Neopets

The early social network featured cute animals, games, forums, and even a stock market. It helped bring a whole generation Very Online.

It’s hard to pinpoint when, exactly, kids and teens became 100 percent plugged in — fully online, all the time. But 1999 would be a decent guess, and November 1999 an especially good one, as it marked the launch of Neopets: a kid-friendly social network that combined virtual pets with discussion forums, games, and even a stock market. Neopets ultimately evolved into something magical, and an inextricable part of many a millennial’s formative years.

Created by a 20-something British couple, Neopets was based on a simple concept: Users owned up to four of the eponymous pets, which were slightly tweaked versions of animals both real and mythical, like puppies, penguins, and dragons. The whole point was to care for the pets, feeding and playing with them on a regular basis. (If you think they sound kind of like Tamagotchi, you’re not wrong; more on that in a second.) Neopets could even have their own pets to take care of, which was pretty meta. They were called Petpets.

There was a financial component too, thought it didn’t involve any real-world currency. Instead, pet owners could play several different games (from a version of solitaire to a version of Whack-a-Mole) and buy, trade, or sell various in-game items to collect “Neopoints.” Raking in the Neopoints dough was as important as keeping your Neopets fed — because you could use the points to buy them fancy outfits, toys, and food, and then you could brag to all of your friends about how rich you were on your public profile page.

Virtual pets were not unheard of in the 1990s. Tamagotchi had become ubiquitous after they launched in 1996 — for a while, the small, egg-shaped toys with a virtual pet on a screen were seemingly in every elementary schooler’s backpack. But the little Tamagotchi characters couldn’t do very much. They whined to be fed, ate, pooped, slept, then whined to be fed again. And on the Tamagotchi’s extremely small screen, the little monster characters looked like nothing more than pixelated blobs on a gray background.

Neopets, by contrast, were colorful, distinguishable from each other, and undeniably cute. Just the fact that anyone could own four Neopets at once put one over on Tamagotchi, which locked owners into a single creature that could die at any moment. Plus, Tamagotchi was an individual pursuit, while Neopets were inherently social. If you and a friend each had a Tamagotchi, your pets couldn’t hang out or play together. Neopets had the infinite space of the internet at its disposal.

Indeed, living online gave Neopets the latitude to be much more than just a pet playground. In some ways, the website was a productive way for kids to spend time that went beyond learning how to care for fake animals. The profile pages where users could show off their family of pets were fully customizable through basic HTML and CSS, a veritable first lesson in coding. And Neopets presented a unique take on the real-world stock market, called the NEODAQ, to teach kids some wayward economics by inviting them to invest in fake Neopian companies.

Neopoints.com/Neopets

And crucially, Neopets was a place to make online friends, pets aside. Forums provided a moderated space to hang out and share jokes, give or receive advice, or talk about favorite TV shows (though there weren’t really any memes yet; this was 1999). For many users, Neopets became less about the pets, and more about the shared community that they were building together — such was the power of the forums.

Chatrooms became a big deal online in the ’90s, but they were rarely appropriate for young people. Parents understandably expressed concerns about their kids talking with strangers late into the night. Neopets scratched an itch as a candy-coated safeguard for this new online frontier, to give many kids their first real taste of the rare beauty that is making conversation over an internet connection, without the social pressures (or geographical limitations) of being face to face.

Twenty years later, Neopets is remembered fondly as an influential moment for many of us in the Very Online Generation. It’s also still operational — but hasn’t been updated much over the last decade-plus, and its user base has dwindled; a visit to the homepage reveals a messy jumble of banner ads and archaic web design. There’s something comfortable about returning to this relic of a website, however, that instantly dredges up those long-gone memories of a simpler internet.

To honor the milestone 20th anniversary of Neopets, I (Allegra Frank, associate culture editor) asked two of my Vox colleagues and fellow Neopets fans — podcast producer Byrd Pinkerton and associate identities editor Karen Turner — to join me in reminiscing about what made Neopets so important to us when we were young and just discovering the internet.

“Neopets helped me cope with social anxiety”

I’ve always had a mighty case of social anxiety. It’s manageable now, thanks to a cocktail of medications and therapy and understanding that’s come with adulthood. But as a kid, I was wracked with nerves in anticipation of nearly every social function.

My coping mechanism was to find common interests between me and the people who scared me, and then lean into those. The tactic still works well for me today. But it first worked really, really well for me in third grade, when I was introduced to Neopets. Its popularity and accessibility were both much broader than my other favorite thing — Nintendo — because all you needed to play Neopets was a computer and an internet connection. In 2002, most people I knew had those.

Turns out, most people I knew also had Neopets. I found this out from a friend in my class, who was one of my rocks; she was a clever and likable person, much cooler and more outgoing than me, with my averted gaze and velcro sneakers. She casually mentioned it to me in our classroom one day, and immediately a group of other kids who I rarely could summon the effort to talk to flocked over.

Neopets

My friend gave out her username. “We can be friends,” she said to the group. “I have this Neopet, and this one, and this paintbrush,” and so on. And other kids started to trade their usernames back, and brag about their own item collections, and compare which species of pets they had, and which games they liked to play on the website.

And how badly I wanted that! To just share a username and become friends with my classmates, in such a low-effort way that only really involved looking at each other’s cute animal pictures. When I went home that night, I was fully convinced I needed a Neopets account.

Once I joined, I quickly found something bigger than an antidote for my debilitating fear of socializing: an entire world on the internet that felt more expansive than any I’d ever seen before. At 8 years old, I’d stumbled upon a land of endless opportunity: a collection of those one-note puzzle and racing games people loved playing illicitly on school computers; fun mysteries to unravel through message boards that were full of middle schoolers whose posts I read in awe. (A middle schooler was practically an adult to me.)

Neopets was a perfect time suck for someone already inclined to love looking at cute animals, reading, and playing games. I learned all of the Neopets’ names, and read as much as I could about the rare items, and how many Neopoints I’d have to earn to buy any of them. I made my friends get in on it, too — an earnest plea to ensure that they would still have this, my new favorite thing, in common with me. Those commonalities were my lifeline. It felt amazing to have found such a satisfying new one.

I did become more friendly with some of my classmates through our mutual Neopets love. But more importantly, Neopets strengthened the friendships I already had. Online, we could have a cohort of cute animals our parents would never let us have in real life. We could keep talking through the Neopets forums, a novelty that was much more glamorous (and more difficult for our parents to spy on or interrupt) than emails or phone calls. I got them hooked on the game Meerca Chase.

Neopets took over my life throughout elementary school, the same way it did with my classmates. I didn’t have much in common with many of them. But being able to share Neopets jokes or tips made third grade a whole lot easier — and a lot more fun after school too. —Allegra Frank

“I got so involved in the NEODAQ stock market that I abandoned my poor Neopets”

Neopets dominated my after-school life for about a year in junior high. But what started as an innocent exercise in caring for virtual alien pets and messaging internet friends eventually turned into the all-encompassing, bloodthirsty pursuit to acquire as much wealth as possible. It all went downhill for me once I got involved in the Neopets stock market.

The Neopets economy seems simple at first. You earn Neopoints by playing games, and then use points to buy rare food, toys, grooming, and other fun stuff like outfits or other ways to personalize your pets. But the system ballooned out in surprisingly complex ways. You could trade Neopoints for items, sell your own stuff for a profit in your shop, and put bids on items sold by other Neopets players. But all of that was small potatoes compared to the Neopian stock market: NEODAQ.

I had hit a point where mining points by playing Neopets’ games like Ice Cream Machine or Meerca Chase wasn’t yielding enough. I wanted to save up to buy rare items to resell in my own personal shop, or get special “morphing potion” items that would enable me to acquire limited edition Neopets. NEODAQ was widely considered the best way to rack up Neopoints, so I decided to get involved.

Neopets

I started out buying modest shares of stocks where I thought the company had a cute name. But over time, I grew greedier. In the morning, I’d log on to my family’s desktop computer and check for bargain stocks, buying up the maximum number of shares, 1,000, in various companies.

