Facebook has pulled down a page that was posting information about women who appeared in the new documentary series Surviving R. Kelly.

The page—dubbed “Surviving Lies” and emblazoned with a cartoon profile image of Pinocchio—had been posting information in a purported attempt to “expose” accusers of the scandal-ridden music artist. Kelly was the subject of a scathing six-part documentary series that aired on the Lifetime network last week in which women accused him of decades of sexual abuse, predatory behavior, and pedophilia. Accusations against the singer have been the subject of media reports dating back almost two decades.

The newly created Facebook page had more than 5,000 followers as of early Monday afternoon. It included several posts that contained images and screenshots of text messages, supposedly from Kelly’s accusers, and was attracting robust discussions and fierce debates earlier in the day. “Why are these facts about #RKellys accusers being ignored?” read one post.

After an inquiry from Fast Company, the page vanished, and it was no longer available as of late Monday afternoon. A Facebook spokesperson offered the following statement:

The Page violated our Community Standards and has been removed. We do not tolerate bullying or sharing other’s private contact information and take action on content that violates our policies as soon as we’re aware.

Surviving R. Kelly brought record ratings for Lifetime, attracting some 1.9 million total viewers.

Analysts are still working through the possible causes of Apple’s stunning $5 billion guide-down of its holiday quarter revenues. Apple laid the blame on weak iPhone sales in the Chinese market during the quarter, but did not pinpoint a single cause of that shortfall.

A widely shared Wall Street Journalreport from Sunday focuses blame for the shortfall on poor sales of Apple’s new “low-cost” phone, the iPhone XR, in the Chinese market. The piece argues that because the XR sells for the equivalent of $945 U.S. dollars in China, price-conscious buyers see options in Chinese phones from the likes of Huawei and Oppo as better deals, while Chinese “status” buyers are more likely to opt for the top-of-the-line iPhone Xs and Xs Plus.

Sounds reasonable, but a new UBS analysis tells a different story, suggesting that geopolitics may have played a much larger role than originally understood. UBS’s Tim Arcuri says iPhone shipments to China fell off sharply in December after the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in Canada December 1, and as anxieties over a U.S.-Chinese trade war lingered.

Here’s Arcuri in a research note released Monday:

“According to China MIIT data, we calculate Apple shipments in China were ~9-10 million through the first two months of the [holiday 2018] quarter, thus implying that shipments in December month may have only been a couple of million units. iPhone XR was weak since launch, but this much of decline could imply some potential backlash to the Huawei event and trade issues.”

Meng is the daughter of Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei. She was arrested at the request of the U.S., which also requested her extradition. The U.S. government suspects Meng of violating rules that prohibit trade with hostile countries including Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria. The arrest came on the same night that President Trump was meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping in Buenos Aires to discuss trade. In the meeting, Trump and Xi agreed to a 90-day trade truce, but the Meng’s arrest immediately introduced uncertainty to U.S.-China standoff.

Shortly before the Buenes Aires meeting, on November 26, Trump said he did not want to delay the imposition of tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods past January 1, 2019. He also said he was considering placing a 10% tariff on Apple phones and laptops that are manufactured in China and sent back to he U.S. for sale.

A U.S. delegation is heading to China this week to further trade talks with Chinese government officials. They hope to strike a lasting compromise to head off a trade war that could be costly to both countries, and very likely to Apple.

People close to WeWork have confirmed to Fast Company that Japan’s SoftBank Corp. will invest an additional $2 billion in the shared workspace company.

The investment will be structured as a $1 billion primary investment and a $1 billion repurchase of  shares from employees and existing investors, Fast Company has learned.

As a result of the new capital, WeWork’s investors will value the company at $47 billion, up from $42 billion pre-money.

The deal, while significant, is considerably less than a $10 billion infusion WeWork and SoftBank had discussed as recently as mid-December, a person close to the company said. (News reports in October pegged the negotiations at the $20 billion level.) At one point during deal talks, SoftBank reportedly sought a controlling stake in the company. But roiling markets and economic uncertainty have hit WeWork and its largest investor. Since the beginning of December, SoftBank’s stock price has dropped nearly 20%. At the same time, a highly anticipated IPO of its Japanese telecom business has flailed, sinking over 14% on its first day as a public company–one of the worst first-day declines in Japan.

The new investment brings SoftBank’s commitment to WeWork to more than $10 billion, including investments in WeWork China, a joint venture.

People close to the company say the financing will help fuel cofounder and CEO Adam Neumann’s ambitious growth plans. Since its founding in 2010, WeWork has expanded to include some 335 locations worldwide. It has acquired at least six companies, and pushed into early childhood education through its WeGrow subsidiary. In the fourth quarter of 2018 alone the company had planned to add 100,000 desks to its workplaces.

SoftBank, the equally ambitious company that invests billions through its Vision Fund, first invested in WeWork in 2017.

“If you had lied to me and told me this was store-bought ground beef, I would have believed you.” So says my friend John as we stand in his kitchen, experimenting with the newly revamped Impossible Burger, which will begin to show up in some restaurants this week. Later this year, the plant-based burger will also be available in grocery stores for the first time.

As a longtime vegetarian, I’ve recruited John–who is serious enough about his meat that he and a group of friends buy a side of grass-fed, grass-finished beef each year from a ranch in Wyoming–to try cooking the new ground “meat.” In taste tests, Impossible says, consumers ranked the new recipe as highly as conventional ground beef; they also liked it nearly three times more than the original Impossible Burger. (Tasters did not know that they were eating plant-based meat.)

Though the original product was successful, Impossible wanted to keep experimenting “because we can,” he says. “Unlike the cow, which will never get better and better, we wanted to leverage all the technology we have so that chefs and consumers everywhere would have a product that is as delicious or maybe even a better choice than picking a burger from a cow.”

The new version, the first to be released since the burger was first sold in restaurants in 2016, has better nutrition, with less fat and sodium than the previous recipe. It has as much iron and high-quality protein as a comparable serving from an animal but fewer calories and no cholesterol.

“We’re a little tight-lipped about our IP, but it all has to do with the nearly seven and a half years we spent determining what makes meat perform, from raw to cooked, like meat,” says Lee. “Not just in terms of its taste, but how it smells, how it sizzles, ultimately even how it looks.” The startup considers itself a technology company; the new product is launching at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show.

In John’s kitchen, we start with a burger. The raw patty looks like beef. In a cast iron pan, it sounds like any burger frying. Like beef, the color changes from pink to brown as it sizzles. The finished burger has a nice sear; inside, it still looks a little rare. “It tastes right,” John says.

Impossible says that the new recipe is optimized for any dish that calls for ground beef, and can be cooked in the same way. It’s intended to be versatile enough to cook in any recipe that would use beef, from dumplings to chili. But our experiments in this area don’t go as well. John wants to try a simple Japanese curry. Alone in the pan, the ground Impossible meat cooks normally. But when John cooks it longer in broth and curry sauce, and then tastes it, he makes a face. The texture isn’t right. He’s skeptical that the meat would hold up in other dishes that have a longer cooking time; he also speculates that it might have been better if he had cooked it to well done before adding liquid instead of leaving it a little rare, as he would have cooked beef, though the foods theoretically cook in the same way. (We didn’t have time for more tests.)

For the company to achieve its goals, the versatility is important: By 2035, the startup aims to fully replace conventional meat. Americans consume around 10 billion pounds of ground beef alone each year; if consumers could be convinced to buy a plant-based version of the meat instead, it would save significant amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, water, and land.

I ask John if he would buy the meat when it shows up in stores. “If I decide to go vegetarian, yes,” he says. That’s not quite the answer that Impossible is looking for–the company wants to sell to omnivores. (John, with a freezer full of beef direct from a ranch–who rarely buys it from a store–isn’t a typical consumer.) It remains to be seen how others will react, but based on burgers alone, the current success in restaurants points to widespread adoption; right now, the company says, most customers who buy the burgers are meat eaters, not vegetarians.

