For most employable humans on this planet, saying racist things in public would be grounds for immediate termination with no pay. Megyn Kelly isn’t most people.
Almost three months and $69 million later, the disgraced TV host who got suspended for her thoughtless on-air remarks about blackface in late 2018, is no longer an employee of NBC. The dollar amount represents the total Kelly stood to earn from her three-year contract, had she stuck around for all of it.
In other words: NBC bought Kelly out of her contract. Megyn Kelly Today launched in Sept. 2017, so she didn’t even make it halfway through her three-year commitment before the network decided it was wiser to just fork over $69 million and show her the door immediately.
As The Hollywood Reporter notes via an unnamed source, Kelly’s contract didn’t even include a non-compete clause that would prevent her from walking right into another job.
Her NBC job has been in limbo since Oct. 2018. At the time, the network pulled her off the air after Kelly defended the use of blackface when it’s part of a Halloween costume. Her remarks prompted an immediate outcry that led to Kelly’s suspension and eventual removal from Today.
(There isn’t any time or occasion in the 21st century that makes blackface OK for white people, to be clear. Not a single one.)
Kelly’s exit from NBC was greeted on social media with a mix of celebration and critical barbs directed at the network. Most seem to agree that she needed to go, but there’s a great deal of puzzlement over the decision to hire her in the first place. Many predicted when the former Fox News pundit was brought in that Kelly’s tenure at NBC would end in disgrace. And hey, here we are.
For Halloween we all should be Megyn Kelly. Just go up to people, say offensive racist things all night and somehow walk away with 69 million pieces of candy. https://t.co/DVJFeX8AaY
Hard to overstate what an own-goal this was. NBC hires a privileged Fox conservative with a history of stupid racist comments, and it takes her all of a year and a half to get fired for stupid racist comments. And they still had to pay her $69 million.https://t.co/WTWHhUopEg
It’s actually quite impressive how catastrophically NBC’s decision to hire Megyn Kelly has backfired on them: full $69 million spent for half a contract + building a brand new (now abandoned) studio for lower ratings and bad press on its flagship show.https://t.co/SK3gCnQmrnpic.twitter.com/U2JUn1ePPM
Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald said he remains undecided about whether he’ll play the 2019 NFL season after the team hired Kliff Kingsbury as its new head coach.
Fitzgerald, 35, told ESPN’s Adam Schefter he’s “taking some time to collect his thoughts” and that the Cards’ choice to hire the offensive-minded Kingsbury had no impact on his decision-making process.
This article will be updated to provide more information on this story as it becomes available.
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The Dallas Cowboys are expected to explore a long-term extension for head coach Jason Garrett this offseason, according to NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport.
Rapoport noted that a potential new contract is expected to be “pretty lucrative”:
Ian Rapoport @RapSheet
From @gmfb Weekend: The #Cowboys are all about the playoffs now, but after the season they’ll get down to business. They will work to extend coach Jason Garrett’s contract. https://t.co/SOTAjh6jts
Garrett originally signed a five-year, $30 million deal in January 2015 and is currently under contract through the 2019 season.
Rumors about Garrett’s job security swirled as Dallas got off to a 3-5 start in 2018. However, that noise quieted as the Cowboys won seven of their final eight games to make the playoffs for the third time in five seasons.
Not only did they claim the NFC East crown with a 10-6 record, but they also advanced to the divisional round of the playoffs with a 24-22 victory over the Seattle Seahawks during Wild Card Weekend.
Overall, Garrett has gone 77-59 during his eight-and-a-half seasons in Dallas. He has just one losing season during his tenure as Cowboys coach, and a Tony Romo injury was to blame for the 4-12 performance in 2015. The team has also won nine-plus games in each of the past three seasons.
Garrett ranks second in wins in franchise history—Tom Landry is first by a mile with 250—but decent regular-season performances have not translated into much postseason success…or appearances. Including last weekend’s victory, Garrett has just two postseason wins in his career, needing four full seasons to capture his first one.
On the other hand, the Cowboys have won a playoff game in two of their three postseason appearances under Garrett, reaching the divisional round each time.
Dallas will take on the Los Angeles Rams on Saturday for a spot in the NFC Championship Game.
We’re fast approaching the moment when expensive hardware will no longer be the deciding factor in which video games you can and can’t play. And it looks like Verizon wants to be one of the first contenders aiming to disrupt an entrenched market.
Leaked emails and images indicate that the company has reached the alpha testing stage for a new service called Verizon Gaming. The Netflix-style interface would allow users to select the tile for the game they want and start playing, based on what we’ve seen.
The report comes from The Verge, which confirms via leaked materials that the service is already up and running (for participating testers) on the Nvidia Shield set-top box. Additional documentation suggests that one goal is to bring Verizon Gaming to Android smartphones.
The testing program features 135 games, including a number of surprising titles. The screenshots show PlayStation exclusives like God of War, Detroit: Become Human, and Knack, unreleased games like Metro: Exodus and Anthem, and even Rockstar’s 2018 hit Red Dead Redemption II, which was only released for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
That’s not to say all of these games are available for testers right now; just that the leaked images show tiles for each of them. It’s entirely possible that the finished version of Verizon Gaming features a slimmed down lineup; an email sent to testers even suggests as much, noting that the alpha test is focused on gauging the service’s performance.
“At a later date, when we advance the product, our library will consist of most or all of the top games you are familiar with — but at this early stage we’re working on the engine and its parts,” the email read.
