The latest version of the bot detector reCaptcha is invisible to users and has spread to more than 650,000 websites. It’s great for security—but not so great for your privacy.
We’ve all tried to log into a website or submit a form only to be stuck clicking boxes of traffic lights or storefronts or bridges in a desperate attempt to finally convince the computer that we’re not actually a bot.
For many years, this has been one of the predominant ways that reCaptcha—the Google-run internet bot detector—has determined whether a user is a bot or not. But last fall, Google launched a new version of the tool, with the goal of eliminating that annoying user experience entirely. Now, when you enter a form on a website that’s using reCaptcha V3, you won’t see the “I’m not a robot” checkbox, nor will you have to prove you know what a cat looks like. Instead, you won’t see anything at all.
[Image: courtesy Google]
“It’s a better experience for users. Everyone has failed a Captcha,” says Cy Khormaee, the reCaptcha product lead at Google. Instead, Google analyzes the way users navigate through a website and assigns them a risk score based on how malicious their behavior is. Khormaee won’t share what signals Google uses to determine these scores because he says that would make it easier for scammers to imitate benign users, but he believes that this new version of reCaptcha makes it incredibly difficult for bots or Captcha farmers—humans who are paid tiny amounts to break Captchas online—to fool Google’s system.
An old version of reCaptcha. [Image: courtesy Google]
“You have to understand what behavior on the site should be and mimic that well enough to fool us,” he says. “That’s a really hard problem versus the general problem of, ‘Pretend like I’m a human.'” Website administrators then get access to their visitors’ risk scores and can decide how to handle them: For instance, if a user with a high risk score attempts to log in, the website can set rules to ask them to enter additional verification information through two-factor authentication. As Khormaee put it, the “worst case is we have a little inconvenience for legitimate users, but if there is an adversary, we prevent your account from being stolen.”
According to tech statistics website Built With, more than 650,000 websites are already using reCaptcha v3; overall, there are at least 4.5 million websites use reCaptcha, including 25% of the top 10,000 sites. Google is also now testing an enterprise version of reCaptcha v3, where Google creates a customized reCaptcha for enterprises that are looking for more granular data about users’ risk levels to protect their site algorithms from malicious users and bots.
But this new, risk-score based system comes with a serious trade-off: users’ privacy.
According to two security researchers who’ve studied reCaptcha, one of the ways that Google determines whether you’re a malicious user or not is whether you already have a Google cookie installed on your browser. It’s the same cookie that allows you to open new tabs in your browser and not have to re-log in to your Google account every time. But according to Mohamed Akrout, a computer science PhD student at the University of Toronto who has studied reCaptcha, it appears that Google is also using its cookies to determine whether someone is a human in reCaptcha v3 tests. Akrout wrote in an April paper about how reCaptcha v3 simulations that ran on a browser with a connected Google account received lower risk scores than browsers without a connected Google account. “If you have a Google account it’s more likely you are human,” he says. Google did not respond to questions about the role that Google cookies play in reCaptcha.
With reCaptcha v3, technology consultant Marcos Perona and Akrout’s tests both found that their reCaptcha scores were always low risk when they visited a test website on a browser where they were already logged into a Google account. Alternatively, if they went to the test website from a private browser like Tor or a VPN, their scores were high risk.
[Image: courtesy Google]To make this risk-score system work accurately, website administrators are supposed to embed reCaptcha v3 code on allof the pages of their website, not just on forms or log-in pages. Then, reCaptcha learns over time how their website’s users typically act, helping the machine learning algorithm underlying it to generate more accurate risk scores. Because reCaptcha v3 is likely to be on every page of a website, if you’re signed into your Google account there’s a chance Google is getting data about every single webpage you go to that is embedded with reCaptcha v3—and there many be no visual indication on the site that it’s happening, beyond a small reCaptcha logo hidden in the corner.
Khormaee would not address the way that Google uses data for reCaptcha in any way and instead referred Fast Company to Google’s terms of service, which is linked beneath the reCaptcha logo on most sites. However, there was no reference to reCaptcha anywhere in the terms of service. After this story was published, Google reached out to say that reCaptcha’s API sends hardware and software information, including device and application data, back to Google for analysis, and that the service is only used to fight spam and abuse.
Google encouraging site admins to put reCaptcha all over their sites, and then sharing the resulting risk scores with those admins is great for security, Perona thinks, because he says it “gives site owners more control and visibility over what’s going on” with potential scammer and bot attacks, and the system will give admins more accurate scores than if reCaptcha is only using data from a single webpage to analyze user behavior. But there’s the trade-off. “It makes sense and makes it more user-friendly, but it also gives Google more data,” he says. Google would not clarify what it does with the data it captures about user behavior via reCaptcha, only that it is used for improving reCaptcha and general security purposes.
This kind of cookie-based data collection happens elsewhere on the internet. Giant companies use it as a way to assess where their users go as they surf the web, which can then be tied into providing better targeted advertising. For instance, Google’s reCaptcha cookie follows the same logic of the Facebook “like” button when it’s embedded in other websites—it gives that site some social media functionality, but it also lets Facebook know that you’re there. Previously, Google has saidthat the data captured from reCaptcha is not used for ad targeting or analyzing user interests and preferences. After this story was published, Google said that the information collected through bbbbbbbbreCaptcha will not be used for personalized advertising by Google.
“It’s always a double-edged sword,” Perona says. “You gain something, but you’re also giving Google a little more control over everything online.” The gain is security and a better user experience, but privacy may suffer.
Google did not address any potential privacy problems and insisted that reCaptcha v3 is a matter of corporate responsibility. It sees reCaptcha v3 as a way of ensuring a safe, frictionless online experience. “Google is so deeply integrated with the internet,” Khormaee says. “We want to do anything we can to protect it.”
Google does everything from building smartphones to creating driverless car companies. So it’s easy to forget that its official mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google is and will always be a company anchored in the business of gathering data and serving it up in a comprehensible way, whether that’s through Search results, Google News alerts, or restaurants you might like automatically popping up on Google Maps.
So it’s perhaps no surprise that Google now wants to help others package their data, too. Manuel Lima—a celebrated information designer who founded and heads Google’s data visualization team (formed in 2018)— has published Google’s Six Principles for Designing Any Chart, a cheat sheet to clear, accessible data visualizations. The principles weigh in on topics ranging from typography to the practice of dishonestly presenting data to serve an agenda. Additionally, Google has launched a series of guidelines to design better graphics, as part of Material Design, the company’s design language for user interfaces.
[Image: courtesy Google]
Google has more deep data knowledge than any company in the world, and it is no slouch in the discipline of design. It’s only natural that the company would combine this expertise. Initially, the audience for the new data design guidelines was Google itself, but much as it did for Material Design, the company decided to publicize these best practices and encourage others to adopt them—anyone from app developers to everyday people who are left wondering why their PowerPoint chart sucks.
“We started doing this internally as a way to guide [employees] through the do’s and don’ts of chart creation,” Lima tells Fast Company. “After conducting various research studies and partnering with teams across the company, the do’s and don’ts evolved into a set of high-level principles that were strongly rooted in Google-wide tenets crucial to the company’s growth, brand, and culture. These principles are meant to be generative and not prescriptive. We hope they can help any chart creator during ideation and evaluation.”
[Image: courtesy Google]
The six principles read something like an introductory data design course. “Don’t distort or confuse the information for embellishment or partiality,” reads one tip. “Respect different user needs on data depth, complexity, and modality,” reads another. To approach data with journalistic rigor, and to make a graphic that is both glanceable for casual use and deep enough for experts, are the sorts of insights that are well known within the (relatively small) data visualization community, but potentially not outside of it.
Meanwhile, the full guidelines walk you through several specific examples of good data visualization, illustrated with charts built by the Google data viz team itself (in this way, it is similar to a 2018 project called From Data to Viz). The guidelines identify charts you’ve seen but probably never named, like “candlesticks” and “waterfalls,” while breaking down contexts where different charts makes sense.
[Image: courtesy Google]Particularly useful are those aforementioned “dos and don’ts.” They are shown side by side to illustrate common mishaps in chart creation, like line charts rendered in so many colors they look the scribbles of a 5-year-old wielding a big box of Crayola, or graphs that love bold typography so much that EVERYTHING BECOMES EQUALLY, LOUDLY UNIMPORTANT.
