Hitting the Books: How SNAP's digital services became an online quagmire

Nobody said dragging one of the largest government bureaucracies to ever exist into the digital era was going to be easy but the sheer scale and myriad variety of failings we have seen in recent decades have had very real, and near universally negative, consequences for the Americans reliant on these social systems. One need look no further than at how SNAP — the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — has repeatedly fallen short in its mission to help feed low-income Americans. Jennifer Pahlka, founder and former executive director of Code for America, takes an unflinching view at the many missteps and groupthink slip-ups committed by our government in the pursuit of bureaucratic efficiency in Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.

Metropolitan Books

Excerpted from Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better by Jennifer Pahlka. Published by Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2023 by Jennifer Pahlka. All rights reserved.

Stuck in Peanut Butter

The lawmakers who voted to cut the federal workforce in the 1990s, just as digital technology was starting to truly reshape our lives, wanted smaller government. But starving government of know-how, digital or otherwise, hasn’t made it shrink. It has ballooned it. Sure, there are fewer public servants, but we spend billions of dollars on satellite software that never goes to space, we pay vendors hundreds of thousands of dollars for basic web forms that don’t work, and we make applying for government services feel like the Inquisition. That’s the funny thing about small government: the things we do to get it — to limit government’s intrusion into our lives — have a habit of accomplishing the opposite.

Take, for example, an application for food stamps that requires answering 212 separate questions. That’s what Jake Solomon at Code for America discovered when he tried to find out why so few Californians in need enrolled in the state’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Many of the questions were confusing, while others were oddly specific and seemed to assume the person applying was a criminal. “Have you or any member of your household ever been found guilty of trading SNAP benefits for drugs after September 22, 1996? Have you or any member of your household ever been found guilty of trading SNAP benefits for guns, ammunition, or explosives after September 22, 1996?” It would often take up to an hour for people to fill out the entire form. They couldn’t apply on a mobile phone; the application form, called MyBenefits CalWIN, didn’t work on mobile. Lots of the people Jake observed tried to complete the form on computers at the public library instead, but the library computers kicked you off after half an hour. You had to wait for your turn to come again and pick up where you left off.

SNAP is a federal program that states are responsible for administering. The smaller the jurisdiction in charge, the more likely that the program will be attuned to local needs and values. California, along with nine other states, has chosen to further devolve administration to its individual counties, putting the burden of managing client data on fifty-eight separate entities. To handle that burden, the counties (with the exception of Los Angeles) formed two consortia that pooled IT resources. When it became clear that clients should be able to apply online, each consortium then contracted for a single online application form to save money. It turned out to be quite expensive anyway: MyBenefits CalWIN, the form Jake studied, cost several million dollars to build. But at least that got divided across the eighteen counties in the consortium.

What those several million dollars had gotten them was another question. Jake and his Code for America colleagues published a “teardown” of the website, over a hundred screenshots of it in action, with each page marked up to highlight the parts that confused and frustrated the people trying to use it. (To be fair, the teardown also highlighted elements that were helpful to users; there were just far fewer of them.) The teardown was a powerful critique. It was noticed by anti-poverty advocates and the press alike, and the ways in which the counties were failing their clients started to get a lot of attention. Jake should not have been popular with the people responsible for MyBenefits CalWIN. Which was why he was surprised when HP, the vendor managing the website, invited him to a meeting of the consortium to present his work.

The meeting brought representatives from each of the counties to a business hotel in downtown Sacramento. It was only after Jake finished showing them his observations that he realized why he’d been invited. The HP representative at the meeting presented a variety of options for how the consortium might use its resources over the coming year, and then the county representatives began engaging in that hallmark of democracy: voting. One of the questions up for a vote was whether to engage some of HP’s contracted time to make MyBenefits CalWIN usable on a mobile phone. Fresh off Jake’s critique, that priority got the votes it needed to proceed. Jake had done the job he’d been invited to do without even knowing what it was.

What struck Jake about the process was not his success in convincing the county representatives. It was not that different from what Mary Ann had achieved when her recording of Dominic convinced the deputy secretary of the VA to let her team fix the health care application. The HP rep was interested in bringing to life for the county reps the burdens that applicants experienced. Jake was very good at doing that, and the rep had been smart to use him.

What Jake did find remarkable was the decision-making process. To him, it was clear how to decide the kinds of questions the group discussed that day. SNAP applicants were by definition low-income, and most low-income people use the web through their phones. So at Code for America, when Jake developed applications for safety-net benefits, he built them to work on mobile phones from the start. And when he and his team were trying to figure out the best way to phrase something, they came up with a few options that sounded simple and clear, and tested these options with program applicants. If lots of people stopped at some point when they filled out the form, it was a sign that that version of the instructions was confusing them. If some wording resulted in more applications being denied because the applicant misunderstood the question, that was another sign. Almost every design choice was, in effect, made by the users.

The counties, on the other hand, made those same choices by committee. Because each of the eighteen counties administers the SNAP program separately, the focus was on accommodating the unique business processes of each separate county and the many local welfare offices within the counties. It wasn’t that the county reps didn’t care about the experience of their users—their vote to start making MyBenefits CalWIN work on mobile phones was proof of that. But the process the consortium followed was not constructed to identify and address the needs of users. It had been set up to adjudicate between the needs of the counties. The result had been, for years, an experience for clients that was practically intolerable.

Ever since the founding of the United States, a core value for many has been restricting the concentration of government power. The colonists were, after all, rebelling against a monarchy. When power is concentrated in the hands of one person or one regime, the reasoning goes, we lose our liberty. We need to have some government, so we’ll have to trust some people to make some decisions, but best to make it hard for any one person to do anything significant, lest that person begin to act like a king. Best to make sure that any decisions require lots of different people to weigh in.

But as Jake saw, the way you get 212 questions on a form for food assistance is not concentrated power, it’s diffuse power. And diffuse power is not just an artifact of the complexities federalism can bring, with decisions delegated down to local government and then aggregated back up through mechanisms like the county consortia. The fear of having exercised too much power, and being criticized for it, is ever present for many public servants. The result is a compulsion to consult every imaginable stakeholder, except the ones who matter most: the people who will use the service.

A tech leader who made the transition from a consumer internet company to public service recently called me in frustration. He’d been trying to clarify roles on a new government project and had explained to multiple departments how important it would be to have a product manager, someone empowered to direct and absorb user research, understand both external and internal needs, and integrate all of it. The departments had all enthusiastically agreed. But when it came time to choose that person, each department presented my friend with a different name, sometimes several. There were more than a dozen in all.

He thought perhaps he was supposed to choose the product manager from among these names. But the department representatives explained that all these people would need to share the role of product manager, since each department had some stake in the product. Decisions about the product would be made by what was essentially a committee, something like the federal CIO Council that resulted in the ESB imperative. Members would be able to insist on what they believed their different departments needed, and no one would have the power to say no to anyone. Even without the complications of federalism, the project would still be doomed to exactly the kind of bloat that MyBenefits CalWIN suffered from.

This kind of cultural tendency toward power sharing makes sense. It is akin to saying this project will have no king, no arbitrary authority who might act imperiously. But the result is bloat, and using a bloated service feels intrusive and onerous. It’s easy to start seeing government as overreaching if every interaction goes into needless detail and demands countless hours.

Highly diffuse decision-making frameworks can make it very hard to build good digital services for the public. But they are rooted in laws that go back to long before the digital era.

Portland, OR, USA - Oct 28, 2020: "SNAP welcomed here" sign is seen at the entrance to a Big Lots store in Portland, Oregon. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is a federal program.

Meet the APA: Lucy Santerre

Know Your Enemy: What’s Wrong With Men?

Matt and Sam explore the “crisis of masculinity” in America through books on the subject by Senator Josh Hawley and Harvard political theorist Harvey Mansfield.

How to survive the "nepo baby" label, win friends and influence people

OpenAI says a bug leaked sensitive ChatGPT user data

OpenAI was forced to take its wildly-popular ChatGPT bot offline for emergency maintenance on Tuesday after a user was able to exploit a bug in the system to recall the titles from other users' chat histories. On Friday the company announced its initial findings from the incident.