“What’s incredible about this newest Impossible Burger is we actually think that it delivers everything that matters to hard-core meat eaters–the taste, the nutrition, the versatility–and it may eliminate the need for animal agriculture because it’s that good,” Lee says.

All the major TV networks, and some cable ones, have now decided to televise a Tuesday address by Donald Trump concerning border security and “the wall.” Now Democratic leadership including House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer are demanding that the networks follow Trump’s address with a rebuttal by Democrats.

The two leaders said this in a joint statement late Monday: “Now that the television networks have decided to air the president’s address, which if his past statements are any indication will be full of malice and misinformation, Democrats must immediately be given equal airtime.”

Trump’s address will air at 9 p.m. Eastern on ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN and FoxNews.

In his address from the Oval Office, Trump will likely to make a case directly to the American people for his proposed wall on the United States’s southern border. Trump’s insistence on $5 billion in funding for the wall lies at the center of the current partial government shutdown, which is entering its third week.

Pelosi and Schumer say in the statement that Trump has “the power to stop hurting the country” by ending the shutdown.  The statement continues:

“Democrats and an increasing number of Republicans in Congress have repeatedly urged the President and Leader McConnell to end the Trump Shutdown and re-open the government while Congress debates the President’s expensive and ineffective wall.”

Debate was raging Monday in journalism and media circles over whether the networks should yield to Trump’s request for live air time. Much of it was centered around a text from an unnamed TV executive, which was tweeted out by Brian Stelter:

“He calls us fake news all the time, but needs access to airwaves… If we give him the time, he’ll deliver a fact-free screed without rebuttal. And if we don’t give him the time, he’ll call every network partisan. So we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.”

The broadcast TV networks declined to grant airtime to Barack Obama in 2014 when he asked to address the country on executive actions concerning immigration policy. One of the reasons they gave was that the subject was “too partisan.” 

As usual, this week’s CES tech confab in Las Vegas is the occasion for a profusion of product announcements whose likes we won’t see until next year’s CES. There are huge honkin’ TVs, of course. And fancy PCs. And gizmos like a smart doorbell that notices when someone knocks on your door. And a bevy of unveilings involving tech giants such as Google, Samsung, and even legendary CES holdout Apple.

And then there’s IBM. The company is in Vegas to announce a new computer system of its own. But the IBM Q System One is the furthest thing possible from your next laptop. It’s the newest iteration of IBM Q, the company’s foray into quantum computing, the mind-bending technology that transcends computing architectures as we’ve known them since the middle of the 20th century.

As the “System” in Q System One indicates, the goal is to take something that began as a raw lab project and turn it into a full-fledged system that’s “stable, scalable, and more modular,” says IBM VP for Q strategy and ecosystem Bob Sutor. “And that we can use as this blueprint for how we will build more and more of them to make them available on the cloud.”

Unlike classical computing, quantum isn’t relentlessly binary; a quantum bit, or “qubit,” can be on and off at the same time and “entangled” with other qubits in complex relationships. That gives machines built with qubits the potential to someday solve computing problems at a clip far beyond that of any system that deals only in mundane ones and zeroes. The technology has a long way to go before it’s ready for full commercial deployment–and even then, it will be a tool for new kinds of industrial-strength number crunching rather than a rival for computers in their familiar form.

Still, IBM’s decision to make this announcement at the most consumery of tech conferences isn’t random. Along with giving CEO Ginni Rometty something to talk about during her CES keynote, it’s in line with past IBM efforts to introduce its research efforts to consumers early on, as it did when it turned its Watson AI into a superhuman Jeopardy contestant back in 2011.

Building a system

For all the ways in which a quantum computer diverges from computing devices in their classical form–from a 1960s IBM mainframe to your smartphone–the 20-qubit Q System One is designed to address some requirements that are pretty conventional. For instance, it incorporates firmware that monitors the health of the system and wrangles software updates. Like any computing system, it’s engineered with temperature in mind–in this case, to maintain the cryogenic state required by qubits. It also hooks into the internet, using traditional computing technology as glue to provide access to its quantum computing resources.

Even though Q System One reflects some of the elements that quantum computing will need to enter the mainstream, Sutor emphasizes that it’s still a research project. “Everybody is at the experimental phase right now,” he says. “Everybody in the world, I would say. And part of it is simply that no one has quantum computers that are ultimately powerful enough to solve brand-new problems.”

IBM’s existing quantum computing efforts have been spearheaded out of its Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York. Along with introducing the Q System One, the company is announcing that it will open an IBM Q Quantum Computation Center at another corporate facility in Poughkeepsie, about 45 miles to the north. “Poughkeepsie is a really historic IBM site,” says Sutor. “It was started in 1941; there was an old cannon company and we took it over to do some manufacturing. And then through the years it became the center of our design and manufacturing for the mainframes . . . And so to be bringing IBM quantum computers back to Poughkeepsie is a very nice looping back into our history.”

Given that Q System One is still very much an experiment rather than a mature commercial offering, you might wonder if IBM is getting ahead of itself by pouring resources into the design aspect. But Wisnieff says that this too connects the project to IBM’s legacy, which has included caring about design for decades.

“It’s hearkening back to the 1960s and Thomas J. Watson Jr.’s [vision] of ‘good design is good business,'” he says. “We want people, when they look at this, to know that we’re entering a new era within quantum computing.”

It’s the software

As with any computer, the Q System One is ultimately only as interesting as the tasks human beings can accomplish with the software it runs. Quantum is such an epoch-shifting departure from existing computer science that IBM formed the Q Network, an alliance that teams its scientists with those at big companies, startups, and research institutions to explore the technology’s applications in fields ranging from financial services to chemistry.

At CES, IBM is announcing new members of the Q Network: ExxonMobil, Europe’s CERN research lab, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Each brings a different perspective to quantum computing’s opportunities and challenges.

“To provide affordable, scalable, reliable energy requires every discipline of science and every discipline of engineering to integrate together to solve these problems,” says Vijay Swarup, VP of research and development at ExxonMobil. “And what underpins a lot of the solutions is computational capabilities.” The potential for quantum computing to accomplish tasks impossible with conventional computers–such as modelling molecules down to the last detail–could help the energy company with next-generation challenges such as waylaying and storing waste CO2 from power plants before it enters the atmosphere, a process known as carbon capture. “We are optimistic that quantum can provide us with insights that we’ve just not been able to garner with traditional computing,” says Swarup.

How soon could a machine such as a descendant of today’s Q System One deliver enough quantum-enabled computational muscle to enable such insights? Swarup cheerfully admits that he doesn’t know. But part of the purpose of ExxonMobil participating in the Q Network is developing enough understanding of the technology’s possibilities to have an informed opinion of where it’s going and when it’ll get there.

“It’s impossible to handicap if you’re not working on it,” he says.

The human species is hurtling toward extinction. It’s not a matter of if. It’s when.

So suggests MoMA senior curator of architecture and design Paola Antonelli in the forthcoming exhibit Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival. The show, which headlines the XXII Triennale di Milano this spring and promises to be the most significant design exhibit of the year, has two tantalizing theses: Design can help prolong human survival, and, when that fails, design can help us cope with the end. “We’re proceeding faster than many other species that have become extinct,” Antonelli says. “I don’t see any other possibility.”

If that sounds unfathomably bleak, welcome to 2019. In a groundbreaking study last year, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that our current pace of greenhouse gas emissions could lead to mass food shortages, wildfires, and the decimation of coral reefs by 2040, with damage costing an estimated $54 trillion.

Make no mistake: The moral imperative falls to leaders in governments, institutions, and corporations to enact radical policy changes. But design plays a role in helping the public understand, and embrace, complex solutions. More immediately, Antonelli says, design can inspire people to mount pressure on those in positions of authority, before it’s too late and all that’s left to do is pick the wood grain on our collective coffin.

Fast Company: Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival is such a provocative title. Is the suggestion that design can fix what humans have wrought or that we’re nearing the end and we might as well make it as beautiful as possible?

Paola Antonelli: There was a recent article in the New York Times, asking: Would human extinction be such a bad thing? Personally I believe that we will become extinct, and I also believe that we need to design a better, more elegant ending.

