Sorry, moon-landing truthers, but when Neil Armstrong took his famous steps on the lunar surface, he left some evidence. Now, as Space.com reports, a group is working to preserve his tracks, as well as those of the other 11 astronauts who walked on the moon during six separate Apollo moon missions (which may have inspired one of the greatest songs the Police ever wrote).

The group, called For All Moonkind (naturally), is working with space agencies around this planet to draw up a protection plan for the lunar landing sites. For All Moonkind hopes their plan, which is based on UNESCO’s protection for sites of cultural and natural significance here on Earth, will preserve the lunar landing sites and golf ranges that were left on the moon from the Apollo missions between 1969 to 1972. They aim to present the plan to the United Nations in the summer of 2018, before any of those Google LunarX prize companies land on the moon and start tromping through the historic sites.

[Via Space.com]

Back in May, Google said at its Google I/O developer conference that it would follow Amazon in enabling voice-activated phone calling on its smart speaker product. Well, it took a few months, but the service is going live for all Google Home owners over the next week, Google says. It is a cool, and potentially sticky, feature.

Google Home owners will be able to voice-call anybody on their contact list who lives in the U.S. or Canada. They can also call U.S. or Canadian businesses, Google said. The person on the other end of the call will see “Unknown” or “No Caller ID.” Google says by the end of the year it’ll make it possible for your own mobile number to be displayed.

Interestingly, the service does not support emergency 911 calls, which seems like a useful thing. We’ll have more to say about Google Home voice calling after we try it out later today.

Movie lovers rejoiced yesterday over the news that MoviePass would let subscribers watch up to 365 movies a year for a monthly fee of $9.95–less than the cost of a movie ticket in most markets. Since every party needs its pooper, AMC Theatres just announced that it is “consulting with its attorneys” on how to rain on the parade to see if they can block MoviePass subscribers from using their pass at AMC Theatres, which is the largest movie theater operator in the United States.

AMC’s concerns seem … weird. In their press release, they focused on the fact that MoviePass’s business model isn’t viable: “From what we can tell, by definition and absent some other form of other compensation, MoviePass will be losing money on every subscriber seeing two movies or more in a month.”

While AMC loses nothing on this deal, as MoviePass pays them the full ticket price, they are worried that the program “sets up consumers for ultimate disappointment down the road” and they wouldn’t want moviegoers to be sad (except when watching Manchester by the Sea or thinking about the money they wasted on The Emoji Movie). Don’t worry, AMC. If MoviePass tanks, we’ll all just stay home and watch Netflix.

A few years ago, as a food industry entrepreneur in Chicago, Gary Lazarski started to notice something that bothered him. “My office back in 2010 was in the Loop; there were a bunch of different lunch places around there, and every sandwich and every salad you bought would have these tomatoes on them,” Lazarski tells Fast Company. “They were terrible. You’d see people sitting on a park bench, and without fail, they all do the same thing: Open up the sandwich, look at that sad, orange disk, peel it off like it was a dirty sock, and throw it out.”

We all do it, Lazarski says; when a tomato is subpar, mealy-textured, and weak-colored, we don’t think of throwing it away as wasting food, but rather as salvaging an otherwise acceptable sandwich. But why, Lazarski wondered, could Chicago, a great food city, not equip its lunch options with tomatoes that actually tasted good?

They pulled together around a dozen investors and $11 million to develop a greenhouse built with Royal Pride Holland’s glasshouse and hydroponic technology, where they would, once launched as MightyVine in August 2015, grow both cherry and large slicing tomatoes. In the Midwest, land-grown tomatoes enjoy just a brief season, from midsummer to early fall. The best tomatoes are those that are plucked at peak ripeness and delivered fresh, but the tomatoes populating grocery store shelves in Chicago through the winter have been plucked prematurely to survive a long trip cross-country from warmer climates. MightyVine, with Lazarski as CEO, can grow and ship ripe tomatoes year-round; the produce is grown without pesticides, and the tomatoes can linger on the vine until they’re ready to be plucked. Lazarski knew the operation would fill a void in the Midwestern produce scene, but they needed land to be able to pull it off.

Rochelle was a city that was poised, in the years leading up to the recession of 2008, for great economic growth, as it sat at the intersection of a number of roads that fanned out into other Midwestern economic centers like Chicago and Milwaukee. When Lazarski put out an RFP to the state of Illinois, seeking a place to site a 15-acre tomato greenhouse, he learned about a parcel that had been bought up by CenterPoint Properties, which intended to build a network of warehouses on the site. They built one, then the recession hit, and they abandoned the plans and sold the property back to its original owner, a local farmer. “You hear a lot of talk about shovel-ready projects around the recession,” Lazarski says. “This was literally shovel ready–CenterPoint had already stripped the topsoil off and run roads, water, and electricity out to the site.”

Because it was already treated for development, the land could not be farmed. When Lazarski and Murphy approached the farmer who owned the property, and explained their idea–to build a greenhouse on top of the wasted land–he was immediately on board; the farmer is now an investor and board member for MightyVine.

Since October 2015, when MightyVine collected its first harvest, it’s been growing continuously. At first, only half of the greenhouse was being used, but the company, in response to demand, brought the other 7.5 acres into production this January. In a given week, MightyVine will harvest and deliver around 120,000 pounds of tomatoes. The approval of well-known chefs like Frontera’s Rick Bayless, who told Modern Farmer that he hasn’t been “so excited about a local product in a long time,” has contributed to MightyVine’s growth.