It’s possible that Verizon’s work on this service is tied to the looming rollout of 5G, the next evolution in wireless data networks. The arrival of 5G means faster speeds all around — for mobile users on the go and broadband users at home both. Crucially, 5G also transmits data very quickly — you might hear this termed as “low latency connections” — which should make it perform much better than current options when it comes to streaming games.
Verizon is hardly the first major interest to signal an interest in a streaming games service, but the company’s arrival suggests a breakthrough moment could be coming soon.
Microsoft, Google, Nvidia and Amazon are all known to be testing streaming services of their own, but Verizon has traditionally existed outside the gaming space. The company’s apparent venture into uncharted territory now suggests a level of confidence in the technology that hasn’t been evident before.
Since this is all technically unconfirmed, that’s all anyone knows at this point. But stay tuned; it’s clear that Verizon is planning some kind of big-time streaming games service, and the fact that it’s in alpha testing now means we could be hearing more sooner than you think.
In a year many deemed lackluster, the most interesting new tech of CES 2019 could not be found in a single one of the more than 4,000 exhibitor booths that populate the convention’s 2.7 million square feet of show floor.
To find it, I actually had to go to a small, unofficial off-site meeting room where the women of Lora DiCarlo, a sex tech company, were huddled together.
The device they’d created, Osé, solves a major problem. For a long time, women have been forced to be content with one-size-fits-all vibrators. But the Osé customizes to fit the vastly different interior anatomies of every woman’s body. Without using any vibration (since that often leads to desensitization), it instead stimulates the clitoris and G-spot in a multitude of ways mimicking a partner’s touch to achieve the “holy grail” of the blended female orgasm.
The Osé, due out in the fall, had not only been banned from exhibiting at CES by the CTA (Consumer Technology Association). A few months prior to the convention, the CTA actually revoked the highly coveted award it initially gave the Osé as a CES 2019 Innovation Awards Honoree in the Robotics and Drone category.
“Our jaws dropped to the floor,” said CEO Lora Haddock about receiving the email notifying them of the abrupt revocation. “We were absolutely devastated.”
The reason? Well, that’s where things get tricky.
The reach around
The official statement from CES claims that the Osé, “does not fit into any of our existing product categories and should not have been accepted for the Innovation Awards Program” since “CES does not have a category for sex toys.”
Lora DiCarlo and other women-led companies (particularly related to sex), are pointing to CES’ storied history of sexism
But that fails to explain why, in the past, sex toys have won similar CES awards. And this also fails to address the fact that Lora DiCarlo’s Osé was submitted, reviewed, vetted, and accepted by CTA’s expert judges as an award-worthy entry into the Robotics and Drone category.
Until, that is, they applied to exhibit their device at the show floor, at which point the CTA denied them due to the Osé being an “adult” product, before taking away their award on the grounds that it now deemed the Osé “immoral, obscene, indecent, [and/or] profane.”
CTA did not provide any further clarification on its awards process, or the exact criteria for what makes a product eligible for a category, or what is or is not “immoral” or “obscene.”
But Lora DiCarlo and other women-led companies (particularly related to sex) are pointing to CES’ storied history of sexism and double standards. And the evidence is hard to deny.
Not only are the CTA’s biases contributing to a hostile environment for women in tech — they’re also driving some of the most innovative new tech away from the CES show floor.
No sex allowed — kind of
The CTA’s caginess around adult content at CES traces back to its origins as a convention with uncomfortably close ties to the porn industry (There was an “adult software” section of CES for decades.) In 1998, the event sanitized its image by splitting from all things sex, leading to a separate Adult Entertainment Expo that takes place a week after CES.
But CTA’s prudishness has since then proven inconsistent, biased, and short-sighted.
Naughty America’s VR/AR Porn exhibit at CES 2017
Image: GLENN CHAPMAN/AFP/Getty Images)
Aside from the CTA seeing no problem with booth babes until very recently (and even then), it saw fit to unveil Solana, the customizable sex robot with a personality, at the trade show just last year. Also last year, the porn company Naughty America had a prominently displayed VR porn room that attracted long lines.
Liz Klinger, CEO of another women-focused pleasure tech company, Lioness, described the Lora DiCarlo situation as “almost a perfect parallel” to what happened to her at CES 2018. Her exhibitor application for pleasure tech that helps women explore their sexuality was also denied on the grounds of being an “adult product.”
“The reasons conveyed to us from backchannels were that [CES] had unspecified ‘bad experiences’ in the past so were banning all ‘obscene’ products,” she said.
It saw fit to
unveil Solana
, the customizable sex robot with a personality, at the trade show just last year
Vibrator company MysteryVibe, another sex tech company with a prominent female co-founder Stephanie Alys, also confirmed to Mashable that their exhibitor application was denied for the same reason.
CTA’s “obscenity” defense against Lora DiCarlo felt particularly thin to Haddock when contrasting the branding between Naughty America and more female-focused companies like Lora DiCarlo and Lioness.
“I mean if I were to try and think of synonyms for ‘obscene’ or ‘profane,’ the word ‘naughty’ would be pretty high up there,” Haddock said, laughing.
I checked out Naughty America’s VR/AR Stripper demo for myself in a meeting room adjacent to the main show floor. It included fully nude 3D models of many different women (only one man) that users move and manipulate like an object around virtual and augmented reality spaces.
The idea, according to CEO Andreas Hronopoulo, is to make the “modern gentleman’s magazine” or the ultimate “man cave.”
I asked Hronopoulo for his thoughts on the banning of Lora DiCarlo, and whether or not he saw any contradictions in CES’ policies toward adult products. “No, I think they’ve been very consistent, and since we’ve been working with them over these four years, great to work with.”