In Tuesday's incident, users posted screenshots on Reddit that their ChatGPT sidebars featured previous chat histories from other users. Only the title of the conversation, not the text itself, were visible. OpenAI, in response, took the bot offline for nearly 10 hours to investigate. The results of that investigation revealed a deeper security issue: the chat history bug may have also potentially revealed personal data from 1.2 percent of ChatGPT Plus subscribers (a $20/month enhanced access package). 

"In the hours before we took ChatGPT offline on Monday, it was possible for some users to see another active user’s first and last name, email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date. Full credit card numbers were not exposed at any time," the OpenAI team wrote Friday. The issue has since been patched for the faulty library which OpenAI identified as the Redis client open-source library, redis-py.

The company has downplayed the likelihood of such a breach occurring, arguing that either of the following criteria would have to be met to place a user at risk:

- Open a subscription confirmation email sent on Monday, March 20, between 1 a.m. and 10 a.m. Pacific time. Due to the bug, some subscription confirmation emails generated during that window were sent to the wrong users. These emails contained the last four digits of another user’s credit card number, but full credit card numbers did not appear. It’s possible that a small number of subscription confirmation emails might have been incorrectly addressed prior to March 20, although we have not confirmed any instances of this.

- In ChatGPT, click on “My account,” then “Manage my subscription” between 1 a.m. and 10 a.m. Pacific time on Monday, March 20. During this window, another active ChatGPT Plus user’s first and last name, email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date might have been visible. It’s possible that this also could have occurred prior to March 20, although we have not confirmed any instances of this. 

The company has taken additional steps to prevent this from happening again in the future including adding redundant checks to library calls, "programatically examined our logs to make sure that all messages are only available to the correct user," and "improved logging to identify when this is happening and fully confirm it has stopped." The company says that it has also reached out to alert affected users of the issue.

This news follows a costly public faux pas committed by Google's rival Bard AI in February when it incorrectly assured Twitter that the JWST was the first telescope to image an exoplanet, as well as revelations that CNET had surreptitiously used generative AI to write financial explainer posts (a week before laying off a sizable chunk of its editorial department). Whether OpenAI will suffer the same market-based repercussions as its competitors remains to be seen. 

SUQIAN, CHINA - MARCH 17, 2023 - A citizen uses his mobile phone to check GPT-4 embedded Office software in Suqian, Jiangsu Province, China, March 17, 2023. Microsoft is reportedly building GPT-4 into Office. (Photo credit should read CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

ChatGPT's new plugins will deliver real-time stats

Following the release the new GPT-4 engine and Whisper API in March, OpenAI announced Thursday that it has begun introducing plugins for ChatGPT. These will enable the chatbot to interact with 3rd-party APIs, tailoring its responses to specific circumstances as defined by the developers while expanding the bot's range of capable actions.

Say you want to develop a chatbot that users can talk sports with. Before the latest GPT-4 upgrade, the chatbot would only be able to discuss games and scores that happened in the past, specifically in 2021 which is when GPT-3's training data was assembled. It wouldn't pull real-time data or even be aware that the year 2022 existed. With a chatGPT plugin, you'll be able to tack ChatGPT functionality onto your existing code stack where it will be able to do anything from retrieve real-time information calls (sports scores, stock prices, breaking news) to pulling specific knowledge-base information like your company's internal documents or from your personal cloud. It will even be able to take action on behalf of the user like booking a flight or ordering take-out — think, an installable Google Assistant made by the OpenAI folks.

"The AI model acts as an intelligent API caller. Given an API spec and a natural-language description of when to use the API, the model proactively calls the API to perform actions," the OpenAI team wrote. "For instance, if a user asks, 'Where should I stay in Paris for a couple nights?', the model may choose to call a hotel reservation plugin API, receive the API response, and generate a user-facing answer combining the API data and its natural language capabilities."

The company also notes that using plug-ins to bridge the knowledge gap between what the model was trained on and what has happened since should help reduce the AI's tendency to hallucinate facts when answering complex questions. "These references not only enhance the model’s utility but also enable users to assess the trustworthiness of the model’s output and double-check its accuracy, potentially mitigating risks related to over-reliance," the team wrote.

The added capabilities and information afforded the model through its plug-in also greatly increase the chances of the model returning problematic responses. To avoid the $100 billion hit that Google took over Bard, OpenAI has reportedly stress-tested these plug-ins extensively. "We’ve performed red-teaming exercises, both internally and with external collaborators, that have revealed a number of possible concerning scenarios," the team wrote. They plan to use those findings to, "inform safety-by-design mitigations" to improve transparency and hobble the plug-in against partaking risky behaviors.  

The plug-in itself is still in early alpha with limited availability. OpenAI granted early access to a handful of partner companies including Expedia, Instacart, KAYAK, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Wolfram, and Zapier for use in their existing apps. You'll need to add your name to the waitlist to try it for yourself.

In this photo illustration an Open AI logo seen displayed on a smartphone screen and Microsoft Office 365 suite in the background. The technology behind the world's most talked about artificial intelligence (AI) system, ChatGPT, is being added to its most ubiquitous work software, Microsoft 365., in Athens, Greece, on march 17, 2023. (Photo Illustration by Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Hitting the Books: How 20th century science unmade Newton's universe

Science is the reason you aren't reading this by firelight nestled cozily under a rock somewhere however, its practice significantly predates its formalization by Galileo in the 16th century. Among its earliest adherents — even before pioneering efforts of Aristotle — was Animaxander, the Greek philosopher credited with first arguing that the Earth exists within a void, not atop a giant turtle shell. His other revolutionary notions include, "hey, maybe animals evolved from other, earlier animals?" and "the gods aren't angry, that's just thunder."

While Animaxander isn't often mentioned alongside the later greats of Greek philosophy, his influence on the scientific method cannot be denied, argues NYT bestselling author, Carlo Rovelli, in his latest book, Animaxander and the Birth of Science, out now from Riverhead Books. In in, Rovelli celebrates Animaxander, not necessarily for his scientific acumen but for his radical scientific thinking — specifically his talent for shrugging off conventional notion to glimpse at the physical underpinnings of the natural world. In the excerpt below, Rovelli, whom astute readers will remember from last year's There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important than Kindness, illustrates how even the works of intellectual titans like Einstein and Heisenberg can and inevitably are found lacking in their explanation of natural phenomena — in just the same way that those works themselves decimated the collective understanding of cosmological law under 19th century Newtonian physics.   

Riverhead Books

Excerpted from Animaxander and the Birth of Science. Copyright © 2023 by Carlo Rovelli. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Did science begin with Anaximander? The question is poorly put. It depends on what we mean by “science,” a generic term. Depending on whether we give it a broad or a narrow meaning, we can say that science began with Newton, Galileo, Archimedes, Hipparchus, Hippocrates, Pythagoras, or Anaximander — or with an astronomer in Babylonia whose name we don’t know, or with the first primate who managed to teach her offspring what she herself had learned, or with Eve, as in the quotation that opens this chapter. Historically or symbolically, each of these moments marks humanity’s acquisition of a new, crucial tool for the growth of knowledge.

If by “science” we mean research based on systematic experimental activities, then it began more or less with Galileo. If we mean a collection of quantitative observations and theoretical/mathematical models that can order these observations and give accurate predictions, then the astronomy of Hipparchus and Ptolemy is science. Emphasizing one particular starting point, as I have done with Anaximander, means focusing on a specific aspect of the way we acquire knowledge. It means highlighting specific characteristics of science and thus, implicitly, reflecting on what science is, what the search for knowledge is, and how it works.

What is scientific thinking? What are its limits? What is the reason for its strength? What does it really teach us? What are its characteristics, and how does it compare with other forms of knowledge?

These questions shaped my reflections on Anaximander in preceding chapters. In discussing how Anaximander paved the way for scientific knowledge, I highlighted a certain number of aspects of science itself. Now I shall make these observations more explicit.

The Crumbling of Nineteenth Century Illusions

A lively debate on the nature of scientific knowledge has taken place during the last century. The work of philosophers of science such as Carnap and Bachelard, Popper and Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Quine, van Fraassen, and many others has transformed our understanding of what constitutes scientific activity. To some extent, this reflection was a reaction to a shock: the unexpected collapse of Newtonian physics at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In the nineteenth century, a common joke was that Isaac New‐ ton had been not only one of the most intelligent men in human history, but also the luckiest, because there is only one collection of fundamental natural laws, and Newton had had the good fortune to be the one to discover them. Today we can’t help but smile at this notion, because it reveals a serious epistemological error on the part of nineteenth-​­century thinkers: the idea that good scientific theories are definitive and remain valid until the end of time.