[Image: courtesy Google]
One particular, if small, point that gives some insight into Google’s chart-design philosophy is its love for labels at the cost of cleaner graphics. “Avoid using solely icons and symbols to represent important information,” one tip reads. Does a graphic need to define the Wi-Fi symbol we all see every single day of our lives? To Google’s information design team, yes, yes it does. Clarity is prized above all else.
In any case, the guidelines are a worthwhile read to both professional designers and occasional PowerPoint chart users alike. You will undoubtedly learn something from the company that is organizing (and, ahem, collecting) the world’s information.
There’s a lot of pressure to schedule every minute of your day in the name of efficiency. According to entrepreneur Colin Darretta, that’s counterproductive.
In true entrepreneur fashion, I tend to jam-pack my calendar, accounting for nearly every waking minute of my day. Meticulous scheduling is great for cramming in a lot of “stuff”—15 minutes for meditation in the morning, 10 minutes to get ready, and a five-minute walking commute. But this obsession with efficiency has significant drawbacks. Moving through a rolling schedule of events leaves little room for the kind of deliberate idleness that generates creative thought.
I discovered this habit when I gave everyone in my organization access to my calendar and made any open slot fair game for meetings. When the organization was smaller, this worked fine. But as we grew, my accessibility meant that my calendar quickly filled up with meetings. That left no time for strategic thought.
This came to a head when I was knee-deep in a website redesign. I had several half-hour windows dotted throughout the day for reflecting on the new site’s direction, but an afternoon of them passed without me making any considerable progress. I felt blocked and stymied. And it was clear I’d blow that evening’s deadline.
Here’s how I started to let go of that time management culture and prioritize high-quality work:
1. CREATE A DIALOGUE AROUND EXPECTATIONS
Be explicit about what you expect and what your teammates can expect of you. This means taking the time to define exactly what you hope to see from a teammate, and being up front about the amount of work you can reasonably complete in a specific time frame. When I worked on the website, I knew it wouldn’t look good for the founder to miss a deadline the entire team had set. However, I recognized that it was equally important for me not to rush to judgments and make a half-baked decision.
As soon as I realized I needed a deadline extension, I should have made that clear and reset expectations with the team. Ultimately, I did finish in a more-or-less acceptable time frame because I distinguished between excellence and perfection when setting my self-expectations. Perfection wasn’t required to move to the next step, but a high-quality output was, and that’s what I aimed to deliver.
2. DON’T MAKE EVERYTHING URGENT
My worst work experience was under a boss who manufactured false priorities nearly daily. At first, I found myself working until the wee hours on the latest “emergency.” Eventually, I stopped treating his requests as urgent. When a real emergency arose, I was slow to act because I had long since stopped trusting that he communicated what was genuinely urgent.
That’s why when I became a boss myself, I didn’t want to create false urgencies. I also knew that it was important for my teammates to do the same. Arbitrary deadlines construct false senses of urgency, and when there are too many of those, people no longer respect the true emergencies that demand all hands on deck.
Every piece of work might be important, but not every problem is time-sensitive. The morning after I busted my deadline in planning the website, I told the team that I’d dropped the ball. I canceled most of my meetings, grabbed my computer, and left the building for a more creative space, letting myself walk and ruminate. By the end of the day, I’d gotten enough done to pass the project off to the design team. And I realized that the urgency I’d created wasn’t real. But it had required me to reject my original time constraints and remake my schedule so I can do my best work.
3. SCHEDULE TIME FOR DEEP CREATIVE THINKING
Our collective obsession with efficiency encroaches on the space we need for creative thought. That’s why I increasingly set aside specific time blocks for “creative thinking,” “product ideation,” and “long-term vision.” I make myself unavailable for meetings during these calendar blocks, and this ensures that I allocate appropriate time for creative thought while still being present for collaboration.
Yes, you might come across a great idea at an unexpected time (in the shower, at the gym, even in a dream). However, those moments don’t always provide sufficient time to cultivate inspiration and creativity. When you allow time to think without doing, you have the mental space to explore a topic at a deeper level. I’ve personally found that blocking out time for the creative process improves the rest of my work because that brainstorming mindset transfers to other projects and tasks.
It’s tempting to want to maximize every moment for the sake of efficiency, but by doing so, you’re making yourself less productive. When you intentionally set aside time to think, rather than do, you’ll prevent time management pressures from stifling strategic thinking and creativity.
Colin Darretta is a cofounder and partner at DojoMojo and the founder and CEO of WellPath. He is a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, and private equity professional turned entrepreneur and angel investor.
By the time California rancher Doniga Markegard picks up the phone around lunchtime, she has already moved the chickens, fed the chickens, fed the pigs, cared for a new litter of 11 piglets, moved the sheep, tended to the horses, milked the cow, and completed a business advising session about the future of her family’s 10,000-acre operation. Overall, a pretty typical Monday.
“We’re good at working with the land and working with the animals, but then all of a sudden you have to add marketing and sales and inventory management,” says Markegard. Based 50 miles south of San Francisco in Half Moon Bay, Markegard and her family produce grass-fed beef and lamb and pastured pork and chicken for customers in the Bay Area. If they operated in a more traditional way, they would specialize in a single product and plug neatly into the industrial agriculture system. Instead, in order to break even, they have to run the equivalent of a consumer-facing small business with a farm attached.
“We’d love to just be out on the land with the livestock, doing what we do, but that’s not practical when you really want to be fully regenerative,” she says.
Regenerative agriculture might sound at first like a subtle variation on organic. But if the term “organic” highlights what’s absent—no chemical fertilizers, no pesticides—”regenerative” goes a step further, advocating for practices like adaptive multi-paddock grazing, in which ruminants like cows and sheep are slowly rotated across a property, so they graze on and fertilize one section of the farm at a time while allowing the rest to naturally regrow and replenish. Methods like this require more hands-on planning involvement from the farmers, but they’ve been found to restore soil health, capture carbon, and help ranches thrive over the long term.
Markegard defines regenerative as “producing more life than you take.” The essential practices are keeping the soil covered with a diverse set of plant species, limiting how much the soil is disturbed by aggressive practices like overplowing, and using livestock to both “kick-start and enhance” the carbon cycle by naturally controlling crops and adding nutrient-rich manure back to the soil. Approaches like that of the Markegard Family Farm are still a tiny niche in the broader agricultural landscape. But interest in regenerative methods has been growing, thanks in large part to evidence suggesting that such practices can cheaply sequester carbon in the soil, while simultaneously solving challenges like erosion and water retention.
This story is part of our series A Green New Deal for Business, looking at how the environmental and economic aims of the resolution might transform industries in the U.S. You can read more here.
The tricky thing, on the surface at least, is that regenerative agriculture depends on livestock—particularly cattle—to work. As awareness around the climate crisis has grown, fingers often point to the production and consumption of meat as a key cause. But the problem is the methods used to mass-produce meat products, not the animals themselves. Integrated correctly into farming operations—as they were before the advent of industrial agriculture, and as regenerative ranchers are trying to do now—livestock like cattle are crucial to keeping land sustainable and productive.
When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) unveiled the Green New Deal in February, participants in the regenerative agriculture movement received further confirmation that they were on the right track. The Green New Deal—a broad resolution designed to accelerate decarbonization of the economy while supporting job growth and community health—is encouraging to regenerative ranchers like Markegard. The legislation’s section on agriculture focuses on supporting family farms and ranches, increasing soil health, and promoting equal access to healthy food. “Transitioning to sustainable, locally focused, ecologically responsible agriculture that drastically reduces greenhouse gases will be a crucial part of implementing a Green New Deal,” Saikat Chakrabarti, chief of staff for Ocasio-Cortez, said in Civil Eats in February. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), agriculture accounts for 9% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Tackling the climate crisis will require radically reshaping the agriculture industry in the United States. Regenerative farming could point the way toward how we could do so, and restore the land we live on in the process.
