Fast Company

BTS may have their own McDonald’s dipping sauce, but Megan Thee Stallion is getting her own Popeyes franchise.

On October 19, Popeyes is introducing Megan Thee Stallion Hottie Sauce to spice up its Chicken Sandwich and new nuggets in the U.S. and 14 other countries around the globe. As part of the deal, the Grammy-winning artist will become a franchise owner for the fast-food company. And it wouldn’t be a celebrity collab without a co-branded, limited-edition merchandise collection. It’s called “The Heat” and includes bikinis, long-sleeve shirts, hats, tumblers, and Popeyes chicken tenders-theme plush dog toys. Get ready for these to go bonkers on the secondary market, but fans can sign up at TheeHottieSauce.com to receive updates and notification about upcoming drops.

Y'all ready? ???? #MeganTheeStallionHottieSauce ????❤️???? pic.twitter.com/s8fApKDvuT

— Popeyes (@Popeyes) October 14, 2021

This is just the latest is what is quickly becoming a branded celebrity arms race. McDonald’s arguably fired the first shot with Travis Scott back in September 2020, taking its Famous Orders idea global in May with K-pop superstars BTS. While Scott had a customized meal and merch collab, McDonald’s learned from the partnership and expanded its offerings for BTS to include Sweet Chili and Cajun dipping sauces adapted from popular dips at McDonald’s Korea. Also in May, salad chain Sweetgreen announced a partnership with Naomi Osaka that included a custom salad bowl and taking the tennis star on as its youngest investor. And in August, Taco Bell named Lil Nas X its newest chief impact officer. 

The celeb ownership model isn’t new. Shaquille O’Neal, at one point, has had ownership stakes in about 155 Five Guys burgers, 17 Auntie Anne’s, and 1 Krispy Kreme franchise. And LeBron James is an investor and franchise owner of Blaze Pizza.

Yesss Hotties it’s true ???? Thee mf HOTTIE SAUCE IS DROPPING AT @Popeyes OCT 19TH So pull up and get you some???????????? Not only that buttt ya girl is now a franchise owner and will be opening my very own Popeyes locations! pic.twitter.com/zxXmlC0jlF

— TINA SNOW (@theestallion) October 14, 2021

Still, in a media landscape that requires a big splash to gain major attention, the music artist x fast food concept is something different. Popeyes and others are finding real connections with these celebs who enjoy the products themselves, and then benefit from that love when the artists tell their millions of fans about that love. It’s a fascinating mix of business, pop culture, streetwear, and menu creation that we’ll doubtless see more of in the future.

When it comes to consumer electronics, their increasingly shortened product lifecycles and our limited repair options are leaving a big, very literal mark: Nearly 63 million tons just in 2021 alone, according to a new assessment from WEEE Forum, the leading group dedicated to solving the planet’s growing e-waste problem. E-waste is a category that includes old computers and TVs, discarded iPhones, broken smart objects, and other types of electronic consumer waste.

The group says if its 2021 estimate proves correct, this year’s “mountain” of e-waste will set an alarming new milestone—it will outweigh Earth’s largest human-made object, the Great Wall of China. Beyond being an absolutely enormous pile of non-biodegradable trash, WEEE Forum point outs this heap of electronics is incredibly valuable. A 2019 report by the World Economic Forum guessed global e-waste is worth about $62.5 billion annually, more than many nations’ GPDs.

In its report, WEEE Forum director Pascal Leroy presses manufacturers to acknowledge their role in this problem, citing electronics’ shrinking lifespans and the fight these companies are waging against consumers’ right to repair. The waste is hard to fathom, from multiple angles: A ton of discarded mobile phones now contains more gold than a ton of gold ore, UN Sustainable Cycles Program director Ruediger Kuehr tells WEEE Forum. Which means that, technically, mining iPhones should now be more lucrative than extracting actual gold nuggets from the rocks in a mine. And unless we reduce their use, we’re at risk in the next century of running out of several other elements used as smartphone materials—some random chemicals like gallium, arsenic, silver, indium, yttrium, and tantalum.

In summary, WEEE Forum says the amount of e-waste we generate grows by another 2 million tons each year, but the amount that ever gets collected for recycling is stuck at less than 20%.

New York City’s subway system has a new map with a very old design concept.

Rolling out in a handful of stations across the city, a pilot version of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) subway map features an abstract version of the city, overlaid with bold lines marking each route. It’s an attempt to clarify where each line goes and how they connect at stations.

The printed map, now being tested on the walls of nine subway stations, is an updated version of a 1970s-era map that has become a classic example of informational design. The new map simplifies the shape of the city, and the precise location of subway lines, to give riders an easily comprehensible overview of the system, showing which lines connect and how to get across boroughs or into different neighborhoods.

[Image: MTA]The new abstract maps are coupled with more geographically accurate maps of the city’s bus system, offering more detail on the exact location of services. MTA chief customer officer Sarah Meyer is leading the effort to redesign the system’s maps, and says the bus map offers “geographic relevance” to show how many blocks it will take to get from one place to another, while the abstract subway map provides a simple way to know where to change trains or how to get across town.

[Image: MTA]The new subway map is more than a little reminiscent of the iconic, if once controversial, subway map from 1972. Created by legendary designer Massimo Vignelli and his team at the New York office of Unimark International, the decidedly minimalist design didn’t take long to raise eyebrows, as the locations of subway lines on the map didn’t actually align with the reality. By 1978, a debate over the future of the stylized but technically inaccurate map was staged at the Cooper Union art school. As explored in a recent book from documentarian Gary Hustwit, Vignelli was pitted against the chair of the MTA Subway Map committee, John Tauranac, who had his own idea for a more geographically accurate map. Tauranac praised Vignelli’s version as aesthetically pleasing, but brushed it off as more art than information. “It’s made some lovely T-shirts for us at the MTA. But there is no relationship between the subway routes and the city above,” Tauranac said.

The next year, Vignelli’s map was replaced by one designed by Michael Hertz Associates, based on Tauranac’s concept. It features a more accurate representation of the city’s layout and distances between stations but simplifies some of the subway routes by combining multiple lines into a single trunk. Nonetheless, it’s been the MTA’s subway map for more than 40 years.

A few years ago, the MTA began reconsidering the wisdom of the Hertz design in the digital age. In 2020, Meyer worked with the interactive agency Work & Co to develop a digital version of the subway map that riders could use to plan journeys and see when service changes might affect their routes. Before, service updates and changes were mostly communicated on paper inside stations.

“I’m personally directionally challenged and really rely on maps,” Meyer says. “The disconnect from having our customers use two different visual forms to try to understand where service is felt wrong to me.”

[Photo: MTA/Marc Hermann]One of Fast Company’s 2021 Innovation By Design award winners, the digital map streamlines all this information—including real-time arrivals—into an app and map with one visual language. The new printed maps being tested in subway stations were developed in parallel and are the static version of the app. They’re intended to be used in combination with one another, with riders able to plan origin-to-destination trips on the app and use the printed maps in stations to grasp routes within the system at a glance. In conjunction with the geographically accurate bus map, they provide two levels of detail.

“The two together is a very powerful way to understand the geography of the system, where you need to go and how long it’s likely to take you to get here,” says J.P. Chan, senior director of creative at the MTA. “You have the best of both worlds.”

[Photo: MTA/Marc Hermann]They’re also intended to be used alongside maps that riders likely already have in their pockets. Unlike the past, when the physical map in the subway station was the primary way riders could plan their journeys, riders today have more options, including smartphone map apps, in-station digital displays, and printed maps. Riders can view one or more map depending on how much information they need, instead of relying on a single map to convey the entire system. “That’s a big burden to ask of a large poster in a station,” Chan says.

Though the new subway map may be seen as vindication for fans of Vignelli’s version, Meyer says the redesign is not about choosing sides, but about getting people information efficiently. “We’re putting up what’s relevant for 2021 riders and the tools that they have.” (Besides, Vignelli’s map is part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.)

The maps installed in the nine subway stations also include a QR code linking to a webpage that riders can use to provide feedback on the designs. Chan says the MTA has received hundreds of responses so far, and the maps will continue to evolve ahead of a system-wide rollout. A final version of the new map is likely months away, Meyer says. “But not that many months.”