When I’d come back from school, I’d check on previous stock holdings, seeing which ones had risen to my selling point value, at which point I’d start unloading a third or half of the shares and hold on to the remaining ones to see if they’d rise more. I’d spend an hour or so reading stock trends on the forums, seeing which companies had good track records. Over time, my portfolio grew and I was making enough from my stock sales to fund my daily investments. I was Neopian rich.

The more points I gained, the more I wanted. Even after I made a killing on some stock I’d hoarded that inflated to a very high value, any sense of accomplishment I felt was so fleeting it would immediately be overtaken by the need for even more Neopoints. It wasn’t about saving up for morphing potions or even about having fun. All I wanted was more.

Eventually the high I once got from accumulating wealth faded and it started to feel stale. My poor Neopets — sick, utterly neglected, and starving, as I had completely stopped feeding them — mattered so little to me that even they couldn’t keep me on the platform. It wasn’t even about chatting with my Neopian guild friends on the forums. I had won NEODAQ, but for what? The experience left me empty.

I eventually logged off for good and never returned to my trading days. But it was a good lesson in the ephemeral high of accumulating wealth — at least in the virtual world. And it’s a good thing I left when I did. A few years later, there was a Neopian economic crash due to inflation, and the heads that “rolled” were the richest Neopets players who were forced to give away billions of Neopoints. Good thing I wasn’t around for that. —Karen Turner

“Neopets offered me a comforting source of human connection at a time when I really needed it”

My friends and I were on a road trip. I posted a picture and geotagged Chicago.

“Hey,” I said a few minutes later, “this woman I met on Neopets years ago just messaged me. She lives in Chicago, I guess? She wants to know if I want to meet up.”

There was a short silence in the car.

“She is probably not a serial killer,” I added.

I first started playing Neopets when my grandmother was sick. My parents flew to visit her, while I stayed with a friend, who introduced me to the game. It was a nice distraction.

I played it all through middle school, swapping digital points for items with my friends at recess, but we all lost interest around the time that most teenagers lose interest in overly cute digital cartoon worlds.

Then, after high school, I took a gap year. I was living and working abroad, and I was lonely. My friends had stopped responding to my emails — or at least, stopped responding quickly. I was having trouble making new friends. So I decided to venture back to a place where I knew I could socialize. I logged back into Neopets, opened up the forums, and found a group of people to talk to.

Neopets

A group of maybe 15 of us created a message board that we kept coming back to each day. When it hit the maximum number of posts, we’d create a new one. It was my favorite place to go when I needed to tell in-jokes, or share dumb pictures I made in PhotoShop, or tell someone about something amazing I’d seen that day. It was almost like a proto-group text, with inside jokes and secrets flowing freely.

I kept coming back to it daily for several months … until, eventually, I found an offline way to fill the social void. I didn’t need the forums anymore. I added a few members of the group on Facebook, but didn’t stay in touch. I stopped logging onto Neopets. I rarely thought of my time on the website afterward.

Until this woman reached out. Her message brought memories of that harder time in my life flooding back. Even though I was among friends, I felt something pulling me toward this woman, something that encouraged me to connect.

I did end up meeting up with her on that trip through Chicago. She was not a serial killer. She was a grocery store employee, a few years older than me. We walked through an empty sports field one night and talked. About her struggle to have kids. About my fear of graduating and entering the real world.

I eventually graduated from college, and everything since has been fine. She eventually had three kids. They are, if Instagram is to be believed, extremely adorable.

But it was nice, in that time of transition, to feel like Neopets was there for me, yet again. Even if I didn’t need to log back on. —Byrd Pinkerton

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Ambassador Kurt Volker, former special envoy to Ukraine, testifies before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on November 19, 2019 | Lex Brandon (Pool)/AFP/Getty Images

He said that he didn’t believe Joe Biden wasn’t corrupt, and that he regrets the push for investigations.

When House Intelligence Committee Democrats offered Republicans the opportunity to suggest impeachment inquiry witnesses, Kurt Volker — the former US special representative to Ukraine — made the list.

And yet in his opening statement Tuesday, Volker made a number of points that seemed quite bad for the case President Donald Trump’s defenders are trying to build.

For one, Volker said that “the accusation that Vice President [Joe] Biden acted inappropriately” with regard to Ukraine “did not seem at all credible to me” — contradicting Trump’s unsupported insistence that Biden acted corruptly in helping push out Viktor Shokin, a Ukrainian prosecutor whom the administration and American allies considered corrupt.

Volker also said that, previously, he drew a distinction between investigating Burisma (the Ukrainian gas company Hunter Biden sat on the board of) and the Bidens. He understood Trump officials were pushing for investigations into Burisma, which he considered appropriate. But “in retrospect, I should have seen that connection differently” — admitting it was inappropriate and “unacceptable,” and targeted at the Bidens.

And Volker said that former Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko, who has made allegations about the Bidens’ corruption that Rudy Giuliani promoted, isn’t credible. Indeed, Volker even said that he told Giuliani this in private — and that Giuliani agreed. All this debunks a counter-narrative pushed by Trump’s allies, in which the President was legitimately concerned about corruption in Ukraine.

The GOP may have wanted to call Volker because, in his initial testimony, he said he did not know of any linkage between nearly $400 million in withheld military aid for Ukraine, with the investigations that Trump was demanding.

However, Volker says in his new opening statement, “I have learned many things that I did not know at the time of the events in question.” By that, he seems to be referring to Sondland’s recent admission that he did, in fact, tell the Ukrainians the aid was linked to the investigations.

Volker had also previously testified that a White House meeting on July 10 between US and Ukrainian advisers was uneventful. But other witnesses testified that Sondland brought up “investigations” in front of the Ukrainians, National Security Adviser John Bolton abruptly ended the meeting. Afterward, some participants moved to a different room (the Ward Room), and Sondland again asked the Ukrainians about investigations.

Now Volker says he recalls some of that: “Ambassador Sondland made a generic comment about investigations,” he said. “I think all of us thought it was inappropriate.” (However, he says that he still doesn’t recall Sondland asking the Ukrainians again about investigations in the Ward Room. “I may have been engaged in a side conversation, or had already left the complex,” he said.)

You can read Volker’s full opening statement at this link.

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Ambassador Kurt Volker, former special envoy to Ukraine, testifies before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on November 19, 2019 | Lex Brandon (Pool)/AFP/Getty Images

He said he didn’t believe Joe Biden wasn’t corrupt, and that he regrets the push for investigations.

When House Intelligence Committee Democrats offered Republicans the opportunity to suggest impeachment inquiry witnesses, Kurt Volker — the former US special representative to Ukraine — made the list.

And yet in his opening statement Tuesday, Volker made a number of points that seemed quite bad for the case President Donald Trump’s defenders’ are trying to build.

For one, Volker said that “the accusation that Vice President [Joe] Biden acted inappropriately” with regard to Ukraine “did not seem at all credible to me” — contradicting Trump’s unsupported insistence that Biden acted corruptly in helping push out Viktor Shokin, a Ukrainian prosecutor whom the administration and American allies considered corrupt.

Volker also said that, previously, he drew a distinction between investigating Burisma (the Ukrainian gas company Hunter Biden sat on the board of) and the Bidens. He understood Trump officials were pushing for investigations into Burisma, which he considered appropriate. But “in retrospect, I should have seen that connection differently” — admitting it was inappropriate and “unacceptable,” and targeted at the Bidens.

And Volker said that former Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko, who has made allegations about the Bidens’ corruption that Rudy Giuliani promoted, isn’t credible. Indeed, Volker even said that he told Giuliani this in private — and that Giuliani agreed. All this debunks a counter-narrative pushed by Trump’s allies, in which the President was legitimately concerned about corruption in Ukraine.

The GOP may have wanted to call Volker because, in his initial testimony, he said he did not know of any linkage between nearly $400 million in withheld military aid for Ukraine, with the investigations that Trump was demanding.