In the margins
Lioness’ Klinger had a different perspective.
“It’s a fairly stark contrast that female sexuality — even health-focused — lands into the obscene but male sexuality, in this case literally pornography, is not and is ‘legitimate technology.’”
“None of us have problems with ‘obscene’ things,” said Haddock. One of the mantras at the nearly all-women company is “never yuk someone’s yum.” But, she said, “If you’re gonna let one in, you can’t turn around and exclude a vagina-focused tech for being obscene.”
Lora DiCarlo may have suffered an astronomical financial hit from investors who flocked to the product after the award, but backed away after it was revoked. Haddock also said that CTA President Gary Shapiro personally sent a letter declaring their product “ineligible” for the Robotics and Drone category, which was an enormous blow to their confidence.
Initially, the CES award had felt legitimizing to the team, since the industry so often diminishes female-oriented tech advancements and stigmatizes sex tech in general. But what came after was a quintessential example of the gaslighting that female innovators in tech experience every day.
Our product that was designed in partnership with a top university robotics engineering laboratory (Oregon State University has ranked the #4 ranked Robotics Lab in the US), inspiring the genesis of OSU Professor John Parmigiani’s Prototype Development Lab. Osé is the subject of five pending patents and counting for robotics, biomimicry, and engineering feats.
We have a team of absolute genius woman and LGBTQI engineers (and a few wonderful men) working on every aspect of this product — including a Doctor of Mechanical Engineering with expertise in Robotics and AI and a Mechanical Design Engineer who specializes in Material Science with a background in Chemistry. Osé clearly fits the Robotics and Drone category – and CTA’s own expert judges agree.
The true icing on the cake is that Lora DiCarlo still showcased the Osé at the Showstoppers press event that is associated but not wholly operated by CES. And despite the CTA deeming it ineligible, the Osé went on to win the IHS Markit Innovation Award in Robotics and Drones.
“What’s really aggravating is that instead of talking about the innovation and engineering, the rapid prototyping we’ve created in-house — which is truly an astonishing accomplishment from my technical director Lola Vars — we have to talk about and deal with this stuff. Again,” said Haddock.
The Osé has the power to redefine the women’s pleasure industry.
The Osé has the power to redefine the women’s pleasure industry. Both the sex and tech industry are both dominated by men, who have far less personal investment in finding new ways to give women pleasure — especially pleasure that they can experience without men.
There have been and continue to be other women innovators in the space, but it’s not just the CTA’s gatekeeping that gets in their way. Even when it comes to the basics of anatomy research, Haddock and her team have found standard data and information on women’s bodies and sexuality lacking.
A 2018 CES-adjacent party at the Sapphire Gentlemen’s Club, showcasing a human woman stripping next to a robotic stripper
Image: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
And that’s exactly why the Lora DiCarlo team is not backing down now.
“What’s really disappointing about what the CTA did is that when you cut out folks like us from creating new innovation and new tech, you’re cutting off the conversation between our industry and other industries, and you’re stifling innovation for everyone,” said Haddock.
CES 2019 was a sexless wasteland of not-so-new products that feel increasingly divided from the realities of the world we live in. And its selectively conservative policies on sexuality, particularly of the female variety, will only guarantee it more cultural irrelevancy.
“Not including sexual wellness, even if you separate it out, is a loss,” said Lioness’ Klinger. “Sex is a part of base physiological function of every single human being — there’s not that many categories you can say that about. It’s certainly a deeper part of most people’s lives than most IoT.”
Luckily, it seems clear that women like Klinger, Haddock, and their team of diverse thinkers will take advantage of that opportunity with or without CES.
“People keep asking me, ‘Are you worried about the fallout — the backlash of bringing light to this situation, of being called bitchy or whiny for calling it out as unfair?’” she told me. “No. I’m not worried. It is fucking unfair.”
Huawei has a widespread presence in Europe, while the US has blocked it since 2012 [Kacper Pempel/Reuters]
Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei has said it has terminated the employment of a Chinese worker arrested on spying allegations in Poland.
Wang Weijing was arrested for “personal reasons”, the company said in a statement on Saturday. “This incident created harmful effects on Huawei’s global reputation,” the company said.
Polish authorities on Friday arrested Weijing and a former Polish security official on spying allegations, a move that could fuel Western security concerns about the telecoms equipment maker.
Maciej Wasik, deputy head of Poland’s special service, said the operation that resulted in the arrest of the two suspects had been under way for a long time and was planned with care.
“Both carried out espionage activities against Poland,” he said.
Polish state TV identified the arrested Pole as Piotr D, saying he was a high-ranking employee at the Internal Security Agency, Poland’s domestic counterintelligence agency, until 2011, where he served as deputy director in the department of information security.
Intense scrutiny
Huawei, the world’s biggest producer of telecoms equipment, faces intense scrutiny in the West over its relationship with the Chinese government and US-led allegations that its equipment could be used by Beijing for spying.
A number of European governments and telecom companies have followed the US in questioning whether using Huawei for vital mobile network infrastructure could open networks to spying by the Chinese government.
US, Canada hold talks amid tension with China over Huawei case
The US blocked Huawei from operating in its territory in 2012, when a House Intelligence Committee report said it was a security risk.
Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, who is also the daughter of the company’s founder, was detained in Canada last month on a US extradition bid.
Her arrest follows US efforts to blacklist the company internationally over security concerns.
In apparent retaliation, China has since detained two Canadians – a former diplomat and a business consultant – on suspicion of endangering national security.