The twentieth century swept away this facile illusion. Highly accurate experiments showed that Newton’s theory is mistaken in a very precise sense. The planet Mercury, for example, does not move following Newtonian laws. Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and their colleagues discovered a new collection of fundamental laws — general relativity and quantum mechanics — that replace Newton’s laws and work well in the domains where Newton’s theory breaks down, such as accounting for Mercury’s orbit, or the behavior of electrons in atoms.

Once burned, twice shy: few people today believe that we now possess definitive scientific laws. It is generally expected that one day Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s laws will show their limits as well, and will be replaced by better ones. In fact, the limits of Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s theories are already emerging. There are subtle incompatibilities between Einstein’s theory and Heisenberg’s, which make it unreasonable to suppose that we have identified the final, definitive laws of the universe. As a result, research goes on. My own work in theoretical physics is precisely the search for laws that might combine these two theories.

Now, the essential point here is that Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s theories are not minor corrections to Newton’s. The differences go far beyond an adjusted equation, a tidying up, the addition or replacement of a formula. Rather, these new theories constitute a radical rethinking of the world. Newton saw the world as a vast empty space where “particles” move about like pebbles. Einstein understands that such supposedly empty space is in fact a kind of storm-​­tossed sea. It can fold in on itself, curve, and even (in the case of black holes) shatter. No one had seriously contemplated this possibility before. For his part, Heisenberg understands that Newton’s “particles” are not particles at all but bizarre hybrids of particles and waves that run over Faraday lines’ webs. In short, over the course of the twentieth century, the world was found to be profoundly different from the way Newton imagined it.

On the one hand, these discoveries confirmed the cognitive strength of science. Like Newton’s and Maxwell’s theories in their day, these discoveries led quickly to an astonishing development of new technologies that once again radically changed human society. The insights of Faraday and Maxwell brought about radio and communications technology. Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s led to computers, information technology, atomic energy, and countless other technological advances that have changed our lives.

But on the other hand, the realization that Newton’s picture of the world was false is disconcerting. After Newton, we thought we had understood once and for all the basic structure and functioning of the physical world. We were wrong. The theories of Einstein and Heisenberg themselves will one day likely be proved false. Does this mean that the understanding of the world offered by science cannot be trusted, not even for our best science? What, then, do we really know about the world? What does science teach us about the world?

Illustration of a Newton's cradle.

Ring Car Cam hands-on: Amazon's video security ecosystem hits America's highways

Amazon’s evolution from omnipresent shopping platform to omnipresent surveillance platform continues apace, having drastically expanded its line of Ring security camera systems in recent years. Nowadays, the company offers video doorbells, exterior cameras, interior cameras, flying cameras, lighting systems, alarm systems and vehicle security packages — the lattermost of which is why we are here today. I put a Ring camera in my car.

That’s not to say that the Ring Car Camera is a poorly designed or manufactured product — far from it! The $250 Car Camera features dual-facing (pointing both at the road and into the cabin), IR-capable 1080p imaging sensors, optional LTE connectivity, Alexa-driven voice commands, and remote vehicle monitoring through the Ring mobile app.

In fact, I was surprised by how quickly and easily I was able to get the system set up. The camera assembly itself is a single piece that wedges into the bottom edge of the windshield-dashboard horizon and sticks to the glass with a high-strength adhesive. It’s not strong enough to keep a car thief from yanking it out but it’ll keep the camera in place as you travel over and through America’s crumbling highway infrastructure system. One sticking point I could see arising is the camera needs access to a home wi-fi connection during the setup/app pairing sequence. I was able to pull around my driveway until I was at the exterior of the wall from my house’s router but if you live in an apartment complex, things might get dicey.

“If you are unable to connect to your home Wi-Fi during setup, you can set up the device using LTE through Ring Protect Go,” a Ring rep told Engadget. “Just skip the ‘set up with Wi-Fi’ step in the set up flow and follow the on-screen instructions. Each new customer will have a free 30-day trial of Ring Protect Go, which provides LTE connectivity.”

I was not at all a fan of the camera’s wired power connection to the vehicle’s OBDII port, which also monitors the battery’s voltage so that the camera can turn itself off before fully exhausting the power supply. For one, that physical requirement limits the vehicles this system can work with to only those with OBD ports located to the left of the steering column. For another, I now have a 6-foot long cable snaking its way across my previously immaculate dashboard, draping down my driver side door panel to connect with the OBDII port just over my brake pedal. Even with the included 3M-adhesive cable stays (which, I might add, were immediately foiled by the tiny crags and crinkles of my dashboard’s surface), I can hear the cord shifting and sliding around during turns, I’m constantly aware of it when swinging my legs out of the car lest I accidentally catch it on a toe and tear the connector from the port. Which I did the very first time I drove after installation — and then the next as well.

Andrew Tarantola / Engadget

The other issue is that not every car has an OBDII port located in the passenger cabin and for those vehicles the Ring Car Cam will not work. Neither will any of the vehicles on this rather expansive list of incompatible models for one reason or another — some cut power to the port when the key is removed and Teslas, for their part, don’t even use the OBDII interface. What’s more, if your dongle is already in use, whether for an insurance tracker or an interlock device, you’re SOL with using the Car Cam. Same if you buy it in a jurisdiction that limits the use of dashcams — except then you also go to jail.

Andrew Tarantola / Engadget

At 1080p, the Car Cam’s video quality is just fine for what the average driver would presumably be using it for and the interior-facing IR sensor will ensure that you get a good look at whoever’s rifling through your center console at three in the morning. But, since it’s mounted on the dash itself and not suspended from the rearview mirror like the commercial-grade ones you find in Ubers and Lyfts, you won’t get much of a view of the interior below chest level. Accessing those videos takes a hot second as well, as the clips aren’t transferred directly to your phone (if using Protect Go). They have to first be uploaded and processed in the cloud before you can watch them.

The camera offers a variety of recording options. You can set it for continuous use, as you would a traditional dash cam — and if you don’t want it recording you, the unit thankfully incorporates a physical lens cover for the interior-facing camera. You can also use it specifically for traffic stops with the verbal “Alexa, Record” command, in which the system will record uninterrupted for 20 minutes even after the ignition has been turned off. Finally, there’s Parking Protection mode that activates the camera if it detects motion or an impact when the vehicle is parked.

Andrew Tarantola / Engadget

All of the recorded data — up to seven hours worth — is saved locally on the device and made available once the camera is back in range of a Wi-Fi connection. Again, that’s not great if a thief or cop rips out the unit before the information can be uploaded. Also, there’s no loop recording so if something important happens when you’ve got 6 hours and 56 minutes of video already saved, you better hope the matter resolves itself in under 4 minutes, otherwise the recording will simply be cut off.

To get around that, you’ll need cloud access and to spend $6 a month (or $60 a year) for the Ring Protect Go subscription service for it. In addition, Protect Go unlocks access to the camera’s onboard LTE connection enabling two-way view and talk, notifications and GPS tracking from anywhere with cell service. Without that subscription access, those features are only available over Wi-Fi.

Andrew Tarantola / Engadget

Ring’s business decisions have made very clear that it is on the side of the police — even if the homeowners themselves aren’t — freely volunteering data to, and often partnering with, law enforcement agencies around the country. When asked whether safeguards have been put in place to prevent law enforcement from surreptitiously spying through the Car Cam, Ring’s spokesperson noted, “Ring builds products and services for our customers, not law enforcement. When parked, Car Cam only records when the smart sensors detect an incident (such as a collision or broken window) or if the device owner or Shared User initiates Live View.” What happens to that data once it's off the device and in Ring’s cloud servers was not made clear.

Even if I could put aside Ring’s cozy relationship with police, $250 for what the Car Cam offers is a big ask, especially with that $6-a-month cherry on top to get anything to work outside of your driveway. Granted, if you’re already part of the Ring ecosystem, you like what it offers and want to extend that platform to your vehicle, absolutely give the Car Cam a shot. But if you’re in the market for a standalone vehicle security system, there are plenty of options available to choose from that offer many of the same features as the Ring at a fraction of the price and without the baggage — or that blasted power cable.