However, Volker says in his new opening statement, “I have learned many things that I did not know at the time of the events in question.” By that, he seems to be referring to Sondland’s recent admission that he did, in fact, tell the Ukrainians the aid was linked to the investigations.

Volker had also previously testified that a White House meeting on July 10 between US and Ukrainian advisers was uneventful. But other witnesses testified that Sondland brought up “investigations” in front of the Ukrainians, National Security Adviser John Bolton abruptly ended the meeting. Afterward, some participants moved to a different room (the Ward Room), and Sondland again asked the Ukrainians about investigations.

Now, Volker says he recalls some of that: “Ambassador Sondland made a generic comment about investigations,” he said. “I think all of us thought it was inappropriate.” (However, he says that he still doesn’t recall Sondland asking the Ukrainians again about investigations in the Ward Room. “I may have been engaged in a side conversation, or had already left the complex,” he said.)

You can read Volker’s full opening statement at this link.

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Stephen Miller arrives at the Capitol on May 14, 2019. | Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

Miller used Breitbart in a campaign to discredit Sen. Marco Rubio, and to advance hardline views on immigration.

White House adviser Stephen Miller has already faced calls to resign following the release of a tranche of emails he sent to a former writer at Breitbart promoting white nationalist content and extremely restrictive immigration policies. Turns out, his relationship with the right-wing site runs even deeper.

According to a new batch of those emails, shared first with the Southern Poverty Law Center and then reported by NBC News, Miller used his relationship with Breitbart staff to also direct coverage to advance his ideological and political stances. He commissioned articles damaging to Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, helped dictate editorial standards about how to describe immigration policies, and published unattributed content under Breitbart’s general staff byline. Part of the time, he did so while working on Donald Trump’s campaign and while Rubio was still in the presidential race.

Miller often referred to Rubio as “pathological” in his correspondence with Katie McHugh, the former Breitbart writer who shared the emails with the SPLC, and asked her to discredit the Florida senator and any immigration policy more moderate than Miller’s hardline stance.

In December 2015, while working for Sen. Jeff Sessions and shortly before he accepted a role in the Trump campaign, Miller asked McHugh to link a report of an undocumented immigrant accused of raping a child to Rubio, writing, “Can you work in a reminder that Rubio’s bill — which he was pushing for Obama — legalized alien sex offenders, ensuring more such rapes would occur? … [Rubio] invents facts to hurt Americans, seems to be the trend.”

Part of Miller’s disdain for Rubio seems to be tied to the senator’s support for immigration reform. Rubio co-sponsored a bipartisan bill in 2013 that would have provided a path to citizenship to some undocumented immigrants. The bill — which ultimately failed in the then-Republican controlled House of Representatives — runs counter to Miller’s hardline views on immigration.

As a White House adviser, Miller has promoted policies — from the Trump administration’s Muslim ban to its more recent attempts to force asylum seekers to pay application fees — that aim to make immigrating, let alone becoming a citizen, more difficult.

Miller has told US Customs and Border Protection officials, “My mantra has persistently been presenting aliens with multiple unsolvable dilemmas to impact their calculus for choosing to make the arduous journey to begin with.”

When Rubio ultimately left the race in March 2016, McHugh sent Miller an email thanking him for his help, writing, “Thank God and thank God for Sen. Sessions, you, [Sessions aide] Garrett [Murch], [Breitbart editor] Julia [Hahn], Matt [Boyle] and the whole team. MAGA!”

McHugh, who has renounced the alt-right movement and no longer works for Breitbart, told the SPLC that Breitbart did all it could to promote negative coverage of Rubio: “Rubio was reviled, and reporters and editors brainstormed ways to craft a narrative that would harm his candidacy.”

In a normal news operation, that sort of bias is not smiled upon. But perhaps more distressing is how much Miller worked to guide that negative coverage.

We’ve learned more about Miller’s relationship with Breitbart

It is not uncommon for lawmakers to write op-eds or to send writers press releases they hope will be turned into articles, but it is uncommon for a congressional aide and campaign adviser to direct the editorial process in a manner damaging to a presidential candidate they do not favor.

This is precisely what Miller did, sending in story ideas, making editorial decisions about story structure, and dictating the organization’s style guide.

At least once, Miller instructed McHugh what to put in her “lede,” or the first sentence of her article, and in an earlier email to McHugh and an actual editor, gave guidance on word choice: “I think the words ‘immigration reform’ should be redefined as meaning ‘immigration control’ and those who oppose ‘immigration control’ as proponents of mass immigration.”

This led to some confusion on the part of Breitbart staff as to how to credit Miller’s contributions. In 2015, when he emailed them a chart about the immigrant population’s rate of increase, an editor responded, “How should we run this? Under Senator Sessions’ byline? Or under ‘Breitbart News’ byline?”

Miller told him to run it under a generic Breitbart byline, and also worked to distance himself from other contributions, like when he sent in a list of immigrants accused of rape: “Articles compiled by our staff,” he wrote. “Didn’t get from me.”

Perhaps most striking is that Miller continued this behavior — particularly his anti-Rubio rhetoric — after joining the Trump campaign. Trump, of course, has a number of media outlets that are notedly friendly towards him, from Fox News to OANN.

But before the Republican media establishment fully coalesced around Trump, Miller seemed to use Breitbart as an unofficial arm of the campaign, for instance, telling McHugh to create content around a post from another outlet critical of Rubio a few weeks after joining the Trump campaign. Hours after he did so, Breitbart ran the piece.

As Vox’s Nicole Narea has explained, the first batch of Miller emails the Southern Poverty Law Center analyzed revealed messages that included links to white nationalist articles; that promoted a white supremacist book that casts immigrants of color as savages who subsist on feces; and that praised President Calvin Coolidge’s nativist, hardline immigration policies in the 1920s. This second tranche of emails suggests Miller used Breitbart not just as a perch for his alt-right ideas, but as a platform to attack enemies.

That revelation is likely to increase growing calls for his resignation. Last week, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar began calling for Miller to leave the White House. They’ve since been joined by more than 80 other Democratic lawmakers. Ocasio-Cortez has also created a petition demanding Miller’s resignation that reads in part, “A white nationalist is currently serving as a top advisor to the President of the United States. In 2019. … This man cannot serve in the White House” — it has more than 50,000 signatures.

The White House has shown no sign of taking these calls seriously. Instead, they have dismissed them as anti-Semitic (Miller is Jewish).

“Mr. Miller condemns racism and bigotry in all forms,” White House spokesperson Hogan Gidley told NBC. “What deeply concerns me is how so many on the left are allowed to spread vile anti-Semitism and consistently attack proud Jewish members of this administration.”

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Heliogen’s demonstration tower in Lancaster, California. | Heliogen

Making high-temperature industrial heat from sunlight.

It’s pretty clear how we can reduce and eventually eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from some sectors of the economy. Electricity, transportation, and buildings, three of the biggest emitters, have a pathway to zero. It won’t be easy, and progress is too slow, but we have a handle on what to do.

But there are still big chunks of the economy that don’t have a clear line of sight to zero. They don’t yet have the tools they need at competitive prices. They are still waiting on innovation.

Many of them, including cement and steel, rely on large amounts of continuous high-temperature heat, and as I described in this post, there are very few viable low-carbon sources of such heat. Collectively, these industrial processes represent around 20 percent of global carbon emissions. It is one of the thorniest dilemmas in climate policy.

It’s not often that I write about a carbon policy dilemma only to have a clever new solution arrive in my inbox mere days later, but that’s what happened. A new company called Heliogen, coming out of stealth mode on Tuesday, has developed a brand new, zero-carbon way of generating high-temperature heat. It’s backed by an experienced team, boasts Bill Gates as an investor, and seems to have pulled off the rare trick of creating something new in the cleantech world.

Let’s take a look at how they do it.

Adapting concentrating-solar technology for a new purpose

Heliogen’s technology is based on concentrating solar power (CSP). That’s where hundreds of mirrors in a field are all angled to reflect sunlight onto a tower, inside of which is a steam turbine. The heat from the sunlight turns fluid (usually water) to steam, which runs the turbine, which generates power.