Vine left a gaping wound in the fabric of our society when it was finally killed two years ago. But on the plus side, TikTok is filling the void that Vine left behind. Sort of.
TikTok, formerly known as Musical.ly, was once full of cringey lip syncing clips and painfully awkward dance routines. But in the past few months, TikTok users have been leaning to more creative short sketches, similar to the Vine skits that captured our hearts.
The videos are 15 seconds long — more than double the length of a Vine. The sardonic humor and quick editing still has that beloved DIY Vine quality, though. Obviously there’s nothing that can truly replace Vine, but as TikTok grows, you can’t help but compare it to its predecessor.
Here are 20 TikTok creators whose hilarious videos are more than just lip syncs.
Welcome toSmall Humans, an ongoing series at Mashable that looks at how to take care of – and deal with – the kids in your life. Because Dr. Spock is nice and all, but it’s 2018 and we have the entire internet to contend with.
Internet marketed direct-to-consumer subscription services are the new black – and bonus points if they’re aimed at a person with children. Offering expecting and new parents anything and everything from smart bassinets to leather playmats, the new products extend a gleaming promise of being better, more hands-on, attentive, and nurturing parents than the previous generation (also known as “your parents”). Upwardly mobile millennials are an eager audience, welcoming the new disruptors to a growing industry, but it can be hard to tell whether they’re truly getting something better, or simply something that makes them feel better.
Among these emerging new companies disrupting decades-old businesses, is Yumi, a Los Angeles-based baby food company started in 2017 with a stated goal of changing the way parents think about baby nutrition. With fresh, seasonal offerings that also look beautiful, Yumi is hopping on the subscription service model popularized by the likes of Birchbox. They’ll ship a selection of baby food with ingredients that include chia seed, pitaya, and quinoa, directly to the customer, thereby bypassing the the grocery store shelves.
As of this moment, Yumi delivers the food, in weekly installments, to most western states as well as the tri-state area surrounding New York City. Parents can either pick their own baby food selections, or opt to have Yumi provide them with a “guided journey” where the company will curate their box based on their kids’ needs/age.
Fueled in part by fears of obesity, there’s now an intense focus on childhood nutrition, which has drifted further downward, to rest on the very first things babies eat. As with many parenting decisions, what was once a simple question—what do feed your baby when he’s ready for solid food—has become more complicated. You could go the baby-led weaning method, wherein you just give small and softer versions of what you’re eating to your child and gradually introduce him or her to new foods, or you could choose the baby food (i.e. purees) route. If you opt for the latter, then you have a choice of either making or buying your baby food, and should you decide to go the “buying” route, you can now add another premade baby food option to the mix.
With weekly plans starting at $35, or a little under $6 a jar (with average costs decreasing the more you buy), Yumi’s target customer base is informed, financially-secure parents who are looking for the best, most convenient option—and who are not turned off by the higher cost. The price tag can be explained by the fact the food is made-to-order, basically, and has a short shelf life—unlike the shelf-stable baby food you can buy in the supermarket.
Founded by Evelyn Rusli, a former journalist at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and Angela Sutherland, who cut her teeth in private equity, Yumi came about after Sutherland got pregnant. Like many expecting moms, Sutherland began to think about she should be eating while pregnant, and what her baby would be eating down the road with first solid foods. ”I remember thinking, what do I need to know and how important is nutrition?” Sutherland shared with me. “The first 1000 days has been widely written about—the Lancet wrote about it. This is the most important time in a person’s life for nutrition, be it brain or physical or metabolic development—and it puts a lot of pressure on you as a parent.”
When Sutherland started reading the ingredient lists of store-bought baby food, she found much of it was packed with “filler” ingredients like apple sauce — rendering the food high in fructose and low in nutrition. Used to organizing large swaths of data in Excel, Sutherland recorded her findings on spreadsheets, and discovered that on average 50 percent or more of the calories from the foods she surveyed were derived from fructose.
Together with Rusli, Sutherland set out to create a product built around babies’ first 1000 days, starting with conception, which pediatricians and children’s nutrition experts deem as critically important. Before solids, babies either nurse on breastmilk or formula, both of which include most essential nutrients for brand new tiny humans.
Since the human palate is predisposed to sweet, babies will naturally gravitate to foods that are sweet – bananas, sweet potatoes – and might need some encouragement to eat foods with naturally-occuring bitterness, like kale and broccoli.
When I was trying to figure out how to feed my baby solids, I felt had but one option — to make the food myself. After looking at many labels in stores and reviewing ingredients, amounts of sugar, vitamins, and so on, I concluded that baby food was not only expensive but also relatively unhealthy (as so many of the calories came from sugar, which was mainly supplied in the form of apple and pear sauces), and was exacerbating my kid’s natural preference for sweet tastes. As a food writer and editor, I wanted to give my baby whole ingredients, while limiting the amount of sugar in his food. I was also hoping to get him excited about real food he could see, not food that was in an opaque packet. So, I resorted to what many moms before me and since then have done—I started making my own baby food in the evenings after coming home from work and putting my baby down for the night.
It was fairly easy to make his food while cooking dinner. I started out by steaming some squash, carrots, or sweet potato, and when it was ready, puree it with some of the steaming water. As my baby got older, I started to incorporate more ingredients and spices. I knew what I was putting in my baby food, and because it wasn’t difficult to make—steaming and pureeing are straightforward— I went with it until my kid was old enough to eat whole foods and lost interest in his baby food.