A Ring Car Cam installed on the dashboard of a car with a garage door in the background, seen from a drivers perspective.

Higher Education Grants or Gifts of Interest to African Americans

Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.

Saint Louis University received a five-year $2,830,00 grant from the National Cancer Institute for programs to increase HPV vaccination and HPV screening to lower incidents of cervical cancer among girls and women in Nigeria. Currently, in Nigeria, only 10 percent of eligible women have been screened and 14 percent of girls are vaccinated for HPV. The project is under the direction of Juliet Iwelunmor, a professor of global health and behavioral science and health education in the university’s College for Public Health and Social Justice. Dr. Iwelenmor holds a Ph.D. in bio-behavioral health from Pennsylvania State University.

Spelman College, the historically Black liberal arts educational institution for women in Atlanta, received a $10 million gift from Rosemary K. and John W. Brown to support STEM educational programs at the college. The Browns’ gift will support the architectural, construction, and equipment costs for the college’s new Center for Innovation & the Arts, scheduled to open in the fall of 2024. John Brown is chairman emeritus of Stryker Corporation, a multinational medical technologies corporation based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Rosemary K. Brown is a long-time educator.

The School of Medicine at the University of Louisville in Kentucky received a $1.2 million grant from the Humana Foundation that will support cardiac disease screening and nutrition-based interventions to address cardiac health disparities among older Black adults in Louisville.

Historically Black Bowie State University in Maryland received a $1,589,014 Augustus F. Hawkins Centers of Excellence Program Grant from the U.S. Department of Education for programs to recruit and prepare Black male educators in early childhood/special education, elementary, or secondary education who can provide effective, culturally relevant/responsive instruction.

The Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, a historically Black educational institution in Los Angeles, received a $150,000 grant Grifols, a biopharmaceutical solutions company. The funds will support a scholarship in nursing and the university’s Saturday Science Academy program. The Saturday Science Academy exposes pre-K through 12th-grade students to fun and engaging science material in an effort to motivate them to move into the healthcare field after graduating high school.

GM's Ultra Cruise system will debut on the Cadillac Celestiq later this year

Even as it has radically expanded the hands-free driver assist capabilities of its current generation Super Cruise ADAS, General Motors has been hard at work on the system's successor, Ultra Cruise, since 2021. On Tuesday, GM finally revealed which model will be first to receive the upgraded features of Ultra Cruise and that vehicle is the Cadillac Celestiq.

"We're trying to expand our hands-free driving experience that we have with Super Cruise to most paved and public roads," Jason Dittman, General Motors' Chief Engineer, said during a press call Monday. "It will be a 'destination to destination' experience."

"You get in your car, use the internal nav navigation system, put a destination in it, and the car would essentially do the driving — roughly on 95 percent of the driving maneuvers on a typical drive, you'll be able to do hands-free," he added.

We already had a solid understanding of what Ultra Cruise would be capable of as GM went into detail when it first announced development of the system in 2021. Super Cruise currently works on around 400,000 miles of US and Canadian highways, allowing drivers to take their hands off the wheel when driving on a compatible highway or state route. It uses a mix of LiDAR, radar, GPS and cameras to know where the vehicle is on the road.

Ultra Cruise, builds off this with a new computing system, that will fuse the incoming data streams into a unified 360-degree view around the vehicle. "They're not redundant, they're fused together to give us the most accurate picture of the vehicle surroundings," Dittman said. Ultra Cruise equipped vehicles will also use an interior-facing infrared driver attention monitor that will track the, "driver’s head position and/or eyes in relation to the road," according to Tuesday's announcement.

Ultra Cruise will work on more than 2 million miles of highway at launch. Over time, the company plans to further expand the number of roadways covered by the Ultra Cruise network to include 3.4 million miles of roadway encompassing, "nearly every paved road, city street, suburban street, subdivision, and rural road in addition to the highways that today on the super cruise operates on," Dittman added.

Note that despite the larger number of roads the new system will work on, it still offers the same Level 2 driver assist capabilities as the rest of the auto industry, save Mercedes. That means, you will have to keep paying attention to the road you just won't have to keep your hands strictly on the wheel.

Unfortunately, current Super Cruise subscribers will not be able to upgrade to the new system once it arrives later this year. Ultra Cruise requires additional sensors and hardware to operate and GM doesn't currently have plans to offer a retrofit kit. You'll have to pony up the $300k Caddy is asking for the Celestiq if you want to be among the first to try it.

The Cadillac Celestiq electric-sedan is unveiled in Los Angeles, California on October 17, 2022. - The ultra-luxury low-volume Celestiq features a host of 3D-printed parts for extensive customization and is the second EV in Cadillac's lineup. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP) (Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)

Hitting the Books: Could we zap our brains into leading healthier lives?

Deep Brain Stimulation therapies have proven an invaluable treatment option for patients suffering from otherwise debilitating diseases like Parkinson's. However, it — and its sibling tech, brain computer interfaces — currently suffer a critical shortcoming: the electrodes that convert electron pulses into bioelectric signals don't sit well with the surrounding brain tissue. And that's where folks with the lab coats and holding squids come in! InWe Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds, author Sally Adee delves into two centuries of research into an often misunderstood and maligned branch of scientific discovery, guiding readers from the pioneering works of Alessandro Volta to the life-saving applications that might become possible once doctors learn to communicate directly with our body's cells.

Hachette Books

Excerpted from We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee. Copyright © 2023. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Lost in translation

“There’s a fundamental asymmetry between the devices that drive our information economy and the tissues in the nervous system,” Bettinger told The Verge in 2018. “Your cell phone and your computer use electrons and pass them back and forth as the fundamental unit of information. Neurons, though, use ions like sodium and potassium. This matters because, to make a simple analogy, that means you need to translate the language.”

“One of the misnomers within the field actually is that I’m injecting current through these electrodes,” explains Kip Ludwig. “Not if I’m doing it right, I don’t.” The electrons that travel down a platinum or titanium wire to the implant never make it into your brain tissue. Instead, they line up on the electrode. This produces a negative charge, which pulls ions from the neurons around it. “If I pull enough ions away from the tissue, I cause voltage-gated ion channels to open,” says Ludwig. That can — but doesn’t always — make a nerve fire an action potential. Get nerves to fire. That’s it — that’s your only move.

It may seem counterintuitive: the nervous system runs on action potentials, so why wouldn’t it work to just try to write our own action potentials on top of the brain’s own ones? The problem is that our attempts to write action potentials can be incredibly ham-fisted, says Ludwig. They don’t always do what we think they do. For one thing, our tools are nowhere near precise enough to hit only the exact neurons we are trying to stimulate. So the implant sits in the middle of a bunch of different cells, sweeping up and activating unrelated neurons with its electric field. Remember how I said glia were traditionally considered the brain’s janitorial staff? Well, more recently it emerged that they also do some information processing—and our clumsy electrodes will fire them too, to unknown effects. “It’s like pulling the stopper on your bathtub and only trying to move one of three toy boats in the bathwater,” says Ludwig. And even if we do manage to hit the neurons we’re trying to, there’s no guarantee that the stimulation is hitting it in the correct location.

To bring electroceuticals into medicine, we really need better techniques to talk to cells. If the electron-to-ion language barrier is an obstacle to talking to neurons, it’s an absolute non-starter for cells that don’t use action potentials, like the ones that we are trying to target with next-generation electrical interventions, including skin cells, bone cells, and the rest. If we want to control the membrane voltage of cancer cells to coax them back to normal behavior; if we want to nudge the wound current in skin or bone cells; if we want to control the fate of a stem cell—none of that is achievable with our one and only tool of making a nerve fire an action potential. We need a bigger toolkit. Luckily, this is the objective for a fast-growing area of research looking to make devices, computing elements, and wiring that can talk to ions in their native tongue.