It is frankly a fact of nature. Everything extinguishes itself sooner or later. Usually, it happens over thousands of years. We’re proceeding faster than many other species that have become extinct. We are particularly good at becoming extinct much faster than anything else. I don’t see any other possibility. Our sense of omnipotence and our sense that the universe revolves around us and we will last forever is very misguided.

So [hopefully] the next species will remember us with a little more respect and tenderness and maybe will incorporate part of us in the future of the planet and the universe. No matter what, whether we become extinct or not, we have a responsibility. We have to think of our legacy. And we have to be empathetic beings in the universe. Design can help us do that.

FC: Can you give me a sense for what that looks like, designing the end? Why do we need to design the end?

PA: If you knew when you would die, you would probably want to make it count. If you knew it would happen at a certain time. First you would have anger and despair. But then, you would probably try to make it so that even the end means something. It’s quite natural to want to go out with some elegance and want to be remembered in a positive way. Every human being thinks about their legacy.

FC: You’ve commissioned some remarkable projects for Broken Nature: melanin used at architectural scale (by Neri Oxman), electronic waste rethought of as a new material (by Formafantasma), an investigation of birds in Syria. What is the through-line between these ideas?

PA: The through-line is trying to repair the threads that connect us to nature, to communities, to empathy. There are two main ideas: One is the attempt to bring about this concept of restorative design. Restorative design already exists in landscape architecture, but it’s very much about agro-biodiversity. Instead I would like to bring it back to the original idea of restaurants. Restaurants were born in 18th-century France, as places you would go after you had eaten too much rich food. You would go to drink bouillon and restore your health. It’s only afterward that they became places for pleasure and conviviality. But this idea of cleansing and restoring, and moving on to a new, different type of pleasure, is something I would like to show in the exhibition. I think we have already gone past the bouillon and chicory moment. We can have that pleasure, but we can be more mindful and responsible.

The other idea is the concept of reparations by design. It’s the Anthropocene. We have truly acted with arrogance as colonizers. We have enslaved nature, other humans, and animals. We have behaved with irresponsible narcissism. So we should pay reparations. We should try to restore and give back, and reposition ourselves in the universe. When we damage nature, we damage ourselves.

FC: Can you give examples that illustrate this idea of paying reparations?

PA: There are two in completely different areas of the world: One is Futurefarmers by Amy Franceschini. She has a project in which a sailboat goes from Oslo to Istanbul, and it carries artists and bread bakers and activists and philosophers and carries wheat seeds that are indigenous to those different places. It’s about trying to bring back these original breeds of seeds and to also bring with them that tradition. It’s a beautiful journey by sea of biodiversity.

Another project is Totomoxtale in Mexico by Fernando Laposse. He uses the husks of corn to create new materials, and he does so by harnessing the craftsmanship of the people who grow corn breeds in different parts of Mexico. He’s also trying to help local populations revert to the indigenous breeds of corn that are maybe yielding less each year, because so much indigenous corn has been substituted by genetically modified breeds that yield more each year. Ultimately, it’s about empathy, and a love of the land and the communities.

FC: Do you have a favorite project or object in the show?

PA: There’s one project, it’s actually not design, it’s photography. But it stands as a symbol of the whole exhibition. There is a photographer called Laura Aguilar. I saw her photographs a year and a month ago in an article in the New Yorker, and I was so moved. It’s the Grounded series. You see self-portraits of this body, her own body, in nature, and there’s such sympathy and empathy between her and nature, and such love. So I reached out to meet her, and she just died, like a week before. I had no idea. She was in her 50s. Right now, I’m struggling to get the work. I’m thinking, I will just have to go to L.A. and get it. It is just so beautiful. It moves me, as art should.

FC: How is the show itself designed?

PA: The exhibit starts in a very factual way. You start by entering a room of information design, where you get the facts. NASA has this website, Images of Change, that shows before and after images of different territories around the world. It’s so effective. We’re going to have these images of change on big screens. And then we’re collecting data sets now, to show people change has happened–it’s not an invention, things are moving at a very fast pace.

Then you enter a cosmic section, which shows what our futures could be, and what our past has been. So there’s going to be a work by Daisy Ginsburg together with Christina Agapakis that brings back the scent of extinct flowers.

From there, you’ll go into the every day. So you move slowly to the Ruby Cup [an eco-conscious alternative to tampons] to characters made of trash in Cape Town, South Africa–very mundane works. Then you go back to a systemic view of reality, in which you see work by [the Dutch studio] Formafantasma, which is designed to make people realize that trash is not trash, but a material. So it has an atmospheric beginning, and then a back-to-reality mode, then at the end–empathy is the way forward. So Laura Aguilar, if I can get the print, will be at the end.

FC: There are projects from all over the world. Why is it important to have global representation?

PA: One of the factors that has held us back, especially in the northern hemisphere and Western world, is our self-centeredness. In a moment of scarcity of resources, we could really learn from places where resources have been scarce all the time. I’m in my mid-50s, and I was lucky enough to have a grandmother born in 1899 and a series of aunts and uncles that went through the first war and especially the second world war, and to this, I make chicken broth with the bones after we had wings. I still have that in me. It’s invaluable. I still have sweaters from 35 years ago. There’s something that comes from an education of scarcity, even though I’ve never been poor. But I’ve had that education from people who went through the war. It’s incredibly important. What makes a world first or third? Is it just money or is it wisdom? And who’s richer in that case?

FC: How much power do you think design really has to effect change and alter people’s behavior?

PA: Design has a lot of power that is still untapped and unexplored. There are many different types of designers. They all have influence on our behavior. Some have fundamental, earth-shattering influence, like the designers behind apps and electronic appliances and the interfaces we use all the time. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. That’s design of the system but also the interface. Other designers might have less effect, but they all act under different pressure points under the great acupuncture system of human life.

This is something I first thought of when I did [the MoMA exhibit] Design and the Elastic Mind in 2008. It was an exhibition about design and science. What I realized was that big revolutions might happen in science and technology and politics, but designers take these big revolutions, and they transform them into life. So by making microwave ovens, by giving the internet windows and buttons, [these technologies] can be used by everyone. Designers take these momentous changes, and they bring them to people.

Nobody has complete power, not science, not politics, not design, but it is the interaction and collaboration between all of these systems that is crucial. Design is the enzyme of progress. It makes the metabolism of scientific and technological revolutions happen.

FC: I’m curious if you can put the exhibit into the larger political context we’re in right now, here in the states but also in Europe–this refusal to tackle any environmental and social challenges head on.

PA: I’ve been trying to make sense of this kind of risky, dangerous, tragic situation that the concept of democracy is in right now. There’s this kind of entrenchment and feeling on the part of some governments that it’s me-first–America, England–and that goes completely against the kind of collaboration needed to counter a destructive path. Instead of being empathetic and collaborative, many governments are separating and being protectionists, and it’s hard to understand why. It’s also a chain reaction: One starts, the most important in the world, and the others go with it. If you are thinking only of yourself, then why should I think of others? It really is an incredible force that is pulling us in the wrong direction.

The citizens are the only ones who can do something. Right now, citizens are much more aware than governments are. I am hoping that [in Broken Nature], they will find inspiration and ideas for how to change their behaviors in their everyday life, and, bottom up, pressure institutions and governments and corporations to come to agreements in legislation that will help us move forward. It has to be a groundswell.

Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survivalwill run March 1 to September 1, 2019 in Milan. It’s curated by Paola Antonelli with Ala Tannir, Laura Maeran, and Erica Petrillo.

When it comes to online dating, Elie Seidman knows what makes people swipe right. As CEO of Tinder, the innovative digital matchmaking app, he has helped thousands of people make a connection and, for better or worse, reinvented the dating world along the way. After taking over the company from founder Sean Rad in January 2018, Seidman, who previously ran dating site OkCupid, has helped grow Tinder into a global brand and digital innovation leader.

Here, he reveals his tips and tools for getting the most out of every day.