In addition to enjoying making the food, I also liked the low-waste aspect of what I was doing. I would compost the vegetable and/or fruit scraps, use (and reuse) glass jars, and for a fraction of the store-bought baby food, I could make enough to give me a week’s worth of breakfasts, lunches, snacks, and dinners. Plus, it made me feel uber-accomplished.
Sourcing ingredients mainly from local, organic farms near their facility in California, Yumi’s offerings aim to pack a nutritional punch, while keeping the food low in fructose and gluten-free. To get babies used to different flavors, Rusli and Sutherland add spices to some of their blends.
In the name of research, I decided to sample the food I was writing about before, well, writing about it. I received 6 jars (compliments of Yumi) filled with the following: minestrone soup, cran squash soup, kabocha buckwheat, a peach-sweet potato blend with coconut milk, a kale-pear-white bean blend, and porridge made with pitaya, sweet potato, and quinoa, among other ingredients. They were, at least to my palate, quite tasty. If I was looking to feed a baby, didn’t want to prepare my own food, and had the money to do so, I would absolutely order from Yumi.
For me, the two main questions were affordability and environmental impacts: Can you afford to buy this food, or is it easier now to make your own? And while the jars are curbside recyclable, the fallout in the wake of China’s refusal of plastic recyclables has left some communities in a pickle when it comes to what to do with their discarded plastics. Though it’s also worth noting that baby food pouches generally aren’t recyclable at all.
And should parents find themselves financially constrained by the expense, or concerned about their carbon footprint, Yumi shares its recipes and feeding tips to help families out, as well as provide advice, if needed, on what to order for a child off a restaurant menu. And while, at the onset, you may feel judged and turned off by the promise of building “a better foodie,” the ultimate goals are to help families feed their kids better food as well as give them options of making the food themselves.
Finally, there’s a disruption that might do some good.
But once you’ve reached all endings, what then? You’d like to keep this interactive buzz going — at an appropriately adult story level, since, let’s be honest, those slim old-school CYOAs look a little childish and schlocky by comparison.
But in which medium do you want to chase the buzz? What was it about Bandersnatch that spoke to you, exactly?
We’ve presented our recommendations here in trusty branching-path format. As in any good interactive adventure, there will be some dead ends and infinite loops. Choose wisely!
If you’d like to explore the brave new world of interactive video, go to #1. If you’re curious about apps that tell interactive stories, go to #2. If you have your heart set on something like the giant doorstop of a book that Stefan loves, go to #3. If you like interactive books but would prefer to use your Kindle, go to #4.
1. Interactive video
Since the 1990s there have been a handful of attempts to make movies with branching story paths, you learn, with the audience voting via handheld controllers or apps. But none made a splash. Moviegoers seem to prefer a passive, shared experience, and they actually don’t want to be looking at their phone (or controller) in the theater.
But there’s one storytelling video startup on a mission to bridge the gap between movies and video games, one that garnered a lot of buzz and netted around $40 million in funding in 2016: Los Angeles-based Eko.
So you give Eko’s website a whirl. There’s a fun dating-based interactive series called “That Moment When,” which is sort of like Bandersnatch meets Girls. Interactive content and embarrassment comedy seem to work pretty well together!
But there’s only so many times you can throw yourself into cringe-worthy dates before it becomes old (or too real). Same goes for Possibillia, Eko’s trippy 8-minute movie about a relationship discussion that splits into multiple alternate realities. There’s a reason it’s that short.
You try Eko’s prestige project with MGM, a 21st century remake of the 1983 Matthew Broderick movie War Games. You click on the first episode, which is full of hackers talking to each other on video chat. You are encouraged to click between the floating chat windows. And you wait, through some pretty terrible acting, for an actual choice to appear.
There isn’t one. Supposedly the show watches who or what you decided to focus on — even if you’re just clicking between windows to stave off boredom — and that makes some kind of difference in later episodes. Which is, simultaneously, creepy and not nearly interactive enough. You’re sure it sounded edgy and subtle in the pitch meeting, but post-Bandersnatch, ain’t nobody got time for that.
As a Hail Mary move you decide to try Mosaic, the interactive video app that came with Steven Soderbergh’s 2017 HBO murder mystery of the same name. It turns out to merely provide different ways of arranging half-hour chunks of what was, sadly, a pretty dull story. Hard pass.
If you’re still feeling visually driven and want to find out what’s up with interactive comic books, go to #5. If you’re enjoying tapping on your tablet, go to #2.
2. Interactive story apps
You would do anything for love. Would you do that?
Image: episode interactive
You tap on the App Store and search for interactive fiction. Your reasoning — that if you can think of it, there’s probably an app for it already — turns out to be sound. Because indeed there are plenty … if you like cheesy comics for tweens, that is. (And no one’s going to judge if you do.)
The biggest interactive fiction apps, with millions of downloads each, are Choices, What’s Your Story, and Episode. They look interchangeable, seem popular with the Twilight demographic, and are content to stay there. You fire up Choices, and your first choice is between “young adult, romance or vampire.” Episode recommends you start on “The K*ss List,” a story in which your goal is to kiss 10 of the hottest singles in high school.
Elsewhere in Apple’s storehouse of stories, there’s a lot of fantasy dreck written by amateurs. Damn, you think, I wish someone had written an article that sifted through all this nonsense for me. There is the occasional diamond in the rough, though. Such as Reigns, a very casual stripped-down medieval romp that has lately introduced a Game of Thrones version. Or Alter Ego, a text-based “life simulation game” that takes you back to the womb over and over.