Visually, it’s probably the most striking and beautiful of all power generation technologies. Here’s a CSP plant in Seville, Spain:

Shutterstock

CSP is a good idea, and it works well, but it stalled out in the 2010s, for the simple reason that solar photovoltaic (PV) panels won. PV got so cheap, so fast, that it undercut CSP. Now CSP is something of a niche product. (Except in Spain, where it’s big.)

Among the CSP startups that didn’t make it was eSolar, a company founded by entrepreneur Bill Gross and his well-known incubator Idealab. (I wrote about eSolar way back in 2008.) Rather than assembling large, complicated, curved heliostats (mirrors) on site, eSolar used small, flat, prefabricated heliostats of only about a square meter. They were cheaper, faster and easier to set up, more modular, and easier to replace.

Gross’s key insight was that he could replace a lot of the material and labor involved in CSP with computing power. (Or, he could replace stuff with intelligence.) Rather than make bigger, more complicated mirrors, he made small, simple ones and controlled them with software, so they stayed aligned more precisely and produced more power. As Gross realized, material and labor generally get more expensive over time, while computing power is always getting cheaper. Anything that substitutes the latter for the former saves money.

eSolar ultimately couldn’t overcome PV’s price advantage, but Gross’s insight remains useful. And with the launch of his new company Heliogen, it seems the technology could make a comeback.

What Gross and his team of scientists and engineers at Heliogen have developed, in a nutshell, is a way to use even more computing power to keep the mirrors even more precisely aligned, thus generating even more heat.

Heliogen

The team had to figure out how to monitor the mirrors in real time, to keep them all aimed at the exact same spot, Gross told me. It’s not enough to calibrate them once, as most CSP plants do. The ground subsides, the wind blows, the mirrors warp, and things slowly drift out of alignment. It may only be by centimeters, but those centimeters add up.

Obviously, a camera can’t be pointed directly at the mirror from the spot where the light is supposed to hit. The camera would melt.

Heliogen solved this problem by perching four super-powerful cameras around the top of the tower. Rather than directly measuring the intensity of light coming off a given mirror, they focus on four points equidistant around it. If the halo of light coming off the mirror is equally intense in each of the four quadrants, then the mirror is precisely aligned. (I find this delightfully resourceful.)

The four cameras are watching all the mirrors all the time, and the exact proper alignment of each mirror is being calculated all the time. As the image-analysis software calculates, it sends constant signals to the mirrors, which result in constant micromovements as the mirrors keep themselves perfectly focused on a single point, about 50 centimeters across.

It’s a “closed loop” system that monitors and adjusts itself, and it requires enormous computing power — more, Gross says, than was available even five years ago.

Heliogen

What is the point of this precise concentrating of light? Heat!

Conventional CSP towers can only get to about 560 degrees Celsius — enough to boil fluid and run a turbine, but not much else. Heliogen’s towers have reached just over 1,000° C and the company believes with further improvements it can hit 1,500° C. That would be a whole new ball game.

High-temperature heat opens up enormous markets for concentrating solar

There are lots of industrial processes that can use 1,000° C heat, like steam reforming of methane. And as that heat creeps higher, it becomes useful for more and more processes, from cement to steel.

When the temperature hits 1,500° C, it opens up something of a holy grail: direct, thermochemical generation of liquid fuels that can substitute for any hydrocarbon fuel.

Huh? Let me explain, as this is a relatively new engineering development, being perfected by Swedish researchers as we speak. It goes like this: a new, state-of-the-art material called ceria (CeO2) is heated to about 1,500° C, at which point it releases a pure stream of oxygen. Then, at about 1,000° C, water and carbon dioxide are introduced. The ceria wants its oxygen back, so it breaks the water and carbon dioxide up into hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and oxygen, and absorbs the oxygen. What’s left is a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, otherwise known as “syngas.”

Basically, you start with H2O + CO2 and you end up with a mix of H + CO. As it happens, every hydrocarbon (fossil) fuel in the world, from kerosene to gasoline, from boat fuel to jet fuel, is built around some combination of H and CO, which means synfuel can be refined into any fuel, for any purpose. If the CO2 that feeds into the process is drawn from the ambient air via direct air capture (DAC), which is still a big if for now, then the resulting fuels can be said to be carbon-neutral, a huge improvement on the carbon-intensive fuels now in use.

Cumulatively, these markets for carbon-free industrial heat — steam reforming of methane, cement, steel, synthetic liquid fuels, and more — are enormous, up to a trillion dollars globally, and represent around a fifth of global GHG emissions. They include almost all the most difficult-to-decarbonize sectors.

Heliogen

Heliogen may or may not succeed, but it has a genuine innovation

Obviously, Heliogen’s technology can’t work with every industrial facility. For one thing, Gross estimates that only about half of them worldwide have the land necessary to build a solar-heat facility on site. Facilities would have to integrate what is effectively an airborne oven into their process flow. And every facility would still need backup sources of heat, since the sun is only out for eight hours a day.

Until the technology is proven in a commercial setting, it’s difficult to say much about the real-world performance and costs, so there’s no way to know whether or how much Heliogen may succeed. Though it is stocked with talent and well-funded — Bill Gates said he is “pleased to be an early backer” of what he called “a promising development in the quest to one day replace fossil fuel” — it faces the same difficult hurdles as any startup. Most of them die.

Still, whatever its fate, Heliogen is something fairly rare in the world of technology: a genuine innovation. And it’s a great application of Gross’s insight, for which I have become something of an evangelist, namely that the clean-energy transition is going to proceed in large part by substituting computing power for material and labor, i.e., intelligence for stuff.

The ongoing explosion in computing power — AI, machine learning, ubiquitous real-time sensing, and all the rest of it — is going to enable innovations in energy that we can’t begin to predict. It will make our renewable energy technologies more responsive to real-time variations in sun and wind, more able to continuously adapt. It will make our cars and buildings smarter, more able to exchange energy. It will enable the electricity system to decentralize and maximize local resources. And the computing power we have today will look primitive by 2030.

That’s one reason the clean-energy transition is going to happen faster than energy transitions of the past: It will be aided and accelerated by computing power, an extension of our imaginations and inventive powers that is new in all of history.

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Taylor Swift | Photo by Zhang Hengwei/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images

Taylor Swift can sing Taylor Swift songs at the American Music Awards, if she wants to.

After an emotional plea to fans and a public spat with Big Machine Label Group, Taylor Swift will be allowed to perform any Taylor Swift song she chooses — for at least one night.

Big Machine, which owns the master recordings of almost all of Swift’s albums, has granted her permission to perform hits from her back catalogue at the upcoming American Music Awards on November 24.

In a statement issued November 18, the company said it had “agreed to grant all licenses of their artists’ performances to stream post-show and for rebroadcast on mutually approved platforms.” Big Machine didn’t mention Swift by name, but everyone who’s been paying attention to this ongoing feud knew whom the record label was talking about.

Since this summer, Swift has been engaged in a public tussle with Big Machine head Scooter Braun and the label’s co-founder, Scott Borchetta. Braun purchased the record label from Borchetta in June, giving the mega-manager ownership over all the records Swift made prior to 2019’s Lover.

This means that anytime someone, including Swift, wants to license one of Swift’s old hits, they have to go through Braun. This perturbed Swift for many reasons, most of all that Braun has connections to her famous enemy Kanye West, as well as other big pop stars. West has a history of feuding with Swift, which made her uncomfortable with Braun. And other Braun defenders, like Justin Bieber (whom Braun manages), chimed in and shaded Swift as the public feud flared up months ago, when Swift publicly stated that Braun owning her music was her “worst-case scenario.”

The repercussions of Big Machine owning Swift’s music erupted again last week, when Swift published an emotional plea to her fans on her social media accounts, asserting that Braun was not allowing her to perform her old songs live. The AMAs, where Swift will be honored as the Artist of the Decade, would not be an exception.

“This is where I’m asking for your help,” Swift wrote. “Please let Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun know how you feel about this.”