Several research groups are working on “mixed conduction,” a project whose goal is devices that can speak bioelectricity. It relies heavily on plastics and advanced polymers with long names that often include punctuation and numbers. If the goal is a DBS electrode you can keep in the brain for more than ten years, these materials will need to safely interact with the body’s native tissues for much longer than they do now. And that search is far from over. People are understandably beginning to wonder: why not just skip the middle man and actually make this stuff out of biological materials instead of manufacturing polymers? Why not learn how nature does it?

It’s been tried before. In the 1970s, there was a flurry of interest in using coral for bone grafts instead of autografts. Instead of a traumatic double-surgery to harvest the necessary bone tissue from a different part of the body, coral implants acted as a scaffold to let the body’s new bone cells grow into and form the new bone. Coral is naturally osteoconductive, which means new bone cells happily slide onto it and find it an agreeable place to proliferate. It’s also biodegradable: after the bone grew onto it, the coral was gradually absorbed, metabolized, and then excreted by the body. Steady improvements have produced few inflammatory responses or complications. Now there are several companies growing specialized coral for bone grafts and implants.

After the success of coral, people began to take a closer look at marine sources for biomaterials. This field is now rapidly evolving — thanks to new processing methods which have made it possible to harvest a lot of useful materials from what used to be just marine waste, the last decade has seen an increasing number of biomaterials that originate from marine organisms. These include replacement sources for gelatin (snails), collagen (jellyfish), and keratin (sponges), marine sources of which are plentiful, biocompatible, and biodegradable. And not just inside the body — one reason interest in these has spiked is the effort to move away from polluting synthetic plastic materials.

Apart from all the other benefits of marine-derived dupes, they’re also able to conduct an ion current. That was what Marco Rolandi was thinking about in 2010 when he and his colleagues at the University of Washington built a transistor out of a piece of squid.

A pink brain simply connects to several wires of multi colours on a blue background

FDA reportedly denied Neuralink's request to begin human trials of its brain implant

Despite the repeated and audacious claims by its sometimes CEO, Elon Musk, the prospects of brain-computer interface (BCI) startup Neuralink bringing a product to market remain distant, according to a new report from Reuters. The BCI company was apparently denied authorization by the FDA in 2022 to conduct human trials using the same devices that killed all those pigs — namely on account of; pig killing.

"The agency’s major safety concerns involved the device’s lithium battery; the potential for the implant’s tiny wires to migrate to other areas of the brain; and questions over whether and how the device can be removed without damaging brain tissue," current and former Neuralink employees told Reuters.

The FDA's concerns regarding the battery system and its novel transdermal charging capabilities revolve around the the device's chances of failure. According to Reuters, the agency is seeking reassurances that the battery is "very unlikely to fail" because should it do so, the discharge of electrical current or heat energy from a ruptured pack could fry the surrounding tissue. 

The FDA is also very concerned with potential problems should the device need to be removed wholesale, either for replacement or upgrades, due to the minuscule size of the electrical leads that extend into the patient's grey matter. Those leads are so small and delicate that they are at risk of breaking off during removal (or even during regular use) and then migrating to other parts of the brain where they might get lodged in something important.

During Neuralink's open house last November, Musk's confidently claimed the company would secure FDA approval "within six months," basically by this spring. That estimate is turning out to be as accurate as his guesses for when the Cybertruck might finally enter production. “He can’t appreciate that this is not a car,” one employee told Reuters. “This is a person’s brain. This is not a toy.” Neuralink did not respond to requests for comment.

Neuralink logo displayed on a phone screen, a silhouette of a paper in shape of a human face and a binary code displayed on a screen are seen in this multiple exposure illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 10, 2021. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Elon Musk lays out his vision for Tesla's future at the company's Investor Day 2023

Tesla's production capacities are in store for a significant growth spurt, CEO Elon Musk told the crowd assembled at the company's Austin, Texas Gigafactory for Investor Day 2023 — and AI will apparently be the magic bullet that gets them there. It's all part of what Musk is calling Master Plan part 3.

This is indeed Musk's third such Master Plan, the first two coming in 2006 and 2016, respectively. These have served as a roadmap for the company's growth and development over the past 17 years as Tesla has grown from neophyte startup to the world's leading EV automaker. "There is a clear path to a sustainable energy Earth by 2050 and it does not require destroying natural habitats," Musk said during the keynote address. 

"You could support a civilization much bigger than Earth [currently does]. Much more than the 8 billion humans could actually be supported sustainably on Earth and I'm just often shocked and surprised by how few people realize this," he continued. He promised that the company would release a "detailed whitepaper with calculations & assumptions," via Twitter during the event.

The Master Plan aims to establish a sustainable energy economy by developing 240 terraWatt hours (TWH) of energy storage and 30 TWH of renewable power generation, which would require an estimated $10 trillion investment, roughly 10 percent of the global GDP. Musk notes, however, that figure is less than half of what we spend currently on internal combustion economy. In all, he anticipates we'd need less than 0.2 percent of the world's land area to create the necessary solar and wind generation capacity. 

"All cars will go to fully electric and autonomous," Musk declared, arguing once again that ICE vehicles will soon be viewed in the same disdain as the horse and buggy. He also teased potential plans to electrify aircraft and ships. "As we improve the energy density of batteries, you’ll see all transportation go fully electric, with the exception of rockets,” he said. No further details as to when or how that might be accomplished were shared.

“A sustainable energy economy is within reach and we should accelerate it,” Drew Baglino, Tesla's SVP of Powertrain and Energy Engineering, added.

Following Musk's opening statement, Tesla executives Lars Moravy and Franz von Holzhausen took the stage to discuss the company's "production hell" and the challenges of building the Cybertruck out of stainless steel. However, the lessons learned from that, Moravy argued will help Tesla build its Gen 3 vehicles more efficiently, and do so within a far smaller factory footprint. von Holzhausen announced to a rousing round of applause that the Cybertruck will arrive later this year, a significantly closer date than Musk's previous public estimate that production wouldn't begin until next year. 

Unfortunately, there will be no new vehicle reveal at this event, von Holzhausen said. That announce will happen "at a later date."  

The company did tease a new video featuring the Tesla Robot walking independently and without the aide of a support frame though there was no live demonstration of the same. Despite difficulties finding suitable off-the-shelf actuators and motors for the humanoid robot platform, "we should bring and actual produce to market at scale that is useful far faster than anyone else," Musk said. 

He further expects the company's robots to become so successful that we may soon see a day where they outnumber humans. "I think we might exceed a one-to-one ratio of robots to humans," he added. "It's not even clear what an economy means at that point."

BEIJING, CHINA - AUGUST 29: A Tesla logo is displayed at Tesla booth ahead of the 2022 China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) at China National Convention Center on August 29, 2022 in Beijing, China. The 2022 CIFTIS is slated to be held in Beijing from August 31 to September 5 to provide platforms for exchanges in service trade. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

Hitting the Books: Why America once leaded its gasoline

Engine knock, wherein fuel ignites unevenly along the cylinder wall resulting in damaging percussive shockwaves, is an issue that automakers have struggled to mitigate since the days of the Model T. The industry's initial attempts to solve the problem — namely tetraethyl lead — were, in hindsight, a huge mistake, having endumbened and stupefied an entire generation of Americans with their neurotoxic byproducts.

Dr. Vaclav Smil, Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, examines the short-sighted economic reasoning that lead to leaded gas rather than a nationwide network of ethanol stations in his new book Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure. Lead gas is far from the only presumed advance to go over like a lead balloon. Invention and Innovation is packed with tales of humanity's best-intentioned, most ill-conceived and generally half-cocked ideas — from airships and hyperloops to DDT and CFCs. 

MIT Press

Excerpted from Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure by Professor Vaclav Smil. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2023.

Just seven years later Henry Ford began to sell his Model T, the first mass-produced affordable and durable passenger car, and in 1911 Charles Kettering, who later played a key role in developing leaded gasoline, designed the first practical electric starter, which obviated dangerous hand cranking. And although hard-topped roads were still in short supply even in the eastern part of the US, their construction began to accelerate, with the country’s paved highway length more than doubling between 1905 and 1920. No less important, decades of crude oil discoveries accompanied by advances in refining provided the liquid fuels needed for the expansion of the new transportation, and in 1913 Standard Oil of Indiana introduced William Burton’s thermal cracking of crude oil, the process that increased gasoline yield while reducing the share of volatile compounds that make up the bulk of natural gasolines.

