieve perfect beachy waves using Hot Tools, and I’ve never looked back.

What service or tool can you not live without?

I travel about one-third of the year, and oftentimes with my cofounder and husband, Dave. We can’t live without Rover.com, which gets us quick and easy access to trusted pet sitters around our neighborhood for our miniature poodle, Rambo.

What do you do with the time when you have . . .

● A free five minutes? Make myself a homemade iced matcha latte, always with oat milk.
● A free hour? Connect with someone over coffee. I try to connect with one to two people a week to catch up and form bonds.
● A whole free day? People-watch at brunch or at a café, and explore the nooks and crannies of NYC for some inspiration. Personal experiences will always provide the most creative, genuine ideas, so you have to get out there.

What’s your Off Switch?

My nighttime skincare routine, starting with the double cleanse, which involves removing all the makeup and impurities from your skin with oil- and water-based cleansers. There is something therapeutic about ending my day by wiping the stresses of the day away.

What’s your On Switch?

Jump in the shower, and then get started on my morning skincare routine.

What books are on your nightstand?

Timothy Keller, God’s Wisdom for Navigating Life. This book takes you through the Book of Proverbs, with one lesson per day. Every daily devotional is inspiring, and offers a fresh perspective on how to live my life with a deeper relationship with God.

Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last. Leadership is never taught in school, and seldom in the workplace. This book has drilled into me that empathy is at the center of being a great leader.

Dami Lee, Be Everything at Once. This cartoonist is a Korean-American, and, with witty illustrations and stories, she shares her life straddling both worlds. I completely relate to her stories, and they make me laugh out loud!

Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter. I picked up this book because she’s a gifted storyteller. My favorite quote from Maya is, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Kim Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. Another leadership book that really makes sense to me and that I’m applying as I build a team for our new skincare line, Then I Met You. You have to gain their trust first by showing you care personally, and then that’s the only time when radically candid feedback can actually work.

Where do you go to recharge and refresh?

When I want to recharge, I like to go camping with friends and family. I love being outdoors because you’re away from the hustle and bustle of the city, food always tastes better when you cook it on an open flame, and it gives my dog, Rambo, a chance to run around and enjoy some fresh air.

Gentle Monster Black Peter sunglasses ($280). Gentle Monster is an ultra-fashionable and eclectic sunglass brand from Korea that recently set up a boutique in SoHo. The Black Peters are my biggest sunglass splurge to date, but they are worth it. They protect my eyes well, keep me from squinting, and because of the unique shape and rimless exterior, I get compliments on them all the time from both men and women!

What travel tips do you swear by? 

I travel a lot to Seoul from NYC. I always choose the flight that gets me into Seoul at 6 p.m. I meet up with my team for dinner and we eat Korean BBQ and drink soju, so that I can sleep through my jet lag.

Always carry a travel-sized cleansing water on an overnight flight. There’s nothing worse than sleeping with your makeup on, or using the airplane sink water to wash your face.

It’s a no-brainer to sign up for TSA Precheck and Global Entry.

A firm rubber Lacrosse ball is my secret weapon for long flights. They’re great at releasing tension in the face and hard-to-reach places on your back.

What’s your favorite thing to eat when . . . 

● You’re in the middle of work and need a quick burst of energy? Iced matcha latte
● When you need a quick takeout lunch? Poke bowl
● When you have plenty of time to go out and eat? Korean BBQ, always with soju

What are three things you love to do when you should be working?

Binge on Korean dramas, watch The Daily Show, and doodling on paper (I doodle on everything).

What’s your necessary vice?

Scrolling through my Twitter feed during specific breaking news. Sharing a bottle of wine with my husband after a stressful day.

What song would you listen to . . .

● When you’re waking up? Eric Nam, “Hold Me”
● When you’re driving? Bruno Mars, “That’s What I Like”
● When you’re working out? BTS, “DNA”
● When you’re hard at work on a big project? Post Malone, “Congratulations”
● To get psyched for a big presentation? Dean, “D (Half Moon)”
● To mellow out at the end of the day? The Black Skirts, “Everything“