While indoor vertical farming companies like Bowery and AeroFarms are perfecting automated, data driven hydroponic models that consistently deliver large quantities of leafy greens with minimal labor, tomatoes, Lazarski says, are a more difficult product. “With lettuce, you have to get the nutrient mixture and the lighting down, but once that’s set, they will pretty much grow on their own,” Lazarski says. Tomatoes require constant pruning; there’s a lot of fussing that has to occur around a vine to ensure it grows correctly. “Until someone invents a robot that can gauge which leaves to pluck off and when, there’s going to be a strong human element in tomato growing,” Lazarski says. MightyVine has hired and trained around 80 local people, who have taken to the working conditions, Lazarksi says: The greenhouse is consistently 70 degrees, and because the tomatoes are grown in standardized hydroponic structures, they’re plucked at waist height, negating the need for injury-inducing stooping.

In order to be able to pay their workers a good living wage and benefits, Lazarski says the tomatoes are priced at a premium; while standard tomatoes retail for around $1.24 per pound, MightyVine products sell between $2.99 and $3.99 per pound. “But what we found is if you offer people a good tomato, they’re willing to pay for it,” Lazarski says. Local high-end grocery stores consistently sell the tomatoes (Local Foods, Lazarski’s and Murphy’s original venture, oversees the distribution of the produce), and some of Chicago’s most prominent restaurateurs are sourcing from MightyVine. While Lazarski cannot testify to the fate of the tomatoes once they reach people’s plates, one can only assume that they land in the trash at a much lower frequency than their pale orange competitors.

Can’t say we didn’t see this coming. President Trump tweeted today that he’s ending his American Manufacturing Council and Strategic and Policy Forum. The move comes after a number of CEOs this week quit the council over Trump’s refusal to explicitly denounce white supremacist groups. Trump did denounce such groups in a prepared speech on Monday, but at an off-the-cuff press conference on Tuesday, he doubled and tripled down on his argument that “many sides” were to blame for this weekend’s violence and unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Most recently, the CEOs of 3M and Campbell Soup both said they were leaving the council, and more than a dozen more were on the brink, according to CNBC. Trump, you might recall, campaigned on his strengths as a businessman and frequently promised to restore the manufacturing sector to its former luster.

Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both. Thank you all!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 16, 2017

Bill Gates’s latest effort to make people understand global philanthropy, and more eager to participate in it, takes the form of “Mosquito Wars,” a letter with an accompanying one-question quiz for readers to learn more about the great progress and continued challenges in the ongoing battle against malaria, a mosquito-borne disease.

“Malaria has terrorized humankind for thousands of years, but for most of that time, we had no idea what caused it,” Gates writes in his letter. “Today, we know exactly who our enemy is: the mosquito.” Which means that with serious effort, the death toll has dropped roughly 50% since 2000, from 870,000 people annually to about 429,000.

Among the interventions that work well is distributing insecticide-laced bug nets, so those who read the letter and complete the quiz correctly will get the chance to donate a bug net to a family in need.

But even the quiz’s lone question—”How long do today’s upgraded insecticide-treated bed nets protect people from mosquitoes?”—is designed to make you feel pretty good about doing that deed. Its multiple-choice answers are six months, one year, two years, or three years. (Hint: It’s the one that will keep people save the longest, of course.)

Gates’s goal is to get enough players to donate 100,000 bed nets to families in the Inhambane region of Mozambique through partner World Vision. To maintain your interest, the post is spiced up with a VR video halfway through that highlights how researchers in Thailand are making progress against the parasite’s increased drug resistance.

Gates employed the same tactics–with a letter, VR video, and quiz–last year for Coop Dreams, another online initiative that led to his followers donating over 100,000 specially bred birds to families in sub-Saharan Africa through Heifer International. Access to a sturdy egg-laying flock represents a serious source of income, and improved nutrition helps economic advancement for impoverished, often remote communities there.

At the same time, the power of insecticide-treated bed nets has improved (they can be washed, reused, and last longer). So have disease-mapping methods, which are helping countries spot their danger zones and deploy nets and other medicines more swiftly. In his letter, Gates calls out several other forward-thinking disease control methods, ranging from poisonous “eave tubes”– mesh-based roof and wall filters–which can be mounted in areas where breeze and bugs tends to enter houses, to early stage gene editing, which seeks to make mosquitoes permanently infertile.

Gates’s entire process of imparting these lessons appears geared toward offering other do-gooders an easy and immediate way to join the fight. As charity evaluators like GiveWell have noted, bed net distribution is one of the soundest and most cost-efficient ways to immediately improve someone’s quality of life and long-term chances of survival.

The tech titan’s gamification strategy extends beyond the quiz: If you sign up to join Gates’s blog, you will also receive the “Gave A Bed Net” award, which resembles a merit badge. Having a profile with rewards is a signal that there will likely be the chance to follow along and earn more collectible awards as he offers them. In the meantime, the little bug net icon comes with a handy link to World Vision, which would probably be happy to also receive direct donations.

Miss him yet? Former President Barack Obama set a record today with an inspirational tweet in the wake of the violent white supremacist rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend.

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion . . . ” the tweet read, quoting from Nelson Mandela’s 1994 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. It was sent on Saturday and turned out to be especially poignant in light of the fact that our current president has proven himself unable to articulate a similar sentiment.

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion…” pic.twitter.com/InZ58zkoAm

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 13, 2017

The tweet is now the most “liked” tweet ever on Twitter, having racked up more than 3.7 million of those little heart icons as of Wednesday afternoon. Meanwhile, social media analytics company Talkwalker came up with a cool animated gif that visualizes how the tweet spread around the world in the hours and days after it was sent. If nothing else, it’s a nice reminder that not everything is awful.

The year was 2016, and despite what could be described as an epidemic of celebrities dying, things–compared to now, at least–seemed totally normal, somehow. Maybe even idyllic. Back in those simpler days, you could see the great pains that technology companies took to prove that they were mere neutral platforms.

In the wake of a Gizmodo story from May 2016 alleging that Facebook’s news editors were told to not highlight right-leaning content, the company shot back that, actually, it was totally neutral. Facebook, the company said in its defense, is a platform. “We’re not interested in adding our point of view–we actually don’t think that works for a billion people,” said Facebook to the Verge.