Her fans responded in kind, taking aim at Big Machine on Twitter. Their angry tweets may have made an impact, as it didn’t take Big Machine long to assuage Swift and her fandom’s concerns about her future live shows.

But although Swift can now, as per Big Machine’s statement, perform old hits like “You Belong With Me” or even deep cuts like “Hey Stephen” at the AMAs, the feud isn’t over. Swift fans are a feverish bunch, and it continues to unsettle the artist that Big Machine owns her most popular work.

The bright side: Swift said she will re-record all of her old songs beginning in November 2020 — the point at which her contract legally allows her to do so.

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Protesters hold up signs of Jeffrey Epstein in front of a federal courthouse on July 8, 2019, in New York City. | Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

But some say they’re scapegoats for bigger problems.

Jeffrey Epstein’s death in a Manhattan jail has been a topic of speculation for months, with many wondering why the sex offender was allowed to be alone long enough to take his own life.

A new development in the case came on Tuesday, when two jail workers were charged in connection with allegations that they failed to check on Epstein, the New York Times reports.

The workers, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, were charged with making false records and conspiring to defraud the United States. They were supposed to check on Epstein every 30 minutes, but fell asleep instead, then falsified records to cover up what they had done, officials told the Times.

Epstein, a money manager whose source of wealth remains somewhat unclear, was first indicted on sex crime charges in 2007, when he was accused of sexually abusing dozens of underage girls. But he served just 13 months in a county jail thanks to a lenient “non-prosecution agreement,” as Julie K. Brown reported in a groundbreaking exposé at the Miami Herald. After her story directed new attention to the issue, Epstein was arrested on new sex trafficking charges this July, and was jailed at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center to await his trial.

But in August, he was found dead in his cell in an apparent suicide. Since then, questions have swirled around the case, with some (including a pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother) questioning whether his death was really a suicide, and others asking why protocols meant to prevent such deaths in the jail were not followed.

The arrest of the workers may lead to more answers, but some argue that the two are being scapegoated for larger failings at the jail, including understaffing — both were working overtime when Epstein died, according to the Times.

Meanwhile, others are pressing the Bureau of Prisons for more transparency around Epstein’s death. “This is a sex trafficking ring in the United States,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) said in a Senate hearing on the case on Tuesday. “This guy had evidence, he’s got co-conspirators, and there are victims out there who want to know where the evidence has gone.”

His comments were a reminder that even after Epstein’s death, the story of his crimes — and the other people who may have been involved in them — lives on.

Epstein’s death points to larger problems at the jail

Epstein’s death raised questions because he was thought to have information on others who might have abused underage girls at his parties or homes. During his life, he was known for his “collection” of famous friends, and had ties to both President Trump and former President Bill Clinton. Ever since Brown’s Herald story was published, speculation has swirled about what other powerful people might have been involved in his crimes — either in helping cover them up or in participating in abuse themselves.

For that reason, some believed that Epstein’s death was not really a suicide, and that someone might have had him killed to prevent him from revealing compromising information at his trial. These theories got a boost last month when a pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother said that the sex offender’s injuries pointed to homicide.

However, the family-hired pathologist, Michael Baden, has been accused in the past of exhibiting “poor judgment in many instances,” according to the Times, and the current New York City medical examiner has strongly disputed Baden’s finding. The examiner’s office has officially ruled Epstein’s death a suicide.

Ultimately, the arrest of the jail workers and accounts of their behavior on the night he died point to a more prosaic problem than a supposed conspiracy.

Epstein had been on suicide watch prior to his death, but was not on suicide watch when he died. Still, under jail policy, he should have been closely monitored.

But like many jails across the country, the Metropolitan Correctional Center was understaffed, according to the Times. One of the two workers arrested Tuesday had volunteered to work overtime on the night Epstein died, but had been doing so for five straight days, a prison workers’ union official told the Times. The other had been forced to work overtime.

Meanwhile, Senate testimony on Tuesday by Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, the director of the Bureau of Prisons, suggests that if the workers were in fact sleeping on the job, it wasn’t an isolated incident. There have been “a few” instances of such behavior, Sawyer said, according to the Times, and the bureau is attempting to identify problem employees.

But some say employees are being treated as scapegoats for bigger problems. Jose Rojas, an official with the prison workers’ union, told the Times that while he did not condone falsifying records, it would usually be treated as a policy violation rather than a criminal matter.

“There’s culpability at the top,” he said. “They always try to blame the lowest person on the totem pole.”

Whoever bears the ultimate blame for the failure to check on Epstein, the arrest of the two workers is unlikely to put to rest the questions around his death.

On Tuesday, Sasse, who has long been vocal about the Epstein case, expressed frustration that Sawyer was not more forthcoming about the sex offender’s death.

The incident “happened in the middle of August, early August,” Sasse said. “It’s Thanksgiving and you’re here to testify today, and you say you’re not allowed to speak about this incident. I think that’s crazy.”

Meanwhile, women who say they survived abuse by Epstein are suing his estate, as well as calling for the statute of limitations for sex crimes to be extended so that more survivors of abuse by the money manager and others can come forward.

Epstein’s death meant these women and others will never face him in court, but they haven’t stopped seeking justice, both for themselves and for survivors of sexual abuse around the country.

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Disney

The best songs from Frozen 2 are the ones that didn’t make it into the movie. Sorry, “Into the Unknown.”

It’s not an exaggeration to say the release of the Frozen 2 soundtrack this past weekend — just ahead of Frozen 2’s November 22 release date — counts as an event. Not since the heyday of Disney’s ’90s animated musicals has a film soundtrack had such high expectations to live up to.

Sales of the original Frozen soundtrack blew away all other competitors when it was released in late November 2013 (just a few days before the film itself); it then went on to reign as the No. 1 album of 2014. At the 2014 Oscars, “Let It Go” won Best Original Song; the next year, at the 2015 Grammys, the album won Best Compilation Soundtrack, garnering Robert Lopez — who wrote all of Frozen’s songs with his wife, Kristen Anderson-Lopez — the rare EGOT distinction. (The pair is credited with writing the entire Frozen 2 soundtrack as well.)

Oh, and if you had younger kids, your kids were probably obsessed with it. In 2014, Frozen was everywhere: The film itself grossed a staggering $1.27 billion worldwide, and the film’s fandom was so eager for more that it drove over $5 billion in retail sales of related Frozen merchandise — just in 2014 alone. Not only that, but five years after the film’s release, the soundtrack was still on the CD sales charts. That’s some heavy lifting.

So does the new Frozen 2 soundtrack hold up to all that hype? Yeah, pretty much.

The Frozen 2 soundtrack has just seven new songs — plus a reprise, several covers, and a few “outtakes.” But there’s a lot to explore.

The Frozen 2 soundtrack boasts the soundtrack versions of its seven totally new songs as well as covers of those songs by artists Kacey Musgraves, Panic! At the Disco, and Weezer. Both Kristen Bell, who voices Princess Anna, and Jonathan Groff, who plays her boyfriend Kristoff, get songs of their own. (There’s also a teensy reprise of the Groffsauce classic “Reindeer(s) are Better Than People.”) The soundtrack also comes with a few surprises — most pleasantly, the revelation that Westworld star Evan Rachel Wood, a new addition to Frozen cast, has a great singing voice. (Fun fact for Broadway buffs: Wood is in a band with guitarist Zane Carney, brother of Hadestown’s Reeve Carney.)

Wood plays Queen Iduna, Elsa and Anna’s late mother. Apparently, her spirit is still alive and kicking, and in the Frozen 2 soundtrack’s opening number, “All Is Found,” she gets a beautiful refrain — “where the north wind meets the sea / there’s a river full of memory” — that recurs throughout other songs and the film’s score. Musgraves covers this song, and it’s just lovely.

If you already know you love Frozen, you’ll specifically want to seek out the “deluxe” version of the soundtrack, which contains a few more songs listed as “outtakes.” These songs — which were apparently all cut before they made it into the movie — include extra solos for Anna and Kristoff, and a gorgeous duet, “I Seek the Truth,” between songwriter Anderson-Lopez and Patti Murin, who originated the role of Anna in Frozen on Broadway.