[Source Images: MarBom/iStock, David Malan/Getty Images, stefann11/iStock, photomaru/iStock]
THE NEED FOR AN AGRICULTURAL OVERHAUL
As a system, mainstream agriculture in the U.S. today operates in a way that is out of sync with both the long-term sustainability of the land and the well-being of the people it is designed to feed. Although the majority of farms are independent, family-owned small businesses, their incentives are profoundly shaped by federal subsidies and corporate “agribusiness” behemoths. For a company like Monsanto or ADM, “yield” is the goal, driving farmers to specialize in a single product, or monoculture. To maximize yield, industrial agriculture operations often lean on synthetic pesticides and fertilizers to boost production. The end result: man-made problems like declining soil health, contaminated landscapes, and a national surplus of mass-produced meat that weighs in at around 2.5 billion pounds.
“We no longer value food. We produce twice the calories that are needed,” says Kevin D. Walker, author of The Grand Food Bargain and the Mindless Drive for More and a professor at Michigan State University. “In other words, we don’t see food in terms of our connection to life and nature and our surroundings. We see food as simple convenience and comfort. It’s a transaction that we just carry out hundreds of times a year, and that’s it.”
At the heart of this disconnected transaction is the agriculture industry. This sector of the economy is responsible not only for a sizeable portion of the country’s carbon emissions, but also for eating through a good deal of natural and financial resources. To support this system of monoculture crop production and factory-farmed meat, the U.S. government allocates around $13 billion in subsidies each year through the Farm Bill to operations that produce just six crops: corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton, rice, and peanuts. As much as 70% of these basic crops goes toward feed for industrial-scale livestock operations. Our modern mainstays are also incorporated into cheap, processed food in the U.S. that’s nutritionally failing the people who consume it.
In the broad framework for the Green New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez and Markey issue a call to reform this system. The resolution aims to precipitate a shift back toward quality in the agriculture industry, which would mean abandoning mainstream monoculture in favor of farms that look more like Markegard’s: diverse operations that produce a variety of crops and integrate all aspects of agriculture in a single, productive farm. Along with this shift, regenerative ranching could create jobs, as it requires more manual labor than its industrial counterparts. If the government can work with ranchers to figure out how to meet their financial and technical needs, meeting that need would track with the Green New Deal’s goal of creating living-wage jobs while decarbonizing the economy.
[Source Images: MarBom/iStock, David Malan/Getty Images, stefann11/iStock, photomaru/iStock]
SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE? THERE’S TECH FOR THAT
If you were looking for one person to embody the Green New Deal’s attempt to link family farms, soil health, and food systems, it could easily be Christine Su. She arrived at Stanford University 15 years ago after a childhood in California and Asia eating home-cooked Taiwanese meals. Before long, her body started rejecting the processed food available in the campus cafeteria. “My lips would swell up, and I would get rashes all over my upper body,” she says. After an elimination diet that made her temporarily vegan, she began visiting farmers’ markets and trying to find foods that made her feel good.
After graduating, Su joined McKinsey & Company and worked on projects involving food brands. But she wanted to get out of an office and closer to the land. Through a series of volunteer projects and internships, she milked cows at a dairy farm in Japan and interviewed shepherds in New Zealand. She also returned to Stanford for an MBA and a master’s degree in land use and agriculture. “I didn’t know the term ‘soil health’ when I first started,” she says.
She quickly learned. By 2014, Su had become convinced that regenerative practices had the potential to transform both the ranching industry and the planet. She also saw a link between the rich microbiome typical of healthy soil on regenerative farms and the conversation around probiotics and gut health, which she had explored through her own diet. “Current industrialized agriculture kills all this microbial life. It’s why soil is blowing away in the Midwest,” she says. “You can tell when you walk on a prairie and it’s full of life, versus driving by fields and no bugs hit the windshield.” Healthy, nutrient-rich soil is one of the most effective carbon sequestration tools on the planet, and much more effective at storing water than dry land. But soil that’s been degraded by decades of intensive monoculture and pesticide use lacks the nutrients that effectively bind carbon in the ground. Regenerative ranching helps replenish those nutrients. If livestock are well managed and rotated, they can process nutrients from the crops they chew, and release them in the form of manure back into the soil. This method of land use, in which everything works as a cyclical system, can act as a direct antidote to industrial agriculture.
[Screenshot: Pasture Map]Su made this connection by learning from a number of “renegade farmers” who practiced regenerative ranching. And she realized that her business experience and “data geek” background could be a boon for ranchers struggling to make regenerative practices work within the constraints of their land and their budget. So she cofounded PastureMap, a map-based digital planning tool for managing livestock that also helps farmers evaluate the environmental performance of their land, like the amount of carbon their soil is storing.
“Regenerative agriculture can be overwhelming because it’s a set of principles that requires a change in mind-set, as well as a bunch of processes that are rooted in science,” Su says. A novice regenerative rancher has to analyze the land, subdivide pastures, rotate cattle, plant a diverse cocktail of cover crops—and that’s just the beginning. Farmers need to take a much more active role in managing their land and the animals on it, and “technology can help with the shift,” she says.
It wasn’t easy, during PastureMap’s early days, to convince ranchers to give the product a try. When Su showed up at industry conferences, she was an outsider in a sea of cowboy hats (she estimates she met 1,500 ranchers in person while doing product development). But for the small set of ranchers who had been contemplating a switch to regenerative practices, whether out of necessity or out of principle, PastureMap clicked immediately. Kansas rancher Brian Alexander, for example, heard about PastureMap on Facebook and that same day drove over four hours to Wichita to buy an iPad in order to use the software. Today, the company has $3 million in funding and 10,000 customers in 40 countries. Markegard, who became a customer in 2014, has used PastureMap to prove out that her ranch is sequestering half a ton of carbon per acre per year.
[Source Images: MarBom/iStock, David Malan/Getty Images, stefann11/iStock, photomaru/iStock]
BARRIERS TO A BETTER SYSTEM
But if an agriculture system modeled after the regenerative movement is the goal—and Ocasio-Cortez has cited it as an aspirational model for the industry—it will take smart policies and a profound shift in market incentives to reach it. Right now, for instance, labor costs can make regenerative ranching prohibitively expensive, particularly if the added costs are not offset by the savings associated with avoiding chemical fertilizers and pesticides. There are quirks to regions and microclimates that make it tough to standardize regenerative ranching best practices. And there are upfront costs, like installing the mobile electric fencing that keeps livestock in place as they rotate across different sections of the farmland. For these reasons and others, grass-fed beef produced on regenerative ranches is typically more expensive for consumers, with prices that only the affluent can comfortably pay. Without significant reform to the way sustainable farming is supported by the government, the regenerative movement won’t be able to bring about the Green New Deal’s goal of advancing universal access to healthy food.
“We have the tools for managing productivity and biodiversity, but in an industry that already has razor-thin margins, the added work or sacrifice of managing truly for the environment is something that is only supported by the livestock industry to a point,” says Ariel Greenwood, co-owner of Grass Nomads, which practices holistic planned grazing and other regenerative techniques on behalf of ranch owners.
The support that Greenwood and other regenerative ranchers seek may coalesce as extreme weather events become more common. “American family farmers are primary stakeholders in the battle against climate change, as they’ve been withstanding increasingly devastating natural disasters, including floods, drought, wildfires, and hurricanes,” National Farmers Union senior vice president Rob Larew said in a statement at the time of the Green New Deal’s unveiling. “The impacts on not only their individual bottom lines, but also on their communities, have already been significant, and they will be exacerbated by more severe disasters.”
As extreme weather prods farmers to embrace systemic change, consumers will need to evolve as well. In particular, Americans need to dial down their annual meat consumption—on average, 250 pounds per person per year, or 130% more than recommended—in order to reduce demand and help adjust to the fact that a regenerative agriculture system will very likely produce less meat. The boom in companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat that are developing plant-based alternatives to animal proteins could also help ease this transition on the consumer side (though Impossible and regenerative ranchers are not on good terms).
While these large-scale shifts will take time, leaders of the regenerative movement are encouraged by a growing number of examples demonstrating that regenerative ranching is ultimately more efficient and cost-effective, once fully up and running, because it allows for a ranch to build on and encourage nature’s own tendencies. Technology solutions like PastureMap have the potential to document those trends at scale and accelerate the transition. The key is to find a way to value the carbon that regenerative operations sequester, giving ranchers a viable path to profitability.