Or Lifeline, an innovative, atmospheric tale in which you have to text assistance to Taylor, the survivor of a spaceship crash on a far-off planet. Taylor goes off and conducts his tasks in real time. If you have an Apple Watch, he will ping you on that when he’s ready. Spooky stuff! No wonder there are seven sequel apps starring Taylor.
As you research further, you can’t help notice that a lot of the most critically acclaimed CYOA apps, such as the Sorcery! series, were based on gamebooks from the 1980s. Maybe you should just go straight to the source. On the other hand, there’s a whole world of role-playing video games, many of which give you multiple conversation options, CYOA style. Perhaps it’s time to get lost in those.
To play a gamebook or two, go to #3. To become an RPG nerd, go to #6.
3. In search of ‘Bandersnatch’ the book
In love with the notion of a giant, meaty, interactive novel that can drive you mad with endless choices? You’re not alone. The great Jorge Luis Borges was the first to tinker with the concept in his 1941 short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” which described a novel with infinite variations.
What came 40 years later in the UK wasn’t exactly Borges, but certainly influenced Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker more than the old-school CYOAs. Fighting Fantasy was a series of more than 50 tomes that added the Dungeons & Dragons elements of dice and character scores (for skill, stamina, luck). You fought monsters and solved puzzles as part of your quests. Many of them have now been converted to apps.
You find Fighting Fantasy to be a little more diverse than its title suggests; there are superhero adventures, samurai adventures, space adventures. But as with those CYOA novels, you find the quality to be uneven, since Penguin started pumping the books out on a monthly schedule when they became a British playground craze. The series went on to sell more than 17 million copies worldwide, even as it flew under the radar in the US.
If there is a real-life Bandersnatch book, this is it
By far the best from this era, and the biggest gamebook a British nerd like Stefan would have been playing in 1984, is the Sorcery! series by Fighting Fantasy co-creator Steve Jackson. Over four volumes unfolds a Lord of the Rings-like quest to retrieve the Crown of Kings from the evil Archmage. More mature than the Fighting Fantasy series, it delivers plenty of fiendish puzzles and chill-down-the-spine moments.
Once per book you are allowed to call on your goddess, Libra, to get you out of a jam. To use a magic spell, you memorize a three-letter code that you have to pick out of multiple options. All of which sounds pretty Bandersnatch-y, you think. The fourth book, Crown of Kings, still weighs in as the longest gamebook ever published. If there is a real-life Bandersnatch book, this is it.
It strikes you that there’s so much potential in this medium beyond high fantasy. What about a more realistic gamebook set entirely in the world where most of us live, with mundane choices like Bandersnatch‘s cereal decision? Or a CYOA that takes its cues from the world’s greatest literature?
To play reality-based adult CYOAs, go to #7. To look into more literary options, go to #8. If you prefer to try other apps, go to #3.
4. Fun with eBooks
Image: spark furnace
Screw this paper nonsense, you think. Isn’t this the age of the screen? You’re right. It turns out gamebooks are making something of a comeback in the Kindle age, thanks to this essential efficiency: tapping on a “go to page X” option on your ebook is just a hell of a lot faster than flicking back and forth through sheaves of dead wood.
And it’s in the Kindle store that you find what is probably the most informative and relevant CYOA of our terrible age. Can You Brexit (Without Breaking Britain) was released in 2018; you play an unnamed Conservative Prime Minister who has to navigate the hundreds of pitfalls and thorns around Britain’s increasingly tricky, economy-threatening divorce from the European Union. (“Rescind Article 50” isn’t an option, alas.)
You keep score of your popularity, your authority, your goodwill with EU leaders, via Kindle notes. The text will ask for a score frequently. It also uses the Kindle’s highlight feature well; you highlight boxes and gain keywords when you’ve done certain tasks as a clever way to navigate you through the same “crossroads” entry a few times.
You worry that Can You Brexit might tip over into academic boredom or political screed or dumb edgy comedy. It does none of these things. Instead, it does what most of the news media has failed to do over the past 3 years: It gives you real insight into why the whole Brexit process is so damn fraught. Having walked a book in her shoes, you find yourself with a tiny bit of sympathy for Theresa May, although you’re now also certain you could make a better job of it.
Time to head back to the Kindle store. You’re ready for a palate cleanser after all that weighty politics.
Maybe something where you’re just a regular Jane or Joe, rather than the prime minister? In which case, go to #7. For a refreshing comedy-based riff on classic stories, go to #8.
5. Interactive comics
Meanwhile: Think outside the page.
Image: abrams books
You head down to the nearest nerd haven and ask your local Comic Book Guy for his favorite interactive comics, expecting him to load you down with a bunch of them. Instead he has to think for a while before saying, “well, there was one, by the cartoonist Jason Shiga … what was it called … Meanwhile.” (He’s currently working on a longer one called The Box).
You pick up Meanwhile (also now available as a $5 app) and it becomes immediately clear why more people haven’t attempted this. It’s really hard! The cartoon panels are connected by decision lines that go all the way off the page. A series of page tabs show where the line you chose is going next. The story, about a time machine and ice cream and infinite coin flips, is twisty enough to make you go insane, Stefan style.
But your curiosity has been piqued. You go down a research rabbit hole and discover that Britain went through a short-lived interactive comics phase in the mid-1980s, the Bandersnatch era. There was the hilariously grim satire You Are Maggie Thatcher: A Dole Playing Game. A magazine called Diceman ran a similar interactive story starring Ronald Reagan alongside tales where you play Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper and other 2000AD characters.