The best of the outtakes is “Get This Right,” a fun, conversational duet between a self-doubting Kristoff and an ever-adventurous Anna, which doubles as a kind of spiritual sequel and answer to Frozen’s “Love Is an Open Door.”

Oh, and here’s the best part if you like to sing along: The deluxe soundtrack contains with instrumental — a.k.a. karaoke — versions of all the songs.

Let go of the idea that there’s a new “Let It Go” on the Frozen 2 soundtrack

The centerpiece of the new soundtrack, however, is clearly meant to be “Into the Unknown.” It’s the showcase song for Broadway superstar Idina Menzel, who plays, Elsa. But is it the diva power number that fans of “Let It Go” have been wanting?

Eh. I’m leaning toward “no.”

Menzel earned her superstar rep for belting into the stratosphere on songs like Wicked’s “Defying Gravity” and Frozen’s “Let It Go,” and Frozen 2’s “Into the Unknown” seems to take off the musical gloves and let her fling high notes left and right as Elsa wrestles with restlessness and the call of a new adventure. She’s joined in the chorus by Norwegian pop artist Aurora, who voices an eerie incorporeal voice that’s been summoning Elsa out into the snowy wilderness.

Audio ads for the Frozen 2 soundtrack all feature Menzel’s version of the song, but if that version itself isn’t far enough over the top, the album also sports a cover from Panic! At the Disco, with frontman Brendon Urie repeatedly shrieking the central motif at the very top of his — and humanity’s — vocal range.

It’s all very showy and attention-grabbing. But that doesn’t make it the album’s best song.

As a musical theater nerd, I personally get annoyed whenever lyrics feel repetitive or time-biding — that is, when they seem to exist just to fill out a line, or when they say something generically relatable but not character-specific. The Frozen songwriting team usually avoids those traps. (Robert Lopez co-created Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon, while he and Anderson-Lopez also did songs for Disney’s Coco and the Broadway version of Frozen.) But “Into the Unknown” has a few lyrics that fall flat, like “some look for trouble while others don’t” and “Ignore your whispers, which I wish would go away.” It’s fine, but compared to the tight, character-building lyrics of “Let It Go” — “a kingdom of isolation and it looks like I’m the queen” — it’s not nearly as satisfying.

The other detail that makes “Into the Unknown” less effective for me is that it’s overly packed with drama. If we assess how well the Frozen movies function within the constraints of the musical theater genre — where songs must drive plot and/or provide important character revelations — then “Into the Unknown,” like “Let It Go,” is a “want song.” It arrives early in the plot and reveals the heroine’s inner desire for something new, thus providing the motive that will propel the rest of the storyline. But “Into the Unknown” gives away too much, too early, both structurally and theatrically. High notes spell out drama, which is why “Let It Go” really only has one good one. Too many high notes too often, and the drama becomes less effective.

Think of “Into the Unknown” in terms of the function it serves in Frozen 2’s overall story. In fact, let’s consider in the context of a Broadway show that the first Frozen film has a lot in common with, Wicked.

In Wicked, the want song — the equivalent to Frozen 2’s “Into the Unknown” — is “The Wizard and I.” It’s followed by the big exciting number that closes the first act, “Defying Gravity.” And then later, there’s the “eleven o’clock number”: the late-in-the-second-act showstopper that marks as a crucial character turning point or climax. In Wicked, that’s “No Good Deed.” Each of these songs has one or two dramatic points, but they work because they aren’t all high-intensity all the time.

Perhaps because an animated movie like Frozen 2 doesn’t have as much room to steadily build drama through multiple songs, it seems to have overloaded on drama in one big early number with “Into the Unknown.” But that makes the song less exciting for me than it may be for others.

At first, my pick for best song went to Kristoff’s solo number, “Lost in the Woods” — but upon reflection, I think I was just glad Jonathan Groff finally got a chance to really sing in a Frozen movie. (He’s probably best known now for Manhunter, but before that, he found fame originating Broadway roles in Spring Awakening and Hamilton.) After a few listens, “Lost in the Woods” starts to feel too generic. Any character could sing these lyrics at any time — which is great if you want a song to be a pop hit, but disappointing as a character-builder for Kristoff. It doesn’t help that the out-of-place ’80s rock instrumentation gives the song an REO Speedwagon-y, Peter Cetera ”Glory of Love”-era vibe. Nothing against the Speedwagon, but it doesn’t quite mesh with Kristoff’s 19th-century Norwegian ice-harvester aesthetic.

Basically, I want good musical scores to give me specific, interesting character development through interesting songs that propel the plot — high notes optional. That’s why “I Seek the Truth,” Anna and Elsa’s duet from the outtakes section of the deluxe edition, is probably the Frozen 2 song I’d take with me to a desert island. It’s a beautiful duet with insights into both characters, and it’s one of the more complex songs in the score. (In general, the “outtake” songs are collectively the score’s strongest group of songs, and I wish the movie had had room for them!)

But if the outtakes don’t count, then after many listens, I’ve decided that the best song from the Frozen 2 score is “Show Yourself,” which Elsa sings when she apparently reaches the end of her quest and locates the source of the “disembodied voice” she’s been following. Menzel and Wood get a gorgeous duet in this number, with Wood appearing to attach a definable spirit to the incorporeal voice performed by Aurora in the earlier “Into the Unknown.”

“Show Yourself” also has plenty of suspense and excitement, but at this point in the story, that intensity level feels more earned than it does on “Into the Unknown,” and the duet is thrilling.

Of course, we don’t yet know which song works best in the movie itself. Perhaps, in context, Josh Gad’s songs as Olaf the Snowman will win the day! One thing is a given, however: This weekend, movie theaters will be full of Frozen fans wanting to experience these songs in their full glory. And I’ll be right there with them, heading into the mostly known experience of Frozen 2.

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The program, code-named “Nightingale,” is already creating major privacy concerns. | Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

What Google plans to do with the records is unclear. This episode of Reset explores the potential impacts on patient privacy.

Google has been venturing into new areas of business and recently made huge news when it got access to the health records of millions of Americans through a partnership with the Ascension hospital network.

Both companies insist their goal is “to provide better care to patients,” but the program, code-named Nightingale, is already creating major privacy concerns. Just 48 hours after it was announced, federal regulators from the Department of Health and Human Services announced an investigation into whether the partnership violates HIPPA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

On this episode of the Reset podcast, Christina Farr, a tech and health reporter for CNBC, tells host Arielle Duhaime-Ross that this type of initiative isn’t exactly new for Google.

Google has this history of walking into a new sector and and saying, “Let’s suck up as much data as we can, and we’ll just use our engineering prowess to figure out what products and tools that we can build off the back of this data.” And it seems like they’re going into health care with a similar intention.

So, what does this mean for the Americans whose health records were accessed by Google?

The first thing to know is that when it comes to medical records, it’s not always clear who owns the data, says Nicholas Tatonetti, assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia University.

It is often generally owned by the doctors, hospitals, and organizations that collect it. But it seems to be a patchwork of regulations and frameworks, which is why it’s valuable for these large efforts to bring data together.

For many Americans, that can be worrisome. But it’s important to know that the Google deal is actually routine. It’s part of a how a lot of medical research is conducted today.

Using an example from his own research — in which his team used similar types of databases to discover that two common drugs, an antibiotic and a heartburn medication, can lead to potentially dangerous heart arrhythmias when taken together — Tatonetti says that everything Google’s done so far “was perfectly above board.” But there is still room for improvement.

There is a feeling in the air about who has access to our data, how private [is it], and when is it being shared? When we are left out of that process, it feels a little like we’re being taken advantage of, even if it’s legal. And even if they are appropriately protecting our data, I’m disappointed in these types of announcements [because] there isn’t an engagement of the patient population in order to bring them into this process, especially when it comes to a giant tech company that has the type of position and an ability to interact and reach billions of people.

