"Half of tech employees think their work culture is toxic," reports one Texas news site, citing a new survey by Blind:
Blind, an anonymous work talk app, asked more than 12,000 tech staffers to respond to the statement: "I consider my current workplace a healthy working environment." Slightly more than half, 52 percent, said the survey statement was "false," versus nearly 48 percent who responded with "true."

Intel was named the tech company with the least healthy work environment, by 48.5 percent of its employees, followed by Amazon at 46.5 percent, and eBay at 44.5 percent. Employees who consider their workplaces healthier work at LinkedIn, where 17.3 percent responded true, followed by Google, at 23.7 percent, and Uber, at 29.7 percent.

It depends on how you define "unhealthy," of course -- but it'd be interesting to hear how Slashdot's readers respond to the same question. So leave your own thoughts and reactions in the comments.

Is your work environment unhealthy?

Linux.org reports:
Wednesday afternoon around 5pm EST someone was able to get into the registrar account for our domain and point DNS to another server -- as well as lock us out from changing it. They pointed the domain name to a pretty rude page for most of the evening until Cloudflare stepped in and blocked the domain for us.

After a lot of back and forth with our registrar, we were able to get things back under our control. I'd like to point out that our server environment was not touched so there are no worries about your data. We've gone over security protocols and are tightening things up that may have slipped through in the past. Thanks for your support!

Linux.org apparently pointed to a page exclaiming "G3T 0WNED L1NUX N3RDZ", which also included a NSFW picture, some abusive language, a shout-out to recently-deceased programmer Terry Davis, and a link to an article about Linus Torvalds' controversial apology for "his hostile behavior towards others in the community." 

Long-time Slashdot reader Grady Martin says he also saw the page pointing to "presumably doxed info" about the creator of Linux's code of conduct, a fact confirmed by a report in the Register. "As for how it was hacked, [Linux.org owner Mike] McLagan blames the public Whois displaying his partner's email address -- presumably the hacker worked their way into the Yahoo email account listed as the admin of the site and from there requested a password change in her Network Solutions account to gain access to the domain."

SwiftOnSecurity, regarding Microsoft's switch to Chromium as Windows's built-in rendering engine:
This isn't about Chrome. This is about ElectronJS. Microsoft thinks EdgeHTML cannot get to drop-in feature-parity with Chromium to replace it in Electron apps, whose duplication is becoming a significant performance drain. They want to single-instance Electron with their own fork. Electron is a cancer murdering both macOS and Windows as it proliferates. Microsoft must offer a drop-in version with native optimizations to improve performance and resource utilization. This is the end of desktop applications. There's nowhere but JavaScript.
John Gruber of DaringFireball:
I don't share the depth of their pessimism regarding native apps, but Electron is without question a scourge. I think the Mac will prove more resilient than Windows, because the Mac is the platform that attracts people who care. But I worry. In some ways, the worst thing that ever happened to the Mac is that it got so much more popular a decade ago. In theory, that should have been nothing but good news for the platform -- more users means more attention from developers. The more Mac users there are, the more Mac apps we should see. 

The problem is, the users who really care about good native apps -- users who know HIG violations when they see them, who care about performance, who care about Mac apps being right -- were mostly already on the Mac. A lot of newer Mac users either don't know or don't care about what makes for a good Mac app.

With providers like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, and more creative risks, network leaders are placing bets on how audience experience will evolve [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report:
"What might we see coming down the road?" says Beau Willimon, creator of The First, Hulu's sci-fi drama starring Sean Penn and Natascha McElhone. "Perhaps like [the characters] in my new show, we're all wearing augmented reality glasses, and we're experiencing television shows in a more intimate way -- a way that feels much more experiential than simply watching it on a rectangle." 

[...] Television, as most people have known it for most of their lives, is no more. "At some point you'll get to a place where thinking about television from a linear standpoint will be like dial-up internet," says Hulu CEO Randy Freer. "It's a great time for content; not a great time for cable networks. I think what will happen is: Cable networks that have been able to create brands for themselves will have an opportunity to expand and figure out how they present to consumers." 

Cable networks with a clear identity have a critical advantage in a subscription-based world, while networks with less-defined name recognition -- those that have been just another channel in the cable lineup -- will likely find it hard to entice the growing ranks of broadband-only consumers to buy an a la carte monthly subscription service. HBO is moving into the new era. "In the domestic market of the United States, where there is a surfeit of content more than ever, I personally think that brands matter more than ever," says HBO chairman and CEO Richard Plepler.