But having more affordable and more reliable cars, more paved roads, and a dependable supply of appropriate fuel still left a problem inherent in the combustion cycle used by car engines: the propensity to violent knocking (pinging). In a perfectly operating gasoline engine, gas combustion is initiated solely by a timed spark at the top of the combustion chamber and the resulting flame front moves uniformly across the cylinder volume. Knocking is caused by spontaneous ignitions (small explosions, mini-detonations) taking place in the remaining gases before they are reached by the flame front initiated by sparking. Knocking creates high pressures (up to 18 MPa, or nearly up to 180 times the normal atmospheric level), and the resulting shock waves, traveling at speeds greater than sound, vibrate the combustion chamber walls and produce the telling sounds of a knocking, malfunctioning engine.

Knocking sounds alarming at any speed, but when an engine operates at a high load it can be very destructive. Severe knocking can cause brutal irreparable engine damage, including cylinder head erosion, broken piston rings, and melted pistons; and any knocking reduces an engine’s efficiency and releases more pollutants; in particular, it results in higher nitrogen oxide emissions. The capacity to resist knocking— that is, fuel’s stability— is based on the pressure at which fuel will spontaneously ignite and has been universally measured in octane numbers, which are usually displayed by filling stations in bold black numbers on a yellow background.

Octane (C8H18) is one of the alkanes (hydrocarbons with the general formula CnH2n + 2) that form anywhere between 10 to 40 percent of light crude oils, and one of its isomers (compounds with the same number of carbon and hydrogen atoms but with a different molecular structure), 2,2,4-trimethypentane (iso-octane), was taken as the maximum (100 percent) on the octane rating scale because the compound completely prevents any knocking. The higher the octane rating of gasoline, the more resistant the fuel is to knocking, and engines can operate more efficiently with higher compression ratios. North American refiners now offer three octane grades, regular gasoline (87), midgrade fuel (89), and premium fuel mixes (91– 93).

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the earliest phase of automotive expansion, there were three options to minimize or eliminate destructive knocking. The first one was to keep the compression ratios of internal combustion engines relatively low, below 4.3:1: Ford’s best-selling Model T, rolled out in 1908, had a compression ratio of 3.98:1. The second one was to develop smaller but more efficient engines running on better fuel, and the third one was to use additives that would prevent the uncontrolled ignition. Keeping compression ratios low meant wasting fuel, and the reduced engine efficiency was of a particular concern during the years of rapid post–World War I economic expansion as rising car ownership of more powerful and more spacious cars led to concerns about the long-term adequacy of domestic crude oil supplies and the growing dependence on imports. Consequently, additives offered the easiest way out: they would allow using lower-quality fuel in more powerful engines operating more efficiently with higher compression ratios.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century there was considerable interest in ethanol (ethyl alcohol, C2H6O or CH3CH2OH), both as a car fuel and as a gasoline additive. Numerous tests proved that engines using pure ethanol would never knock, and ethanol blends with kerosene and gasoline were tried in Europe and in the US. Ethanol’s well-known proponents included Alexander Graham Bell, Elihu Thomson, and Henry Ford (although Ford did not, as many sources erroneously claim, design the Model T to run on ethanol or to be a dual-fuel vehicle; it was to be fueled by gasoline); Charles Kettering considered it to be the fuel of the future.

But three disadvantages complicated ethanol’s large-scale adoption: it was more expensive than gasoline, it was not available in volumes sufficient to meet the rising demand for automotive fuel, and increasing its supply, even only if it were used as the dominant additive, would have claimed significant shares of crop production. At that time there were no affordable, direct ways to produce the fuel on a large scale from abundant cellulosic waste such as wood or straw: cellulose had first to be hydrolyzed by sulfuric acid and the resulting sugars were then fermented. That is why the fuel ethanol was made mostly from the same food crops that were used to make (in much smaller volumes) alcohol for drinking and medicinal and industrial uses.

The search for a new, effective additive began in 1916 in Charles Kettering’s Dayton Research Laboratories with Thomas Midgley, a young (born in 1889) mechanical engineer, in charge of this effort. In July 1918 a report prepared in collaboration with the US Army and the US Bureau of Mines listed ethyl alcohol, benzene, and a cyclohexane as the compounds that did not produce any knocking in high-compression engines. In 1919, when Kettering was hired by GM to head its new research division, he defined the challenge as one of averting a looming fuel shortage: the US domestic crude oil supply was expected to be gone in fifteen years, and “if we could successfully raise the compression of our motors . . . we could double the mileage and thereby lengthen this period to 30 years.” Kettering saw two routes toward that goal, by using a high-volume additive (ethanol or, as tests showed, fuel with 40 percent benzene that eliminated any knocking) or a low-percentage alternative, akin to but better than the 1 percent iodine solution that was accidentally discovered in 1919 to have the same effect.

In early 1921 Kettering learned about Victor Lehner’s synthesis of selenium oxychloride at the University of Wisconsin. Tests showed it to be a highly effective but, as expected, also a highly corrosive anti-knocking compound, but they led directly to considering compounds of other elements in group 16 of the periodic table: both diethyl selenide and diethyl telluride showed even better anti-knocking properties, but the latter compound was poisonous when inhaled or absorbed through skin and had a powerful garlicky smell. Tetraethyl tin was the next compound found to be modestly effective, and on December 9, 1921, a solution of 1 percent tetraethyl lead (TEL) — (C2H5)4 Pb — produced no knock in the test engine, and soon was found to be effective even when added in concentrations as low as 0.04 percent by volume.

TEL was originally synthesized in Germany by Karl Jacob Löwig in 1853 and had no previous commercial use. In January 1922, DuPont and Standard Oil of New Jersey were contracted to produce TEL, and by February 1923 the new fuel (with the additive mixed into the gasoline at pumps by means of simple devices called ethylizers) became available to the public in a small number of filling stations. Even as the commitment to TEL was going ahead, Midgley and Kettering conceded that “unquestionably alcohol is the fuel of the future,” and estimates showed that a 20 percent blend of ethanol and gasoline needed in 1920 could be supplied by using only about 9 percent of the country’s grain and sugar crops while providing an additional market for US farmers. And during the interwar period many European and some tropical countries used blends of 10– 25 percent ethanol (made from surplus food crops and paper mill wastes) and gasoline, admittedly for relatively small markets as the pre–World War II ownership of family cars in Europe was only a fraction of the US mean.

Other known alternatives included vapor-phase cracked refinery liquids, benzene blends, and gasoline from naphthenic crudes (containing little or no wax). Why did GM, well aware of these realities, decide not only to pursue just the TEL route but also to claim (despite its own correct understanding) that there were no available alternatives: “So far as we know at the present time, tetraethyl lead is the only material available which can bring about these results”? Several factors help to explain the choice. The ethanol route would have required a mass-scale development of a new industry dedicated to an automotive fuel additive that could not be controlled by GM. Moreover, as already noted, the preferable option, producing ethanol from cellulosic waste (crop residues, wood), rather than from food crops, was too expensive to be practical. In fact, the large-scale production of cellulosic ethanol by new enzymatic conversions, promised to be of epoch-making importance in the twenty-first century, has failed its expectations, and by 2020 high-volume US production of ethanol (used as an anti-knocking additive) continued to be based on fermenting corn: in 2020 it claimed almost exactly one-third of the country’s corn harvest.

Gasoline prices are displayed at a gas station in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, U.S. October 19, 2022.  REUTERS/Aimee Dilger

Hitting the Books: Meet the man who helped Microsoft break into the entertainment business

Some of us are destined to lead successful lives thanks to the circumstances of our birth. Some of us, like attorney Bruce Jackson, are destined to lead such lives in spite them. Raised in New York's Amsterdam housing projects and subjected to the daily brutalities of growing up a black man in America, Jackson's story is ultimately one of tempered success. Sure he went on to study at Georgetown Law before representing some of the biggest names in hip hop — LL Cool J, Heavy D, the Lost Boyz and Mr. Cheeks, SWV, Busta Rhymes — and working 15 years as Microsoft's associate general counsel. But at the end of the day, he is still a black man living in America, with all the baggage that comes with it.