[Source Images: MarBom/iStock, David Malan/Getty Images, stefann11/iStock, photomaru/iStock]
A WAY FORWARD: PAYING RANCHERS FOR RESTORING THE LAND
Some of today’s leading regenerative practitioners adopted the practices almost by accident. Rancher Gabe Brown, who operates on 5,000 acres outside Bismarck, North Dakota, was brought to the brink of bankruptcy before he decided to experiment with a variety of cover crop “cocktails” and new ways to manage his livestock. By growing more diverse crops, like millet and daikon radish, he improved soil health while providing essential nutrients to his animals. He also found that his cattle, pigs, and chickens were effectively distributing nutrients without assistance from industrial pesticides and fertilizers, and was able to save money by winding down those purchases. After nearly two decades, the soil on Brown’s farm is now much more nutrient-dense and able to store three times more water. His memoir and guide book, Dirt to Soil: One Family’s Journey Into Regenerative Agriculture, makes the case for regenerative agriculture with both scientific data and personal conviction.
But while Brown’s journey is instructive, it would be bad policy to incite change by pushing ranchers to the brink of financial ruin. If the Green New Deal moves forward, policymakers could redirect subsidies toward regenerative ranchers. In the interim, grassroots initiatives are starting to take off; a coalition of food-world allies in the Bay Area are working together to more accurately price the value that regeneratively produced beef offers not just hungry diners, but the planet. There, a nonprofit led by former chefs, called the Perennial Farming Initiative, is collaborating with California regulators on an initiative that would pay ranchers for sequestered carbon. “People will pay $80,000 for a Tesla, but they won’t necessarily pay a dollar extra for the carbon-ranched burger,” Perennial cofounder Anthony Myint told the Los Angeles Times. For ranchers like Markegard, California’s initiative could translate into real money. She would be happy to have it: Markegard Family Farm is profitable, but pays a princely sum for Bay Area real estate. Nationwide, median on-farm household income has been negative for over two decades. Farmers will not be able to operate regeneratively unless they have the financial means to quit their off-farm jobs.
Projects like the Perennial Farming Initiative could scale up or replicate in other parts of the country under the Green New Deal. Su, through PastureMap, is trying to lay the groundwork for such a system by making it easier for regenerative farmers to track their carbon sequestration. Earlier this month, she formally launched an integration with Point Blue Conservation Science that allows PastureMap customers to monitor grazing patterns and soil health in concert. Ranchers simply take soil samples from their pastures and drop them in the mail so PastureMap partners can analyze them. “The message I want to share with ranchers is: ‘Get paid for what you’re doing, and keep good data about it,'” says Su. Over time, with enough data, she will have data and benchmarks that can power carbon-offset markets and compensate ranchers for their work. (Indigo Agriculture, another sustainable farming company, has also introduced a program to compensate farmers for the amount of carbon they’ve captured.)
There are also early signs that large companies might lend their clout to models like California’s nascent experiment. Last year, Patagonia, Dr. Bronner’s, and a host of other prominent environmentally conscious brands debuted the Regenerative Organic Certification, which will be bestowed on companies that advance both carbon capture farming and fair labor practices. Earlier this year, General Mills announced that it will work with farmers it sources from to convert their farms to regenerative operations. These types of recognition and support could one day enable farmers and agricultural companies to build out career pipelines for younger people interested in agricultural work.
As the idea of regenerative ranching gains momentum under the Green New Deal and in the agriculture industry more broadly, researchers are hard at work examining the concept. Paige Stanley, a doctoral student in environmental science, policy, and management at the University of California, Berkeley, worked with Jason Rowntree, chair of Grassfed Exchange and professor at Michigan State, on one such effort. There’s no doubt that raising beef simply for slaughter is ruinous for the environment. But integrating cattle into crop farming and soil management can have the types of carbon-neutralizing benefits the Green New Deal wants to support. “Our study last year showed that, in fact, you can have huge amounts of soil carbon sequestration and in some cases might even offset the greenhouse-gas profile of [the beef production system],” she says.
In the meantime, the movement is growing through anecdotal knowledge sharing. There are conferences and Facebook groups and apprenticeships, and grazers-for-hire who spread best practices. “We had to make a lot of mistakes,” Markegard says. “Hopefully the next generation will be able to figure this out.”
If you want to know the legacy of Jonathan Ive, who announced today that he will step down as Apple’s design chief after 27 years at the company, you don’t need to look very far. It’s visible in every iPhone you see in someone’s hand. And Apple Watch on a wrist. And MacBook on a Starbucks table. Given Ive’s immense influence on products from other companies, it’s not a stretch to say that our era’s consumer electronics look pretty much the way that Jony Ive thinks they should.
But Ive earned additional fame for his durable part as a spokesman in videos played at Apple launch events, crisply hyping new products as gorgeous product shots swoop by. In the years since Steve Jobs’ death in 2011, these videos have played an even greater role in Apple’s traditional creation of a reality distortion field around its latest stuff.
Which led me to wonder: When did Ive begin appearing in such promotional mini-films?
At Macworld Expo 1999, Apple’s big news was the Power Macintosh G3, a high-end tower desktop. After introducing it, Steve Jobs played a promotional video, prefaced with a Henry Kissinger quote and featuring Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s The Look of Love on the soundtrack. (If you know who’s singing, please tell me; I’m not sure, and it stumped Shazam.) The video touts lustworthy features such as a 400-MHz processor, up to 1GB of RAM, and USB (“the future of I/O!”).
And several times during the video, we get a glimpse of a younger, hairier, less polished version of the man who eventually became Apple’s chief design officer, Sir Jonathan Ive. I’m not sure if this is the first keynote video he appeared in, but it’s certainly a prototype for many to come.
“To try and design an object that elicits the reaction of ‘I really want that’ is enormous fun,” declares Ive in his first appearance. Later, he adds that “these have to be objects that are totally seductive.” And finally, as if he’s convincing himself as he talks: “A computer absolutely can be sexy. It … yeah, it can.”
In the 1999 video, Ive was merely one of several Apple executives—along with outsiders from companies such as Eidos and Epson—who sang the G3’s praises. (I’m particularly fond of the moment when Phil Schiller brandishes an anvil-like camcorder that wouldn’t fit in a briefcase let alone a pocket.) But Ive’s appearance turned out to be a sign of things to come. Alone among Apple’s highest-profile employees, he was not a regular on the keynote stage. (“I’m shy,” he explained in a 2015 New Yorker profile by Ian Parker, which remains essential reading for Apple watchers.) So he became a dominating presence in videos shown during the keynotes, rhapsodizing over his own team’s work in a signature style that became so familiar that even his pronunciation of “al-u-min-ium” is a long-running meme.
A couple of years after the G3 video, this one has Ive looking more recognizably Ivesian—shaved head, gray T-shirt—and sounding more confident. But he’s still relatively low-key in his claims about a device that turned out to be one of Apple’s most epoch-shifting achievements: “Collectively, it’s a product that we’re really looking forward to getting our hands on.”
Nine years later, this 2009 video for the new unibody MacBook has Ive up front, and his sound bites have grown more epic (“I don’t know how we could make anything any more essential, any simpler, than the new MacBook”).
In 2010, when Apple introduced the new iPad, Ive’s pronouncements were still reaching new heights of grandeur: “When something exceeds your capacity to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical.” (I’m still not sure whether he meant that he didn’t understand how the iPad functioned, or that consumers wouldn’t.)
The same year’s iPhone 4 video is among the most classic: “iPhone 4 is so much more than another new product … I mean, this will have a lasting impact on the way we actually connect with each other.”
In this 2016 video, Apple gave the Ive-video treatment to an unexpected new product: an expensive coffee-table book full of photos of devices he designed.
Lastly—and from just earlier this month—here’s Ive helping to introduce the upcoming new Mac Pro, the great-great-grandchild of 1999’s Power Mac G3. The video is simultaneously more minimalist and lavish than the G3 one, and looks like it was produced on a budget about a billion times higher. You don’t need to see Ive—who is just a voiceover—to know that’s him talking about the new machine’s “absolute flexibility and uncompromising utility.” Even the on-screen identification feels superfluous.