Salts that de-ice roads, parking lots and sidewalks keep people safe in winter. But new research shows they are contributing to a sharp and widely rising problem across the U.S. From a report:
At least a third of the rivers and streams in the country have gotten saltier in the past 25 years. And by 2100, more than half of them may contain at least 50 percent more salt than they used to. Increasing salinity will not just affect freshwater plants and animals but human lives as well -- notably, by affecting drinking water. Sujay Kaushal, a biogeochemist at the University of Maryland, College Park, recounts an experience he had when visiting relatives in New Jersey. When getting a drink from the tap, "I saw a white film on the glass." After trying to scrub it off, he found, "it turned out to be a thin layer of salt crusting the glass." 

When Kaushal, who studies how salt invades freshwater sources, sampled the local water supply he found not just an elevated level of the sodium chloride, widely used in winter to de-ice outdoor surfaces, but plenty of other salts such as sodium bicarbonate and magnesium chloride. He also found similar concentrations of these chemicals in most rivers along the east coast, including the Potomac, which provides drinking water for Washington, D.C. Where did all of it come from? De-icing salts, Kaushal determined, are part of the problem, slowly corroding our infrastructure.
 

Coding together at the same computer, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat changed the course of the company -- and the Internet. An anonymous reader writes:
The New Yorker has profiled Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, two of Google's most storied developers and to date, the company's only Senior Fellows, the highest level Google awards to engineers. The article dives into some of Dean and Ghemawat's successes at Google but focuses on their deep and collaborative friendship -- particularly exploring the power of programming with a partner. "I don't know why more people don't do it," Ghemawat explains. As Dean points out, all you need to do is "find someone that you're gonna pair-program with who's compatible with your way of thinking, so that the two of you together are a complementary force."

Tim Berners-Lee, writing for The New York Times:
All technologies come with risks. We drive cars despite the possibility of serious accidents. We take prescription drugs despite the danger of abuse and addiction. We build safeguards into new innovations so we can manage the risks while benefiting from the opportunities. The web is a global platform -- its challenges stretch across borders and cultures. Just as the web was built by millions of people collaborating around the world, its future relies on our collective ability to make it a better tool for everyone. 

As we forge the web of tomorrow, we need a set of guiding principles that can define the kind of web we want. Identifying these will not be easy -- any agreement that covers a diverse group of countries, cultures and interests will never be. But I believe it's possible to develop a set of basic ideals that we can all agree on, and that will make the web work better for everyone, including the 50 percent of the world's population that has yet to come online. 

Governments, companies and individuals all have unique roles to play. The World Wide Web Foundation, an organization I founded in 2009 to protect the web as a public good, has drawn up a set of core principles outlining the responsibilities that each party has to protect a web that serves all of humanity. We're asking everyone to sign on to these principles and join us as we create a formal Contract for the Web in 2019. The principles specify that governments are responsible for connecting their citizens to an open web that respects their rights.
 

It's been a rough week or so to be invested in a Google messaging service, hell it's been a rough decade to be invested in a Google messaging service. Phandroid:
The latest victims are Allo, which will be going away in March of 2019, and "Hangouts Classic" which has a more nebulous end of life forecast. These products join the host of other Google messaging casualties over the years, Google Wave, Google+ Huddles, Google+ Hangouts, Google Spaces, to name a few. Now if this left us with an entirely clear picture of Google's messaging strategy going forward that would be something, but the reality is that the company still has 5 such apps with at least some overlapping functionality. 

The 5 survivors are Duo (Video), Messages (Text), Hangouts Chat (Enterprise Text), Hangouts Meet (Enterprise Video), and Google Voice (Voice and Text). Why am I including two enterprise-focused products in a discussion about consumer messaging? Because the head of those products, Scott Johnston, indicated that "Hangouts (Classic) users will be migrated to Chat and Meet." This was corroborated by an official blog post from Google's VP of Consumer Communications Products, Matt Klainer, who similarly put no definite timeline on this migration. 

This is a problem that Google themselves seemed ready to settle once and for all almost exactly 2 and a half years ago when they announced Allo and Duo at Google I/O 2016, this was going to be the two-pronged answer to messaging on Android. But it became clear reasonably quickly that Allo wasn't going to hold up its end of the bargain, it saw limited adoption and within two years of launch, Google has now admitted that it shifted resources away from Allo and instead was focused on bringing the relevant features into Messages.

Tech executives worry China will turn to tit-for-tat arrests of Americans in response to the detention of Meng Wanzhou. And the worries don't stop there. Kara Swisher, writing at The New York Times:
Imagine, if you will (and you should), a big American tech executive being detained over unspecified charges while on a trip to Beijing. That is exactly what a number of Silicon Valley executives told me they are concerned about after the arrest this week of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of the Chinese telecom company Huawei, in Canada at the behest of United States officials. "It's worrisome, because it's an escalation we did not need," one executive said, referring to the already tense trade talks between the two countries. "What China will do, given all the existing tensions, is anyone's guess." 