Having kids has made me an early riser. My day begins at 5 a.m. On a good morning, I’ll go to Equinox and do a core workout inspired by training I took at David Kirsch‘s gym when I lived in New York. Then I’ll swim. I’m a coffee aficionado, and when I get home, I’ll make Blue Bottle pour-over coffee while listening to NPR.

Before heading into the office, I like to put together priorities for the day: the things that must be done today, and work out how they ladder up into the rest of the week/month/year’s priorities. Doing this ensures that my schedule doesn’t control me, because I’m mindful of the big picture.

What’s your off switch? 

Since I’m an early riser, I also tend to end the day on the early side. Many mornings, I’m out of the house before my wife and kids are up, so I make a point of getting home for dinner most nights of the week, and I’ll put my kids to bed. My wife and I will catch up over a Cabernet. My mother is French, so my appreciation of wine started early.

I watch very little television and end all screen time a few hours before going to sleep. I love books and like to read fiction to wind down. A great book pulls my mind somewhere else.

What books are on your nightstand? 

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This book is ultimately about the role of luck in life. It made me think about the magic of randomness and reminds me to be appreciative and grateful. We often attribute too much control over our own destiny, when in fact so much is related to luck. Correlation is frequently mistaken for causation.

The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy by Bill Walsh

This is, in my opinion, the best book on leadership by far. It’s by a football coach, but it’s not actually about football. The core idea is the results are symptoms and you need to manage the process. If you are successful in managing the process, the symptom (or result) takes care of itself. For so much of what we do, it’s how good the team is and how well it works together. The results are a symptom of that team cohesion.

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World by Lucette Lagnado

My mother grew up in France, but she was born in Egypt. This book is about the world her parents lived in. It’s a beautiful and sad story about the joys of living. It’s about the beauty of day-to-day life. This book has deeply impacted me. It reminds me to be present every day. I spend very little time thinking about what my life will be in 5, 10, or 15 years. Your life is essentially your days; so if you want a good life, focus on having good days.

I love gadgets. Honestly, there are so many things I could talk about here. I have an analog IWC Big Pilot watch. I’ve had it for 15 years, and I don’t see a need to get anything else. The 1987 Toyota FJ60 Land Cruiser. It’s a classic for a reason. The 1980s Mercedes 300 TD is an indestructible car with an engine known for easily going a million miles. A headphone amp with vacuum tubes. The sound produced from vacuum tubes is entirely unique. And paper and pen. Nothing will ever improve upon it.

As CBD morphs from niche to mainstream, the onslaught of new products containing the compound proves relentless. Every day brings another body lotion, beverage, gumdrop, even wine–each claiming to offer relaxing and pain-relieving benefits. It’s hard to keep track (or make sense of it all), which is why two former Goop directors built an online marketplace solely devoted to the trendy cannabis compound.

“Despite the fact that cannabis (and CBD, specifically) is taking center stage in the health and wellness industries, the retail space is fragmented, the experiences are clunky and unsophisticated,” explains Lewis in an email to Fast Company, “there is not great education on what the various products do, where they were sourced–are they safe, clean, tested–and how to use them.”

The cofounders believe that, despite the influx of new brands, women are sorely underserved by the cannabis industry. While progress is being made, many still feel restricted by the legacy stigma stamped on the once-outlawed ingredient. But the opportunity is there: The Cannabis Consumers Coalition (CCC) found that, nowadays, women consume cannabis as frequently as men.

With a female-focused platform, explains Schroeder, they can speak directly to the “MVP of consumers about cannabis in terms that feel relevant to their life and needs, and deliver an experience that specifically addresses how she thinks and shops.”

There’s also a heavy focus on female pain relief with products spanning calming oils to medicinal patches. A collection of starter kits tackle four separate issues: sleep, anxiety, period pain, and skincare woes.

Fleur Marché joins similar CBD retailers, such as Poplar, which curates an assortment of vetted, independently tested CBD products. Mainstream retailers also dipped into the market: Sephora now carries Lord Jones CBD body lotion and KUSH CBD-oil based mascara. The cofounders are less concerned about the latter, believing there’s more promise in building a devoted niche audience.

“We have a great opportunity to be the real authority in this space,” says Schroeder.

Last month, President Trump signed the 2018 Farm Bill, which now permits all states to legally produce hemp. Such advancements point to greater growth in the hemp-based CBD industry, and Fleur Marché intends to capture the incoming audience–albeit, women with discretionary income.

“I think we’re just scratching the surface of how brands will incorporate it into different kinds of products,” says Lewis. “The more we can spread the word about that, the more we can normalize it, the bigger this thing becomes.”

It’s a known and perhaps depressing fact that Amazon knows a lot about us. The company’s many tentacles have become a ubiquitous part of our lives. And the Jeff Bezos-founded company is only trying to become bigger. Digital advertising is one of the burgeoning businesses Amazon is pushing hard for. Already, it’s become a multibillion-dollar business, but it’s still nowhere near as powerful as Google and Facebook. Amazon, however, has an idea about how to convince more brands to use its ad offerings: free samples.

According to Axios, Amazon has been partnering with select brands and letting them send people free samples. Essentially, Amazon’s robust data on its users is figuring out who would be more likely to buy a certain product. If someone fits that mold, they may end up randomly receiving a package from Amazon showcasing the item. The program works like this, according to Axios: “Samples of new products are sent to customers selected using machine learning based on Amazon’s data about consumer habits.”

Amazon on its website describes samples as “like Amazon’s product recommendations, but real, so you can try, smell, feel, and taste the latest products.” While it’s fun to get a free sample from Costco, this certainly raises some privacy red flags. Though the packages come from Amazon, the program works by matching brands with unknowing users’ data. There is a way to opt out on the Amazon site from receiving samples; this latest report, however, notes that new users are automatically opted in.

I reached out to Amazon for comment about this sample program and will update if I hear back.

Though small, this is one way for Amazon to prove to advertisers it has an edge on Google and Facebook. And if any company has the capital to pilot a free sample program at scale, it’s Amazon. Still, the past year has proven that ad platforms running rampant can produce unfavorable outcomes. Free samples may be the lead up, but when the triopoly happens, what’s next?

As politicians spar over the government shutdown, more Americans are being impacted. National parks are languishing and thousands of federal employees are not being paid–all in the name of a wall.

If things don’t change soon, the crisis will become even more disastrous. Airport security, for instance, will likely be significantly hindered. TSA employees up until now have received paychecks, but if a budget deal isn’t reached by this Friday they will miss their first check. TSA spokesperson Michael Bilello told Bloomberg, “If we go past Friday without a paycheck, that will be the first missed paycheck. Now we’re talking about a completely different environment.”

Already, things have been hectic for the agency. Hundreds of TSA employees have reportedly already called in sick. This was all in anticipation of being forced to work without the promise of timely compensation. But once that first paycheck is missed, this problem is only going to get worse. And with fewer TSA workers at airports, it’s likely that security will have to become more lax. Currently, to make up for the staff shortages, the agency is implementing an emergency program that moves officers to different airports in need, reports Bloomberg. If things get dire, it’s unclear how the agency will keep up.

Federal employees are hoping that a budget can be passed sooner rather than later. But as the bitter political fight continues, it’s unclear if President Trump will allow for any compromise. Tonight he’ll give an address to the nation, which could provide some clarity but is more likely to make things even more divisive.

For now, we’re left with the bitter irony that a government shutdown caused by a supposedly attempt to enforce better border security measures is almost certainly making our country unsafer.

Editor’s Note: This story is part of our special New Year’s package “Your Future Self,” click here to read the full series. 

There are some widely accepted practices that can help you reach your goals this year:

• Be clear and specific about what you want to achieve and why.
• Set S.M.A.R.T. goals. Be sure that your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
• Recruit the people and assemble the resources you need to succeed.

But there is another factor that has an impact on how we can best set and achieve our goals: Our personality types.