Still wondering how we should think about what Google is doing with these data and whether there’s a way to avoid all of the mistrust? Listen to the entire conversation here.

Below, we’ve also shared a lightly edited transcript of Farr’s conversation with Duhaime-Ross.

You can subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

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Christina Farr

This blew up because of various reports that some of this information was not anonymous — that, in fact, it contained things about patients that you wouldn’t necessarily want to share with a company like Google.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

What kind of data was shared?

Christina Farr

So the data that was shared was a bit of a mix. There were some cases where it was fully anonymized information, and that was simply to inform some of the analytics work that they were doing. In other cases, the companies came clean that they were sharing some personal health information which could have been potentially identifying. It could be all sorts of different things, including even just dates of service (when a patient went into the hospital).

We haven’t seen yet any clear evidence that patient names were shared in this process. But there’s a reason to worry about Google having access to any identifying information, because if they combine that with any other data they have about us, anything could be identifiable.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

We aren’t just talking about Google knowing people’s blood pressure, right? We’re talking about Google knowing people’s HIV status or whether they have a mental health issue that requires medication.

Christina Farr

Absolutely. The big fear here is that Google will start to learn more about our health conditions and [probably] already has quite a lot of that information.

We’re sharing our health status with Google inadvertently all the time. And the idea that they could then touch our clinical records from when we go see our physicians at the hospital is just terrifying.

Adding to this is that Google has seen other issues with some of the health things that it’s done.

Only a few months ago, there was a lawsuit from a patient at the University of Chicago. And what came out is that Google was supposed to be making sure that information that was shared from the university to their servers was fully anonymous. But it turns out that some dates of service … were actually shared with the company. So that led to a lawsuit.

Before that, there was a whole issue in the UK with DeepMind, one of their subsidiaries, having access to patient data.

This is all adding up to this picture that Google is not properly just managing this. I would like to see Google get out there and deny that and say, “We would never target people based on their medical information,” and just create some policies around this, and maybe even some public forums where people can ask questions of Google and get straight answers about how their health information is going to be used by the company.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

What about Google’s partner here? Why would they want to partner with a company like Google?

Christina Farr

Ascension is a Catholic health system. They have lots of different hospitals and their own C suite that is looking for partnerships with tech companies, as are many other health systems. In the US, it’s quite common now to work with either one of the big three, whether it’s Microsoft, Amazon, or Google.

So, Ascension in theory would have wanted to have their brand associated with an innovative tech company like Google [be] very positive for them. I think they did see an opportunity to work with a big tech company on that and be viewed broadly as an innovative mover within the health care space.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

What was Google trying to do with the data?

Christina Farr

My sources have said that there were a few projects that were outlined with Ascension specifically. One of them was that they were looking to build a tool that could search through a medical record really easily. I also heard that they were looking at early detection of disease. So, for instance, if a patient is likely to have a condition called sepsis, which could lead to a fatal outcome, is there a way that they could look at these large-scale datasets and figure out who’s most at risk and intervene earlier? And then once they had done that for something like sepsis, they could move on to other conditions.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Is it normal for a free company like Google to have access to this data, especially if it’s not anonymous?

Christina Farr

These sorts of agreements are very common in the health care industry. Some folks in the wake of this news say that if these agreements didn’t happen, health care would grind to a screeching halt. So we see these deals all the time. Typically it doesn’t involve companies like Google, but it involves health care technology companies that you may be familiar with.

Optum, [for example], works with health systems regularly on large-scale data projects. And in these cases, they have to sign what’s called a BAA (or business associate agreement), which allows for this data to be shared and can actually include some personally identifiable data.

Google is just latching on to a long history of these preexisting types of projects that we see every day but [that] rarely get reported on. When it’s Google, it’s a big deal. But when it’s not Google, people don’t care quite as much.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

It sounds like, because the name Google is tied to this, people are reacting really strongly.

Christina Farr

That’s absolutely the case. This is standard practice. All sorts of health-privacy folks I’ve spoken to have said these deals are routine now. I think there is still reason to criticize Google.

One piece where I would call them out is consent. There was no evidence here that Google did tell any of the patients or the physicians that they were doing this work. That only came out later, after the news exposing some of the details of the project. They could have chosen to do that. Did they have to? Maybe not. Some BAAs allow for this to be done without consent.

I hope that once the dust settles, we end up having much deeper discussions about what we expect when it comes to our health information, who should own it, who should access it, and in what circumstances should patients have the right to say no.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

You alluded to a small number of Google employees who had access to this data.

Christina Farr

Google hasn’t disclosed yet exactly who those employees were, who had access to the data. They said that this small number of employees were closely monitored, implying that those employees were watched if they did have any access to the information.

At this point, we just have to trust them that those employees weren’t sharing this data or attempting to use it for any nefarious purpose, like selling the data, trying to use it for targeted advertising, or even just building tools off the back of Ascension datasets that they could try to sell down the line to other hospital systems.

We don’t know that they did that. Google is asking a lot by just saying, “Hey guys, a few people had access to this, but don’t worry, we had it under control.”

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

It’s always fun when a large tech company like Google asks you to just trust them.

Christina Farr

Exactly. As has been rightly pointed out, Google has been quite cavalier.

[The company] has this history of walking into a new sector and then saying, “Let’s suck up as much data as we can, and we’ll just use our engineering prowess to figure out what products and tools that we can build off the back of this data.” And it seems like they’re going into health care with a similar intention.

On the one hand, it could be a good thing, because this work does need to be done in health care and these large-scale analytics projects can be really important.

But on the other hand, you know, Google just hasn’t instilled the public with a lot of confidence that they’re going to approach this with all the protections and the controls and just fundamentally do it in the right way.

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To hear the potential positive aspects of Google’s partnership with Ascension and its access to massive amounts of medical records, listen to the full episode and subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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A still from Zack Snyder’s alleged directors’ cut | Vero/Snyder

Zack Snyder’s fabled cut of Justice League and the corporate conspiracy theory behind it.

The most anticipated Warner Bros. superhero flick is one that might not even exist: the infamous “Snyder Cut” of the movie Justice League. It’s an alleged version of director Zack Snyder’s Justice League that has become something of a myth among fans.

Diehard DC Comics fans will tell you that the fabled Snyder Cut is exactly the Justice League story fans wanted: a darker, more cohesive, and overall better director’s version that completely changes the movie for the better.

Whispers of a possible Snyder Cut began soon after Justice League hit theaters in November 2017. The movie that we got, according to Snyder’s biggest fans, is a twisted, gnarled, ignorant work that was knee-capped by outside forces that suffocated Snyder’s true vision. And since its release, a hashtag movement has simmered, bubbling up with each Warner Bros. premiere with increasing fervor.

This week, coinciding with the two-year anniversary of the Justice League’s theatrical release, the Snyder Cut — which until now has mostly existed as a myth spread by word of mouth among fans — is the closest it’s ever been to a reality.

On November 15, Snyder posted pictures on the social media platform Vero, which fans quickly believed were from the cut itself: a still of Henry Cavill’s Superman in the hero’s trademark uniform, and another of the character in what appears to be a resurrection scene that differs from the one in the original Justice League:

Zack Snyder/Vero

Zack Snyder/Vero

The shots Snyder posted might seem like typical superhero-movie fare of an actor in costume. But to devoted fans, the stills are evidence that the superior Snyder Cut does exist, and that for some reason, it’s being withheld from the public.

Adding fuel to the fire were tweets from former Batman actor Ben Affleck and Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot on November 17. Affleck, who vacated the Batman post after Justice League, simply tweeted the hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut:

Gadot tweeted a black-and-white image of her character looking wistful, using the same hashtag:

For the heroes themselves to be spreading the hashtag has given what’s been dubbed the “Release the Snyder Cut” movement more legitimacy than ever before. It’s one thing to have DC Comics enthusiasts get the hashtag trending, but Gadot and Affleck are actual Justice League members.

If even they want the Snyder Cut released, is the fan-driven movement onto something? Could the Snyder Cut really exist?