No one I spoke to would talk on the record, out of fear of antagonizing either side and also because no one knows exactly what is happening. But many expressed worry about the possibility of tit-for-tat arrests. While everyone focuses on the drama of the arrest -- Ms. Meng was grabbed while changing planes at the airport -- and its effect on the trade talks and stock prices, to my mind there is a much more important fight brewing, and it is about tech hegemony. Specifically, who will control the next internet age, and by whose rules will it be run? 

Until recently, that answer was clearly the United States, from which the Internet sprang, wiring the world together and, in the process, resulting in the greatest creation of power and wealth in history. While China has always had a strong technology sector, in recent years it has significantly escalated its investment, expertise and innovation, with major support from the government. That hand-in-glove relationship creates obvious issues, and the Trump administration is right to stop pretending that China does not present a threat both from security and innovation perspectives.
Further reading: China summons U.S. ambassador, warns Canada of 'grave consequences' if Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou is not released.

Like Google's Duplex, Chinese internet giant Alibaba has its own humanlike voice assistant capable of making restaurant reservations and salon appointments. But unlike Google, which has rolled out the feature to select audience, Alibaba's offering already has a wider reach. And it's smart, too. From a report:
On December 2 at the 2018 Neural Information Processing Systems conference, one of the largest annual gatherings for AI research, Alibaba demoed the AI customer service agent for its logistics company Cainiao. Jin Rong, the dean of Alibaba's Machine Intelligence and Technology Lab, said the agent is already servicing millions of customer requests a day. The pre-recorded demo call involved the agent asking a customer where he wanted his package delivered. In the back-and-forth exchange, the agent successfully navigated several conversational elements that demonstrated the breadth of its natural-language capabilities. 

Take this exchange at the beginning of the call, translated from Mandarin: Agent: Hello, I am Cainiao's voice assistant. I am -- 
Customer: Hello. 
A: Yes, hi, you have package scheduled for morning delivery to 588 Culture West Road. Is it convenient for you to receive? 
Who are you? 
A: I am Cainiao's voice assistant. I'd like to confirm your morning delivery to 588 Culture West Road. Does that work for you? 
I'm not home in the morning. 
A: Then do you have another address that you'd like to use? 

Within 30 seconds, the agent has smoothly handled three common, and tricky, conversational ingredients: interruption, nonlinear conversation, and implicit intent. Interruption is self-explanatory: the agent can respond to the customer's interruption and continue relaying relevant information without starting over or skipping a beat.

From a story:
Year after year, I watch in dismay as students obsess over getting straight A's. Some sacrifice their health; a few have even tried to sue their school after falling short. All have joined the cult of perfectionism out of a conviction that top marks are a ticket to elite graduate schools and lucrative job offers. I was one of them. I started college with the goal of graduating with a 4.0. It would be a reflection of my brainpower and willpower, revealing that I had the right stuff to succeed. But I was wrong. 

The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. For example, at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance. 

Academic grades rarely assess qualities like creativity, leadership and teamwork skills, or social, emotional and political intelligence. Yes, straight-A students master cramming information and regurgitating it on exams. But career success is rarely about finding the right solution to a problem -- it's more about finding the right problem to solve.
 

In a space no longer than 500 metres, researchers say they recorded at least 195 different species of corals. From a report:
A team of researchers says it has discovered the most diverse coral site ever recorded on the Great Barrier Reef. Great Barrier Reef Legacy, a non-profit organisation that conducts research trips on the reef, and scientist Charlie Veron, known as the godfather of coral, have identified the site on the outer reef. In a space no longer than 500 metres, the researchers say they recorded at least 195 different species of corals on a research expedition last month. The group first stumbled upon the site on a voyage last year, and returned in November to conduct studies. 

"I've spent eight years working on the Great Barrier Reef in just about every nook and cranny," Veron said. "I thought there would be nothing new for me on the Great Barrier Reef." Veron returned with the group to record the corals and will write a paper on the site. He said it was located in a general area that had been affected by widespread coral bleaching and coral mortality and it would take further work to assess why this particular spot had survived so far. It also appeared to have been unaffected by cyclones and other factors such as crown of thorns that threaten coral health.
 

China has established a new body that reviews ethical issues in video gaming, marking the country's latest attempt to tighten control over the world's biggest games market. From a report:
The recently formed Online Games Ethics Committee has so far evaluated an initial batch of 20 video game titles, according to a report on Friday from state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV). This was the first time the committee's existence was made public. Without elaborating, the CCTV report said the ethics committee rejected nine games for publication in the domestic market, while ruling that certain content be modified in the 11 other games that were reviewed. 