Here is a great untapped genre, you think. In fact, you don’t just think it. You make it happen! You work nights and weekends to create great interactive comics. In the wake of Bandersnatch there is no shortage of publishers willing to take you on. You become wealthy and successful, and decide to reward the writer of the article that inspired you. Ten percent of your fortune is a fair commission, right?
6. Role-playing games
In Bandersnatch, Stefan was trying to build a computer-based role-playing game, or RPG. Maybe that’s the direction you should go in — after all, wouldn’t he love to see what’s possible in your era, O Netflix user from the future?
You’ve heard Bioware’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003) described as the best RPG of all time — and yeah, you guessed it, it’s also an app now. So you dive in. Wow! It’s better than you expected, a compelling action-filled story full of that rich Star Wars conflict between light and dark, Jedi and Sith. No wonder fans want a movie trilogy in this setting.
You feel so much perverse delight as your character slips to the Dark Side that when you’re done, you fire up the sequel. After KOTOR II, you know this is your new obsession. You devour the Mass Effect series; the Fallout series. You sample award-winning new interactive content that pushes the envelope, like Life is Strange and What Remains of Edith Finch. Like a true hipster you go through your old-school phase with text adventures like Zork.
Somewhere around Final Fantasy IX, you lose your job — only a day or so after you finally realized you’ve stopped going into the office. Well, whatever. Your parents can keep you in Mountain Dew and Doritos and pay the electric bill, and do you really need anything else to play? When your house is seized by the bank, you devolve into a series of couch-surfing situations; you are thrown out every time for hogging the TV with your console.
Under a downtown bridge, examining a knife you won in a recent fight, wondering why you can’t have a simple conversation without seeing dialogue boxes in the air, you think about taking revenge against the writer of the article that took you down this dark path. Interactive fiction this, buddy.
7. Reality gamebooks
Image: penguin random house
There aren’t a whole lot of gamebooks that even attempt to represent the ups and downs of an average human life. But you find a few leaders in the genre: Life’s Lottery by Kim Newman and Pretty Little Mistakes (plus its sequel in which you win the lottery, Million Little Mistakes) by Heather McElhatton.
The choices here seem like the natural heir to the cereal choice in Bandersnatch: seemingly easy but somehow ominous. Life’s Lottery opens with you as a kid in a British playground in the 1960s being asked a casual question about the hit show The Man From U.N.C.L.E.: Do you like Napoleon Solo or Ilya Kuriakin?
Such choices lead in radical and unexpected directions, almost all of them feeling like mistakes at times. You feel the authors take a sadistic pleasure in leading you down dark paths, but you enjoy (if that’s the right word) its overall resemblance to the regretful let-downs and blind alleys of life.
Still, after dipping into a few satirical office-based gamebooks (In a Daze Work and Choose Your Own Misery: The Office), you realize you’re spending more time making choices at fake work than real work. it’s all getting a little too real.
You abandon your Bandersnatch obsession and return to your other hobbies with a renewed appreciation for the game of life itself, a game that does not tie itself up in a neat bow like most narratives; a game that can, at any moment, stop.
8. Literary gamebooks
Image: penguin random house
There’s a lot of fun to be had with taking sacred tales like Hamlet or Regency-era romance novels and giving them a CYOA makeover (the former in To Be or Not to Be; the latter inLost in Austenand My Lady’s Choosing). Still, in reading them, you can’t shake the notion that you’re reading a piece of edutainment.
The goal seems to be to encourage you to read the source material, to make it accessible in a slightly too zany manner. The adventure, which often loops around back to a single story, is secondary.
So you go to the source material. Shakespeare and Austen lead you inevitably to the other giants of the canon, and before you know it, you’re hooked on Actual Literature. You consider going back to school, maybe getting a PhD in this stuff.
This is not something you expected to result from watching a Black Mirror episode. But hey, in a universe of infinite branching paths, any ending is possible.
The FBI was so distressed by President Donald Trump’s behavior in the second week of May 2017, when he fired FBI Director James B. Comey, that it opened criminal and counterintelligence investigations to determine if the president was acting on behalf of Russia against the United States or had fallen under its sway, the New York Times reported on Friday night. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III soon assumed control of and merged the FBI investigations into his own, and no evidence has surfaced publicly to show that Trump had become a willing Russian dupe. But even so, the Times account pulses like a John le Carré thriller as the FBI works to determine if the country has fallen to the Russians in a silent coup.
FBI antennae began twitching in summer 2016 during the campaign, the Times reports, when Trump urged the Russians to find and release Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. Trump seemed never to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Republican Party platform went soft on the Russians over the Ukraine invasion. Later, as the Steele Dossier gained circulation inside higher Washington circles, directly claiming that Trump had been compromised, worries inside the bureau became palpable. But it was the firing of Comey, buttressed by the interview Trump gave the NBC News’ Lester Holt in which he said he sacked the director because of the Russia investigation, that prompted the FBI to act.
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The Times FBI scoop overshadowed—but not by much—news from midweek that was as redolent of the musk of collusion as anything we’ve encountered since the Russia scandal commenced. Thanks to a redaction error made in a legal filing by convicted felon Paul Manafort’s lawyers, we learned that special counsel Mueller believes that former Trump campaign director Paul Manafort lied about passing, in spring 2016, political polling data to two Russia-aligned Ukrainian oligarchs he had previously worked for. Using his right-hand man— suspected Russian intelligence asset Konstantin Kilimnik as his go-between—the Manafort pass-through splinters Donald Trump’s protestations that his campaign was free of connections to the Russians.
Trump denies knowing about the sharing of polling data. “No. I didn’t know anything about it. Nothing about it,” Trump said this week.