And that was what every other social and sharing-economy tool at the time was saying to eschew responsibility and regulation in the name of eyeballs and clicks and growth. In any case, Facebook’s solution to the appearance of bias was to invite conservative power players to Palo Alto and turn to algorithms, and it was this software that bots exploited to peddle fake news throughout the rest of 2016. Even as its own employees decried the company’s role in Donald Trump’s election—a role about which government investigators have also raised questions—Mark Zuckerberg contended, however reluctantly, that the company was still, ultimately, a neutral tech platform.

Now, in the year of our Lord 2017, things have changed. But it wasn’t until this week that we glimpsed a deeper shift afoot in Silicon Valley. In the wake of the deadly Charlottesville rallies, where white supremacists were able to come together primarily online, technology platforms are finally cracking down.

Here’s a quick rundown:

• GoDaddy denied the white supremacist website Daily Stormer domain registration, after insisting for months that it would not censor content.
• Google did the same.
• So did WordPress.
• Facebook too is cracking down on linked white supremacist content, and has even began to delete white nationalist accounts over hate speech.
• Airbnb canceled reservations for white nationalists trying to travel to Charlottesville.
• PayPal said it wouldn’t do business with hate groups.
• Uber banned two white supremacists from using the ride-hailing app after a driver overheard a racist conversation.
• The chat app Discord has banned white supremacist channels.
• Even CloudFlare, the content distribution service that protects websites from hacking and DDoS attacks, changed its long-held tune on protecting white supremacist sites: It stopped providing service to Daily Stormer.

All of these are important (and necessary) judgment calls by the platforms, and they do away with the neutrality security blanket. They also signal a new interpretation of their various terms of service agreements: neither Facebook, Google, WordPress, Airbnb, or any of the other platforms have changed their written policies since Charlottesville, even as they’ve taken more stringent steps to curb hate speech.

The moves were undoubtedly prompted by the rallies in Charlottesville, which fanned the flames of white supremacy and nationalism into a full-fledged inferno of violence. These groups’ content may now qualify as “directly threatening material,” or similar categories forbidden by companies’ user agreements, which are, in any case, always up to reinterpretation by those companies.

We’ve seen small examples like these decisions for years—with Milo Yiannopoulos being booted off Twitter for harassment, and Facebook announcing a crackdown on “fake news”— but never has there been such a seemingly coordinated action. It makes sense, too: Private companies that claim to foster inclusive values should have their business models follow suit. Yet in this new era we’re living in, the blatant racism of this past weekend has forced these organizations to take stances that their investors would have balked at years ago.

This will surely play into reactionary fears. With far-right people crying foul over Google firing engineer James Damore over a controversial internal memo, more examples of cohesive Silicon Valley “ideology” is coming to light. Free speech is being infringed, they say, over the left’s PC politics.  Does this mean that Silicon Valley companies have an ideology? Not necessarily. In fact, probably not. These are necessary, moral moves–and they are surely driven by an marked uptick in public outcry.

But the platforms’ recent decisions do show that the techno-utopian idea of a neutral platform can sometimes create a dystopia for others. More importantly, it does away with the pesky neutrality science fiction, and forces these companies to take more responsibility over how their carefully designed platforms work, and how they’re actually used.

There’s been lots of news in the world of ride hailing this week.

Uber is experimenting with several new featuresfor drivers, including a system for alerting drivers when a rider is requesting an especially long trip before they accept, and the ability to choose destination areas. A few Uber drivers included in the pilots posted images of the potential new tools on Uberpeople.net and Reddit. The tests come during a 180-day period in which Uber has promised to make its platform better for drivers. The company has faced backlash from drivers over wages and working conditions.

While Uber tries to win over drivers’ hearts, General Motors is contemplating its own ride service, according to Reuters. The company is currently gathering data through its rental-car service Maven, which loans cars to consumers, and Maven Gig, which loans cars for ride-hailing networks. That would put the company, which is also developing self-driving cars, in competition with the likes of Uber and Lyft.

In other Uber news, tech investor Roger McNamee tells CNBC the company is probably not worth $69 billion. And according to recently released records in the Waymo vs. Uber battle, the former head of Uber’s autonomous division, Anthony Levandowski, once proposed starting a #FakeTesla social media campaign. In texts to then-CEO Travis Kalanick, he wrote, “We’ve got to start calling Elon on his sh-t.”

“I’m not on social media but let’s start ‘faketesla’ and [sic] start give physics lessons about stupid sh-t Elon says like this.” The texts are a reference to Tesla’s self-driving technology, which, unlike competitors, doesn’t use lidar.

A Ukrainian hacker who authored malware used in last year’s hack on the Democratic National Committee is now a witness for the FBI.

The hacker, known as Profexer, sold the malware online, allegedly without realizing the purchaser was the Russian intelligence hacking group known as Fancy Bear, said to be behind the hack. As The New York Times reports, Profexer turned himself into Ukrainian police earlier this year after the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security identified his software. The head of the country’s cybersecurity police said he let FBI agents interview the hacker, but have declined to disclose other details publicly, including his name.

“P.A.S. web shell,” the malware, was available to download free from a website that asked only for donations, but Profexer’s real business was in selling customized versions and assisting his hacker clients in its use—something he reportedly did for a client who investigators say was Fancy Bear.

“He was a freelancer and now he is a valuable witness,” Anton Gerashchenko, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament with ties to the security services, told the Times.

Profexer is the first known witness in the DNC attack investigation, which has primarily relied on technical evidence, according to the Times. The use of third-party malware code has at times made it harder to definitively attribute attacks to any Russian government agency. As a result of a dearth of physical evidence, President Trump has waffled on whether he believes U.S. intelligence assessments attributing the hacks to Russia.