The report neither revealed which government department the ethics committee was directly under nor identified the 20 games that the body processed. The creation of the Online Games Ethics Committee has come amid concerns over internet addiction, childhood myopia and unsuitable content in China's US$38 billion video games market, which has led Beijing to tighten its control over the industry and freeze the approval of new titles this year.
 

There are some 8 million abandoned homes -- or akiya -- in Japanese suburbia, according to The Japan Times . And if you've got a visa allowing you to live in Japan, some of them can be yours for free or very low prices, and the government may give you a subsidy to renovate one. From a report:
There are even databases devoted to helping people find these homes, known as "akiya banks." What's driving the government to give away homes? In part, it has to do with Japan's aging population: According to the World Bank, the country's population decreased by -0.2% in 2017 alone, while China and the U.S. slowly grew 0.6% and 0.7% respectively. There are simply fewer people in Japan than there once were -- roughly 1.3 million fewer people than in 2010 by one count [paywall].

An anonymous reader shares a report:
An all-electric mini-airliner that can go 621 miles on one charge and replace many of the turboprops and light jets in use now -- flying almost as far and almost as fast but for a fraction of the running costs -- could be in service within three years. But this isn't another claim by another overoptimistic purveyor of electric dreams. It's using current technology, and the first planes are being built right now. In fact, the process of gaining certification from aviation regulators for what would be the world's first electric commuter plane has already started. 

The pressurised Alice from Israeli company Eviation is a graceful-looking composite aircraft with one propeller at the rear and another at the end of each wing, placed to cut drag from wingtip vortices. Each is driven by a 260 kW electric motor, and they receive power from a 900 kWh lithium ion battery pack. 

Alongside its 650 mile range, the pressurised $3 million-plus Alice can carry nine passengers and two crew, and cruise at 276 mph -- up there with the speed of the turboprops that are widely used in the commuter role, if not anywhere near that of jets. But crucially, says Eviation chief executive Omer Bar-Yohay, "operating costs will be just 7 to 9 cents per seat per mile," or about $200 an hour for the whole aircraft, against about $1,000 for turboprop rivals.

In a developer blog post published this week, Alexa AI director of applied science Ruhi Sarikaya detailed the advances in machine learning technologies that have allowed Alexa to better understand users through contextual clues. From a report:
According to Sarikaya, these improvements have played a role in reducing user friction and making Alexa more conversational. Since this fall, Amazon has been working on self-learning techniques that teach Alexa to automatically recover from its own errors. The system has been in beta until now, and it launched in the US this week. It doesn't require any human annotation, and, according to Sarikaya, it uses customers' "implicit or explicit contextual signals to detect unsatisfactory interactions or failures of understanding." 

The contextual signals range from customers' historical activity, preferences, and what Alexa skills they use to where the Alexa device is located in the home and what kind of Alexa device it is. For example, during the beta phase, Alexa learned to understand a customer's mistaken command of "Play 'Good for What'" and correct them by playing Drake's song "Nice for What."

Until now, the reticulated siren was just a rumor.

A mythical and mysterious swamp monster—also known as a species of giant salamander—the reticulated siren is found in the shallow freshwater marshes of Florida and Alabama, and locally known as a “leopard eel.” Rarely spotted and never previously studied by herpetologists, the siren made its scientific debut on Dec. 5.

In a study in Plos One, researchers from Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas, and the Georgia Sea Turtle Center in Jekyll, Georgia, described, classified, and named the salamander species for the first time, placing it in the Siren family. The first such giant salamander was captured in 1970, and was at the time suspected to be an undescribed new species. But few of them have been seen since, so there hasn’t been any formal work in the intervening half-century.

This strange giant salamander has a slimy spotted body that extends about two feet. It has two forelegs, no back legs, and a set of gills that fan out like leaves just behind its head. Basically, it looks like a long eel—hence the local moniker—but is in fact the largest species of salamander discovered in the past 100 years in the US.

The scientists behind the discovery admit that they still have much to learn about the latest siren to join the salamander family, but hope that classifying the creature and making its existence official will inspire further study. A more complete understanding of the salamander could also help them determine the extent to which it may be endangered. S. reticulata’s habitat—wetlands within the longleaf pine ecosystem—is already imperiled.