Candy corn is not the beloved Halloween candy you may have thought it was.

That’s according to new research from Morning Consult, which finds that the autumnal icon is ranked dead last in a roundup of Halloween candies among U.S. adults. Only 16% say it’s their favorite.

Sharing that percentage are Lifesavers and Sour Patch Kids.

Topping the list of adults’ favorite Halloween goodies are M&M’s and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups with 53%, followed by Kit Kat at 43%. Rounding out the top five: Hershey’s Chocolate Bars (42%), Snickers (41%), and Hershey’s Kisses (38%).

Except for Snickers, which Mars produces, all are made by The Hershey Company (it’s even the U.S. licensee of Nestlé-owned Kit Kat).

Morning Consult also finds evidence that trick-or-treating may be rebounding after last year’s dismal Halloween season due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A quarter of consumers plan to buy as much candy as they normally do, up from the 18% who said that in 2020.

The data is from a poll of 2,200 U.S. adults, conducted from October 1 through October 5.

WhatApp just announced it has launched the much-anticipated ability to back up chats that remain fully end-to-end encrypted to Apple’s iCloud and Google Drive. Prior to today’s rollout of end-to-end encrypted backups, when WhatsApp messages were backed up to iCloud or Google Drive, the messages could be accessed by Apple or Google under certain circumstances when the companies were compelled to do so by law enforcement.

But with WhatsApp now offering the ability to back up messages to the cloud that remain fully end-to-end encrypted, no one but the user can ever read those backed-up messages no matter what. In a blog post announcing the rollout of the much-anticipated privacy and security feature, WhatsApp said:

“While end-to-end encrypted messages you send and receive are stored on your device, many people also want a way to back up their chats in case they lose their phone. Starting today, we are making available an extra, optional layer of security to protect backups stored on Google Drive or iCloud with end-to-end encryption. No other global messaging service at this scale provides this level of security for their users’ messages, media, voice messages, video calls, and chat backups.

You can now secure your end-to-end encrypted backup with either a password of your choice or a 64-digit encryption key that only you know. Neither WhatsApp nor your backup service provider will be able to read your backups or access the key required to unlock it.”

The rollout of end-to-end encrypted backups does have one potential downside: since no one but the user can now decrypt their backed-up messages, if they should forget their password or encryption key there would be no way the user could unencrypted their backed-up messages. But that’s the tradeoff for anything that is fully end-to-end encrypted.

Today’s news also means that the Facebook-owned messaging app is even more private and secure than Apple’s own Messages app. While Apple encrypts iMessages that are backed up to a user’s iCloud account, Apple continues to hold the key, which means they could be ordered to decrypt a user’s iCloud backup and hand the messages over if compelled to do so by legal bodies. So far Apple has resisted calls to end-to-end encrypt iCloud or Messages backups, but perhaps now that WhatsApp is offering end-to-end encrypted backups, Apple may finally decide to do the same.

WhatsApp notes that while it’s rolling out the end-to-end encrypted backups feature starting today, it will be a phased rollout, which means some users may not see the option for a while.

More than 10,000 unionized John Deere workers are on strike as of the night of October 13, 2021, after rejecting a contract proposal from the farm manufacturing company, marking the largest U.S. strike in two years.

Members of the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers (UAW) union say they are striking against Deere & Company, the corporation that makes the John Deere brand of products, for higher wages, improved retirement and healthcare benefits, and a better work environment.

The strike deadline was announced earlier this week after union members overwhelmingly voted down a tentative agreement reached between the union and the company, with 90% rejecting the proposal. “Our members at John Deere strike for the ability to earn a decent living, retire with dignity and establish fair work rules,” Chuck Browning, vice president and director of the UAW’s Agricultural Implement Department, said in a statement. The company said in a statement that it is “determined to reach an agreement with the UAW that would put every employee in a better economic position.”

While John Deere’s profits grew 60% in recent years, including a 160% salary increase for its CEO during the pandemic, workers say their wages have been cut, Good Morning America reported. In the third quarter of 2021 alone, John Deere reported a net income of $1.6 billion, and forecasted full-year earnings of up to $5.9 billion. Workers hired after 1997 have also seen their out-of-pocket health care costs rise, LaborNotes reports, and have lower pensions than those workers hired before 1997. “UAW John Deere members have worked through the pandemic after the company deemed them essential, to produce the equipment that feeds America, builds America and powers the American economy,” UAW President Ray Curry said in a statement.

The strike includes more than 10,000 workers at 14 facilities. It’s the largest strike in the U.S. in two years, since nearly 50,000 UAW members were on strike against General Motors for six weeks in 2019, but it’s just one in a series of labor actions by workers across the country amid the turmoil of the pandemic. (CNN reports that the U.S. Labor Department says the number of strikes this year is actually fewer than the same period in 2019, before COVID-19. Still, workers have continued to call out labor practices, even quitting in droves, after working throughout the pandemic.)

Last week, more than 1,000 Kellogg workers went on strike, and workers with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which represents some 60,000 film and television employees, overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike. On October 11, 24,000 Kaiser Permanente workers also voted to authorize a strike over pay and working conditions in the health sector, and 2,000 hospital workers in Buffalo have been striking since October 1.

With climate change continuing to threaten the Arctic in new and terrifying ways, a group of top scientists and conservationists is trying to recruit half a million “walrus detectives” from across the planet to help them carry out a “walrus census.” The World Wild Fund for Nature and the British Antarctic Survey have partnered with space tech company Maxar Technologies to launch the “Walrus from Space” project, which is effectively a crowdsourced search for walruses along the Arctic’s Laptev Sea. The research is predicted to take four years to complete, and will require scientists and the public to scour thousands of high-res images for signs of these whiskery, tusked Waldos.

How hard is it to find two-ton mammals that lay on beaches in large colonies? you may wonder. The British Antarctic Survey’s Hannah Cubaynes—whose official job title is Wildlife from Space Research Associate—explains that using traditional methods to assess walrus populations isn’t effective because the creatures actually “live in extremely remote areas, spend much of their time on the sea ice, and move around a lot.” Her group’s solution to this problem was to collect satellite imagery from the areas where walruses live, and go through them one by one. That project would be far too massive for their team alone, so Cubaynes adds: “We need help from thousands of citizen scientists to help us learn more about this iconic animal.”

Although walruses play a vital role in the Arctic ecosystem, scientists admit they aren’t sure how many exist along the coastline of Russia’s inaccessible Laptev Sea, which measures almost 10,000 square miles—almost as big as Massachusetts, to give you an idea of this task.

The WWF says the project is crucial because, like every other animal up there, walruses are feeling the effects of climate change in the Arctic, which is warming almost three times faster than the rest of the world. Walruses need sea ice to rest, breed, and eat. But sea ice is melting, and the organization says once the problem gets serious enough, the walruses will have to relocate to land, which will likely cause overcrowding and require them to expend vast amounts of energy to get their food from the ocean.

Eagle-eyed walrus detectives can join the hunt by visiting wwf.org.uk/walrusfromspace, where they’ll be asked to create an account, then complete a training module before getting started.

The pandemic was perhaps the perfect storm. Suddenly trapped at home, doomsurfing the woes of quarantine, forever logged into work emails—it’s enough to make you want to quit your job, quit social media, quit everything.

But as much as we lamented the toxicity of virtual-everything, we still clung to it like a lifeline or a last breath, desperately inhaling content from the outside world through our screens. Because it was through this medium that, as if traversing the stages of grief, our pandemic-muddled frustrations and manias gradually crystallized into a sort of therapeutic catharsis. Call it, the rise of the “Why I Quit” story: told in online essays, vlogs, Twitter threads, or just about any other digital-friendly platform.

The trend is not exactly new: It’s a storytelling format that has been around since the dawn of the digital age, used by social media influencers, multi-level marketing executives, and self-care coaches to peddle the dream of a major lifestyle change bringing wealth, power, and happiness. Then as the internet evolved, it also became a way for activists to spotlight their causes and call for reform.