Though Ive is leaving Apple, his influence on its products may be far from over: The company will be a client of LoveFrom, his new design consultancy. But he will surely retire from his duties as video pitchman, which means that this new Mac Pro teaser might be the last time we’ll ever hear that voice in this context.
Confession time: Whenever I’ve attended an Apple launch and the company has played one of these videos, I’ve gotten a little itchy. “Why show up to a live event to watch something so canned?,” I’ve thought to myself. Still, now that I know that Ive’s pre-taped appearances are history, I will miss them. Here’s hoping he doesn’t slip entirely behind the scenes now that his keynote duties are coming to an end.
‘Hereditary’ filmmaker Ari Aster talks about making the drug sequences in his folk horror follow-up ‘Midsommar’ and why they feel uncomfortably authentic. (No spoilers.)
“I would not advise people to do drugs and then watch this,” Ari Astersays of his new horror film Midsommar. “Although you’re probably okay if you take something that’s not too . . . athletic.”
By “athletic” he means psychotropic, and the reason people might want to stay away from such athleticism here is because when the characters in Midsommar go all Serena Williams, they take the audience with them. More so than any other film in recent memory, this one puts viewers uncomfortably and intractably in an electric psilocybin headspace—multiple times—and is not entirely gentle about it. Sober audiences may feel like they’re tripping, but tripping audiences will probably feel like they’ve died or perhaps were never born at all. It’s a masterful marriage of visual effects and storytelling that’s not suitable for the easily wigged out.
Midsommar introduces us to Dani (Florence Pugh) at a vulnerable moment in her life. Recovering from unimaginable tragedy, Dani tags along with her inattentive boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), and his pals as they visit a remote community in Sweden on the eve of a once-every-90-years festival. If you’ve ever seen a horror movie, especially a folk horror movie (e.g., The Wicker Man or Picnic at Hanging Rock), you can probably guess that things don’t end so well for all parties involved.
Along the way, however, two rather effective tripping sequences help usher these characters on toward their respective destinies.
Following the surprise success of Aster’s 2018 film, Hereditary, which grossed a healthy $79 million worldwide, Midsommar was rushed into production for summer 2019. The turnaround was extremely accelerated, with filming beginning just last August and editing wrapping, well, what time is it?
According to Aster, though, the hardest part of meeting his deadline, at least in post-production, was getting the tripping sequences just right. “We kind of went back on it at least 10 times, where it’s like, ‘Okay, this sequence is too much,’ and then, ‘Okay, now it’s too subtle,'” the filmmaker says.
Writer and director Ari Aster (left) and cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski (right) on the set of Midsommar. [Photo: Gabor Kotschy/A24]Aster needed to get the feel of the drug scenes exactly right because they serve a pivotal function in his film. Without giving away too much, let’s just say there’s a scene early on where the main characters take mushrooms upon arriving at the Swedish town, Horga, and then there’s a sustained 20-minute gonzo drug scene near the end, involving unspecified psychotropics. Between these two scenes, we see the full spectrum of how tripping can affect one’s psychological state. It’s important that we do so, too, if we’re going to follow these people wherever they may be headed.
The first scene, the mushroom one, is set in the lush, rolling hills at the edge of Horga, beneath the open sky and never-setting sun. According to Aster, the scene is meant as a bridge between the real world of college apartments and dissertations, and the tight-knit rural community Dani, Christian, and company are about to enter. The mushroom scene plunges us down the rabbit hole, into a fantastical new world, and primes us for how various characters will react to it.
In order to research those reactions, Aster merely had to look back on old memories.
Vilhelm Blomgren (left) and Florence Pugh (right) in Midsommar. [Photo: Gabor Kotschy/A24]“I’ve done mushrooms before, back in college, and I’ve had very good trips, and I’ve had very bad trips,” the filmmaker says. “The good trips tend to bring you very close to people and you feel like a family. Then when you come down, there’s this hangover where that all kind of dissipates and you’re back to being alone again. Sometimes it’s the inverse, where the revelation is that you’re alone and you’re gonna die alone and then when you come out of that, it’s a huge relief.”
Both types of reactions happen simultaneously to different characters during both of the film’s drug scenes, and viewers ride sidecar into both frames of mind. Aster wrings a lot of hazy authenticity out of performance and dialogue (“It’s a new person” one member of the group gasps when a stranger walks by), but it’s the auditory and visual effects that bring it all home. In Midsommar’s drug scenes, color cascades, light bends, and all of nature feels vibrantly alive.
Just as important as how Aster wanted these scenes to feel, however, was how he didn’t want them to feel.
(Left to right) Ellora Torchia, Archie Madekwe, Will Poulter, William Jackson Harper, Vilhelm Blomgren, and Jack Reynor in Midsommar. [Photo: Merie Weismiller Wallace/A24]“I definitely tried to avoid the brand of psychedelia that we’ve seen already,” he says. “I’ve seen it done really well before. I think Gaspar Noé is really good at it. But I wanted to avoid like that ’60s tie-dye, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider kind of thing. Some Kenneth Anger, too. I basically had a look book of things I wanted to stay away from.”
If the mushroom scene establishes Aster’s visual vocabulary for how these characters feel while under the influence, the bravura, 20-minute sustained drug scene near the end reveals its full range of possibilities. This immersive sequence mimics the gradual, blooming come-on of hallucinogens. Viewers who aren’t paying close attention to every corner of the screen might not notice as objects begin to undulate and sway, open and shut, shimmer and shine. (Aster’s go-to words to describe this phenomenon in the script were ‘swelling and deflating.’) It starts off almost imperceptibly but at a certain point it becomes impossible to ignore, leaving audience members to wonder how long the kinetic shift had been going on before they noticed.
We in the audience need to have had the experience with the mushroom scene so that we are prepared for this one.
“The tripping sequence probably goes on for altogether about 20 minutes but hopefully you’re feeling that it’s shorter,” Aster says. “It was important to us to maintain that feeling and have it last a long time and have it be an experience, but at the same time have it not be distracting from the story and characters. We were kind of obsessed with making sure that we could live in this without it being agitating or obnoxious.”
Whether the filmmaker succeeded is a matter of perception. Some viewers will be riveted while others will be horrified. Kind of like how the same mushrooms can deliver one person heavenly euphoria—and slip someone else into psychosis.
[Photo: courtesy Copenhagenize]1. Copenhagen
A staggering 62% of Copenhageners bike to work or school (in Portland, Oregon, with the largest number of bike commuters in the U.S., the number is roughly 10 times smaller). Copenhagen has a long history of bike-friendliness, but hasn’t stopped investing in new infrastructure, from bike bridges to regional cycle highways.
[Photo: courtesy Copenhagenize]2. Amsterdam
By 2025, Amsterdam will strip more than 11,000 parking spaces from its city center and replace them with bike parking, sidewalks, and trees. The city is also adding wider bike paths to accommodate hoards of cyclists at rush hour and redesigning intersections to better protect people on bikes.
[Photo: Clarence Eckerson/courtesy Copenhagenize]3. Utrecht
This Dutch city is already bike-friendly, but the city now plans to double the number of bike commuters by 2030. Electric bikes are getting dedicated lanes, smart traffic signals help cyclists hit green lights, and the area around the city’s central train station will soon have 33,000 bike parking spaces.
[Photo: courtesy Copenhagenize]4. Antwerp
Roughly a third of trips in this Belgian city are now made by bike, and more than half of riders are female. The city is planning a new bike and pedestrian bridge, expanding regional bike highways, and lowering speed limits to 18 miles an hour on almost all streets.
[Photo: courtesy Copenhagenize]5. Strasbourg
Known as the most bikeable city in France, Strasbourg has a new bike strategy that will add new cycle highways into nearby suburbs and encourage new riders.
[Photo: courtesy Copenhagenize]6. Bordeaux
This French city recently banned cars from a key bridge, increasing bike traffic. The city center has parking spots for cargo bikes, and the city offers its own employees electric bikes to use.
[Photo: Dreamstime/courtesy Copenhagenize]
7. Oslo
When downtown Oslo removed parking spaces to become essentially car-free, it also added new bike parking. The city’s bike-share system now offers cargo bikes and, in the winter, bikes designed to ride in the snow.
[Photo: courtesy Copenhagenize]
8. Paris
The number of bike commuters in Paris is still relatively low compared to cities like Amsterdam or Copenhagen. But the city is building out new protected bike lanes—including on the Champs-Elysées—and continues to push to reduce driving.