Warner Bros. Studio hasn’t officially addressed the campaign, which has expanded beyond tweets and hashtags to include real-life demonstrations and events held by wanting fans. But according to the Hollywood Reporter’s sources at Warner Bros., there’s no imminent plan to release any such cut — nor has the studio confirmed it even exists.

That said, DC Comics fans’ interest in an alternate, higher-quality version of the poorly received team-up movie is natural, especially when stars and the film’s own director say one exists. But the “Release the Snyder Cut” campaign has darker motives too, as it galvanizes the fandom’s toxic sect, which has previously clung to conspiracy theories about film criticism and the business of Hollywood that threaten to damage the reputations of all of the above.

#ReleaseTheSnyderCut is a genius marketing push — if that’s all it is

The origin story of the Snyder Cut starts in May 2017, when Snyder left the Justice League project just before reshoots to deal with the death of his daughter. (There are reports that dispute this and claim Snyder was fired much earlier, however.) Avengers director Joss Whedon was called in to handle the movie’s numerous reshoots. The reshoots with which Snyder was reportedly uninvolved, combined with fan theories that Warner Bros. was rushing the film to meet a year-end release date, led fans to believe the finished product had strayed from Snyder’s original vision.

Perhaps “Release the Snyder Cut” wouldn’t have become such a rallying cry if Justice League had been more successful.

After months of anticipation, Justice League turned out to be a critical and box-office disappointment. The more time that passed, the more fans blamed Snyder’s departure and Warner Bros. for its failure. In response, their hopes for some unannounced director’s cut of the film grew. Snyder fans consider his previous directors’ cuts of 2009’s Watchmen and 2016’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice to be improvements upon the theatrical versions, and that fueled a belief that a similar redux of Justice League would also be much more satisfying.

An online petition by one fan in late 2017 that asked for a director’s cut garnered over 179,000 signatures. That kicked off a full-on movement that, among other things, spurred a site called ForSnyderCut.com, which become a centralized hub for all Snyder Cut news. Then there was a January 2018 “march” on Warner Bros.’s Burbank studio to show how serious fans were, along with YouTube videos (in many languages), letters, and phone calls to Warner Bros. itself.

The Ringer has a good breakdown of the various teases Snyder himself has participated in to further fan the flames. Fans sunk their teeth into every one, culminating in a nearly $27,000 GoFundMe campaign to fly a banner at San Diego Comic-Con 2019. It wasn’t until March 2019 (just prior to the GoFundMe campaign) that Snyder confirmed the existence of his director’s cut to a fan while attending a fundraiser for the ArtCenter College of Design’s Ahmanson Auditorium:

Gadot, the flagship actress of Warner Bros.’s superhero universe, tweeting about the Snyder Cut is another sign of how much this movement has grown — and the possibility that the edit may eventually see the light of day.

But despite the star-studded endorsements and Snyder’s crafty hints, only a few people have said they’ve seen the cut. Most of its existence hinges on the word of Snyder himself or secondhand accounts. And others, like director (and early champion of the “Release the Snyder Cut” movement) Kevin Smith, say they’ve heard the cut isn’t in cinematic shape to actually screen.

“There is a Snyder Cut. For sure. That’s not a mythical beast. It exists. Now, it’s not a finished movie by any stretch of the imagination,” Smith told CinemaBlend earlier this year. “The ‘Snyder Cut’ that, again I haven’t seen, but the one I’ve heard everyone speak of was never a finished film. It was a movie that people in production could watch and fill in the blanks. It was certainly not meant for mass consumption.”

The rumors kept moving closer to home throughout 2019. In August, Aquaman actor Jason Momoa posted on Instagram that Snyder let him see the cut and that it was, in Momoa’s words, “ssssiiicccckkkkkk”:

It’s worth keeping in mind that Momoa and Gadot are still playing the heroes they portrayed in Justice League in upcoming standalone sequels. Drumming up interest in Justice League also drums up interest in their upcoming projects; tweeting about the Snyder Cut keeps their names in the news.

Supporting the Snyder Cut shows they also care about what fans want. These actors are essentially saying, without explicitly doing so, that they want the best for their fans. And since Justice League was so universally trashed, Gadot and Momoa aren’t really burning bridges by saying a better version of that movie exists somewhere.

When Wonder Woman 1984 comes out in June 2020, fans will likely remember that Gadot asked for the Snyder Cut to be released. And Gadot will likely be asked about the Snyder Cut again during that press tour.

Even if the Snyder Cut is never released, the Justice League stars who support the movement will have garnered goodwill from fans.

But releasing the Snyder Cut also courts a toxic aspect to this fervent fandom

Gadot and Momoa’s support may be good for them, but it’s not great for those who are less concerned about the Snyder Cut. Despite the motivation or intent behind the Snyder Cut campaign — and regardless of the shape it’s in, if it does exist — it’s worth noting that some of the fans involved have gained a bad reputation. Their demands for the Snyder Cut’s release have grown more intense, and it’s emblematic of how toxic some fandoms have become in the past decade.

The #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement frames the scenario to make it seem like Warner Bros. is keeping fans from the high-quality superhero movie they desire. The movement is not simply about wanting a director’s cut to be made available.

Rather, its supporters actually use the phrase to suggest that Warner Bros. executives like ex-DC Entertainment president Geoff Johns (who takes the brunt of the fans’ blame for Justice League, since it’s theorized he sabotaged Snyder’s vision because it was incongruent with his own); reshoots helmer Joss Whedon; and even Marvel Entertainment, film critics, and many people in between all have it out for Snyder fans. They don’t care whether fans get a good movie out of Justice League, a beloved property many DC Comics fans wanted to see adapted for years. They just care about making money.

This notion continues to send fans on the more paranoid side of the argument into attack mode online:

The online harassment has grown so fierce that a former DC exec deleted her Twitter in fall 2018 to avoid the rage in her mentions. A year prior, a writer from Pajiba received an avalanche of vitriol for criticizing the campaign online.

The reaction, albeit far more intense than previous Snyder-fan antics, is nothing new. It’s reminiscent of the great conspiracy theory of 2016, when a vocal sect of DC and Warner Bros. fans were convinced that Marvel had paid off critics to trash Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Supplemental to that theory is the narrative pushed by Snyder that his movies are made for fans, not critics.

The Snyder Cut contingent subsist on an “us versus them” mentality, where if you aren’t a fan of these poor movies, you must not be a “real” fan of the heroes themselves. Real fans are the ones who matter, of course. Brushing off negative criticism becomes a lot easier when it’s coming from people who aren’t real fans.

This creates a strange paradox of sorts in that true fans ostensibly should enjoy the Justice League movie no matter what, according to Snyder himself. But Snyder Cut fans will argue that the movie they were served was actually the work of other people — Whedon especially — and that they never got to see Snyder’s vision.

Hating Justice League means hating everything that was tinkered with. The Snyder Cut is what “real” fans should want.

Pitting fans against critics and movie execs reflexively creates an environment in which a silly idea like Marvel paying off the media to trash Warner Bros. takes flight. It also encourages some fans to verbally abuse anyone with a negative opinion of the movie or a Warner Bros. property.

Just prior to the release of October’s Joker, fans sent misogynistic tweets and emails — some that vaguely warned of theater shootings — to critics who saw the movie and gave it a poor review. This behavior continues and, in some ways, is entrenched in modern fandom culture, particularly among fans of DC superhero movies, which have suffered poor reviews over the years.

With stars like Affleck, Gadot, and Momoa urging Warner Bros. to release the Snyder Cut of Justice League, it seems like it would be in Warner Bros.’ best interest to eventually release it — if that edit of the film does exist in some watchable form. There are countless fans who want it and the studio could cash in, especially on the anniversary of the movie. I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing more of Gadot and Momoa superhero-ing.

But there’s also a question of what happens after fans — especially the particularly toxic ones — get what they want. They could very well see the release of a Snyder Cut as something they earned by acting and lashing out, as though Warner Bros. is caving in to their demands or rewarding their bad behavior. And it’s hard to believe that’s the best course of action.

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