Now, in the midst of one of the worst economic and social crises in recent history, it’s serving both purposes, putting names and faces to the legions of American workers leading a 21st-century labor crusade.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly 4 million employees have quit their jobs each month this summer in what’s been dubbed the Great Resignation. In August, 4.3 million workers resigned, leaving a record-breaking 10.4 million job openings. Chloe Shih, a former product manager at TikTok, was one of them; her YouTube video revealing why she parted ways with the company has gone viral this week.

There’s also John Marty, who left his Amazon innovation manager role earlier this year. And Christine Chun, who left her Facebook UX design gig late last year. And Lisa Nguyen, who quit her paralegal job to become a food vlogger.

That so many of these newly liberated job seekers are posting their stories online is hardly surprising. A study from Adobe suggests that Gen Z is leading the worker revolt; for the so-called zoomer population, social media updates are a native instinct. That might explain why there’s a burgeoning TikTok hashtag, #quitmyjob, which cues up a stream of users sharing the moments they turned in their two-week notices, with millions of views awarded to the ones who got most creative with it (a Walmart employee broadcasting over the store intercom, a Joystick Gaming and Collectibles staffer outing a colleague as a snack thief). For those workers, “Why I Quit” stories are an outlet that can transform bottled-up resentment against the system into a simple punchline that makes people laugh.

Striving for change

But the trend is much more than just jokes. Fast Company’s Elizabeth Segran shared why she quit shopping at Amazon in protest of its planetary harm, mistreatment of workers, and crushing of small businesses. In her video, Chloe Shih detailed what she saw as an unhealthy workaholic culture and an unacceptable lack of diversity at TikTok, which eventually pushed her to the brink. And in a recent personal essay, a freelance writer described why she stopped working after a mental health epiphany during a Black Lives Matter march last summer. Because—here’s a radical thought—sometimes quitting could actually make your life, or even the rest of the world, better.

In fact, “quitting” has been a weapon in the fight to illuminate global issues big and small: from psychologists recommending patients with poor self-image delete Facebook, to Grand Slam tennis champion Naomi Osaka forgoing news conferences, to a high-profile sponsored gamer retiring from Fortnite because World Cup tours began to bring more stress than joy.

So perhaps we should celebrate the “quit” not as a flag of defeat, but as a vision of hope for a brighter future and a better tomorrow—even through the darkest nights of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because after all, it’s about time we quit wishing and make it happen.

When a show is on the air for almost three quarters of a century, it’s bound to have its ups and downs. Such is the case with NBC’s Meet the Press, which has survived the advent of color television, 24-hour cable news, the internet, social media, countless format overhauls, and 14 presidential administrations since its first episode aired in November 1947.

The perennial Sunday news program is still a ratings winner in its category, but like any brand that established itself on linear TV, it’s faced increasingly existential questions over the last decade about how, when, and on which platforms viewers will find it—and whether they will even want to. In a fragmented media ecosphere of unlimited streaming choices, how do you keep a brand as old as Meet the Press relevant?  

Chuck Todd says he was asking those questions seven years ago when he was named the 12th full-time moderator of the series. “There’s a memo I wrote in 2014, before I took over the show, when I was asked to what I would do if I were handed the keys, and this was the first thing I identified,” he tells Fast Company. “My theory of the case at the time was that you can’t expect Meet the Press to just be a Sunday show anymore. And really we’ve sort of taken that attitude.”

Since then, efforts to diversify the brand have probably been most fully realized in Meet the Press Reports, a weekly series of long-form, magazine-style reporting, which just began its third season on Peacock and NBC News Now, the network’s over-the-top streaming service for news content. Todd describes it as “Real Sports meets Meet the Press,” referencing the the long-running Bryant Gumbel series on HBO. The series tackles such topics as climate change, the new space race, and activism in professional sports. In the latest episode, launching today, Todd explores the evolving political influence of evangelical voters. “It’s the type of topic you need 30 minutes with,” he says. “You can’t just do it in five minutes.” 

By going deep on a single topic, Meet the Press Reports addresses some of the core criticisms of the traditional Sunday show format—that it’s too focused on presidential horse races, for example, or that its surface-level interviews and rotating guests are more conducive to sound bites than in-depth discussions. Todd himself often bears the brunt of those critiques, notably on Twitter, where it’s not uncommon for clips of his interviews to be picked apart and dunked on by viewers and fellow journalists. For what it’s worth, he doesn’t scroll through the site each week after Meet the Press airs to see if his name is trending, which it often is. “The only time I ever look at Twitter on a Sunday is if there’s some bad call in a football game and I’m curious to see if others noticed,” he says.

NBC News is not alone in strategic efforts to meet viewers where they are. News divisions at ABC and CBS both have free streaming options (ABC News Live and CBSN) that are easily accessable on smart TVs. Fox News has a subscription-based counterpart, called Fox Nation, and CNN is launching its own version, CNN Plus, early next year. Just about every major news show, including Meet the Press, has a podcast, and many shows put their clips up on Twitter, YouTube, or elsewhere for easy consumption. This doesn’t even get us into TikTok, which is likely to be a powerful political force for young voters in 2024, and which many established news brands are still trying to figure out.

It might have been easier to push all this aside five years ago—or even last year—when news outlets were enjoying the famous “Trump Bump.” Add to that the COVID-19 pandemic, historic protests over racial justice, a presidential election in which one candidate wouldn’t accept the results, and the Capitol Hill insurrection, and it’s easy to see why anxious news consumers could not tune 2020 out, even if they wanted to.

News brands have the opposite problem this year. Viewers are feeling burned out and the next presidential election is still three years away. It’s no longer a revelation to say news consumers are living in their own echo chambers, but for brands like Meet the Press that still try to position themselves as nonpartisan, the ever-deepening chasms of our hyperpartisan news landscape will make finding and keeping viewers all the more challenging—today and for the next 74 years.

“This is a moment when we’re fragmenting,” Todd says. “This is both a good and bad thing. I worry about fragmentation as far as how we get our information, but obviously it’s an opportunity for us to do more.”

A landscape architect whose work focuses on unloved and degraded spaces has just been awarded the profession’s new top prize. Julie Bargmann, founder of D.I.R.T. Studio and a professor at the University of Virginia, is the inaugural laureate of the $100,000 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize.

Julie Bargmann, 2021 Oberlander Prize laureate [Photo: ©Barrett Doherty/courtesy the Cultural Landscape Foundation]Bargmann has specialized in work on overlooked, environmentally challenged, and deeply polluted sites, bringing an ethos of recycling, remediation, and repair to places others may see as too far gone. In projects like the Vintondale Reclamation Park, built on a former coal mine’s dumping ground, and the retrofit of the Philadelphia Navy Yard into the headquarters of Urban Outfitters, Bargmann turns design projects into environmental interventions, and vice versa.

Urban Outfitters, Philadelphia; Julie Bargmann, landscape architect [Photo: ©Charles A. Birnbaum/courtesy the Cultural Landscape Foundation]Founded in 1992, D.I.R.T.—which stands for Dump It Right There—has often reworked elements of a site’s previous life into the new design, using rubble and chunks of former buildings to draw connections to the past. Bargmann’s work also emphasizes the importance of using landscape design and ecological processes to filter and remove pollutants from heavily impacted postindustrial landscapes, including Superfund sites—areas of land that have been designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as hazardous to human health and/or the environment.

[Image: courtesy the Cultural Landscape Foundation]“To work with these toxic and degraded sites, you must look carefully, and care about, the processes of their past—industrial, social, environmental, and cultural,” Bargmann tells Fast Company via email. “It’s only when you understand the flows and the stories that you can imagine their next life. And the sites’ landscape narratives are the only way to engage the neighbors’ story.”

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander in 2007 [Photo: Susan Cohen/courtesy the Cultural Landscape Foundation]The Oberlander Prize is being awarded by the Washington, D.C.-based Cultural Landscape Foundation as a landscape-focused counterpart to the $100,000 Pritzker Architecture Prize, regarded as architecture’s top honor. To be given every two years, the $100,000 Oberlander Prize will also include two years of public engagement focused on the laureate’s work. Named for the pioneering environmentalist and landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, who died earlier this year at age 99, the prize was created to shine a spotlight on a design profession that is sometimes disregarded as simply filling in the spaces around architecture projects.