Among its cache of evidence, the FBI is also reviewing copies of hard drives from Ukraine’s Central Election Commission, which were targeted by hackers during the May 2014 presidential election. The bureau, reports the Times, has posted a full-time cybersecurity expert in Kiev as one of four agents stationed at the U.S. Embassy there.

Meanwhile, The Nation magazine is currently reviewing a controversial article this month that suggested, contrary to U.S. intelligence reports, that Russia might not be behind the attack, The Hill reports.

I wrote more about the post-election activities of Fancy Bear here.

Squarespace and Cloudflare are the latest digital platforms to shift their approach to right-wing websites in the wake of violence in Charlottesville.

“In light of recent events, we have made the decision to remove a group of sites from our platform,” a representative from Squarespace wrote in an email. “We have given the site owners 48 hours’ notice.” The company hasn’t said which websites would be evicted.

Cloudflare, the content distribution network that has long stood by sites’ free speech rights, announced this afternoon that it would no longer support The Daily Stormer, ending a set of digital protections for a neo-Nazi website that was earlier dropped by GoDaddy and Google this week.

The shift at platforms that have long espoused a “neutral” approach follows voluble calls on Twitter and elsewhere for these services to stop serving people like Richard Spencer and groups like his National Policy Institute. One petition calling on Squarespace to act has more than 36,000 signatures. (See how other platforms have responded to Charlottesville here.)

Though Squarespace’s Acceptable Use Policy forbids advocating “bigotry or hatred against any person or group based on their race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual preference, age or disability,” it, like other platforms, has resisted calls for banning these sites.

Earlier this year, Fast Company‘s Sean Captain asked Squarespace about its hosting and provision of e-commerce and fundraising support for hate sites, but the company did not respond. As he wrote,

Radix Journal is run by the white supremacist National Policy Institute, whose website is also hosted on Squarespace. Another essay on the site, by neatly dressed, Nazi-quoting NPI chairman Richard Spencer, argues for the intellectual inferiority of black people. Squarespace even powers the online store for Radix Journal, where Aryans can pick up an alt right-themed T-shirt or a “Trump Deportation Force” poster for under $30.

These groups may not be welcome at a growing number of platforms, but their sites could still find harbor elsewhere: After GoDaddy and Google stopped providing domain registration for white supremacist site The Daily Stormer, it re-emerged today on a Russian domain.

And then, by the afternoon, it was offline again, as Cloudflare announced its own small, but still significant, about-face.

“No One Should Have That Power”

It was, however, “an arbitrary decision,” wrote CEO Matthew Prince, who said in a letter to employees that his rationale “was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I’d had enough.”

“Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet,” he wrote in his letter. “No one should have that power.”

When she’s not soaking up the sun or otherwise trying to have some fun, Sheryl Crow can reliably be found in one place: at home in Nashville, where she spends her days in the studio writing new songs and by night, unwinding at home with her two kids. But compared to the house the multi-Grammy-winning, lifelong musician was raised in, Crow’s place is a world apart: It’s way quieter.

“I grew up when music was a real social experience and also with parents who played music in the house all the time. I can vividly remember Mom and Dad having people over and dancing in the living room,” Crow says. “That has sort of died.”

For many of us, the quiet isolation of home life is heightened by our addiction to connected gadgets. Crow’s kids, aged 7 and 10, aren’t yet old enough to get sucked into the mindless distraction of smartphone screens, but Crow knows that in a few years, they’ll likely feel the lure of the blue light of screens. So she’s hoping to preempt it.

The fear of an antisocial, tech-dependent generation is a common (and undoubtedly valid) one, but it also happens to be a talking point for a new product that Crow is promoting. U.K.-based startup Electric Jukebox—in which the singer-songwriter and a few other celebrities are investors—is making its U.S. debut with the ROXI, a music streaming box that connects to your TV. In addition to a Spotify-style, all-you-can-stream library of music that you can search using your voice, the ROXI offers on-screen music trivia games and, thanks to a remote that doubles as a microphone, karaoke.

“In its sneaky way, this makes music more social again,” Crow says. “It takes everybody off their phones and puts them into a participatory experience. My kids are going to totally dig it.”

The ROXI also comes with a Sound Machine feature that streams meditation-friendly sounds and slumber-inducing white noise, as well as a selection of playlists curated by Electric Jukebox investors like Crow, Robbie Williams, and Stephen Fry. But let’s be real: It’s the karaoke screen that’s going get most people excited.

Crow says that if anything, she’s afraid she’ll have trouble prying her kids away from the ROXI, especially when it’s in karaoke mode. “But that’s great,” she says. “I’ll be able to subliminally introduce them to the music that I feel are the important references.”

For U.S. consumers already committed to a service like Spotify or Apple Music, the ROXI may be a tough sell. At $52 per year (the first year is included in the $200 price of the device itself), Electric Jukebox’s streaming service is cheaper than some existing music subscriptions, but it only works on the television–a nonstarter for anybody looking to stream music from their phones or in the car. Instead of going after entrenched music subscribers, the company is hoping to entice U.S. households by marketing the somewhat odd gadget with a family-friendly appeal and a dead simple, plug-and-play use in the hopes of turning uncharted demographics like baby boomers onto the concept of streaming music. If they succeed, then sure, it’s easy to imagine families (not to mention twenty-something roommates) throwing impromptu karaoke parties and playing music trivia games.

The idea that playing more music will bring families closer together is more than just hype from a startup’s marketing department. There’s some science behind it. Last year, a study commissioned by Sonos in collaboration with Apple Music and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin found that playing music out loud at home made people more intimate and affection, less irritable, more inspired, and even more enthusiastic about doing household chores.

On the flip side, the science behind what our phones are doing to the brains of the next generation is still rolling in, but the early research doesn’t look promising. For this product launch, Electric Jukebox commissioned its own independent research with an outside firm, which showed that 72% of parents are concerned that their kids are missing out on precious time spent with family because they’re glued to personal devices (for an average of 39.5 hours per week, according to the same survey).