“There’s quite a bit of research about the relationship or association between personality and habit and behavior change,” says organizational psychologist Kenneth Nowack, president and chief research officer at Envisia Learning, a change and performance management firm, and co-author of Clueless: Coaching People Who Just Don’t Get It. Personality plays a role in goal achievement from the first thoughts through seeing through the initial vision. Here are five ways your personality impacts your ability to achieve your goals:

Getting started

For some hard-charging, Type-A individuals, finding and committing to a goal isn’t the problem–it’s reining them in to ensure that what they’ve chosen is reasonable, says goal-setting expert and motivational speaker Juanita McDowell. This type selects challenging goals, Nowack adds. They’re competing and looking for opportunities to stretch.

More laid-back personalities may not be as driven about their goals, but it doesn’t mean they’re lazy, Nowack says. For this personality type, smaller, more specific goals that allow them to feel comfortable and collect some “wins” will be important to get started.

McDowell uses her own relationship as an illustration. “You can’t take someone like my husband and then expect to have the same goal setting and execution that you would see out of me. He is someone who wants to research every stage of the game. You give him a goal, he’s got to research the heck out of it before he even accepts it as a goal. And then he breaks it down to 10 pieces, where I would want to break it down into five,” she says.

Goal types

Nowack says that the differences between assertive, outgoing go-getters and laid-back, analytical types is also reflected in the types of goals at which each tends to be more adept. The former personality type tends to do better with performance-based goals. They like competition, so they look at their targets in terms of whether or not they’re likely to achieve them.

Their Type-B counterparts tend to prefer learning-based goals. “It’s not so much about competition with others. It’s more about their own intrinsic motivation to want to learn. So really big difference in the type of goals that are set there,” Nowack says.

Resources and support

Personality type may also affect the types of resources you choose to achieve your goals. The hard-driving goal-achievers are more likely to use apps, which allow them to track their progress, Nowack says. They also like gamification, which appeals to their competitive nature. They may have high levels of social support and feel less stress in going after their goals.

Those who approach their goals in a less frenetic way may find other ways of tracking their progress in more informal ways, he adds. They may seek out more personalized peer support or counsel in achieving their goals rather than reaching out to a wide social network.

It’s important to understand the support you need so that you can best set yourself up for success, says career coach Allison Task, author of Personal (R)evolution: How to be Happy, Change Your Life, and Do that Thing You’ve Always Wanted to Do. But accountability can make a big difference in goal achievement. Whether you have a big or small circle of people supporting you, be sure you pick out an individual or a small group to whom you are regularly accountable for your progress, she says.

Adaptability

Another area where more aggressive achievers have trouble is letting go of a goal or pivoting when it’s a bad fit, Task says. They may be overly focused on a career goal that isn’t working out. Instead of pivoting, they’re going to try to see it through. Or they let one goal take over their lives until it hurts other areas necessary for balance, such as relationships or self-care, Task says. When goals create imbalance, it’s time for them to change.

At the same time, Nowack cites research that finds that sometimes it’s healthier to back off of a goal than to see it through if it’s not working. But, at the same time, his own research found that having a Plan B from the outset tends to undermine achievement. A healthy level of commitment to the primary goal is necessary to see it through, he says. The key is to find the balance between adjusting to what a realistic goal is for you and allowing yourself to adapt if it ultimately turns out to be the wrong choice.

Staying the course

How you stay motivated over time also has to do with your personality type, Task says. When she has clients who are excitable, they may underestimate the challenges ahead and get discouraged. Or if they’re indecisive or lack confidence, they may have trouble getting started. Understanding these traits can help them chart their course accordingly, perhaps breaking down the goal into appropriate steps based on their enthusiasm or boldness, she says.

Anchoring–creating a clear picture of their reason for achieving the goal and having a physical or visual reminder of it nearby–can also be helpful to most personality types to help them get through the challenging parts of goal achievement.

For high-intensity goal-setters, focusing on what’s left to do to accomplish the goals–the home stretch–is useful. These achievers crave crossing the finish line, so focusing on the remaining tasks can be an effective way to get them there, Nowack says. But, for the more mellow people, focusing on what’s been accomplished–celebrating the wins–is typically a more effective way of helping them stay motivated.

Of course, most people fall somewhere on a continuum between very aggressive and easygoing types, Nowack says. So, experimenting with what works for you can help you achieve what you’ve set out to do.

This is the LG Signature OLED TV R. The “R” stands for its rollable screen, a 3-millimeter OLED panel that rises from a thin rectangular volume at its base. It’s a technical marvel, but it also solves a big problem with televisions: they tend to be eyesores when they’re off.

But that changes with LG’s new rollable TV, which the company introduced yesterday at CES 2019 in Las Vegas. Rather than having to devote space to the screen somewhere in your living room, the display panel simply emerges from a discrete but pretty white aluminum volume that also houses the audio system. When you need the TV, just turn it on and it quickly unrolls right in front of you. Turn it off and it disappears. No more dead screen ugliness in your living room.

This brand-new form factor is even more useful than a conventional TV, since LG also designed three “display modes” that take advantage of its rollable display. The first mode only raises the screen a few inches, enough to show information tiles like the time, weather, news, or music track information if you’re using Airplay 2 or Alexa to stream songs. A second mode gives you a way to play ultra-wide-ratio films like Star Wars or 2001: A Space Odyssey without the black bars on the top or the bottom. And finally, a third mode will give you the 16:9 aspect ratio needed for regular TV, movies, and series.

It reminds me of Dieter Rams’s classic Hi-Fi gadgets, like the Braun SK55 vinyl player, the Braun LE1 speaker, or the Braun L60 sound system, since it reflects his principles of good design: the rollable screen is innovative technology, and makes the product more useful than existing TVs. The aesthetics couldn’t be more beautifully simple. It’s unobtrusive and honest to the last detail–as little design as possible. As far as quality goes, “it’s impressive,” according to my colleague, Tom’s Guide editor Mark Spoonauer, who saw it in person in a hotel suite at an LG special CES presentation. As you’d expect from LG–which has led in TVs over the past few years thanks to its OLED panels–the 4K resolution reportedly looks gorgeous in action. The audio unit itself is a 100-watt Dolby Atmos sound system that does 5.1 virtual surround, enough to drive your neighbors crazy, and has Alexa and Google Assistant built in.

The TV will be available in the second half of 2019, and while it doesn’t have a price yet, Spoonauer says it will be LG’s most expensive unit, so you can expect it to cost well over $20,000. But eventually, this kind of technology will likely be available for everyone at a low price–just like every other gadget that debuted at an astronomical price.

Early in the morning of November 8 in Paradise, California, Mark Mesku got a call from his daughter. “She said, ‘Dad, you got to get out. The whole town’s on fire.'” Mesku looked outside, saw the sky filled with smoke, and shouted for his wife. After grabbing a few belongings, they got in their cars. “Three hours of pure darkness is what it took us to get out from our home,” he says. “The sky was pure black, except for the trees and cars that were burning up and exploding right next to us.” When they got to the main road–the only route out of Paradise–the other cars wouldn’t let them merge into traffic. Mesku had to force his truck onto the road, and let his wife merge in front. They later learned that cars behind them on the side road had burned.

They survived, and during the exodus Mesku even managed to rescue a woman whose car caught on fire. But their house was destroyed, and their neighbors were killed in the fire. Emotionally, Mesku says, he and his wife can’t go back to Paradise, where they had lived for 15 years. “I look at it as a graveyard,” he says. It also isn’t practical to go back now. The toxic aftermath of the fire will take time to clean up. The town’s infrastructure is gone, and with roughly 14,000 homes destroyed, so is the tax base. Mesku’s business, a dental lab, was destroyed, and the dentists that he worked with no longer have patients. Even the trees in his yard–40 massive Ponderosa pines–present an insurmountable obstacle, because taking down each damaged tree would cost $2,000 apiece, totaling more than the value of the land. Mesku and his wife had to move. In late December, they found a home in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

The fire that destroyed Paradise was the most destructive in California history. But it’s an example of the kind of event that is becoming more likely as climate change intensifies disasters. And the Mesku family’s move is an example of the kind of forced relocation that will also become more common in the wake of hurricanes, wildfires, or slower-moving disasters like sea level rise.