Even with the new information and the official classification, research probably won’t be easy. Scientists happened upon the giant salamander accidentally when they were looking for sea turtles in 2009, finally confirming rumors of the species that had been circulating for decades. “It was surreal to see after years of talking about this creature—it was kind of a mystical, mythical beast,” researcher David Steen tells The Revelator. “It’s so unlike most other creatures that we share the planet with.”

It took five more years for the researchers to capture two more of these animals and start classification efforts in earnest. “It lives in swamps and mud,” Steen explains. “These are not really places where people spend a lot of their time.”

"Half of tech employees think their work culture is toxic," reports one Texas news site, citing a new survey by Blind:
Blind, an anonymous work talk app, asked more than 12,000 tech staffers to respond to the statement: "I consider my current workplace a healthy working environment." Slightly more than half, 52 percent, said the survey statement was "false," versus nearly 48 percent who responded with "true."

Intel was named the tech company with the least healthy work environment, by 48.5 percent of its employees, followed by Amazon at 46.5 percent, and eBay at 44.5 percent. Employees who consider their workplaces healthier work at LinkedIn, where 17.3 percent responded true, followed by Google, at 23.7 percent, and Uber, at 29.7 percent.

It depends on how you define "unhealthy," of course -- but it'd be interesting to hear how Slashdot's readers respond to the same question. So leave your own thoughts and reactions in the comments.

Is your work environment unhealthy?
 

The rechargeable lithium-ion battery helps define our era. It powers our smartphones and electric cars, and promises a future where we’re better able to store renewable energy. It also requires lithium and cobalt, minerals that some of the world’s poorest countries happen to have in abundance. That should be good news for all concerned, but mismanagement and graft—common in extractive industries—are making the latest mining boom looks uncomfortably like the bad old days of previous booms.

This week provided reminders of that. First, the Democratic Republic of Congo tripled its levies on cobalt, of which it has the world’s largest natural supply, in a move that could result in pricier smartphones and production slowdowns for electric-car makers. Also, HSBC released a report showing that the projected market share of electric vehicles will be smaller than first thought, due to the high price of lithium and cobalt amid soaring demand.

Dominance of cobalt supply has proven a cash-cow for the DR Congo’s government, but that hasn’t helped ordinary citizens much, with just a sliver of mining exports funding the national budget. The DR Congo is among the poorest countries in the world, despite its vast mineral wealth. Gécamines, the state-owned mining company, has long faced allegations of corruption. It recently denied such allegations while conceding that (link in French) “the economic benefits of mining in the DRC do not contribute as much as they should to the wealth of our country.”

The government’s move this week wasn’t entirely unexpected. Last year, the country classified cobalt as a “strategic metal” and threatened to push mining tariffs up. For decades, colonial powers exploited the area for its mineral wealth. The country’s current leaders want to cash in, too, even if it’s at the expense of their own people.

To secure their supply of cobalt, smartphone makers Apple and Samsung—and electric-vehicle manufacturers BMW and Volkswagen—have entered into direct talks with miners in the DR Congo. That, however, has not removed the Congolese government, which has proven to be a hard middleman to please. Miners have looked to Canada and Namibia as alternatives, but with more than half of the world’s cobalt beneath the ground, the DR Congo’s ruling regime has an upper hand.

The lithium triangle
In South America, the Andean region’s “lithium triangle”—including parts of Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia rich in the mineral—is witnessing similar power plays (paywall). Until now, Chile has easily outpaced Argentina and Bolivia thanks in part to low production costs. Years before the DR Congo used the phrase, Chile declared lithium a “strategic” material in response to lithium’s role in the rush to develop nuclear power in the 1970s. The upshot? Today only two companies have the rights to extract lithium in Chile, limiting output.

Now that lithium is a strategic material for an entirely different rush, Argentina is positioning itself as an alternative source while Chile struggles to reform. Lithium-related investments in Argentina have increased dramatically in recent years. President Mauricio Macri is creating a “Goldilocks” regulatory environment that will make Argentina “just right,” Bloomberg reported this week (paywall), though next year’s general elections could dishevel this house.

In Bolivia, president Evo Morales’ state-centric regime has scared many investors away from the lithium-rich area that once filled Spain’s coffers with silver. But with the world’s second-largest lithium deposits, Bolivia aims to become Tesla’s main supplier, though, in a contradiction, to do so through state-run mining operations that lack sufficient expertise (paywall).

China, for its part, already controls most of the world’s cobalt supply (paywall), with Chinese firms being more than willing to do business with the DR Congo despite ethical issues that give many pause. It’s also gained access to Bolivia’s lithium riches, clearly hoping for a dominant position in the global battery market.