“Even though technology is meant to keep us connected, I feel like it’s created a vast disconnect,” Crow says. “When I’m performing, I see people who are incapable of just being in a room and having a collective experience because they’re either on their phone or they’re filming it and then they’re going to Instagram it or whatever it is that they do.”

For artists like Crow, the sea of glowing phones they see from the stage isn’t likely to subside anytime soon. But at least she can get some relief at home. For now.

All it took was 137 characters at 6:12 a.m. for Amazon’s valuation to drop more than $5 billion on Wednesday.

Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt – many jobs being lost!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 16, 2017

It wasn’t much of a dent for Amazon, which is still worth a whopping $474 billion. (The company’s stock fell by $4.56, or less than 0.5%.) Overall, its stock price has soared since Trump entered office. And this was far from the first time Trump has accused the company of tax avoidance (he’s previously said CEO Jeff Bezos operates a “no-tax monopoly” that fails to pay “internet taxes.”).

First, the implication is not quite accurate: As we’ve noted before, Amazon now pays sales taxes in every state in which it operates for the products it sells directly. In its latest annual report to the SEC, it said it paid $177 million in income taxes in 2014, $273 million in 2015, and $412 million in 2016. As to the company’s negative impact on retail jobs (and other companies’ stocks for that matter) it has recently begun hiring for more than 50,000 positions across the U.S.

Two, the Trump tweet comes as Amazon is fielding a challenge to its third-party merchant taxes policy, which leaves tax collection up to the merchants. A complaint filed this summer by South Carolina’s Department of Revenue alleges that Amazon didn’t collect taxes on sales made by third-party vendors to the tune of more than $12 million in taxes and penalties for the first quarter of 2016. (In total, it’s estimated that $23 billion in state taxes go uncollected.) A Supreme Court ruling says a retailer must have a physical presence in a state for that state to collect taxes. A ruling in South Carolina’s direction could pave the way for more rulings in other states. In other words: Trump’s tweet isn’t entirely bogus.

Three: Is this, in some way, the result of the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Postregularly taking Trump to task? I’ll leave that up to you.

Read more:Why Amazon Is The World’s Most Innovative Company Of The Year and Why It’s Time To Break The Company Up

The fund will help enable Ng’s goal of bringing about an AI-powered society, reports TechCrunch. It’s not yet known what type of AI startups the fund will invest in. Before setting out on his own as a VC Ng founded the Google Brain Team and has long been an evangelist of the benefits of AI.

The hacking group OurMine briefly took over not only the main HBO Twitter account but the official accounts for some of its shows, including Game of Thrones, reports BetaNews. The Twitter hack comes as what is believed to be separate hackers dumped materials from the “4th Wave HBO Leak” online, which included Westworld season 2 shooting schedules and Game of Thrones season 7 shooting diaries. HBO soon regained access to their hacked accounts, but not before OurMine sent them a message on the official GOT Twitter account: “OurMine are here. we are just testing your security. HBO team please contact us to upgrade the security – ourmine.org -> Contact.”

You’re a grownup with a job, plenty of good ideas, and expertise. That’s why you find yourself presenting to a roomful of your coworkers, or possibly to an auditorium packed with business leaders. And yet you feel like a fifth-grader struggling to explain the plot of Inception to your biggest crush: Why are you so nervous? Was that last detail even right? Is anything in here making any sense at all?!

Relax. With a little practice, you can learn to speak more clearly, confidently, and naturally. To find out how, Fast Company asked five hosts of some of the most popular podcasts to share their speaking tips.

Silence Is Worse Than “Ums” And “Likes”

When I asked Guy Raz, host of NPR’s How I Built This podcast, which explores innovation and entrepreneurship, whether he makes a conscious effort to cut so-called “filler words” from his speech, he replied, “Nope. Um, I like, use them, like they are a giant bowlful of, um, gummy bears on my, um, desk, you know?”

Lindsey Weber, who cohosts the celebrity podcast Who? Weekly with Bobby Finger, doesn’t worry about those “um”s and “ya know”s either. They add “personality,” she says, so it would be crazy to cut every single one of them. Part of what people like about conversational pods is that they feel natural,” Weber explains–and the same is likely true of most speeches, talks, and presentations, where there’s actually a risk to sounding too formal and stiff.

Weber acknowledges that she and Finger both “have a serious ‘like’ problem” and that they “try to avoid repetition,” but Finger adds that filler words “don’t bug me as long as they’re immediately followed by a thought.” As he sees it, dead airtime is a much bigger killer than any “like” or “um.”

Jot Notes, Rehearse With Them, Then Throw Them Out

But preserving a natural vibe doesn’t mean improvising completely. Being in the moment still takes some preparation and practice.

As Manoush Zomorodi, host of WNYC Studios’s Note to Self, points out, “People who sound like they aren’t reading from a script are probably really good writers. They know how people talk, little nuances, and how to structure sentences so they sound natural.” But “this is not a gift,” she emphasizes. “It takes practice and doing it over and over again.”

Related:5 Ways To Improve Your Speaking And Writing At The Same Time

Even Weber and Finger, who’ve always done Who? Weekly off the cuff, share a very messy Google doc between the two of them. That’s where, as Weber explains, “We lay out the episode’s topics as well as various links and research we’ve done.” Doing this prep work allows them to riff when it’s time to record an episode. “I think the improvisation just comes with knowledge of the material,” says Finger.

That’s true for Glynn Washington as well, who’s a colleague of Zomorodi’s at WNYC, where he hosts the storytelling podcast Snap Judgment. “Everything starts on the page,” says Washington. “Only after I get it right on paper can I throw the paper away. If I happen to sound both clear and casual at the same time,” he continues, “that means I have spent time crafting what I am saying. No one wants to hear my unfocused, unrehearsed babble. The performance is the final step of a longer process.”