After Hurricane Maria, thousands of Puerto Ricans moved to Florida. In Arizona, where extreme heat in Phoenix killed a record 172 people in 2017, so many people are moving north from Phoenix to Flagstaff that Flagstaff residents joke about building a wall to keep them out. In Louisiana, the federal government is paying to relocate an entire community from an island that is slowly sinking underwater. In Alaska, as the permafrost melts and water rises, villages are relocating. By the end of the century, around 13 million Americans may be displaced by sea level rise alone; globally, that number may be around 2 billion.

Miami Beach is spending millions to raise roads and install pumps and other infrastructure. But because of the local geography–with neighborhoods built on a bed of limestone that lets groundwater up through Swiss cheese-like holes–it’s possible that the problem can’t be engineered away. “I think Miami will have to be basically abandoned before the end of this century,” Pilkey says. One study estimated that around 2.5 million people will leave the area around Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach, with many potentially ending up in inland cities nearby, like Orlando or Atlanta.

In the meantime, the area is beginning to experience so-called climate gentrification. Some investors are starting to buy property in lower-income neighborhoods that are on slightly higher ground, like Little Haiti–a historically black neighborhood in Miami where property values have risen steeply in the last few years. At the same time, some other low-income neighborhoods in the city, like Shorecrest, are already experiencing chronic flooding, and, unlike richer communities like Miami Beach, don’t have the same level of resources to try to deal with the water’s impact by installing pumps or other expensive infrastructure.

Poorer communities elsewhere will also be hit hardest, including parts of southern Louisiana or coastal Maryland or New Jersey where the poverty rate is high and there’s a risk of chronic flooding. As property values drop from the flooding and the local tax base erodes, cities will struggle to be able to afford to build infrastructure to adapt. Those who can least afford to move may also be most likely to be stuck in neighborhoods that can’t mitigate damage. The Mesku family was able to leave Paradise because they had good insurance; some others in the community didn’t.

“It’s a huge challenge in our economy that we have a lot of people who are essentially too poor to move to where the jobs are, which in this country has been largely in urban areas where people can’t afford to move,” says Jesse Keenan, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design who studies adaptation to climate change. “Climate change is going to make the problem much more profound. What I’m concerned with and other people are concerned with is not necessarily where people are going to move, but who’s going to be trapped.”

For those who can leave, no destination is immune from the effects of climate change. Some parts of the U.S. will be hardest hit economically, particularly the Southeast, but the whole country is beginning to see negative impacts. In the Albuquerque area, where the Mesku family moved, the risk of severe drought is increasing. In the Pacific Northwest, a region that is often cited as one of the places that will be less impacted by global warming, wildfires are incurring record costs and smoke is starting to impact local economies. In Seattle, where most people don’t have air conditioning, there was a record-breaking heat wave in 2017 and again in 2018. In Madison, Wisconsin, record rainfall, a problem that is also linked to climate change, caused widespread flooding in August 2018. In Maine, as the ocean warms and acidifies, fisheries and the lobster industry could collapse. In Canada, a heat wave in Quebec in July 2018 was linked to more than 90 deaths. San Francisco hit a record 106 degrees in September and then in November went through 13 days of dangerous air quality as smoke from the Camp Fire blew into the area. As many as 13,000 properties in the Bay Area are at risk of chronic flooding by 2045.

The same thing is true globally–while some regions will be hardest hit, there’s no real escape. Last June, temperatures in Iran and Pakistan soared above 129 degrees. As climate change continues, one study suggests that parts of the Middle East and North Africa will suffer heat waves so intense that they could become uninhabitable. Indonesia is sinking as the sea level rises, making disasters like the 2018 tsunami deadlier. As sea level rise increases flooding and threatens freshwater supplies in some island nations, they could be uninhabitable by the middle of the century. But even regions like inland Sweden, which might seem relatively safe from the worst effects of climate change, are already experiencing some impacts; last summer, after a heat wave and drought, wildfires raged across the country, including areas north of the Arctic Circle.

In India, drought in some areas has forced millions of farmers to move, while others have fled flooding. In Bangladesh, sea level rise, worsening storms, and declines in crop productivity may displace nearly 20 million people by 2050; in South Asia as a whole, that number could be 40 million. In sub-Saharan Africa, a lack of rain for crops in some areas could displace 86 million people. In Latin America, threats to farming could drive 17 million climate migrants to cities. While much migration many happen within borders, climate change will also contribute to the refugee crisis and that, in, turn, could contribute to the rise of nationalism as other countries react against the influx of new residents. In some areas, it already is–the beginning of the conflict in Syria was linked to climate change, and many of the migrants currently fleeing Central America are being driven out because of the impacts of drought on agriculture. As rainfall drops farther in the future in countries like Honduras, and disasters like tropical storms increase, more people will be forced to move.

Adaptive infrastructure could help residents, at least in some places, have a better chance of staying in place. “Our perspective is that the best way to deal with this issue is to make investments in climate resilience,” says Francesco Femio, CEO of The Center for Climate and Security, which studies the security risks of climate change. The cities and countries where climate migrants are most likely to move can also begin to prepare to handle swelling populations.

It’s also important to note that the worst impacts are not yet inevitable. Since the industrial revolution, we’ve burned enough coal, oil, and gas to pump more than 400 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, driving up the global average temperature more than 1 degree Celsius. The last time that CO2 levels were this high, 3 million years ago, it led to camels living in the Arctic. There’s no doubt that global warming already underway will impact where people live. But if emissions drop–and if we reach net zero emissions by the middle of the century–it will make a radical difference. In Miami, for example, if emissions continue in a business-as-usual scenario, 146,000 homes will be at risk of chronic flooding by the end of the century. If emissions are cut enough to limit global warming to around 2 degrees, only 6,500 homes will be at risk. Cutting emissions could also dramatically reduce other impacts like drought and wildfire risk.

“A recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made it clear in stark terms that in order to avoid the most severe climate impacts, we need to reduce our emissions drastically within the next 10 to 15 years,” says Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Doing so could spare over 4.1 million Americans–including nearly 2 million Floridians–from having to confront the difficult choice of whether to stay and cope with disruptive flooding or whether to move.”

Yesterday AT&T rolled out a software update to its Android phones that changed the 4G logo to a 5G logo, claiming its current service is now “5G.” However, those phones on AT&T’s network weren’t actually suddenly 5G-enabled and running on the next-generation network. The move was just an incredibly shady and misleading branding tactic, as ArsTechnica pointed out. And the internet was having none of it. On Twitter, the hashtag #fake5G quickly spread.

But some of AT&T’s rivals also jumped on the shaming wagon. Our favorite was T-Mobile’s snarky reply on Twitter:

didn’t realize it was this easy, brb updating pic.twitter.com/dCmnd6lspH

— T-Mobile (@TMobile) January 7, 2019

But another rival thought a more serious reply was needed. Without mentioning AT&T by name, Verizon’s chief technology officer Kyle Malady penned a blog post on the company’s site titled, “When we say ‘5G,’ we mean 5G.” In it, Malady wrote:

Verizon is making this commitment today: We won’t take an old phone and just change the software to turn the 4 in the status bar into a 5. We will not call our 4G network a 5G network if customers don’t experience a performance or capability upgrade that only 5G can deliver.

Doing so would break an enduring and simple promise we’ve made to our customers: That each new wireless generation makes new things possible…

We lead by example. And we challenge our competitors, vendors and partners to join us. People need a clear, consistent and simple understanding of 5G so they are able to compare services, plans and products, without having to maneuver through marketing double-speak or technical specifications.

Our industry knows 5G will change the world. Let’s uphold that promise, while maintaining our integrity. The success of the 5G technological revolution must be measured in truth and fact, not marketing hype.

Here’s hoping AT&T will revert all those 5G logos to 4G so its end-users aren’t duped into thinking they have something they don’t.