In his autobiography, Never Far from Home (out now from Atria), Jackson recounts the challenges he has faced in life, of which there are no shortage: from being falsely accused of robbery at age 10 to witnessing the murder of his friend at 15 to spending a night in lockup as an adult for the crime of driving his own car; the shock of navigating Microsoft's lillywhite workforce following years spent in the entertainment industry, and the end of a loving marriage brought low by his demanding work. While Jackson's story is ultimately one of triumph, Never Far from Home reveals a hollowness, a betrayal, of the American Dream that people of Bill Gates' (and this writer's) complexion will likely never have to experience. In the excerpt below, Jackson recalls his decision to leave a Napster-ravaged music industry to the clammy embrace of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. 

Atria Books

Excerpted from Never Far From Home My Journey from Brooklyn to Hip Hop, Microsoft, and the Law by Bruce Jackson. Published by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2023 by Bruce Jackson. All rights reserved.

“We gotta figure out a way to stop this.”

In the late 1990s, the digital revolution pushed the music business into a state of flux. And here was Tony Dofat, sitting in my office, apoplectic, talking about how to stop Napster and other platforms from taking the legs out from under the traditional recording industry.

I shook my head. “If they’re already doing it, then it’s too late. Cat’s out of the bag. I don’t care if you start suing people, you’re never going back to the old model. It’s over.”

In fact, lawsuits, spearheaded by Metallica and others, the chosen mode of defense in those early days of the digital music onslaught, only served to embolden consumers and publicize their cause. Free music for everyone! won the day.

These were terrifying times for artists and industry executives alike. A decades-old business model had been built on the premise that recorded music was a salable commodity.

Artists would put out a record and then embark on a promotional tour to support that record. A significant portion of a musician’s income (and the income of the label that supported the artist) was derived from the sale of a physical product: recorded albums (or singles), either in vinyl, cassette, or compact disc. Suddenly, that model was flipped on its head... and still is. Artists earn a comparative pittance from downloads or streams, and most of their revenue is derived from touring, or from monetizing social media accounts whose numbers are bolstered by a song’s popularity. (Publicly, Spotify has stated that it pays artists between $.003 and $.005 per stream. Translation: 250 streams will result in revenue of approximately one dollar for the recording artist.)

Thus, the music itself has been turned primarily into a marketing tool used to entice listeners to the product: concert and festival tickets, and a social media advertising platform. It is a much tougher and leaner business model. Additionally, it is a model that changed the notion that record labels and producers needed only one decent track around which they could build an entire album. This happened all the time in the vinyl era: an artist came up with a hit single, an album was quickly assembled, often with filler that did not meet the standard established by the single. Streaming platforms changed all of that. Consumers today seek out only the individual songs they like, and do it for a fraction of what they used to spend on albums. Ten bucks a month gets you access to thousands of songs on Spotify or Pandora or Apple Music roughly the same amount a single album cost in the pre-streaming era. For consumers, it has been a landmark victory (except for the part about artists not being able to create art if they can’t feed themselves); for artists and record labels, it has been a catastrophic blow.

For everyone connected to the music business, it was a shock to the system. For me, it was provocation to consider what I wanted to do with the next phase of my career. In early 2000, I received a call from a corporate recruiter about a position with Microsoft, which was looking for an in-house counsel with a background in entertainment law — specifically, to work in the company’s burgeoning digital media division. The job would entail working with content providers and negotiating deals in which they would agree to make their content — music, movies, television shows, books — available to consumers via Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. In a sense, I would still be in the entertainment business; I would be spending a lot of time working with the same recording industry executives with whom I had built prior relationships.

But there were downsides, as well. For one thing, I was recently married, with a one-year-old baby and a stepson, living in a nice place in the New York City suburbs. I wasn’t eager to leave them—or my other daughters—three thousand miles behind while I moved to Microsoft’s headquarters in the Pacific Northwest. From an experience standpoint, though, it was almost too good an offer to turn down.

Deeply conflicted and at a crossroads in my career, I solicited advice from friends and colleagues, including, most notably, Clarence Avant. If I had to name one person who has been the most important mentor in my life, it would be Clarence, “the Black Godfather.” In an extraordinary life that now spans almost ninety years, Clarence has been among the most influential men in Black culture, music, politics, and civil rights. It’s no surprise that Netflix’s documentary on Clarence featured interviews with not just a who’s who of music and entertainment industry superstars, but also former US presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

In the early 1990s, Clarence became chairman of the board of Motown Records. As lofty a title as that might be, it denotes only a fraction of the wisdom and power he wielded. When the offer came down from Microsoft, I consulted with Clarence. Would I be making a mistake, I wondered, by leaving the music business and walking away from a firm I had started? Clarence talked me through the pros and cons, but in the end, he offered a steely assessment, in a way that only Clarence could.

“Son, take your ass to Microsoft, and get some of that stock.”

The logo of Microsoft is seen outside their offices in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, Israel December 27, 2022. REUTERS/Rami Amichay

Sex trafficking suspect Andrew Tate threatens alleged victim: retract your claim or I sue you

Professional misogynist Andrew Tate, imprisoned in Romania as part of a rape and sex trafficking investigation, has issued a legal threat to one of the woman accusing him. The cease-and-decist letter was sent by a U.S. lawyer on behalf of Tate and his brother, Tristan Tate, and threatens to sue her and her family for $300m if she does not retract her claim. — Read the rest

DREAMHOUSES: Abstract Fantasy Homes Prompt Short Stories

With controversial AI creations around so many corners, it’s refreshing to see an analogue project like DREAMHOUSES come along. Thought up by Fort Makers and stemming from the idea of vivid pandemic-induced dreams, the project is an online exhibition of abstract fantasy homes. Six artists and designers created their own “dream house” before being paired up with writers, who then used the creations as a prompt for an accompanying text work. The catch was that participants could only use materials that were available in their actual homes. The result is a digital neighborhood that explores the idea of what a home is to the creators.

“The past few years have forced us to radically reconsider our relationships with our homes, coming to realize that it is where our imagination comes together with reality: we create spaces in our own image while making sure they also serve our quotidian needs,” says Fort Makers Co-Founder Nana Spears. “With this project, we wanted to see what would happen if the artist is free to eschew the practical part of this equation and create a space of pure fantasy,” adds Co-Founder Noah Spencer.

CHIAOZZA X Janelle Zara

CHIAOZZA x Janelle Zara, “Parallel House”

“Parallel House,” created by the duo at CHIAOZZA, features a horseshoe-style layout of two houses. With an all-white exterior and interior full of brightly-colored objects, the design takes advantage of indoor/outdoor living spaces. Entirely modeled of construction paper, this modern piece of architecture is ready for the California desert.

Janelle Zara wrote “Imagining Life Inside CHIAOZZA’s Dreamhouse, Which I’m Sure Exists in LA” in response. “In my dream house, time is an illusion, a social construct; here adherence to time is 100 percent a choice. There are no clocks, no scheduled zoom meetings, only the movement of light and shadow as the sun traces its path along the sky. Throughout the year, from day to day, this movement is never fixed; the day stretches and contracts according to the seasons.” Read it in full here.

CHIAOZZA X Janelle Zara

CHIAOZZA X Janelle Zara

Harry Nuriev X Drew Zeiba

Harry Nuriev x Drew Zeiba, “Off The Road”

Harry Nuriev’s immersive work likes to blur the line between actual and virtual realities, so it makes sense that “Off The Road” would follow suit. The 3D rendering uses his signature cobalt blue to highlight a canopy bed set in a green meadow. Once the sky dims, an otherworldly light of its own turns on.

In “Sense Index Zero,” Drew Zeiba dives into what we feel like when alone in the comfort of our homes and the color blue. “One can feel blue; blue is not something one wants to feel. In Maggie Nelson’s obsessive catalogue of the color, Bluets, she writes, “Loneliness is solitude with a problem.” Soot lands on my tongue as a reminder that there are things I cannot control, that home is not the shape of a globe, that there is no edge. The world escapes. I am beneath a sky of my own making as words crystalize carbon gray against my teeth. I shed description: I become primary.” Read it in full here.