[Photo: Dreamstime/courtesy Copenhagenize]
9. Vienna
In Vienna, if you need to run an errand, you can rent a free cargo bike. Another recent program gave local businesses grants to buy cargo bikes. The city has also installed 5,000 new parking spaces for bikes over the last two years and ran a creative ad campaign called “#warumfährstDUnicht?” or #whydontYOUcycle?
[Photo: Sampo Kytömäki/courtesy Copenhagenize]
10. Helsinki
Helsinki’s local bike-share program has grown seven times larger in the last two years, and the city also has an extensive (and growing) network of 800 miles of bike infrastructure and 12 miles of bike highways. It has also tested programs like a cargo bike-share system for neighbors.
[Photo: courtesy Copenhagenize]11. Bremen
A new “bike district” in this German city has streets prioritized for cyclists, bike-friendly cobblestones, and extra bike parking. The city is also expanding its network of bike lanes, including eight new major cross-city paths.
[Photo: Carlos Felipe Pardo/courtesy Copenhagenize]12. Bogotá
On the list for the first time, Bogotá is working to quickly add new bike lanes and infrastructure like bike parking garages near bus rapid transit stations, and the number of cyclists is growing in response, jumping from 6% of commuters to 9% in the last two years.
[Photo: courtesy Copenhagenize]
13. Barcelona
By the end of the year, Barcelona plans to have more than double the length of bike lanes from just four years ago, with an aim to have 89% of residents live within 300 meters of one of the lanes. The city’s growing “superblocks” that are designed to limit traffic also make it safer to ride bikes.
[Photo: Dreamstime/courtesy Copenhagenize]
14. Ljubljana
The Slovenian capital is adding new car-free and low-speed zones, improving the design of intersections, and adding new infrastructure like traffic lights for cyclists.
[Photo: Dreamstime/courtesy Copenhagenize]
15. Berlin
A new bike plan in Berlin calls for 100,000 new parking spaces for bikes, protected bike lanes on major streets, and more bike highways that lead out of the city. In the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, the city is testing a new distribution station that delivery companies use to make deliveries by cargo bike.
[Photo: Youhei Hayakawa/courtesy Copenhagenize]
16. Tokyo
Tokyo has a long history of a strong bike culture, though Copenhagenize notes that this hasn’t been well-supported by city planners. At train stations, 18% of commuters arrive by bike. To go further, the city will need to add more protected bike lanes.
[Photo: Claire Backhouse/courtesy Copenhagenize]
17. Taipei
New to the list, Taipei has a huge bike-share system that residents can access via their metro card. The system includes free rentals for seniors and other incentives.
[Photo: courtesy Copenhagenize]
18. Montreal
Montreal plans to build a large new network of one-way bike paths crossing the island. Downtown, hundreds of parking spots for cars will be removed, and streets will connect to car-free plazas.
[Photo: courtesy Copenhagenize]
19. Vancouver
Vancouver has been adding new protected bike lanes to its downtown, and is adding new bike parking and other infrastructure like intersections designed to better protect cyclists from cars.
[Photo: courtesy Copenhagenize]
20. Hamburg
Central Hamburg is already fairly bike-friendly, but the city will soon have better connections for people who commute from elsewhere, including new cycle highways that connect to suburbs and new bike parking at regional stations.
This is the 27th in an exclusive series of 50 articles, one published each day until July 20, exploring the 50th anniversary of the first-ever Moon landing. You can check out 50 Days to the Moon here every day.
One day in early 1969, two engineers from General Motors stood in the corridor just outside the office of NASA rocket maestro Wernher von Braun, in Huntsville, Alabama, holding what looked like a toy car.
Huntsville was home to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, headquarters for the effort to design and test the biggest rockets the world had ever seen, including the Saturn V, which sent Apollo to the Moon.
As it happened, in a bureaucratic quirk, Marshall was also in charge of “Moon mobility” vehicles—Moon cars. Lunar rovers.
The two GM engineers outside von Braun’s office that day were Sam Romano and Ferenc Pavlics, and they had come to Huntsville in a last-ditch effort to persuade NASA that the Apollo astronauts had to have a car on the Moon for at least some of the Apollo missions.
It was late to be making that argument: The first Moon landing was just weeks off. NASA had also shelved rover development several years earlier. In the early 1960s, NASA had developed elaborate lunar rovers whose size rivaled that of a modern Honda Odyssey minivan. But the agency canceled the projects because the rovers were too big, too heavy, and too costly.
Romano and Pavlics were so determined that the astronauts have a Moon vehicle that they kept working, using GM’s own money, even after NASA decided not to send any kind of car to the Moon.
“I decided it can be done, it should be done, and we want to do it,” said Romano. “If there’s going to be a vehicle on the Moon, it’s going to be a General Motors vehicle, and I’m going to make sure it happens.”
The men quietly talked to engineers at Grumman, where the lunar module was being designed and built, and got the dimensions of a storage compartment on the outside of the lunar module that was empty, and that they could use to stow a lunar vehicle if they could design one to fit.
The whole idea was silly on its face: That compartment was shaped like a tall wedge of pie, five feet wide at the wide end, five feet tall, and five feet deep, narrowing to a point. An odd shape, and they would be trying to design a vehicle that could somehow fit into a space no bigger than the trunk of a typical Earth car—while also being useful once it was on the Moon.
The folding design of the lunar rover. [Image: NASA]
Pavlics had designed an almost magical system for folding up the car like an elaborate metal origami. The seats folded down, and the front end of the rover was hinged and folded flat onto the center of the vehicle—wheels, suspension, and all. The rear end did the same, like a pool lounge that could be folded flat. Once front and rear were folded into the center, the wheels unlocked and angled in as well, to make a package in the shape of that wedge storage compartment.
That day in early 1969, Romano and Pavlics had brought with them what looked like a child’s toy car, with the lines of a sleek, open-topped dune buggy. It was, in fact, a scale model of the lunar rover they wanted to send to the Moon. Pavlics had built an 18-inch radio-controlled scale model, which motored along using batteries and was finished with meticulous detail, including seats sewn by his wife.
As he was completing the model, Pavlics noticed that his young son’s latest GI Joe was a new version—”Astronaut GI Joe”—wearing a shiny Mercury spacesuit. For the trip to Huntsville, Pavlics had borrowed Astronaut GI Joe and put him in the little rover’s driver’s seat. The men set the model down in the corridor outside von Braun’s office. “I guided the little model with radio control into his office,” said Pavlics, “right to his desk. He was on the telephone, looking at what was coming into his office.”
The NASA rocket chief, who was also director of the Marshall center, immediately hung up. “What have we here?” he asked.
Said Romano, “That gave us the opportunity to tell him what we could do.”
A half hour later, von Braun was convinced. He slapped his hand on his desk with determination and said, “We must do this.”
Romano and Pavlics, by sheer will and their captivating motorized Moon car, had just changed the history of space exploration.
Just weeks later, von Braun created a project office to oversee the creation of a lunar rover. It was April 1969, just three months before Apollo 11, ridiculously late to imagine adding something as complicated as a car to the Moon flights. Spaceships, spacesuits, experiments, procedures—not only were they all designed, built, tested, and flight-qualified, but the astronauts had been practicing with their Moon equipment for months or years.
But von Braun was true to both his word and his influence. A quick competition was run to select companies to design and build the rover. GM won the right to design and engineer the rover, working with Boeing, which built the GM design.
The ramp-up to get the work done was astonishing: Romano and Pavlics’s group of a half-dozen expanded to a team of 400 within weeks, with Pavlics as the chief engineer.
The Apollo 15 Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) and the Lunar Module (LM) during simulations at the Kennedy Space Center. [Photo: NASA]
The lunar rover, which would unfold out of the side of the lunar module and plop onto the surface of the Moon, almost ready to drive, ultimately weighed 460 pounds, including the batteries that powered it, and including a color TV camera, seat belts for the astronauts, and four quarter-horsepower electric motors (one driving each wheel). The rover was 10 feet long and 6 feet wide, and it could carry 1,050 pounds of astronauts, gear, and rocks across the surface of the Moon at 8 mph.