Indeed, the history of landscape architecture has played into that perception, with its roots in decorative garden design that was more about aesthetics than performance. This, over time, has evolved into a more broadly considered practice, with landscape architects working on climate adaptation, regional water planning, and environmental justice, in addition to designing gardens and parks.

“Where the world is today in terms of climate change, equity, and what we know, in a post-COVID world, the role that the public realm plays in our everyday lives, it is more critical than ever that we need to make visible the often invisible hand of the landscape architect,” says Charles Birnbaum, president and CEO of the Cultural Landscape Foundation. “With the prize we’re hoping to really elevate its visibility and a broader public understanding of what landscape architecture is and what landscape architects do.”

Bargmann was selected by a jury of designers, including landscape architect and professor Dorothée Imbert, architect Tatiana Bilbao, landscape architect Gina Ford, and landscape architect Walter Hood.

Core City Park, Detroit [Photo: Prince Concepts/the Cultural Landscape Foundation]Hood says Bargmann was chosen for her radical impact on the practice of landscape architecture and her persistence in using design to address broader issues than pure aesthetics. “It’s not about getting the next big project, but still investigating those ideas and issues over a 25-year period and being able to stay with it,” he says. “We don’t get rewarded a lot of the times for being consistent.”

Bargmann’s work, Hood says, has forced people “to see landscape and the medium in a different way. I use the term messy in my work. Julie afforded me that view that the work could be messy and could still be wonderful.”

Turtle Creek Water Works, Dallas [Photo: ©Charles A. Birnbaum/courtesy the Cultural Landscape Foundation]In advocating for the reclamation and remediation of heavily polluted sites, Bargmann has long been a provocateur, but she can also be playful. Her Urban Outfitters project at the Philadelphia Navy Yard included the prominent placement of two large chunks of concrete from the site, which she nicknamed Betty and Barney Rubble, after cartoon characters from The Flintstones. Hood says that move inspired one of his own projects, Solar Strand in Buffalo, New York, a few years ago. “I got a client to allow us to do some big Barney Rubble, too,” he says.

Bargmann’s approach to landscape architecture has pushed the field beyond its decorative roots. Hood says that while the profession still has a long way to go, Bargmann’s influence has pushed other designers to take a more holistic view of what their projects can do. “She’s always been that voice out there in the wilderness doing the work, and I think she is an inspiration for the future,” Hood says.

Core City Park, Detroit [Photo: Prince Concepts/the Cultural Landscape Foundation]Bargmann seems gratified by the award, and is hopeful that the attention may help encourage more designers to engage with the social and environmental challenges embedded within the built environment. “Out there are 25 years’ worth of my former students who have ventured into this derelict territory with me and now they, along with other colleagues, are poised to nurture ugly duckling landscapes,” Bargmann says. “If I paraphrase Cornelia Oberlander, the award is a firm tug to pull your head out of the sand and to regenerate, with joy and optimism, these fallow landscapes.”

Startup compensation packages include equity—in the form of stock options—to give employees ownership in the company they’re building. It also creates an incentive to reward all for their hard work and align company growth objectives. If all goes well, the company thrives and employees experience a life-changing financial windfall as a result. 

But it’s not that simple and, unfortunately, startup employees don’t often reap the benefits they deserve. We believe companies have a responsibility to step up and educate their employees to help their team avoid common equity pitfalls. 

Equity gets more expensive over time

Employees join a startup out of their personal drive to build anew and make great impact through their work. In many cases, they take a salary cut in favor of receiving stock options in the form of company equity—an exciting moment with huge potential. But, in reality, they lean in, put in the hours, work hard, and lose sight of the fact that they need to take action regarding their equity. In other words, they need to “exercise their options.” This means they need to come out of pocket to buy their stock options. 

In the early days with low strike prices and company valuations, it may not make a huge financial dent. But many wait to exercise their options for two reasons: One, they don’t understand the economics behind how stock options work in that there are significant tax advantages that make stock options cheaper to exercise in the beginning, and two, they are not yet ready to bear the associated risks and costs with an early-stage company. 

Over time, the plot thickens. The company is growing, and its growth is being recognized through higher 409A valuations. There may even be talk about a future exit in the form of an IPO, acquisition, direct listing, or SPAC. And that prompts many questions from employees regarding the value and cost of their stock options. 

This is where the frustration for many startup employees really sets in. The more successful and valuable the company becomes, the more expensive it is to exercise options because of taxation. The taxes are determined by the difference of the strike price (the cost to exercise one stock option) and the 409A valuation (the appraisal of the value of a single company share) at the time of exercising. 

In 2020 alone, startup employees left behind $4.9 billion by not exercising their options before an IPO. The number one reason was because they couldn’t afford them. The cost to exercise is, on average, twice the annual income of an average employee at a late-stage startup. And it’s mostly due to taxes. In fact, 85% of exercise costs are taxes.

Many employees lose their equity when they leave the company

Employees decide to leave their job for many reasons—a new opportunity, a change in career paths, or even moving to a new location. But many are surprised to learn they have 90 days to exercise any vested options when they leave.

If they are still bullish on their company—which many leaving employees are—they suddenly find themselves scrambling to get as much cash as they can to take ownership of their shares. But there are many that, as hard as they try, will just never be able to come up with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in 90 days.

Some also decide the short-term pain isn’t worth the long-term reward. Maybe they’re about to put a down payment on a house or are worried about losing all of their emergency savings. So, they let them expire and hope it wasn’t a mistake. At Snowflake, one of the most successful IPOs in recent years, more than $1.2 billion worth of stock options went unexercised. 

Some startups are combatting this latter issue with longer exercising windows. Instead of 90 days, employees can have 5, 7, or even 10 years to exercise. In a recent episode of the Founder’s Field Guide podcast, Spenser Skates, CEO of Amplitude, discussed how he personally got involved to extend their window to 10 years. 

But this workaround still comes with a 90-day deadline. That’s because, legally, incentive stock options (ISOs) automatically convert to nonqualified stock options (NSOs) after 90 days of leaving the company. Most employees are granted ISOs, which have a more favorable tax treatment than NSOs. So while it’s fantastic that more startups are extending the window, employees who take it will likely end up paying even more to exercise their options. 

Companies need to provide more equity education

 All this talk about cost, taxes, and planning illustrates just how complicated equity is. Most employees are left feeling lost and are not sure where, or to whom, to turn. The first place employees will likely go when they do have a question is their employer. In fact, 82% of employees want their company to help them understand their equity. 

Founders and executives do want employees to value their stock options. Many just don’t know how to help. Legally, companies can’t offer financial advice to employees, but they can offer helpful tools and resources. Being more proactive about educating and helping their employees with equity would also benefit the company.

First, it would foster a culture of transparency and openness. Culture is a big part of any successful company. Proactive communication about stock options can contribute to a positive culture. And that can help with any number of things, from recruiting and retainment to just overall employee satisfaction. It’s no secret that happy employees are often productive. 

Second, going public is not easy. It’s why companies bring in equity teams to help—it’s a lot of work. Getting ahead of employee questions can streamline that process so the executive team can focus on going public. Having a successful IPO will benefit everyone. The same goes for an acquisition. Getting ahead of employee concerns removes unnecessary work in the process.

Going public is something to celebrate, but financial conversations are not easy to have. So, most people don’t have them, especially at work. Even for the most seasoned CPA, stock options can be complex territory. Yet employees are being asked to figure out one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives on their own. 

If more startups can help provide the tools and resources for employees to make an informed decision about their equity, it can create much more value for everyone in the company. Quite literally.

Frederik Mijnhardt is the CEO of Secfi, a pre-wealth management platform helping startup employees navigate financial decisions from offer to IPO.

Let me introduce you to an employee who recently joined a new employer. As her previous job, Reema was a top performer at a fast-growing organization where she contributed plenty of ideas. Everyone knew of her incredible leadership skills. Her insights determined most decisions. Hers was the voice everyone stopped to listen to in meetings—everyone except for Jared, the founder of the company.

Last week, Reema gave notice that she accepted a job at another company. She would have better pay, more visibility, and more autonomy. She wrote a LinkedIn post about how grateful she was for the incredible experience at Jared’s company. Jared sang her praises in the company-wide Slack channel. No hard feelings. It’s just business. People move on.