Harry Nuriev X Drew Zeiba

Laurie Simmons X Natasha Stagg

Laurie Simmons x Natasha Stagg, “Sparkle House”

Artist Laurie Simmons, explorer of nostalgia, gender, and consumerism, created “Sparkle House.” A sparsely furnished Victorian mansion of sorts, its personality comes from the patterned textiles used throughout its rooms – including the sparkling rugs that come to life when hit with light.

Undeniably a great setting, Natasha Stagg wrote “Nowhere to sit” in accompaniment. The short story tells of a group of roommates, their various personalities, and the dynamics that exist in such situations. “The couch was so unlike the image when it arrived. All of the roommates looked at it, delivered and out of the box, the first new piece of furniture they had bought as a group. It was supposed to be what brought the room together, a luxurious blue velvet thing. They should have known, they all thought, that cheap velvet would look it, giving away more than what their second-hand or inherited furniture did.” Read it in full here.

Laurie Simmons X Natasha Stagg

Laurie Simmons X Natasha Stagg

Laurie Simmons X Natasha Stagg

Noah Spencer X Philippa Snow

Noah Spencer x Philippa Snow, “Sunshine Daydream”

“Sunshine Daydream” was brought to life by Fort Makers Co-Founder, wood sculptor, and painter Noah Spencer. The tiny mixed-media hut features a single unfurnished room that can move across the accompanying desert landscape with you – almost like a pet.

Critic and essayist Philippa Snow wrote “Ithaca” in extension.
“Ithaca, whose name was actually Jane, had dropped out of her Creative Writing MFA to start a new life in the desert, where she’d planned to write a novel, drop some acid, and behave exactly like the kind of white girl who called things her ‘spirit animal.'” Read it in full here.

Noah Spencer X Philippa Snow

Noah Spencer X Philippa Snow

Marcel Alcalá X Whitney Mallett

Marcel Alcalá x Whitney Mallett, “Corner Studio Girlies”

Populated with non-binary figures, Marcel Alcalá’s “Corner Studio Girlies” uses glazed ceramic figures against a cardboard city painted red to share alternative expressions of queerness. It was photographed in the corner of Alcalá’s studio, which is also the piece’s namesake.

Whitney Mallet explored the hectic, playful yet dark, “Corner Studio Girlies” and wrote #Justiceforglitter. The piece revolves around Mariah Carey, 9/11, and the movie Glitter. “And while I’m not suggesting that sabotaging the vehicle intended to catapult Carey into cinema stardom played a role in Al Qaeda’s attack schedule, it has been documented that Osama Bin Laden’s preferred five-octave-range songstress was Whitney Houston.” Read it in full here.

Marcel Alcalá X Whitney Mallett

Marcel Alcalá X Whitney Mallett

Marcel Alcalá X Whitney Mallett

Samuel Harvey X Tash Nikol

Sam Harvey x Tash Nikol, “From Here I’ve Seen Even More”

Like something out of a fairytale, ceramicist Sam Harvey created a single tower. Covered in light blue shingles and waving a flag reading “having no idea as to what it all meant he chose to stay home,” your imagination just might run wild.

Poet, writer, and curator Rash Nikol interpreted the tower into words, perhaps as a link to another world, in “Waiting Room for Spirits.” “the wise ones speak of the spirit house / here and there / our ancestors speak of a place there / a holding room for spirits / outside of skin / not far from clouds.” Read it in full here.

Samuel Harvey X Tash Nikol

Samuel Harvey X Tash Nikol

Samuel Harvey X Tash Nikol

To learn more about DREAMHOUSES, visit dreamhouses.fortmakers.com.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

The hard truths of war, child trafficking in India, a deeply personal search for a lost climber, the high personal toll veterinarians must pay in offering the final kindness to old and sick pets, and a call to look beyond common ethnic food tropes.

Important trigger warning: Please note that stories three and four reference suicide. Both pieces are difficult, but we hope that you’ll agree that they’re important reads.

1. The Hunt for Russian Collaborators in Ukraine

Joshua Yaffa | The New Yorker | January 30, 2023 | 9,078 words

“About all anyone can trust in war is that everybody lies.” As I read Joshua Yaffa’s piece about accusations of betrayal among residents of a Ukrainian city liberated from Russian occupation, I kept thinking about this sentence. It comes not from Yaffa’s piece, but from a story about the treatment of ISIS fighters after Iraqi forces retook the city of Mosul, which I had the honor of editing six years ago. So often in conflict coverage, the media are quick to draw blunt distinctions: Ukraine good, Russia evil; military righteous, ISIS monstrous. It’s easier, I suppose, than acknowledging that war is a hideous enterprise from which virtually nothing and no one will emerge clean. In the aftermath of violence, it can be hard to discern the truth from what people wish it to be, and administering justice, while an essential moral endeavor, is also a deeply fraught one. In his haunting feature, Yaffa doesn’t seek to untangle facts so much as he listens to the stories people are telling. They are talking to him, of course, but you get the sense that they are telling stories to themselves as well: They are remembering, processing, contextualizing, rationalizing, and in some cases rewriting. What do these stories and their contradictions reveal? The picture is messy, which is to say, it’s true. —SD

2. Storm Cycle

Ritwika Mitra | Fifty Two | February 3, 2023 | 4,900 words

Muddles of light and noise overlay my memories of India; it is a place that envelops you in a blanket of color, energy, and smells, with life and dirt pulsating from every inch. It is also a complicated country, so I am fascinated by this publication, Fifty Two, which publishes weekly essays on aspects of Indian history, politics, and culture. This week I read a powerful piece by Ritwika Mitra, reporting on child trafficking in the Sundarbans, an area plagued by natural disasters and poverty. Mitra focuses on the story of one mother, Ayesha, and the child she has after her family sold her to “Oi Bihari” (the old man). Her case is not unique, and Mitra first meets Ayesha while interviewing other women at Goranbose Gram Bikash Kendra (GGBK), a community-led organization working on gender-based violence. Mitra narrows in on Ayesha, talking to her and her daughter over several months. This time allows her to dig deep, and she does not sugarcoat their tempestuous relationship and strong characters, an honesty that lets the reader into the lives of this family and the pain of their past.  —CW

3. What We Search For

Jason Nark | Alpinist | January 30, 2023 | 6,174 words

“I had no special power, they said, to keep him alive.” Sometimes a piece on grief will kick you square in the gut, whisking you back, back to that place where you are indeed powerless. In this moving essay at Alpinist, Jason Nark comes to terms with the suicide of a dear friend as he investigates the disappearance of Matthew Greene, a climber who went missing in California in 2013. “Grief counselors said I couldn’t have done anything to save Anthony. Even now, nine years after his death, some part of me thinks they’re wrong. We hugged when we parted that afternoon, making plans to meet up, and he held that embrace a second longer than usual. I still feel him, pressing on me, like a mountain.” —KS

4. Our Business Is Killing

Andrew Bullis | Slate | February 5, 2023 | 3,220 words

Unless you have a long-lived bird, you’re generally going to outlive your pet and be faced with that final visit to the vet. If you’ve had to euthanize a very sick or very old pet, you know that sharp, stabbing pain of loss that lessens only a tiny bit each day. But, have you ever stopped to think about the toll that euthanizing animals takes on the vets who provide this necessary kindness? At Slate, veterinarian Andrew Bullis helps us understand the ongoing personal cost that’s so high it can drive some vets to suicide. “You see, our business is healing, yes. But you all know there’s only so much we can do. In the end, euthanasia is an option. I want to make this abundantly clear: If there’s one thing you must do flawlessly in your career, it’s killing.” —KS

5. When Food is the Only Narrative We Consume

Angie Kang | Catapult | February 8, 2023 | 2,146 words

Food is an essential part of culture, and an accessible way into understanding it. (Exhibits A and B: See the Pixar animated short film Bao, or nearly any account of an Asian American child’s embarrassing “lunchbox moment” at school.) But Angie Kang urges storytellers to create more varied and nuanced stories about Chinese culture and the wider Asian American experience — like Fresh Off the Boat and Everything Everywhere All At Once — that reach beyond food. “We don’t stop living in between meals,” she writes. Kang’s resonant words and fantastic artwork combine in a delightful illustrated essay about narrative and representation. “I’m just hungry for something new,” she writes. I am as well, and with this fresh, inspired piece, she delivers. —CLR

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