Shortly before Christmas, Adam Neumann, CEO of WeWork, was about to sign a deal that would have changed everything for him and his company. His largest financial backer, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, was prepared to give him enough money to fuel not only WeWork’s ongoing and massive growth plans, but also to buy out all his other existing investors. The numbers on the table ranged as high as $20 billion, at a valuation that hovered close to $50 billion. With one signature, Neumann would have unprecedented freedom as an entrepreneur to build out his most ambitious plans for his company.

Then Son called with bad news.

Just as both sides were preparing to close the deal, December’s market turmoil clobbered SoftBank’s stock–down 20% since late November. The highly anticipated IPO of its Japanese telecom unit was pummeled 14% on its first day of trading. (SoftBank is a conglomerate that includes a variety of tech holdings and the VisionFund, a $100 billion investment arm.)

Son “called me,” Neumann recalls, in an interview on Monday with Fast Company. “He said, ‘We’re partners. What should we do?'” Son told him that the deal SoftBank and WeWork had spent months negotiating was no longer viable.

It was a blow, but those inside WeWork who worked closely with Neumann on the deal say that, almost immediately, he returned to the negotiating table. “It took a day for Adam to recover,” says one source who was close to the negotiations.

Working around the clock, through the holidays into early January, WeWork and SoftBank hammered out a revised deal, announced this week, for $2 billion of new capital at a $47 billion valuation. WeWork now has more than $10 billion of funding from SoftBank and close to $7 billion on its balance sheet.

While the numbers are still eye-popping, for WeWork the reduced deal terms raise questions for a company that has fueled much of its growth from its ability to raise and spend billions. For the first three quarters of 2018, it generated $1.25 billion in revenues but lost $1.22 billion.

The company, which will turn nine this year, hasn’t yet weathered a real economic downturn of the kind that economists are predicting for 2019 and 2020. One telltale sign: WeWork says that leasing prices in all but two cities it operates in are declining.

Still, Neumann insists that nothing will throw WeWork off pace. The company maintains that lower lease prices are good for WeWork’s business, and softening markets could open new opportunities. “When 2019 comes and if the world goes into a real downturn, the one thing you are not going to see us do is be afraid or slow down or take less risks,” he says. He spoke to me by videoconference from his office in Los Angeles, sporting a black T-shirt that said “Creator.” He wore a cast on one of his fingers–he busted it last week surfing an 18-foot wave in Hawaii with surfer Laird Hamilton. “For me, a downturn is not scary. It’s an opportunity,” Neumann says.

This week at an internal annual conference, the WeWork Global Summit, he will announce a major corporate and strategic shift. Going forward, the company will no longer be called WeWork but rather The We Company. The new structure is part of Neumann’s heady ambition to push the company’s market and opportunity beyond commercial real estate. Rather than just renting desks, the company aims to encompass all aspects of people’s lives, in both physical and digital worlds, he says.

The We Company will be comprised of three main business units: WeWork, its main office business; WeLive, a fledgling residential unit; and WeGrow, a still evolving business that currently includes an elementary school and a coding academy. Although the company could not provide specifics, it says plans are in the works to build out its residential and education units this year. Also coming in 2019 are more acquisitions and new hires. The company aims to add 1,000 engineers.

Moving beyond office space, Neumann says, has always been a part of the plan. Recently he and his cofounder Miguel McKelvey found a old pitch deck they put together six months before starting WeWork. It dates back to 2009, and on it they mapped out plans for everything from WeSleep to WeSail to WeBank. Now, Neumann says, the company is in a position financially and logistically to execute on these ambitions. When asked about WeBank, Neumann confirms, “It’s coming,” but he declines to offer specifics.

Now, starting 2019 flush with cash and brio, the pressure on WeWork and Neumann is mounting. Can the company live up to its $47 billion valuation? Can it survive a real economic downturn or a more restrictive environment for cheap capital?

Neumann says he and his team thrive under pressure. “Do you know how long it takes a diamond to be created?” he asks me. “Half a million to 4 million years. I love that analogy: to make something very precious, you have to apply a lot of pressure.”

In Stockholm, the advertising company Clear Channel owns more than 1,000 digital kiosks serving an endless loop of ads to citizens. It’s the sort of high-tech urban installation we wish might do more than just sell us things. And beginning in November of last year, Clear Channel partnered with the city to give these signs new purpose: to offer homeless people directions to the nearest shelter on particularly cold nights.

“It started with us asking, ‘How can we use our screens, our technology, and infrastructure to do something good?'” recounts David Klagsbrun, head of communications at Clear Channel Scandinavia, in an interview with Co.Design. By taking an inventory of its reach, Clear Channel realized it had informational screens, “in the street, in the city centers, in the subway systems–and that’s actually where this other group of people spends their whole lives. It’s where they reside,” says Klagsbrun.

In conversations with the city and local organizations, Clear Channel spotted a promising opportunity. When temperatures drop below 19°F in the city, all sorts of organizations from churches to community centers open their doors as part of an agreement to support at-risk populations on cold nights.

“From what we gathered, most homeless people in Stockholm know where there are shelters, but during these emergencies, they don’t know where the new ones will be, and the new ones fill up quickly,” says Klagsbrun. It’s exactly the sort of scenario a digital billboard, full of dynamic information, can respond to perfectly.

With the help of nonprofits, the company identified 53 billboards within inner Stockholm that were close to many homeless people. On cold nights, these billboards play two regular ad loops, with one ad slot in each replaced with a public service announcement. (These PSAs are displayed pro bono, with Clear Channel collecting no revenue for them. Klagsburn called them “forfeited revenue.”) The first loop displays the nearest open shelter. And the second loop displays information for volunteers, including items most needed for donation, from coats to toothpaste.

So how is the initiative working out? “We don’t have a reference, but having talked to people who staff the shelters and have been our partners in this, they say there’s a lot of new faces coming into the shelters they haven’t seen before,” says Klagsbrun. “And more pertinently, there are more volunteers and necessities donated than previous years.” In other words, the ads can not only serve homeless people directly; they can mobilize a city of citizens to be more responsive to their needs.

Clear Channel intends on running a more complete audit when the initiative runs its first cycle at the end of January. “What we’re going to do in February is evaluate it–has it been appreciated, has it been successful?” says Klagsbrun. “If it’s been proven to be both, there’s nothing stopping us from expanding this to other cities in northern Europe.”

As reality in tech-heavy economies blends further into an unending choose-your-own adventure episode of Black Mirror, the biggest, creepiest innovation may be the big data economy built on the back of the black mirror in your hand. It’s not just Google and Facebook and Amazon and the rest of Silicon Valley sucking up our digital exhaust: A vast array of companies are increasingly capturing information about your every move for profit, and in ways that can adversely and quietly impact you.

Even Sheryl Connelly, Ford’s generally optimistic futurist, is worried about what’s to come. Between surging economic inequality, a yawning digital divide, and persistent privacy violations, she says, “it’s a very 1984 moment, and you have to wonder when the other shoe will drop.”

In many countries, there is little legal framework surrounding the collection and potential abuse of personal data. Last year, just a few months after Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal exploded, Europe began to grapple with new rules surrounding data collection through its new General Data Privacy Regulation, or GDPR. Shortly after that, California passed the nation’s most far-reaching data privacy law, set to go into effect in 2020.

The new laws were important victories for personal privacy in a year that was otherwise marred by tech industry scandals, blunders, and all kinds of reminders of innovation’s creepy side. Here are a few recent developments worth keeping an eye on this year.

Face recognition: Airports, stores, casinos, and an untold number of other places are using facial recognition, even in real time, to search for suspicious people with the help of massive and obscure databases. Australia is launching a national face scanning system, and in China, facial recognition technology is catching criminals as they sip brews at a beer festival. In December, as Amazon continued to face criticism for the sale of its Rekognition service, one of the most prominent call for regulations came from one of its AI competitors. Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, wrote, “We don’t believe that the world will be best served by a commercial race to the bottom, with tech companies forced to choose between social responsibility and market success.”