It seemed all was right with the world—besides the fact that this entire process did not need to happen. Yes, Reema left because she found a better opportunity, but Reema also left because she felt stifled and undervalued by Jared. And Shamika before her experienced a similar situation . . . and Nuranne before them. Notably, the HR department didn’t blink twice at these departures because the numbers were all in the range of healthy turnover.

It’s the classic line from politicians that they are stepping down from office to “spend more time with family.” This may be true. But what are they not saying?

Opportunity for learning and growth hides in the perspectives we don’t want to hear. The perspectives that confuse, infuriate, and challenge us. The perspectives we don’t typically hear until someone leaves the organization, if ever. So how as a leader can you better meet, and embrace, inconvenient truths? I provide a few ideas.

Normalize opposition

From time to time, it can help to have someone on the team who never agrees. This devil’s advocate individual can help turn the tables in a beneficial way and broaden your discussion. Team members should take turns taking on this role so the responsibility doesn’t fall to people who are naturally outspoken or see things differently because of their backgrounds. Taking turns also reduces the likelihood any person is stigmatized for slowing down the conversation or being the proverbial “stick in the mud.”

The implicit power imbalance between leader and team members makes asking people to share what’s missing feel risky. Instead, bake the same simple questions into evaluating any idea. To begin with, ask yourself what are the upsides, as well as the downsides? Use whatever language suits your culture. It can be a pro or a con. Alternatively, you can use plusses and minuses when doing your analysis. The key is to create predictable spaces where others can share different perspectives.

Interrogate your own reaction 

Inconvenient truths are by definition inconvenient. They take time and energy (we don’t have) to engage with. They mess with the comfortable narratives we have about who we are (typically, good, well-meaning, capable people). If you’re upset when a colleague or someone who is providing you feedback points out a mistake or an example of bad leadership—that’s okay. It’s normal to be upset. But don’t let that be the end of the conversation, where you shut off and storm out.

Instead, consider what behaviors, mindsets, actions have led your conversation partner to feel this way. Further, consider what would it mean if it were true? What might you learn from this exchange, down the line.

Consider what you’re losing

What are the costs of you denying or not wrestling with their perspective? Further, ask yourself what learning and growth are you missing out on by ignoring inconvenient truths? In addition to turnover, consider the impact of your unwillingness to engage with the topic on work culture, productivity, innovation, and trust.

Refusing to engage with others’ perspectives often means making others uneasy to preserve your own comfort. This sort of one-sided burden is too often taken up by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) employees.

These days, adopting “a growth mindset” is a popular phrase. Many companies even name “having a growth mindset” as a core value. In a nutshell, it means going beyond the things which are easy and palatable, to embracing the things you don’t want to hear and someone has likely taken risk to share with you. It can look like the team isn’t going to hit the sales targets for the quarter, that you’ve created a toxic work culture, or that they are really leaving the company because they felt you didn’t value their contributions.

While incredibly important, it’s not just about retaining the Reemas and other valuable employees of the world or about creating work cultures in which everyone can thrive; it’s also about getting out of your own way, as a leader. Don’t stop at the convenient truth, seek out, embrace, and engage the inconvenient. It can be key to supercharging your own learning and capabilities.

Elaine Lin Hering is a lecturer at Harvard Law School and a managing partner of Triad Consulting Group, where she has worked with leaders from across the globe and across multiple industries to develop skills necessary to work better, together. 

The creator economy’s explosive growth has largely outstripped the means to support the creators fueling it.

The market size of the creator economy is estimated to be more than $104 billion, yet 78% of creators who consider themselves full-time only make $23,500 annually, according to Influencer Marketing Hub. It’s not just that creators are struggling to patch together a livable wage from ad revenue, merch sales, creator funds, tips, and so forth. They’re also challenged by not having sufficient capital on hand to grow their businesses.

Historically, traditional banks have been wary of lending to creators, which has paved a path from venture capitalists and fintech startups to close the gap.

One of the latest companies aiming to support creators financially is Spotter.

Spotter, which soft-launched in 2019, provides YouTube creators with lump-sum capital in exchange for acquiring the rights to their back catalog of videos for a limited time. (Creators retain control and monetization of future uploads.)

Using a proprietary prediction engine, Spotter is able to value and underwrite video content for anywhere from $50,000 to more than $30 million. The company reports to have pumped more than $200 million into the creator economy, striking deals with the likes of Dude Perfect, MrBeast, Donut Media, and more.

Spotter creators: Aphmau, Daym Drops, Deestroying, Donut Media, Dude Perfect, Gloom, MrBeast, preston, Vlad and Nikita [Image: Siberia]“Creators really don’t have access to capital. They’re not going to take on equity partners and give up their business, nor do they want to take on loans or debt,” says Nic Paul, Spotter’s chief operating officer. “That’s really where fueling the growth of creators while allowing them to remain independent and in control of their destiny was really a huge part of the company.”

Spotting potential in market

Spotter is the brainchild of Aaron DeBevoise, cofounder and the former executive vice president of network programming of the YouTube multichannel network Machinima. One of DeBevoise’s primary tasks was researching if YouTube creators’ revenue could be predictable enough to provide them financing to grow their businesses. That idea started to become a reality when YouTube made engagement the primary metric for driving viewership.

Aaron DeBevoise [Photo: Alex Freiman]“We started to see that the creators who were hyper-focused on specific categories—not all gaming, but Minecraft, and not all of cooking, but baking cupcakes—those creators were being rewarded by consistently creating the same type of content on a high-volume basis,” says DeBevoise, who serves as Spotter’s CEO.

DeBevoise says Spotter is meant for YouTube creators in all content categories with the only caveat being consistent performance and proof of monetization for at least a year. Once the value of a creator’s back catalog is assessed, they’re offered what Paul calls “life-altering capital.”

“This is not capital like they would get from a brand deal or anywhere else,” Paul says. “The reason why we wanted the back catalog is because it doesn’t interfere with any of their initiatives, strategies, or growth. They can have new uploads that are generating more revenue than the back catalog, and we can still allow them to unlock a lot of meaningful capital.”

Reed Duchscher, founder and CEO of the digital talent management company Night, was one of the first people DeBevoise called, because Duchscher works with such YouTube powerhouses as Jimmy Donaldson (aka MrBeast), and Preston Arsement (aka PrestonPlayz).

“Initially it was something we were a little hesitant on not knowing the numbers. It’s hard to project future earnings for YouTube,” Duchscher says. “There’s just so many unknowns: What’s an RPM [revenue per mille, i.e., total revenue per 1,000 video views] going to be? Is there going to be a new adpocalypse?”

Duchscher worked with Spotter’s team to crunch the numbers around a back catalog’s worth, and eventually felt comfortable enough to broker deals with several of his clients, most notably MrBeast, who has more than 124 million subscribers across his YouTube channels.

While an exact figure wasn’t disclosed, Duchscher says Spotter’s deal for some of MrBeast’s old videos is for three years. The capital they raised is going toward building infrastructure around MrBeast’s higher-budget video ideas and expanding his team.

“When I met [Donaldson], it was just him and an editor. Now it’s a massive team around multiple channels. It’s just incredibly expensive,” says Duchscher of MrBeast, who’s also known to have massive cash giveaways. “There actually aren’t a lot of places for creators to go get capital to fund their business right now. Almost every bank that we’ve spoken with over the last two years has not been willing to give creator loans.”

Duchscher also underscores that Spotter’s appeal lies in part with the fact that it doesn’t ask more of a creator in exchange for being a source of capital. “The business model was not for them to get intertwined in these businesses,” Duchscher says. “There’s no hand-holding. They’re not trying to change someone’s content style. They’re not giving feedback on videos. It’s a pretty straightforward deal.”

Cody Jones, one-fifth of the group Dude Perfect, says their Spotter deal has allowed them to invest in several businesses, as well as expand their own, with plans to create a headquarters in Texas that would double as an experiential location for fans.

“It’s been one of those deals where we’d love to have the cash on hand now to get our money working,” Jones says, “versus in the past, we were like, ‘let’s just wait until the ad revenue rolls in and keep running the business that way.'”

A spot for all?

It’s fair to wonder why top creators such as MrBeast and Dude Perfect would need capital in the first place. These are some of the highest earners across AdSense, brand deals, merch, and other successful ventures that generate considerable revenue that they could pump back into their businesses.