For Zomorodi, that process is all about getting to know your notes so well that you can ditch them: “Read your script, underline words that you want to punch, say it out loud over and over again, record yourself, listen back while you walk around, make changes, read it again,” she advises, “almost to the point where you don’t need the script. When you feel the words and why you wrote them when you talk, that’s when you know you are nailing it.”

Finally, “In order to nail the performance,” says Washington, “I first set the stage in my mind. I imagine walking up to a card table with a bunch of my uncles shouting through a heated game of Spades. As I approach, magically, they all turn, and shut up long enough to allow me to speak (this would never happen). Whatever I say has to fit that [imaginary] moment.”

Always Ask For Feedback

According to Washington, “The best thing that any creative person can have is someone to let them know when they’re getting it right–and when they’re falling short.” It’s one thing to practice alone in a room; it’s another to do a dry run for a trusted audience. “You may not know the person that can tell you the truth,” Washington adds, since the people we’re closest with aren’t always great sources of unvarnished feedback. “It might not be your mom or boyfriend or uncle or friend. But find them!”

As cohosts, Finger and Weber serve this role for one another. “We are always telling each other to wrap it up,” says Finger. “You can tell while speaking if something is going to drag for the audiences, so after recording, we usually chat about what worked/what didn’t/what we should save for another episode.” These quick recaps help them both retool and nail it the next time.

It’s Okay To Gesture–Just Do It Right

“When I’m speaking into the microphone, my hands are flailing!” Washington confesses. “I’m gesticulating. Prowling. Laughing. I need a lot of space! You may not see any of that, but I think you hear it.”

Using your hands can be a great way to add emphasis and force to what you’re saying, but Washington knows he can get away with more when his audience is only listening to him, not watching. Before getting back into radio, Zomorodi had been doing a lot of TV, so she’d trained herself not to use her hands while speaking. But, she points out, “All that energy needs to go somewhere, and I find that I strain my voice less when I can let my body relax and emote, too.” Fortunately, there are a few ways to gesture meaningfully without looking ridiculous–here are a few tips.

If you find that you’re a hopeless hand talker, then at least clear the podium or table in front of you to avoid any mishaps. “Sometimes I fidget with things on my desk, which–hey, I’m stupid–make noises in the podcast!” says Finger. “So I generally have to remove all coins [and] knick-knacks from my area before recording, or you’ll hear taps and clicks and clonks.”

Don’t Try To Sound Like Someone Else

Early on, Zomorodi says she had to stop trying to speak “like a ‘broadcast reporter’–just the facts–without any personality,” as she was trained to do at the BBC and Reuters. Raz agrees that authenticity matters: “I tried to sound like Robert Siegel [the longtime host of All Things Considered] because I thought that’s what an NPR host should sound like. It took me a while to grow comfortable with my own voice and mannerisms.”

Related:Four Quick Tips For Speaking More Confidently

To get this right, Weber draws a useful distinction: “We don’t really care about sounding ‘professional.’ I guess really the only thing we do care about–and are still working on!–is making sure we sound good. This is not the easiest thing for us,” she adds, “as we aren’t trained sound engineers and do our own production.” Much of the time, you’ll sound good simply when you sound like yourself.

On this last point, Weber adds, “I think the idea of ‘vocal fry’ is a sexist myth, so when people accuse us of that, I refuse to give a shit.”

One of the most difficult roles at a startup is managing a team of employees who have a long-term, personal relationship with the company’s founder. “I may have authority over these people but really I don’t because they have these personal, long-held relationships with the CEO,” says Michelle Lapierre,  a Denver-based consultant who is often brought in help startups grow their brand. “It’s basic human nature for them to leverage that relationship,” she says, and to go directly to the founder.

Lapierre is currently working at a startup where the founder is 21 and just about everyone on staff, except for Lapierre, is the founder’s close, personal friend. “It’s my job to help people understand the difference between passion and profitability, and cause and capitalism,” she says, but at most startups hierarchy is seen as a poisonous term.

Here are seven ways to manage a staff when everyone has a long-term, personal relationship with the CEO except for you.

Have An Honest Conversation

“You have go into these positions with your eyes wide open,” Lapierre says. Before you even accept the position, she recommends having a frank conversation with the CEO about how you will both define your authority with the staff.

Some CEOs might be clueless or not think that it will be a problem so it’s best to ask the CEO how he or she will make your authority clear to the staff, says Nancy Halpern, principal at KNH Associates. Ask how he or she will introduce you to the team and how he or she will lay out the chain of command, she says. You might also ask the CEO to speak directly with any staff members who seem most likely to undermine your authority. Ask the CEO to personally reinforce to those staff members that they no longer report to the CEO, but to you instead.

Set Boundaries With The CEO

The CEO might also need to be reminded not to go directly to the staff with requests, says Tracey Adams, founder of ThriveOn Seminars. State what you see the CEO doing (for instance, giving the team work you don’t know about) and remind the CEO of your overall goal (my goal is to distribute work evenly). Then explain what effect this action has on your ability to do your job (when you makes decisions without my input or knowledge, I can’t do my job effectively).

Make A Bold Move Early On

Establish your authority with the first action you take at your new job by spearheading a project that most people on staff would have expected the CEO to head up or by introducing a new budget initiative, Halpern says. Just make sure the CEO backs up your plan and doesn’t feel that you’re stealing his or her thunder, she says.

Differentiate Yourself

If the CEO is charismatic, don’t try to win over followers by out-charming a founder who is a charmer, Halpern says. Instead, develop your own reason for staff to respect you by either capitalizing on your subject matter expertise, your industry recognition, or your connection with investors by creating a personal brand that doesn’t compete with the founder’s personal brand.