Affect recognition. So-called affect recognition software isn’t just being used to evaluate job candidates: Police are increasingly turning to AI-based systems to determine whether a person is a risk based on their facial gestures and their voice, in what some experts have described as a modern-day version of physiognomy.

Related:The 60 dumbest moments in tech in 2018

Digital humans. Lil Michaela, who charmed the world when her account first arrived on Instagram, was just the beginning. Now we have simulated TV news anchors and assistants like Google’s Duplex, which is capable of making phone calls to restaurants and hair stylists on a user’s behalf. The humanness of Duplex was so uncanny that many accused Google of fakery; when Fast Company tried the service, it seemed to work as advertised. While simulated people are being proposed for customer service and similar jobs, they also risk exacerbating an environment where living humans can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality.

Digital fakes. As with digital people, the technology surrounding deepfakes—videos intended to trick viewers into thinking someone said or did (or danced) something they didn’t—has recently given way to new techniques, like deep video portraits and near photo-realistic simulations of physical places. While experts wage battle against advanced digital fakery, backed by agencies like DARPA, some are also raising alarms about the prospect of a much less sophisticated kind of attack: the spread of fake data and fraudulent documents.

Meanwhile, ride-hail drivers and other algorithmically-guided workers are confronted by a similarly crucial question, writes Alex Rosenblat, the author of Uberland: ‘Given that Uber treats its workers as “consumers” of “algorithmic technology,” and promotes them as self-employed entrepreneurs, a thorny, uncharted, and uncomfortable question must be answered: If you use an app to go to work, should society consider you a consumer, an entrepreneur, or a worker?’

Workplace monitoring. Companies have been able to track employees’ locations and conversations for years, but the tracking is getting more invasive, and closer to workers’ bodies. Last year, Amazon received a patent for a wristband that uses haptic feedback to correct employees when they may be about to do something wrong. Still others are deploying sensors around offices to track movement and space utilization.

Home surveillance. Smart home gadgets boomed in 2018, bringing more cameras and facial recognition technology into the home. Facebook launched Portal, Google expanded its Home Hub line, and Amazon launched its smart doorbell service Ring as part of its aggressive push into our homes. (Last week, the company said that more than 100 million devices with Alexa on board have been sold.) We were already concerned about Alexa’s ability to pick up on people’s conversations, but now the company is headed toward integrating facial recognition technology into its devices, which the ACLU said portended a “dangerous future.” Of course, it’s not just Apple, Google, and Amazon reaching deeper into our homes: Our smart TVs are watching us, too.

Related:Get ready for the “splinternet”: The web might not be worldwide much longer

Genetic abuse. Genome editing using tools like CRISPR promises incredible improvements to human health, but they also raise incredible medical and ethical questions that threaten to overshadow their potential benefits. In October, a Chinese researcher announced he had used CRISPR to create new human babies whose future offspring would be resistant to the AIDS virus. That led to widespread condemnation by the global research community—germline gene editing and the implantation of embryos into a human mother’s womb are illegal in many countries—but the research was a reminder that the tools for genetic modification are spreading, and could spread significant risks to ecosystems in the process. In 2017, we spoke with CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna about the threats that worried her most.

Genetic testing. As the DNA testing market has exploded—expected to increase to $310 million by 2022—concerns have grown about the unexpected uses and abuses of genetic data. Many consumers don’t realize that the genetic data they get from DNA testing companies may be shared with an array of third-parties like pharmaceutical companies, a detail that is buried inside ever-hard-to-read privacy policies. The companies have insisted that they only share anonymous data with users’ consent, but regulators may not be convinced: In June, Fast Company reported that the Federal Trade Commission was investigating some of the DNA testing companies, possibly over privacy concerns. Meanwhile, DNA sites are also an appetizing target for hackers, raising the uncomfortable prospect of an Equifax-like leak of your genetic information.

Related:7 digital privacy tools you need to be using now

As the public and privacy advocates call for more control over how companies collect their data, and more legal protections develop, another glimmer of hope has emerged from the tech companies themselves: Through protests and letters, workers are increasingly holding their employers accountable for their behavior and the risks of the products they sell. Without strong rules in place, it may be the people building creepy technology who are best positioned to keep it from getting dangerous.

Last week, social media was ablaze with memes about Netflix’s Bird Box, an honestly pretty bad movie that features Sandra Bullock yelling at little children and writhing while blindfolded in a stupid post-apocalyptic world. Then news hit that a lot of people were watching the movie. Netflix, in fact, said that more than 45 million accounts watched it–which is truly astonishing, although Netflix provided little context.

Now new data from Nielsen reveals the unusual consumption patterns behind this bizarre (and, again, bad!) movie. According to the data, Bird Box had an average-minute viewership of 24.2 million in the United States in its first seven days. By the end of the first 10 days, that statistic hit over 36 million.

The new data comes from Nielsen’s SVOD Content Ratings, a service it launched in 2017 in an attempt to shed light on viewership on streaming platforms.

Interestingly, Nielsen says Bird Box didn’t hit fever pitch until a few days after its release. Only 3.5 million viewers watched it the first day it was available. Nielsen helpfully compares it to another Netflix film, Bright, which saw a reach of 5.4 million viewers on its first day. But as Bird Box‘s big week went on, more people tuned in. By day eight, says Nielsen, Bird Box received its highest average-minute viewership for the day of 3.9 million. And before then, the daily viewing metrics had been incrementally going up.

What happened? During the first week of its release, Bird Box quickly became a meme. Many people made fun of it, and others began participating in a “challenge” (which, mind you, Netflix helped spur). The movie had become the butt of internet jokes, but that made people… want to watch it.

And the numbers clearly show this. As conversation became more prominent online–be it positive or negative–more people became curious and turned on Netflix. Google Trends shows that an uptick in people began searching “bird box” on December 20, the day before its release. Then it went viral, with online searches getting higher and higher and then peaking on the 29th. December 28 was the day Nielsen says Netflix had the most average-minute viewers.

Meanwhile, the viewer demographics were also interesting. According to these new numbers, the viewership skewed generally toward younger people–the highest concentration (36%) of viewers were between the ages of 18 and 36. Moreover, 46% of the viewers were either Hispanic or African American, and 57% of the total viewers were female.

It’s easy to create potentially misleading narratives based on this data, but given the high proportion of young people, it’s pretty easy to surmise that a lot of the viewers were likely hooked in because of the digital hype. Given that there was a general consensus by reviewers that the movie was bad, and the fact that it took a few days for it to really take off–concurrently with the online memes and jokes–it seems what we have here is a viral internet phenomenon.

Netflix seems to know how to craft these moments that feel spontaneous and insider-y. The company capitalized on the online conversation associated with Stranger Things to make it an even bigger deal than it originally was. And it seemed to have the inklings that this movie, too, despite (or perhaps because of) its badness would also create a unique internet moment.

Whatever the case, the data sure is interesting. And perhaps it’s giving rise to a new formula: If you know your movie is bad, just make it into a meme and the eyeballs will follow anyway.

In 1963, the industrial design legend Dieter Rams was just beginning his three-decade run as Braun’s chief designer. He wanted to surprise his wife Ingeborg with a gift. So in what certainly sounds like a slight abuse of power, he collaborated with the leather companies behind Braun’s shaver cases to produce a one-of-a-kind purse for her.

The project began when a close friend of Dieter Rams reached out, and told Tsatsas the origin story of the private bag. “No one except the members of the Dieter Rams Foundation knew about the existence of the handbag,” Esther says. Taken by the “timelessness, paired with a perfect balance between the minimalist exterior and the sophisticated and somehow feminine interior,” Tsatsas worked closely with Rams himself, discussing “every single step” with him and his team. The updates to the design were minor–the most aggressive of which was that Tsatsas added a detachable shoulder strap to give the piece more flexibility in day-to-day life.

“As you can imagine, as a perfectionist for sure he also checked the final version and approved it,” says Esther. Each bag is produced in a traditional leather working shop in Offenbach, Germany. If you’d like to acquire a 931 for yourself, the bag is available now for $1,030. You can order it through the Tsatsas website.