Influencer Marketing Hub’s report found that only 46% of creators who’ve been building an audience for four or more years earn a little over $20,000 annually across their channels. “It’s not really a living wage. That is just the reality of it right now,” says Werner Geyser, founder of Influencer Marketing Hub. “It’s really the influencers at the top and then everyone else.”

Nic Paul [Photo: Alex Freiman]DeBevoise and Paul note that they went after YouTube’s bigger names at first in hopes to have a trickle-down effect with other creators. “We have been focusing on the highest viewership creators on the platform so that we can deploy as much capital as possible to prove out the model,” DeBevoise says. “But now that the model has been proven, because we’ve been doing this for two years, we’re going out to as many creators as possible.”

“We need to go out and educate the marketplace, meaning creators, that this is an opportunity for them, but more importantly, we need to educate them on why this is a good opportunity for them,” Paul adds. “If we can do those larger deals, it allows the market to get educated.”

DeBevoise argues that Spotter’s predictive engine actually keeps their human intuition in check. “One of our first deals was a channel that was all about travel in Las Vegas. That was not something that we would, from a high level, [have chosen]. But it ended up being a great channel for us to work with from a predictive perspective and from a data-centric perspective,” DeBevoise says. “We really value our predictive engine in helping us source the entire ecosystem rather than just do what’s in plain sight.”

Markian Benhamou, creator of the YouTube comedy group Smile Squad, is one of the more up-and-coming creators that Spotter has worked with.

The company acquired the back catalog of Smile Squad’s main channel (1.6 million subscribers) for $1 million for five years.

“The main thing was understanding what’s in it for [Spotter]. Like, what am I missing that they know that they’re willing to pay this much? It sounds too good to be true,” Benhamou says. “But once I understood that they’ll pay for 80% of what they expect us to make and that they seem like they’re taking a fair guess based on math and algorithms, I decided to take it.”

DeBevoise’s ultimate goal with Spotter is to create a robust portfolio of YouTube talent. “We’re not a venture capital firm saying, ‘hey, let’s go out and make a 10x on one deal,'” he says. “The more deals we do, the more we can pay, because the more likely we are to hit singles and doubles. We’ve already spent $200 million investing in these types of deals across over 115 channels, and, ultimately, we want to grow that by two times or more over the coming years.”

United Airlines has announced what it says is its largest transatlantic expansion in its history. The airline will launch five new destinations and 10 new routes by spring 2022. United says the destinations are not served by any other carrier in North America.

Here’s the full list of totally new destinations that you can hop to on a United flight to come next year. These will begin in spring 2022:

• Amman, Jordan
• Bergen, Norway
• Azores, Portugal
• Palma de Mallorca, Spain
• Tenerife, Spanish Canary Islands

And here’s the list of new routes United is adding come next spring from select U.S. cities:

• Berlin
• Dublin
• Frankfurt
• Milan
• Munich
• Nice, France
• Rome
• Zurich
• Bangalore, India
• Tokyo

United’s expansion in transatlantic flights shows a healthy dose of optimism that international travel will pick up next year after being destroyed in 2020 by the pandemic and seeing relatively sparse activity compared to historical trends in 2021.

Announcing the transatlantic expansion, Patrick Quayle, senior vice president of international network and alliances at United, said, “given our big expectations for a rebound in travel to Europe for summer, this is the right time to leverage our leading global network in new, exciting ways. Our expansion offers the widest range of destinations to discover—introducing new, trendy locales that our customers will love, as well as adding more flights to iconic, popular cities.”

Each of its carbon-sucking units is the size of a shipping container, yet the world’s largest direct air capture machine—the Orca plant in Iceland—captures and stores only about 4,000 tonnes of CO₂ a year. That’s about three seconds’ worth of global emissions.

Still, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that technologies that remove CO₂ from the air like this will be needed alongside deep cuts in emissions to reduce global warming. In fact, climate scientists modeling pathways for stabilizing warming at 1.5°C (the goal of the Paris agreement) assume that a carbon removal industry based around one method may need to be around 40% the size of the current fossil fuel industry.

There are several ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere. One is called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or Beccs. Here, vast acres of fast-growing plants are grown and then harvested and burned to generate electricity or make biofuel for vehicles. Beccs can even use waste from farms or timber plantations. The carbon normally released during the burning or fermentation stage is instead captured and pumped underground in old oil and gas wells or deep rock formations called saline aquifers. These storage sites can be beneath land (which is common in the U.S.) or the seabed. There are more than 20 years of experience in storing CO₂ under the Norwegian North Sea, for instance.

Attempts to calculate how much carbon removal is possible often address how much it will cost, or how much carbon can realistically be extracted from the atmosphere. This can be done by assessing the land area available to produce biomass crops, or the size of underground reservoirs for storing the gas.

But what scientists often overlook when predicting the future capacity of these technologies is how society will need to change to accommodate them. For instance, what will a sudden change to how land is used mean for communities and livelihoods? How can increasing demand for land to grow food or restore habitat be reconciled with the need to produce lots of biomass for Beccs? And who should even be able to make these decisions for them to be considered fair and ethical?

If world leaders at the UN climate summit in Glasgow fail to address these questions, they run the risk of making overly optimistic judgments about how much CO₂ it’s possible to remove. If it transpires that the international community cannot rely on these technologies as much as climate modeling suggests we need to, then society will need to decarbonize even faster to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Social and political issues matter

There is only one demonstration Beccs project operating in the world today, in Illinois. Alongside other researchers, we talked to experts working in sectors like forestry and energy to understand what’s needed to bring this new industry to life.

These experts are aware of large-scale bioenergy projects, such as those cultivating sugar cane ethanol in Brazil, which have deprived local people of land and destroyed native habitat. Many of them worry that a global Beccs industry that developed from these practices would exacerbate inequality by, for example, reducing access to food and ultimately fail to remove carbon from the atmosphere by actually increasing deforestation. The U.K.’s largest power plant for generating energy from biomass, Drax, mostly imports wood chips from North America, while U.K. farmers grow grass for use in a handful of smaller-scale power plants. But as the U.K. develops a Beccs industry, rising demand for bioenergy could mean the cheapest and most exploitative sources win out.

The experts were also unsure about whether there is even enough free land to accommodate expanding bioenergy crops. Many voiced concerns about the consequences for the rights of people living in and working on land that is earmarked for Beccs.

Some experts doubted there was sufficient political support—capable of transcending short-term electoral cycles—to pull off the necessary innovation to build carbon capture and storage capacity in the U.K. This technology is needed not just for Beccs but also to decarbonize heavy industry, including steel manufacturing and chemicals.

We found that these social and political obstacles were rarely represented, if at all, in models of the global potential for carbon removal. Of course, some of these things can’t be modeled. Models aren’t usually designed to incorporate the nuances of decision-making at national, regional, and local levels, or the importance of cultural and spiritual values that people endow landscapes.

World leaders need a more complete picture of the complexity we know exists in the real world before embarking on the construction of a global carbon removal industry. Making this happen is as much a question of who pays to remove the carbon and who has a say in how the land is managed, as details about technology. If the political and social limitations are not better understood, then it is hard to imagine how these carbon removal pipe dreams will get off the ground.

Johanna Forster is a lecturer in environment and international development at the University of East Anglia. Naomi Vaughan is a senior lecturer in climate change at the University of East Anglia.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Facebook says it’s designing a pair of augmented reality glasses that can add digital content to the world in front of us. They might be years away from shipping. And to be useful to us—to walk us through a pizza recipe or help us find the car keys—they need to offer a built-in assistant with some serious AI smarts. The challenge is getting enough video footage—shot from the perspective of the user—to train the assistant to make inferences about the world as seen through the lenses of the glasses.

That kind of first-person training video is scarce. So Facebook partnered with 13 universities to create a large new data set of “egocentric” training video called Ego4D. The universities recruited a total of 855 people in nine countries to strap on GoPro cameras to collect the video. In all, participants captured 3,025 hours of first-person video from their everyday lives.