Address Issues Directly

If there is one person who consistently goes directly to the founder, don’t try to address the issue by lecturing the entire staff. Instead, speak with that person directly. Trying to address it through a group discussion will only cause the rest of the staff to resent you, and the person you’re trying to send a message to, probably won’t realize you’re talking about them, Halpern says.

Tell Them More Than Once

Establishing procedures for the team is not a one-time event, Adams says. You might need to remind staff three or four times, she says. For instance, if someone on the team consistently forgets to copy you on emails to the boss, you might need to talk with them a few times. “You just have to keep at it,” Adams says. “If you notice it again, say to them, ‘We talked about this a few weeks ago and I noticed you did it again. Let’s talk about that.’ ”

Build Your Case

When making a recommendation to the CEO, spend some time explaining the reasons for your decision, Lapierre says. “I always take the extra step to lay out the foundation for my decision and recommendation,” she says. “I’ll say, ‘Here is my opinion and these are the facts.’ People who have an emotional tie to the CEO don’t feel like they have to take that step.” Lapierre says she often wins the argument because she builds her case around facts, not emotions.

Amazon’s Echo Show doesn’t like to be the bearer of bad news. Although the device’s 7-inch touchscreen constantly cycles through trending news stories on its home screen—and lets you ask Alexa for more details with a voice command—the topics seldom cover anything too heavy.

So instead of updating users on the Charlottesville protests, President Trump’s subsequent press conference meltdown, his earlier war of words with North Korea, or countless other anxiety-inducing stories, the Echo Show offers soothing headlines such as these:

• “Spanish Super Cup: Real Madrid Beat Barcelona”
• “Box Office: ‘Annabelle: Creation’ Tops”
• “North Carolina Shaman Mistaken for Bigfoot”
• “Usain Bolt Injured in Final Race”
• “Chimpanzees Can Learn Rock-Paper-Scissors”

For those who are glued to the news, the aloofness of these “trending topics” might seem strange or even off-putting, as if Amazon prefers blissful ignorance to an informed public. You don’t see Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Facebook shying away from serious stories in their own news products, so why is Amazon doing it?

Amazon’s explanation: The Echo Show is a different kind of product.

“For trending topics on Echo Show, we primarily surface lifestyle, entertainment, and sports news since it’s a communal device that the whole family sees and uses,” an Amazon spokesperson said via email. (The company provided the same statement to Android Central‘s Phil Nickinson, whose recent post on Twitter got me thinking about this topic.)

Essentially, you don’t want your kids discovering the concepts of white supremacy or nuclear war by walking past an ambient video screen. Amazon also notes that the Echo Show isn’t devoid of serious news; users can still hear political and business stories from whatever outlets they choose by asking Alexa for a Flash Briefing. The key difference in that case is that users must ask for the news first.

But even if Amazon wanted to offer weightier stories on the Echo Show home screen–perhaps as an optional setting–the system isn’t equipped to handle them.

Right now, the Echo Show’s trending topics only provide a sentence or two of information beyond the headline, with no way to hear more details. The blurbs have no bylines, and the source of the reporting isn’t always clear.

That lack of substance might be acceptable for a story like “Guns N’ Roses’ Slash named Gibson Ambassador,” but it would do a disservice to a story like the Charlottesville protests. Any summary Amazon provided would have to be lengthier, with more context and clearer sourcing. For whoever at Amazon is in charge of the curating, that becomes a much bigger job, not to mention a political minefield if users perceive any sort of bias. (See: the many changes to Facebook’s Trending section.)

The obvious solution would be to pull in stories from news organizations–perhaps the same ones users have already added to their Flash Briefings–instead of just generating longer blurbs. But even that would require Alexa to understand specific news topics in a way that it doesn’t currently do. If you say “Alexa, what’s the latest news on Donald Trump?” the system merely launches into your Flash Briefing, rather than zooming in on the topic you just asked about. Amazon may have to work more closely with news providers to chop their Flash Briefing segments into individual stories, which the Echo Show could identify and display on its home screen.

To be fair, the Echo Show launched less than two months ago, and it’s unclear how many people own one, let alone how many are perturbed by its lack of hard news coverage. But as Amazon tries to expand its virtual assistant onto phones, in-car dashboards, and other devices, a more informative news product might help justify Alexa’s onscreen presence.

Amazon, at least, seems aware that it’s a work in progress.

“As with everything we do,” a company spokesperson said, “the Echo Show trending topics experience will continue to improve and evolve over time based on customer feedback.”

For the past 18 years, it’s been an open secret that Fader magazine and creative agency Cornerstone have been operating under the same ownership. Former music executive Rob Stone founded Cornerstone in 1996, eventually bringing on his childhood friend and fellow former music exec Jon Cohen as a co-CEO. Together, they founded Fader in 1999, and the two companies have been kept relatively separate ever since.

“In our early days, media companies and advertising agencies were very different businesses. As a brand-new editorial property, we wanted to ensure the purity of our editorial and make sure the integrity of our journalism was paramount,” Cohen says. “Over the years, media and advertising have truly converged. Both are now about storytelling.”

During the most tumultuous times for both print/digital media and the advertising industry, Fader and Cornerstone have actually managed to thrive in both areas. Exact figures weren’t disclosed but Cohen says both Fader and Cornerstone have maintained profitability, with 2017 being “our most successful year to date.” Knowing that each entity is strong enough to stand on its own has given Stone and Cohen the impetus to dismantle the barrier between the two companies in an effort to make better use of resources and to fortify the magazine/agency model they’ve pioneered–a model that has been duplicated by other outlets including Vice and its agency arm Virtue Worldwide, as well as Complex magazine’s aggressive branded content strategy.