One way to avoid the geopolitics is to go beyond the earth. Asteroids are essentially floating hunks of mineral wealth, but efforts to capture it have not moved far beyond animated models. Meanwhile some deep-sea mining ventures are, despite environmental worries, hoping to uncover a viable business model by drilling into the seabed, with little success so far.

The acquisition of limited natural resources is an age-old challenge. Making the batteries of the future, it appears, is just the latest chapter.

It came as a serious shock to me when I rounded a corner at Art Basel Miami Beach, the world’s largest contemporary art fair, and came face-to-face with Donald J. Trump.

A second shock came with the wave of relief that washed over me: Here, after exhibit after exhibit of modern art I didn’t understand by artists I had never heard of, was something familiar. After attending various panels about the meaning of some piece or how one should assess various kinds of art, here was something I could just look at. Something I could laugh at.

“Queen Elizabeth and Donald” (2018).

I was looking at a portrait of Trump posing with her majesty Queen Elizabeth II— she with a cup of tea, he clutching a carton of McDonald’s fries. His expression is one of bland, insipid contentment; his skin is painted in shades of peach.

Perhaps it is this kind of familiarity that made Vincent Namatjira’s exhibit a popular one with Basel-goers this year. His absurdist portraits of global leaders are politically potent and technically impressive, but they’re also funny: Kim Jong Un getting a haircut, Vladimir Putin’s iconic shirtless horseback ride, reimagined in caricature.Namatjira, an Australian Aboriginal, often inserts himself alongside the leaders as a way to draw attention to his perspective as an indigenous person.

Vincent Namatjira’s “Self Portrait after Henry Taylor” (2018).

Namatjira hails from Australia’s Ntaria (Hermannsburg) territory, but now lives in the remote community of Indulkana, in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara area of South Australia’s far northwest. “These people are far away from the remote community where I live, but when I paint them it brings them into my world,” hesays of the exhibit’s political content. “I chose to paint some world leaders—powerful figures—and strip away some of their power, to show a different side to what we see on the TV news,” he writes over email.

“Putin” (2018).

As for using humor in his work, Namatjira write that “humour and the paintbrush are my weapons. I use humour as an equaliser, it puts everyone on the same level. If a painting is making me laugh while I’m working on it, then I know there is something there, like a spark that’s going to get people interested.”

It’s a kind of comic relief that’s welcome at Basel. He doesn’t make it hard to “get it,” which is refreshing when so much of modern art begs to be understood, often leaving the viewer feeling confused and kind of stupid. His works are uncomplicated but still manage to address today’s thorniest topics: international politics and the power of the people who dictate them.

He adds, however, that while humor is a great hook for viewers, he wants people to look deeper: “I want to show a strong voice from an Australian Aboriginal man and put our Indigenous stories front and centre, not pushed to the background.”

This story contains spoilers for “Mary Queen of Scots.”

In Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Stuart only ever meets her cousin, Elizabeth I, once. Production notes reveal that the actresses playing the roles—Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie, respectively—never saw each other in full costume until filming that one moment. (There is no evidence in the historical record that the queens ever met in real life.)

The film portrays Mary and Elizabeth as almost obsessed with each other’s faces and activities. Their interest in each other is expected, considering there is a kingdom and its dynasty at stake, and the film centers around Mary’s fight for the English throne, which eventually ends in her execution. However, their fixation with one another also feels relevant now, even if it was originally set during a 16th-century monarchical dispute.

In the film, the first correspondence between the queens involves a portrait exchange, and it is these first images that kickstarts their preoccupation with what the other is like, and how they themselves are perceived. Some reviews have said that the film’s attempts to resonate with modern audiences, whether that’s championing female power or diversity, fall short. But the portrait exchange feels on key. Trying to influence someone’s impression of you through a carefully curated lens—each queen supervised the painting of her own portrait—is something people do on social media every day, sometimes at the expense of their own well-being.

A portrait exchange that ends in a beheading is not quite the same as Instagram posts that can incite unhealthy envy over an “influencer’s” life. But by highlighting how carefully Mary and Elizabeth both send and receive their portraits, the film does capture the process of presenting yourself to the world, and dealing with how the world accepts the real you.

The movie shows this gap between perception and reality for both the queens. When Elizabeth first looks at the portrait Mary has sent her, she remarks that she can see a “young” and “clever” woman—a threat to the throne, her reaction implies. Throughout the film, Mary’s youth and cunning antagonizes Elizabeth, who is constantly reprimanded for not marrying and getting too old to have children. Mary, on the other hand, entered a strategic marriage and gave birth to a son. After Elizabeth learns this news, it is clear by her regular allusions to Mary’s youth, beauty, and fertility that the portrait is present in her mind. But by the time they meet, Elizabeth realizes that Mary’s youth, rash decisions, and even her motherhood became her downfall, and she says so to Mary’s face.