The new data set will help Facebook researchers begin the process of creating and training an AI assistant to understand how users interact with other people, objects, and the environment around them. The AI, Facebook says, will be trained to recall things a user has seen or heard in the past to help with present activities, and to anticipate things the user might need in the future.

Facebook has boiled those general concepts down into five more-specific AI tasks, which hint at how the company sees its future AR glasses being useful. Facebook’s lead researcher on the Ego4D project, Kristen Grauman, told me the tasks were chosen based on how well they “span the fundamentals needed to build any or many applications.”

[Image: courtesy of Facebook]“Episodic memory” simply allows an assistant to recall something recorded by the glasses in the past. For instance, the AI assistant might recall and display the location of a lost item such as a set of keys. It might even display within the glasses the actual footage of the user placing the item in a certain location.

[Image: courtesy of Facebook]“Forecasting” analyzes a present activity and then suggests what the user might or should do next. It might suggest the next step in a recipe, for example.

[Image: courtesy of Facebook]“Object manipulation” might analyze how a user is handling an object, and make suggestions on how to do it better. For instance, the AI assistant might teach a percussion student how to hold drumsticks properly.

“Audio-visual conversation transcription” listens to social conversations the user has, and records them or transcribes them into text that could be recalled later. If you’re following a recipe, you might call up something your grandmother said in the past about a secret cooking tip, for example.

“Social interaction” adds a layer onto the audio-visual conversation transcription task, Grauman says, by detecting “who is looking at me and when, who’s paying attention to me, and who’s talking to me.”

Grauman says that the data set created by Facebook and its university partners contains anywhere from 50 to 800 hours of video footage for each of the use cases. Figuring out what it showed involved plenty of human labor: “Someone watched the video and every time something happened, [they] paused and wrote a sentence about it,” she says. The process yielded about 13 sentences per minute.

In all, the annotation job took a quarter of a million hours of work by professional labelers. But these annotations are vital for teaching the AI models to make inferences and recall things. “It’s really cool because it gives us the language-vision connection and it gives us a way to index the data from the get-go,” Grauman says.

The data set will lay the groundwork from which researchers can push the AI to understand a variety of everyday tasks the user might need help with. But training an AI model to classify and predict the universe of things, people, and situations a user might encounter during their day is a very big challenge, and Facebook has a long way to go toward producing a helpful and versatile assistant.

“The first real barrier is the data, so we’re taking a good crack at that through this contribution,” Grauman says. “But even with the data, now the fun begins in earnest as far as the core research challenges.”

The latest tech IPO of 2021 is GitLab, which begins trading today. Its initial public offering will be highly watched by those interested in cloud computing platforms. Here’s what you need to know:

• What is GitLab? It’s a cloud-based depository of software. The platform allows developers to share and contribute to each other’s work. In this way, GitLab competes most directly with Microsoft’s GitHub.
• What exchange will GitLab trade on? GitLab will trade on the Nasdaq, beginning today, October 14, 2021.
• What is GitLab’s stock ticker symbol? GitLab will trade under the ticker “GTLB”
• How many GTLB shares are available? 10,400,000 shares of Class A common stock will be up for purchase, per a company press release.
• How much will GTLB shares cost? The IPO price of one GTLB share is $77.
• How much is GitLab worth? As Bloomberg notes, at $77 per share, GitLab has a market cap of $11 billion. What its market cap will be by the end of today depends on if the shares rise or fall.
• Anything else to know about GitLab? As Fast Company’s Julia Herbst reports, GitLab is one of the few companies in the world with no physical headquarters. The 1,300-strong company is completely remote.

When it comes to pregnancy and childbirth, the focus tends to be on the baby’s health. As a result, women don’t often get the support they need, as they experience radical physical and psychological changes during and after delivery. That’s partly why maternal mortality rates have been on the rise in the United States, increasing more than 15% in 2019 alone. And Black women are three times more likely than their white counterparts to die of pregnancy-related causes. Yet, nearly two-thirds of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable.

Four years ago, Kate Westervelt founded a startup called Mombox to give women tools and products that would help them as they recovered from labor and delivery. Now, she’s launching a new subscription kit that gives women science-backed support as they recover in the year after childbirth. Westervelt was inspired by a growing body of academic research about the intense transformation that women experience after giving birth.

Westervelt came up with the concept of Mombox after her own pregnancy, when she noticed that the medical system, and society more broadly, tended to focus on the needs of the baby rather than those of the mother. Companies now sell products like belly bands, which help with C-section recovery, and more comfortable mesh underwear. But products like this are often hard to find and come from a range of small brands. Westervelt’s idea was to scour the market for labor and delivery products and test and curate them, in order to spare women the time and effort required to do it themselves.

But Westervelt realized that a woman’s recovery from pregnancy takes far longer than her hospital stay or even the few weeks after she’s home with her newborn. “It’s a misconception that maternal mortality refers to dying during childbirth,” she says. “When a woman dies within a year of giving birth, that is counted toward the maternal mortality rate. And yet, women get hardly any support during this first year, besides a final checkup with their OBGYN six weeks after delivering.”

[Screenshot: Mombox]With the new offering, Westervelt wants to provide tools for each month post-delivery to help with the physical recovery. For $99, customers can buy a single month’s box to focus on a problem like mood shifts or sleep. Or for $69 a month, they can sign up for the yearlong program, which will deliver boxed kits every month at the right postpartum stage. (There are also 3- and 6-month subscriptions.) Still, the subscription boxes aren’t cheap and will likely be out of reach for many lower-income women who would especially benefit from these kinds of products and resources.

Each box contains educational materials to help new mothers identify what’s considered “normal” and what might need medical attention. They also can include wellness and fitness products for help with common issues, such as the separation of abdominal muscles or weakening of the pelvic floor. Westervelt worked with a panel of researchers and practitioners to develop this content and curate products, including lactation consultants and perinatal physical therapists. And when possible, she sources products from small businesses owned by women and people of color. “Our priority is picking the best products on the market,” says Westervelt. “We’re also helping to support brands that specialize in creating these products by connecting with the women who need them.”

As she was developing these boxes, Westervelt was influenced by the research on “matrescence,” an anthropological term that refers to how a woman’s identity changes when she becomes a mother. It was coined in the 1970s by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael, but never really became widely known in mainstream culture. Over the last decade, Aurélie Athan, a reproductive psychologist at Columbia University, has been working to bring it back into the public consciousness. “It’s a concept that has parallels in adolescence, which is something that is widely understood in our culture,” says Westervelt. “We accept that when a child becomes an adult, their bodies change but so does their entire relationship to the world, and it’s a process of transformation that takes years. The same is actually true when a person gives birth. And yet we don’t seem to recognize that.”

In some ways, it’s not particularly surprising that matrescence hasn’t been rigorously studied. Researchers have documented a persistent gender bias in health care, in which doctors don’t treat women’s pain as seriously as men’s, and women’s health issues aren’t researched as thoroughly as men’s—including how pregnant women would respond to the COVID-19 vaccine. But Athan says things are slowly beginning to change. “There’s been growing awareness about postpartum depression and maternal mental health screening,” she says. “Then there was the #MeToo movement, where women insisted that people take their voices seriously.”

Athan believes that simply educating women—and society—about matrescence can be an important first step toward helping new mothers through this transition. “So much of the discourse about new mothers is about how they can bounce back physically or ‘return’ to work,” she says. “The concept of matrescence is that you don’t ever go back to who you were before. But with the right tools, women can adapt to their new identities and lives.”

And that’s become Westervelt’s goal as she’s developed these monthly offerings. In addition to addressing women’s physical health, the boxes include resources to help mothers negotiate tricky things like reestablishing sexual intimacy with their partner and understanding postpartum brain shifts as they return to work. “The goal is to empower new moms with the research, so they can take control of their lives after they have a baby,” she says. “They might not be able to return to who they were before, but with support, their new lives could be even better.”

I haven’t had a reason to yell in the morning since my boys were little. Those occurrences were more of this variety: “You’re going to be late for school!” “Get in the car!” or “Where are your shoes?” So, when I heard about a class that encourages you to start your day screaming, I was curious.

The platform, called Open, is an in-person and online mindfulness studio that includes breathwork, meditation, and yoga instruction. Some of the breathwork classes include screaming. I’ll admit, the classes weren’t what I expected—which is a good thing. I envisioned jumping right into a scream. Instead, you build up to it with several minutes of active breathing, crescendoing with a guttural yell.