The rover project, completed in a hectic 17 months, wasn’t cheap. It cost $38 million total in the early 1970s ($240 million today), and each of the four flight rovers individually cost $1.5 million ($9.5 million today). Three of these went to the Moon; the fourth was reserved for spare parts.
Astronaut David R. Scott in the Lunar Roving Vehicle. [Photo: NASA]
The first Moon road trip had Apollo 15 lunar module pilot Jim Irwin in the observer seat and commander Dave Scott at the wheel. The rover was operated with a single joystick control that worked exactly as we’ve come to know them: Push it forward and the rover went forward; the harder Scott pushed, the faster it went. He angled the stick left and right to turn the rover, which had innovative dual front and rear steering to give it maximum maneuverability on the bumpy lunar surface.
The rover brought exuberance, even joy, to lunar exploration. Within minutes of heading off on their first expedition, Irwin and Scott were laughing with the sheer fun of driving on the Moon. “Man, this is really a rocking-rolling ride,” Scott said to Mission Control.
In 15 minutes of driving on that first trip, Scott and Irwin went farther than any of the previous three Apollo landing crews had been able (or allowed) to walk in hours on the surface. On that first jaunt alone, one of three using the rover, Scott and Irwin stayed out for two hours, driving around, getting out, gathering specimens, filming geological features, then hopping back in the buggy and racing off to the next place. They not only covered terrain; the pair gave a nonstop narration of the geology they were seeing and that the rover’s camera was transmitting in real time back to Earth. The live TV coverage had a rapt audience of, among others, geologists and scientists who felt like they were looking over the shoulders of the lunar astronauts from the back seat, as it were, seeing an astonishing display of never-before-seen alien geology.
“Keep talking, keep talking,” Mission Control’s Joe Allen said. “Beautiful description.”
Apollo 15, 16, and 17 each carried a rover, and the two-man crews ended up being able to explore wide swaths of terrain. Apollo 16 astronaut John Young took a few minutes to put the rover through its full paces—maximum speed, tight turns, dirt flying—to show the engineers what the rover could do, in a test that became known as the “lunar rover grand prix.”
The significance of the rover was instantly appreciated: It was honored with its own U.S. postage stamp, issued on Earth while Apollo 15 was on the Moon.
[Photo: DeAgostini/Getty Images]Heading back to the lunar module from that first rover excursion, Scott and Irwin got going so fast down a lunar hill they accidentally did a sudden 180-degree spin in the rover, going in an instant from zooming downhill to being pointed back uphill.
It sent them both into gales of laughter, which Mission Control took a moment to appreciate. Said Scott to Mission Control, “Boy, I’ll tell you, Joe, this is a super way to travel.”
One Giant Leap by Charles Fishman
Charles Fishman, who has written for Fast Company since its inception, has spent the past four years researching and writing One Giant Leap, his New York Timesbest-selling book about how it took 400,000 people, 20,000 companies, and one federal government to get 27 people to the Moon. (You can order it here.)
For each of the next 50 days, we’ll be posting a new story from Fishman—one you’ve likely never heard before—about the first effort to get to the Moon that illuminates both the historical effort and the current ones. New posts will appear here daily as well as be distributed via Fast Company’s social media. (Follow along at #50DaysToTheMoon).
GitHub, Atlassian, and Basecamp—where some or most of the employees are remote—share their tips for designing offices that are good for workers, wherever they are.
The shift raises a question for companies: How do you design a space when a significant portion of your workforce uses it rarely or not at all? Fast Company spoke to three partly remote companies—project management software company Basecamp, enterprise software company Atlassian (which makes tools like Trello and Jira), and developer hosting service GitHub—to find out how they’ve designed their offices to accommodate everyone, regardless of where they’re working.
[Photo: Christopher Barrett/courtesy Basecamp]
MAKE WORKING AT THE OFFICE MORE LIKE WORKING FROM HOME
When Basecamp got its start back in 1999, the company’s employees were all local. But when the fifth hire—David Heinemeier Hansson, who is now a partner at the company—was based in Copenhagen, Basecamp’s other founders also decided to try out remote work, too.
The remote-first nature of the company has deeply impacted Basecamp’s office design. CEO Jason Fried says he designed the office to “simulate what it would be like if nobody was actually at the office.” That meant making the experience of working in the office to be as close as possible to what it’s like to work from home.
[Photo: Christopher Barrett/courtesy Basecamp]“If you’re at home in a second bedroom or no one’s around during the day, you’re not distracted,” Fried says. “You’re in an environment you can control for the most part and you work in isolation and get into deep work and [aren’t] bothered by other people. We wanted to create an office space to simulate the advantages of that, but also give an opportunity for people to get together in a sound-controlled environment.”
[Photo: Christopher Barrett/courtesy Basecamp]As a result, Basecamp’s office is more of a place to meet. There are acoustic materials on the walls to ensure that it’s always quiet. The desks are spaced at least 10 feet apart so you can’t see anyone when you’re sitting down and working. And for those inevitable conversations, Fried says, there are soundproof rooms.
At this point, Basecamp has become so remote-friendly that only a few employees still work out of the company’s Chicago office on a regular basis. As a result, Fried says the office is much too big for the company’s purposes. When the space’s lease comes up this year, he plans to move to a much smaller space—or maybe ditch the office altogether. Even so, Basecamp’s HQ provides one model for how to think about designing an office that is more of a meeting hub than a place to go sit at a desk.
[Photo: courtesy Atlassian]
BUILD MORE SMALL, ACOUSTICALLY SOUND SPACES
Not every company is nearly remote, like Basecamp. Others, like software company Atlassian, have smaller numbers of remote employees—the team that is responsible for the company’s popular Trello app is 70% remote—and operate a host of offices that many people travel to on a regular basis. That means that a lot of collaboration is happening in conference rooms, using video conferencing software.
[Photo: courtesy Atlassian]
As a result, Scott Hazard, the global head of real estate and workplace experience at Atlassian, designed the company’s offices with lots of small, acoustically sound spaces. He heard from employees who were working out of one of Atlassian’s 12 offices that they needed smaller spaces more than they needed four- to six-person conference rooms, as many of them were collaborating with one other person who was working remotely. But to support these tiny soundproof conference rooms, Atlassian also provides other nooks around the office that act as overflow spaces. As Hazard put it, “Problems don’t get solved in a 30- or 60-minute window.” With these nooks, people can continue their video call outside a dedicated conference room without disturbing other people in the office.
These nooks also come in handy for larger meetings. Hazard says that when Atlassian acquired Trello in 2017, the team learned that you shouldn’t have seven employees sitting around a table for a meeting if even one person is dialing in remotely. Instead, Hazard says, “We encourage people to get on their own systems if someone is remote and create that democratic interaction model—everybody dialing into their own system and individually having a screen.” When everyone is individually dialing into conference video calls within the office, having places to sit that will muffle sound is a must.
Employees who are traveling to come into the office may not have time to drop by their hotel after stepping off a red-eye flight. That’s why at GitHub, where more than two-thirds of the workforce is remote, the office features perks focused around helping employees get cleaned up after traveling. The company’s four offices have showers for exactly this purpose, and nap rooms for when jet lag hits.
“When you have employees who are local, who come into an office every day, their opinion of your office is the aggregate sum of many days—good, bad, and indifferent,” says Lara Owen, the director of workplace operations at GitHub. “With remote employees, we only have one or two days to get it right.”
[Photo: Jasper Sanidad/courtesy Github]
That’s why Owen and her team run focus groups and surveys with remote employees to ensure that the GitHub offices are meeting their needs.
“If you’re used to working in a home office all day and you come to a big, busy office, how do you adjust?” she says. The office has its own library, where remote workers who need absolute quiet can put their heads down. Atlassian also has libraries in its offices, and Basecamp practices what Fried calls “library rules” throughout the entire office to ensure that no one speaks too loudly and disturbs other people.
At GitHub, Owen’s focus groups also netted another change. “When I started [at the company], we had [catered] lunch two days a week,” she says. “We found out remote employees were booking travel based on opportunity to have lunch. We changed [the schedule] to lunch every day so remote employees can always have that social interaction.”