On the other hand, when Mary first receives Elizabeth’s portrait, she wonders out loud how close the resemblance really is. At the time it is sent, the image is beautiful and accurate, but many years and a bout of disfiguring smallpox later, Elizabeth looks very different when she finally meets Mary. At first, she tries to cover up her scars using heavy makeup and a red wig (as Slate put it, she looks like Ronald McDonald), and tells Mary that she wanted to present her best self. But after a heated confrontation, Elizabeth removes her wig and reveals the borders of her makeup, and how much hair she has lost, and tells Mary that she doesn’t care how she is seen anymore.

Almost all the time, it is the men around the queens—nobles, advisors, priests—that try and control their narrative. The portraits and the face-to-face meeting are the only times that Mary and Elizabeth have full control of their image. Even if these instances show just how different people can be, or how much they can change, compared to the first picture that they present of themselves, those scenes are also the moments when the women hold the most agency—and that’s worth noticing.

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As India approaches its next general elections, Facebook says it is doubling down on transparency in political ads.

On Dec. 06, the social media giant said anyone who wants to run political ads in India will now have to first disclose their name and location, and provide more details about who placed the ad. Beginning early next year, all ads related to politics in India can only be run by authorised advertisers, and they will carry a disclaimer with information on who placed the ad. Facebook added that these ads would be recorded in its online searchable Ad Library, along with details on the budget behind them, and the demographics of who saw them.

“By authorising advertisers and bringing more transparency to ads, we can better defend against foreign interference in India’s elections,” Sarah Clark Schiff, product manager at Facebook, said in a post announcing the move.

The authorisation feature and Ad Library were first rolled out in the US, Brazil, and the UK. But an earlier report by Quartz found that Facebook had already begun taking down anonymous political ads in India. In October, its digital archive included several Indian ads that had been removed for not listing who paid for them. At the time, there were no clear standards for Indian advertisers, and Facebook had seemingly targeted a wide range of ads, including those for museums and even well-known charities.

The company’s latest efforts come as its reputation has taken a beating around the world in the wake of several scandals related to the unchecked spread of misinformation on its platform. In India, where fake news can kill, Facebook and WhatsApp, the messaging service it acquired in 2014, have increasingly come under fire for not doing enough to address the crisis.

In response, WhatsApp recently launched its first television ad campaign to raise awareness about the risks of forwarding fake news, after first taking out newspaper and radio ads. Some of the company’s executives also reportedly met with the Indian government to discuss allowing messages that cause public unrest to be traced, a move that if implemented would mark a significant shift after years of WhatsApp resisting calls to break its end-to-end encryption.

But whether Facebook’s authorised political ads will make a difference on the ground in India remains to be seen. As The Atlantic revealed in a report in October, companies in the US have already found ways to get around the system by using surrogate buyers.

 

The rumors around John Kelly, the US president’s chief of staff, have finally been confirmed: The former Marine general will leave his current job by the end of the year. President Donald Trump announced the news to reporters on the White House lawn on Saturday afternoon (Dec. 8). Even the timing of the announcement was an indication of the sour relationship between Trump and Kelly; the chief of staff had planned to tell his staff on Monday, according to the New York Times (paywall), but Trump beat him to it.

Kelly was hired in July 2017, and he quickly established himself as “the adult in the room” (paywall), emphasizing the narrative that his experience as a Marine would allow him to bring order to a chaotic White House. Politicians on both sides of the aisle bought into the chief of staff’s steely, no-nonsense manner. “The kind of discipline that he is going to bring is important,” senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut, said on CNN shortly after Kelly was hired. “I hope that we’re at a turning point now.”

Those hopes proved misguided. In the months since, many have lamented that Kelly was not living up to his cultivated reputation as a man who could keep Trump in check. Indeed, his own rhetoric on immigration was incendiary. He claimed that illegal immigrants refused to assimilate into US culture and that those who didn’t register for DACA were“too lazy to get off their asses.” He also referred to Confederate general Robert E. Lee as “an honorable man who gave up his country to fight for his state.” That comment was widely condemned as implying that the fight to maintain slavery was a valiant act.

Meanwhile, like so many other West Wing employees, Kelly’s relationship with the president has slowly deteriorated. In April, White House staffers claimed that Kelly had called Trump an “idiot,” saying that the president “doesn’t even understand what DACA is. He’s an idiot,” and, “we’ve got to save him from himself.” At the time, Kelly seemed confident of his influence in the White House, allegedly claiming that, “If it weren’t for me, the president was going to agree to some hasty deal.” Though Kelly denied these comments, and Trump dismissed them as “fake news,” the relationship between the two soured. Trump reportedly believed that his chief of staff was keeping crucial information secret, and Kelly’s departure from the White House was widely anticipated for months.