Why did Manafort offer the oligarchs polling data? asked the New York Times. To impress them with his campaign chops? To do them a political favor by lending a window on the Trump campaign? Or, the newspaper alternately muses, was he trying to impress the oligarchs as a way to stall the predations of Russian billionaire Oleg V. Deripaska, an important Putin ally, to whom he is said to owe millions?
Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, who met with Mueller in early 2018, also worked for Manafort on Ukrainian elections, narrowing the circle of participants. He says he didn’t know the data was shared, but, according to Bloomberg News, Fabrizio can be found on email chains with Manafort and Kilimnik. After the election, Fabrizio explained to Frontline how powerful his data was in identifying “Trump targets” who were ready to change direction in the upcoming election.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., did not inhibit himself from speculating that the polling data was put to direct use. “Did the Russians end up using this information in their efforts that took place later in the fall where they tried using the Internet Research Agency and other bots and other automated tools on social media to suppress, for example, the African-American vote?” Warner said.
Manafort’s partner in crime, confessed felon Rick Gates, told an associate that “Person A” (now widely known to be Kilimnik) “was a former Russian Intelligence Officer with the GRU” (the Russian military intelligence agency) according to a March 2018 Mueller filing. The filing later states that Kilimnik still had his Russian intelligence ties in 2016. This might not make Kilimnik the smoking gun in the Russia caper, but surely he qualifies as a hot bullet. That a top associate to the campaign director of an American presidential campaign was directly connected to Russian spies—perhaps even working in their service—sounds like a paranoiac’s fantasy. But there it is.
If Gates knew Kilimnik was spooked up with the Russians, it stands to reason that Manafort did, too. Manafort and Gates had to have known also that the data they shared would have been re-shared with darker audiences, presumably those residing in Moscow. The delivery of the polling data to Russia-friendly powers is consistent with other efforts by Russia to become more intimate with the Trump team. At least 16 Trump associates—Manafort, Gates, Michael Flynn, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Jeff Sessions, J.D. Gordon, Roger Stone, Michael Caputo, Erik Prince, Avi Berkowitz, Michael Cohen, Ivanka Trump and Felix Sater—met face-to-face with Russians during the 2016 campaign or transition, texted or spoke telephonically with them or exchanged emails. The Russians were smarting from the economic sanctions levied on them for the Crimea invasion and famously pressed incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn for relief the month before the Trump inauguration. (Flynn later pleaded guilty of lying to investigators about his conversations.) Russian agent Maria Butina, too, asked Trump about sanctions in a 2015 town hall.
But back to Kilimnik, who was indicted by Mueller in June 2018 for tampering with witnesses in a case about Manafort’s foreign lobbying. The latest court filing also indicates that Manafort and the Soviet-born Kilimnik were working on a Russia-friendly “peace plan” in August 2016, just as Manafort got canned from the Trump campaign after his business with the Russia-aligned moguls in Ukraine was publicized. The duo met again, including in Madrid in early 2017.
Kilimnik’s fingerprints pop up practically everywhere in the Russia saga. He allegedly helped Manafort illegally conceal income he earned while consulting in Ukraine. He also figures in the case of Washington lobbyist, W. Samuel Patten, who pleaded guilty last summer for lying to the Senate Intelligence Committee. He also made illegal straw purchases of inaugural tickets for an unnamed Ukrainian oligarch. (Foreign nationals are prohibited from contributing to inaugurations.) Patten also “worked with Mr. Kilimnik and Russia-aligned Ukrainians looking to build ties to the Trump administration,” reported the New York Times. Called “Manafort’s Manafort“ by some, Kilimnik was political consultant’s point man in dealings with Deripaska, meeting with the mogul and then communicating to Manafort about the sessions via email, including one message where Manafort offers to give Deripaska “private briefings“ on the campaign.
When Franklin Foer contacted Kilimnik last June for the Atlantic via email, “Manafort’s man in Kiev,” as he has been described, was cagey about where he was living. (Mueller has hinted Russia, Foer writes.) “I don’t want to play a role in this zoo,” Kilimnik said. The Foer feature plots Kilimnik’s ascent from Manafort’s gofer and fixer to a position of influence in the Ukraine government the pair helped elect. In 2016, Kilimnik turned his focus to the United States, and as Politico reported in March 2017, he claims to have helped spike a tough-on-Russia plank to the Republican Party platform. Manafort defended Kilimnik against Politico’s questions about his links to Russian intelligence, calling them “smears.”
Where isn’t it raining Ukrainians? A dozen rich Ukrainians who made a splash at Trump’s inaugural have drawn the Mueller probe’s attention, the New York Times reported this week. Like Manafort and Kilimnik, some of them came bearing “peace plans” for Ukraine that just so happen to call for the lifting of Russian sanctions. One of the inauguration partiers, Serhiy Lyovochkin, was one of the two oligarchs who got 2016 polling data from Kilimnik. Lyovochkin, the Times continues, also seems to match the description of the oligarch who got Patten to buy him illegal tickets.
Manafort maintains he didn’t lie about the polling data pass-through, he just didn’t remember making the contact. Should we laugh at his moxie or sympathize with him? It’s conceivable, I guess, that he made so many contacts as Trump’s campaign director that it has slipped his mind. Alas for Manafort, Mueller is there to help us recall what Trump would rather we all forget.
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Open the court filing. Scroll down to the blacked-out sections. Clip and paste those section into a new document and voila, view the redactions. Send your best redactions to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts work for the Ukrainians, my Twitter feed for the Russians, my RSS feed for the highest bidder.
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