To pull off bringing Fader and Cornerstone together, Stone and Cohen have doubled down on talent, primarily at the executive and C-suite levels, bringing on heavy hitters in the creative space including VP of strategy Grace Gordon, creative director Louis-Philippe Riel, executive creative director Steve Caputo, and chief creative officer Trevor Eld, whose primary task since he left R/GA about eight months ago to join the Fader and Cornerstone team has been to seamlessly merge the two.

“We’re talking about two different cultures with their own staffs, IP, client relationships–everything,” Eld says. “What excited me was to start to integrate those into one with a creative team being at the core, really the connective tissue between all of these different teams that have been kept pretty siloed from each other.”

A recent example of this creative synergy came about when Gorillaz co-creator Damon Albarn reached out to Cohen about the launch of their latest album, Humanz. Sonos was also in touch with Cornerstone about promoting the launch of a new product. Seeing the potential in merging an innovative band and a speaker company, Cornerstone created replicas of the Gorillaz’s Spirit House, the trippy focal point for the band’s VR music video “Saturnz Barz,” using projection mapping and featuring Sonos’s Playbase speakers. The activation spanned New York City, Berlin, and Amsterdam, and was the ideal blend between two entities that may not have crossed otherwise.

“We had two different teams launching products and what we brought to that was fitting those puzzle pieces together so that everyone wins, [including the people experiencing the activation],” Eld says. “When you walk through, it’s cool and exciting because we didn’t forget what they care about. Because of our experience with events and experiential, we knew what people would want.”

That ability to predict what will break through in culture comes from the fact that both Fader and Cornerstone have been actively creating culture. Stone and Cohen’s deep roots in music–specifically hip-hop/R&B and indie rock, respectively–have laid a solid foundation to develop culture through brand work for Nike, Coca-Cola, Sprite, Converse, and Levis; campaigns that have garnered Grammy and Emmy nominations; white-label partnerships with the likes of YouTube; events such as their festival within a festival Fader Fort at South by Southwest; and most recently this summer being one of Google’s first partners to help launch its virtual reality platform VR180.

“We live the culture. This company is based on the foundation that Rob and I grew up loving music,” Cohen says. “If you talk to our staff and get to know the people that have been here past and present, they live, eat, and breathe the culture of music. They go to shows, they read, they listen. They pride themselves on really studying what’s going on out there.”

Building a staff that’s on the same wavelength of passion has been only half of the equation for Fader and Cornerstone’s success. What’s been just as important has been Stone and Cohen’s commitment to maintaining that freeform way of thinking they had when they first launched both companies.

“When we started Cornerstone, we didn’t understand the agency game. Sprite was our first corporate client and they didn’t know what to make of us,” Stone says. “We’ve never played [the game] of ‘if these agencies are doing that, that must be what we should be doing.’ We don’t care what everybody else is doing and as long as we can deliver for our clients and have this connection to culture, that’s what’s paramount to everything we do.”

“This company has always been built on bucking tradition,” Cohen continues. “When we started Fader, we printed on such a heavy paper stock that every traditional media person told us we were crazy and that we were going to be out of business the next year. But that was the reason that every great photographer wanted to work for us–that was the reason that artists started coveting being on our cover. When it comes to the ‘agency business,’ we like to refer to ourselves as the un-agency. We don’t want to do all of the traditional things. We want to create really compelling stories around the brands. So we’ve evolved by breaking the rules, and we’ll continue to do that throughout our history.”

Part of that history–and the company’s future–is already in Fader’s name. The magazine was named after the device on a DJ’s mixing board that blends different sounds together, a sentiment that can be applied to bringing the magazine and agency side together.

“For the people that come here from all these different backgrounds, we need leadership that can direct them and give them tasks that set them up for success,” Eld says. “And we need to set the artists and brands that we work with up for success, too. That way, we get these really interesting, uncommon ideas you wouldn’t get at a typical agency or at a typical media property.”

Under the new creative leadership, Eld says Fader and Cornerstone are diving deeper into consultancy work, as well as potentially taking Fader’s IP to Hollywood.

“What we’re hearing unanimously from production studios is Hollywood is bone dry on ideas. The production studios and the distribution networks are hungry for new thoughts and new ideas,” Eld says. “What we didn’t realize is whenever we would go out there for meetings, people would hear that we’re in the building and they wanted to meet with us. They want to know what out of our IP do we have the rights to option right away into a series, film, or documentary.”

Maintaining their influence in culture and being able to spot new areas for growth are positioning Fader and Cornerstone to do what most media entities are struggling with: being in-step with those ever-desirable millennial and gen Z demos while simultaneously being commercial.

“We’ve been really fortunate that we’ve hired great people and we let go of some of the habits that [could hold us back],” Stone says. “We see it all the time–these agencies [and media companies] that were great five years ago, they’ve kind of played themselves out because they’re still doing the same thing.”

“We’re learning by trial and error–we’re learning by experience,” Cohen continues. “That learning curve is the fun part of the job, and what makes this successful is that we’re constantly looking to what’s next instead of just resting on where we’ve been and what we’ve done. The world moves at such a fast pace that if you’re not aware of where things are going or not trying things, you’re going to find yourself falling behind very quickly.”

Bet someone’s not renewing their subscription to the Economist. The weekly magazine appears to have had quite enough of Donald Trump, thank you very much. It published a story today declaring the president to be “politically inept, morally barren, and temperamentally unfit for office.” He’s probably not invited to sit at their lunch table, either. The magazine’s bluntness is not unprecedented—after all, this is the publication that featured Kim Jong Il on the cover under the headline “Greetings, earthlings“—but it’s especially blunt in this case. The cover features an illustration of Trump yelling into a bullhorn shaped like a KKK hood. It’s part of a pattern, though: Unflattering Trump-themed covers have been pretty common for the Economist since January.

Donald Trump is politically inept, morally barren and temperamentally unfit for office https://t.co/xLDMtLclUw

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) August 17, 2017

Our cover this week pic.twitter.com/lYD3HLXvSC

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) August 17, 2017