Who’s next on the list to take the role, now that Kelly is out? Vice president Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, has been reported as the most likely candidate. But, though Ayers is believed to have the political savvy that Kelly lacked, it’s currently uncertain whether he wants the job full-time, according to the New York Times (paywall), or only on an interim basis until the spring. Still, judging by the track record of Trump’s White House staffers, there may not be a meaningful difference.

British prime minister Theresa May is struggling to gain support for her plan to steer the UK out of the EU. Her deal has two parts: a 585-page divorce agreement and a 26-page statement of intent on future relations between Britain and the EU. It is seen by some as not enough of a clean break from the EU, and by others as pushing Britain too far away from its closest trading partners. In other words, it’s a hot political mess.

Parliament votes on May’s plan on Dec. 11, and nobody knows what will happen if—or, more likely, when—it is rejected by lawmakers. Britain will formally leave the EU at the end of March next year, whether it has a transitional arrangement in place or not.

In lieu of May’s plan, an increasingly popular idea floated by some is the so-called “Norway option”: Britain stays in the EU’s common market, follows the bloc’s rules, but gains the right to sign its own trade deals with outside countries. This is the current arrangement, with some wrinkles, for the members of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA)—Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, and Liechtenstein, none of which are officially in the EU.

The biggest hurdle to the UK joining the EFTA, or forging a relationship with the EU akin to it, is that it would mean Britain would have to follow the rules around the free movement of people across the bloc. Curbing immigration from the rest of the EU was a major motivating factor for British voters who opted for Brexit in the 2016 referendum.

What’s more, Norwegians think it’s a bad idea to let post-Brexit Britain into their club. ”I think you would mess it all up for us, the way you have messed it all up for yourselves,” Heidi Nordby Lunde, a conservative member of parliament in Norway, recently told the UK’s Channel 4 News. Lunde’s party is the senior member of Norway’s current government coalition under prime minister Erna Solberg.

Lunde wrote in the Guardian yesterday that the UK seeking a temporary Norway option, much less a permanent one, wouldn’t work. “It would be like inviting the rowdy uncle to a Christmas party, spiking the drinks and hoping that things go well. They would not.”

And yet, Amber Rudd, the UK’s minister for work and pensions, said today that she was in favor of a “Norway-plus” model if May’s Brexit deal failed in the vote in parliament next week. ”Nobody knows if it can be done,” she admitted, according to Politico.

If Lunde is any indication, it cannot. The talk in the UK of following Norway’s example after Brexit—enjoying many of the benefits of EU membership without actually joining the EU—is misguided. “We’re not interested in being the rebound girl while you look for better options,” Lunde wrote.

Julianna Goldman recently wrote a piece for the Atlantic in which she explained that she quit her job as a TV journalist because it was impossible to balance with being a mom. I can relate: I too quit a high-octane news job in part because I needed more “balance.”

For Goldman, it was a bittersweet decision. She loved the job, and giving it up felt like also giving up the years it took to get there. She also felt the sting of looking around and seeing a stream of fathers who seem to face no such choice in their careers. Indeed, she cites research showing that at the so-called “big three” networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—combined, men were responsible for reporting 75% of the evening news broadcasts over three months in 2016; the 25% share for women was down from 32% two years earlier. 

It’s not hard to imagine why it would be hard to be a TV journalist and try to carve out the time that kids and families need. The news is 24/7, and stories happen everywhere, on no one’s schedule. “If you decline an assignment, you may be labeled a problem or deemed not to be a team player,” she writes. “Managers judge correspondents partly based on how often they’re on air.”

We all know that women take a hit in their career for having a family, while men are often paid a premium for doing the same. We have been told to lean in, and simultaneously, that we can and cannot have it all. But really, all many of us want is the support to work, and know our children are safe and cared for in stimulating environments.

But here’s the point that got me: Goldman writes that when men asked for time off, they were often rewarded for being fathers. Mothers, not so much. “One reason may be an assumption that a man’s caretaking responsibilities will be temporary, while a mom will always ask for special accommodations,” she suggested. Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist at NYU who studies gender dynamics in the workplace, agreed:  “It’s still considered so unusual for a man to be an equal or primary caretaker that there can be brownie points associated with that.”

That’s like salt in the wound. Parenting is a forever gig for both genders. Beyond exclusive breastfeeding, men can share the work and should (and there’s plenty of other work during that time too). Managers should see their demands not as temporary, but as human.