[Photo: courtesy Atlassian]
GIVE EACH TEAM A HOME BASE SO REMOTE WORKERS HAVE A PLACE TO LAND WHEN THEY VISIT
When remote workers do come into the office, they’re going to need a place to sit—and ideally, a place where they feel at home. “How do you travel to any one of our offices, and within an hour of grabbing your first cup of coffee feel part of the community with the teammates you may not see as often?” Hazard of Atlassian says.
To create that feeling, Hazard ensures that each office has central team spaces that are branded with the team’s name and function, where team members can also add their own decorations and personality. Then, when remote workers come into the office, there’s an immediate home base. He thinks of this space as the center of the team’s neighborhood or “village.” It also features lockers for people to use and no assigned seating. That way, all employees can “feel like everyone has a place and a purpose as well as create a local sense of community within a village [a group of desks].”
By now, you’ve probably seen some of the stats about how the apparel industry is wreaking havoc on our planet. As a fashion writer, I read through these figures every day, and they are staggering to me. McKinsey reported the world tipped over into manufacturing 100 billion articles of clothing annually in 2014. (Consider that there are only 7 billion humans that inhabit the Earth.) The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a sustainability nonprofit, says that the average number of times that a garment is worn before it stops being used has gone down by 36% over the last 15 years, and many consumers wear items less than 10 times before they chuck them out.
This means that all of the pollution generated from sourcing raw materials, manufacturing them into garments, and transporting them around the world results in pieces of clothing that someone might only wear a couple of times. At that point, the wearer might throw it out to make room for new clothes. And even if that outfit just sits, unworn, in the closet or basement, it is effectively going to waste. Some experts estimate that the average consumer only wears 20% of the clothes they own.
[Photos: Patagonia]
The good news is that consumers are increasingly aware of the environmental impact of their clothing, studies show. And a few large, environmentally conscious brands like Madewell, Patagonia, and Eileen Fisher are tackling the problem in clever ways by taking back your old clothes and putting them to new use. This ensures a garment keeps circulating in the economy rather than ending up in a landfill. Research has found that selling or donating garments extends their life for 2.2 years.
Of course, consumers have always been able to donate clothes or resell them them through consignment stores. But these brands are creating new systems to make it easier and more enticing for customers to bring them back to the store in exchange for store credit. The theory goes that if reselling products becomes the norm, it could reduce the demand for entirely new products altogether.
This process—of collecting clothes, refurbishing them, and finding new ways to sell them—has environmental costs as well. Transporting clothes generates carbon emissions, for instance, and cleaning them might pollute water and generate microplastics (tiny particles of plastic that come off when you wash synthetic materials). It would be better for the environment if people did not accumulate so many unused clothes to begin with, and instead bought durable pieces and wore them as long as possible. But it’s a tough behavior to change. So brands are finding ways to keep items circulating in the economy for longer—by making what’s old seem new.
The latest brand to hop on this trend is Arc’teryx. This month, the Canadian outdoor clothing company launched a new program called Rock Solid Used Gear allowing customers to sell their lightly used Arc’teryx products back to the brand in exchange for a gift card for 20% of the original retail price of that item. Arc’teryx will then refurbish these items so that they are in like-new condition, and sell them on a special section of the Arc’teryx website at prices that are about a third less than they would be new. “There are many items that our customers buy and wear until they reach the end of their life,” says Drummond Lawson, Arc’teryx’s director of sustainability. “But we’re betting that there are some items that are sitting in our customer’s basements or storage closets that still have plenty of life in them. This gives them an opportunity for them to lighten their load and get some money back for it.”
Arc’teryx estimates that 65% of the environmental footprint of its garments comes from producing the raw materials and manufacturing them. The rest comes from caring for them—such as, say, washing them—and then disposing of them. So if each Arc’teryx jacket, base layer, or bag is used as much as possible before the end of its lifecycle, Arc’teryx can ensure that fewer of the resources used to make it went to waste.
Arc’teryx’s program and others like it are not without risks. An important business consideration: If you’re suddenly flooding the market with inexpensive products, will that dilute the brand and discourage customers from buying full-priced items? In this sense, the design of the resale program matters. “We hope that customers who sell back products to us will use their gift cards to buy used products from the Rock Solid Used Gear site,” Lawson says. “Then we’ll be creating a circular system.” In other words, by creating a resale market on its site, Arc’teryx is creating a new revenue stream for itself. “We think this will expand our possible consumer base,” Lawson says. “Suddenly more people can afford to buy our gear.”
Here are some other brands working to breathe new life into their products in a range of creative ways:
THEREALREAL X STELLA MCCARTNEY
Some brands aren’t selling their used products themselves, but are instead relying on other resale sites to help them extend the life of their products. After all the business of recommerce—or selling secondhand products—can be complex. It involves assessing the quality of a used product to see if it is actually sellable, and also managing the logistics of receiving and shipping these products to and from customers.
Luxury brand Stella McCartney has partnered with TheRealReal, an online consignment store, to encourage customers to consign their lightly used products to extend their life. When someone consigns a Stella McCartney item on TheRealReal, they receive a $100 gift card to buy something on the Stella McCartney store.
REFORMATION X THREDUP
To educate customers about the environmental benefits of reselling products, Reformation launched a partnership with ThredUp. On Reformation’s website, there are details about how ThredUp works and how much money someone could earn by selling their used clothes and accessories. (ThredUp pays between 5% and 90% of the list price of the item.) To encourage customers to clean out their closets, Reformation is currently giving customers an extra 15% in Reformation store credit—even if they are not selling Reformation clothes.
PATAGONIA
Patagonia is one of the pioneers of preserving the life of its products. The company has a robust program called Worn Wear, which invites customers to send in worn items that are in need of repair, where they will be fixed up. There are also events around the country where customers can bring in products in person to be repaired. But if customers don’t want to hold onto an item that is in good condition, they can trade it in for store credit. Depending on the type of item, customers can receive between $10 and $100 for their used goods. These items are then sold on a separate Worn Wear website, where customers can snag secondhand gear for a fraction of their full retail price.
THE NORTH FACE
The North Face’s program isn’t focused on reselling, but rather donating used gear to people who need it. It’s Clothes The Loop program invites customers to bring any footwear or jackets into a retail or outlet store—no matter what condition it is in or what brand it is—and get a $10 voucher toward any purchase of $100 or more at The North Face. The company will then weed through all these garments, recycle anything that is no longer usable, and donate garments that still have life in them to a nonprofit partner that will distribute clothes and shoes to people who need it.
EILEEN FISHER
Eileen Fisher has a program called Waste No More that encourages customers to keep the brand’s products in circulation for as long as possible. Customers are invited to bring used items back into the store, no matter what condition they are in. (They will receive $5 for each item they bring in, which can be used to purchase more used Eileen Fisher garments.) When Eileen Fisher receives an item, the company will either refurbish it and sell it at a special Renew store (which is both online and at physical locations) or, if it’s damaged beyond repair, transform it into unique pieces of artwork or home products. The company recently had an art exhibit where it displayed all the art that was created using these goods.
MADEWELL
Madewell has a slightly different program that transforms old denim jeans into insulation for houses—which still ensures the items stay in use long after they are out of style. Their program which partners with an organization called Blue Jeans Go Green, allows customers to hand over used denim—from any brand—to a Madewell store to receive a $20 voucher toward new Madewell jeans. Then, partner nonprofits like Habitat for Humanity create houses for people in need to turn them into materials that will keep homes warm in the winter. In addition to providing resources to people who need it, the program also keeps the jeans out of landfills.
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Tagging it is a process whereby a designer uses tread needle to pin tag , well designed or fray peace of texture . it can serve as Notion eg Sequence, Bartons etc . all these notions are used to design a garment , by illustrating a perfect illustration . with tailors chalk and tag this notion on the circumference of the illustration , till you fill the circumference of the illustrations and even in with the notions by tagging them . first of all, you pick the notion , and make sure your sequence is ready and your needles and yarn for tagging . you will make sure the yarn is intertwined to pass the loop , of the needle and then knot it enables the yarn knot to remove from the loop . then pick the sequence to pass through the loop of the sequence and tag it tites to the circumference , of the illustration and they are supposed to tag close to each other . but not all notions are used to tag cause they are of sizes , #IllustrationSequenceTagging.bb Blogged
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