While there are several options, the class I took lasts 20 minutes and includes rounds of breathing exercises. You take two quick inhale breaths in through your mouth—the first to fill air near your belly, and the second to the top of your chest near your heart. Then you release the air with one exhale, also through your mouth. The exercise is done in quick succession, which after a while made me feel tingly and lightheaded.

A round lasts about five minutes. At the end, you take a deep breath in and hold it for 10 seconds. Then you exhale and hold empty lungs for another 10 seconds. After the second round, the breath-holding lasts 20 seconds, and after the third round, you hold your breath for 30 seconds.

The screaming comes in after the last round of active breathing exercises. You take a deep inhale and then let out a scream. Repeat as many times as you want.

The class I took is led by Open breathworks instructor Ally Maz. “This type of class is what we call upregulating,” says Maz. “It lifts the heart rate and works on endurance for performance and mental clarity. It’s similar to [Dutch fitness guru] Wim Hof breathing exercises.”

Active breathwork can help you release stress at the beginning of your day and connect to your body. After the third morning taking the class, I started to feel more in control of my day.

But why the screaming?

Active upregulating breathwork is energizing. Screaming can help you get out emotions you may not know you’re holding.

“When we hold the classes in person, people will scream, and then they’ll either cry or laugh because it’s like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been holding on to that thing,'” says Maz. “There’s a transformational moment. It can be scary to hear your voice, especially as a female because we’re not always in touch with our rage or have a lot of ways to use our voice in the world. We can be hard on ourselves and may be holding onto guilt or shame. Stuff starts bubbling up, and screaming is an energy release.”

I didn’t cry or laugh, but I did feel lighter after the scream. Eventually, I increased the number of times I screamed because it felt empowering.

Other forms of breathwork

Breathing—without the screaming—can also circumvent stress. I also used the platform to do quick classes that are designed to help calm you. “Downregulated breathwork practices slow the heart rate and help you recover, rest, and sleep better, which is also helpful for anyone struggling with anxiety or panic,” says Maz. “It’s all how you manipulate the breath. Different patterns have different outcomes.”

Maz calls this type of breathing a sigh of relief. Inhale through your nose, and exhale through your mouth. “That stimulates the vagus nerve, and it sets off a neurotransmitter that essentially goes to your heart and says, ‘Hey, heart, slow down,'” she says. “The breath shifts us from the fight or flight state back into parasympathetic, which is the rest and digest part of the nervous system. It helps open the lungs and reset the body. So many of us are sitting on our computers, typing, and not focusing on our breath.”

Breathwork is one of Open’s most popular types of classes, says founder Raed Khawaja. “You can actually discover a lot when you start to pay attention to how you breathe,” he says.

The more breathwork practice you do, the more you remember to take a deeper inhale, adds Maz. “I feel more at ease being in traffic, or when the stress response comes in,” she says. “I know if I can slow my breath down, I’ll slow my heart rate down, and stimulate my vagus nerve.”

I tend to be a breath holder, either when I’m feeling stressed or in deep focus with work. I don’t realize I’m doing it until I release the breath. Getting in tune with my breathing felt very foreign at first, but it’s definitely a valuable tool I can use on demand when I start to feel tension.

So, after taking classes for a week, will I keep up the screaming? Probably not every day. Maz screams weekly and says it helps her feel calmer in her life. This seems like a cadence I’ll try.

“I would call it a safe avenue to get that emotion out of your body,” says Maz. “Then it’s not coming out in road rage or at your partner or being suppressed with alcohol or numbed out through binge watching TV. It’s a really healthy way to get some of that emotion out of your body.”

This story is part of Fast Company’s Climate Change Survival Plan package. As time runs out to prevent climate catastrophe, we’re looking at what we need to do now to safeguard our future. Click here to read the whole series.

Without much effort, you can find news every day that confirms—over and over—that we are in a climate emergency. Droughts, fires, floods, hurricanes, and heat waves are now happening with such frequency, it can be hard to remember which tragedy happened last, while the political reaction is, at best, muted—entirely incommensurate to the challenge at hand.

In the absence of a grand political solution, we are forced to nibble around the edges and hope that science and technology can make enough advances to mitigate the problem, to give more time for world governments to act on broad de-carbonization. There is no cause for techno-optimism: We will not invent a perpetual motion machine that can somehow eliminate all the carbon in a way that allows life to continue as is, all without pushing political and business leaders. At the same time, you don’t need to surrender to complete techno-pessimism because scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs are making slow but steady advances in ways to replace the vital carbon in our economy with clean alternatives.

Forty years ago, solar and wind power were considered by some to be expensive boondoggles, only for the wealthy hobbyists, that would never make a difference at scale. Now—after decades of research and development—they’re the cheapest source of power we have. This list contains just a few of the recent advances that could be the next technology that can grow into part of a future, clean economy. Some of the items on this list will turn out to be too expensive, too hard to scale, too small in impact to matter. But others could become part of the solution. No one piece of technology will save us, but together many of them can be the building blocks that undergird the political solution we need. —Morgan Clendaniel

Moving to renewable energy

• This giant wind turbine blade can be recycled. Energy companies are trying to redesign wind energy so the giant components don’t end up in landfills. Siemens Gamesa’s RecyclableBlade can be broken down into its raw materials at the end of its life.
• During a power outage, this tech keeps the electricity on in the most important places. A grid powered by renewables requires managing much more complexity than one powered by a single, always-on coal plant. Intel has designed a new platform to help.
• This startup helps build solar farms where the grid is dirtiest. Renewable installations usually get installed where it’s easiest to build, which leaves some areas without new clean power. Clearloop wants to even out the distribution.

Reducing carbon footprint

• This sleek, climate-friendly cooling unit reduces the footprint of HVAC by 75%. Heat pump technology is the future of cooling and heating, but it’s been expensive to install. Now you can get a small heat pump for your window.
• How the shipping industry can go from global polluter to carbon neutral. From hydrogen to sails to green ammonia, the shipping industry is rethinking how it moves the massive amount of goods that undergird the global economy.
• This startup ensures that forestry-based carbon offsets deliver on their promises. The market for carbon offsets could be worth $100 billion by 2030. Pachama cofounder and CEO Diego Saez Gil is keeping it transparent and accountable.
• These carbon-capturing robotic seaweed farms are like planting forests in the ocean. Phykos is trying to pioneer a new form of carbon sequestration: using automated boats to grow seaweed in the middle of the ocean, then sinking it to the ocean floor.

Redesigning how we live

• What if walking around on your wood floors powered your home? Scientists have figured out how to make pieces of wood generate a charge when you apply pressure to them, which could reshape how we make buildings more efficient.
• 100 ways to make better use of urban rooftops, from parks to tiny homes. Cities have a lot of roofs. Let’s put some stuff on them!

Improving transportation

• Every new car and truck in the U.S. can be electric by 2035. The transition to EVs can happen faster than you think.
• Austin, Texas, just voted to spend $7 billion on a transportation revolution. The Texas capital will build a 31-station rail system, rapid bus routes, and bike lanes to get more people out of cars.

Solving food shortages and waste

• Everything you need to know about the booming business of fighting food waste. A new wave of companies is figuring out how to make new products from food that used to end up in the trash, from pulp popsicles to beer bread. Here are 20 to watch.

Cleaning the planet

• These drones will plant 40,000 trees in a month. By 2028, they’ll have planted 1 billion. We need to massively reforest the planet, in a very short period of time. Flash Forest’s drones can plant trees a lot faster than humans.
• This beach-cleaning robot sifts sand for the tiny plastics that humans miss. It’s hard to pick up all the plastic trash on beaches by hand. BeBot, a solar-powered robot, speeds up the process.
• This “sustainable infrastructure company” just raised $2 billion to build more clean tech. Generate Capital makes the often-costly upfront investments in sustainable projects—from solar panels to electric vehicles to food waste digesters—and then sells the services to other companies.
• Microplastics are in everything. What if they were biodegradable? Microplastics are used everywhere from laundry detergent to agriculture. Biotech startup Calyxia is making a new version of the tiny capsules that dissolve in nature.