Category: Perspectives

Point of views, angles and perspectives that are sometimes religious

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A US judge rejects X’s bid to overturn a May 2022 FTC order imposing restrictions on its data security practices and declines to stop a deposition of Elon Musk

—  SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge on Thursday rejected an attempt by Elon Musk’s social media company to overturn a May 2022 order by the Federal Trade Commission that imposed requirements for safeguarding the personal data of its users.

 

A pile of characters removed from a sign on the Twitter headquarters building are seen in San Francisco, Monday, July 24, 2023, after Musk changed the name of the company to X. (Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP)

The company, then known as Twitter, had agreed to the order and a fine of $150 million after the FTC found that it asked for user phone numbers as a security mechanism but used them for marketing.

Musk bought the company later that year and renamed it X. By then, the FTC had launched a new investigation based on an explosive whistleblower complaint by former Twitter head of security Peiter Zatko, who said the company’s engineers had wide access to data with ineffective tracking.

Musk’s legal team asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson to throw out the FTC order on the grounds that the agency had improperly increased its scrutiny after Musk took over and also pressured an outside assessor of the company’s security practices to find fault with them.

Hixson denied that motion after a hearing in San Francisco, ruling that the court was only involved in the underlying case for limited procedural reasons, such as the transfer of case documents to the Justice Department. He wrote that he lacked authority to set aside a consent order approved by an FTC administrative judge.

Hixson also declined to interfere in the FTC investigation by letting Musk avoid a deposition.

In his 11-page ruling, Hixson noted other problems with X’s argument. For example, the company had cited an Ernst & Young employee who said in his deposition that he felt the FTC expected him to find issues with X’s privacy program. But Hixson noted that the same employee said his work was delayed by the constant turnover in the executive ranks after Musk took charge and the lack of designated parties in charge of multiple aspects of the privacy program.

And while it is true the FTC increased its activity post-takeover, it had provided reasons for that, Hixson wrote.

“The government says this increase in investigative activity should not be surprising because Musk directed at least five rounds of terminations, layoffs or other reductions in X Corp.’s workforce, which affected the security, governance, risk and compliance team. The government argues that the FTC was concerned about X Corp.’s ability to comply with the Administrative Order given these significant changes to the company,” he ruled.

“As for deposing Musk, the government argues that the major changes to the company appear to have been initiated by Musk himself,” the judge said in declining to stop the deposition.

— Joseph Menn / Washington Post

— Techmeme

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Companies that provide Microsoft, Google, and others with AI data-labeling services often hire minors, which can be traumatic

 

Niamh Rowe / Wired:

 

 

Like most kids his age, 15-year-old Hassan spent a lot of time online. Before the pandemic, he liked playing football with local kids in his hometown of Burewala in the Punjab region of Pakistan. But Covid lockdowns made him something of a recluse, attached to his mobile phone.

 

“I just got out of my room when I had to eat something,” says Hassan, now 18, who asked to be identified under a pseudonym because he was afraid of legal action.

 

But unlike most teenagers, he wasn’t scrolling TikTok or gaming. From his childhood bedroom, the high schooler was working in the global artificial intelligence supply chain, uploading and labeling data to train algorithms for some of the world’s largest AI companies.

 

The raw data used to train machine-learning algorithms is first labeled by humans, and human verification is also needed to evaluate their accuracy. This data-labeling ranges from the simple—identifying images of street lamps, say, or comparing similar ecommerce products—to the deeply complex, such as content moderation, where workers classify harmful content within data scraped from all corners of the internet. These tasks are often outsourced to gig workers, via online crowdsourcing platforms such as Toloka, which was where Hassan started his career.

 

A friend put him on to the site, which promised work anytime, from anywhere. He found that an hour’s labor would earn him around $1 to $2, he says, more than the national minimum wage, which was about $0.26 at the time. His mother is a homemaker, and his dad is a mechanical laborer.

 

“You can say I belong to a poor family,” he says.

 

When the pandemic hit, he needed work more than ever. Confined to his home, online and restless, he did some digging, and found that Toloka was just the tip of the iceberg.

“AI is presented as a magical box that can do everything,” says Saiph Savage, director of Northeastern University’s Civic AI Lab.

 

“People just simply don’t know that there are human workers behind the scenes.”

 

At least some of those human workers are children. Platforms require that workers be over 18, but Hassan simply entered a relative’s details and used a corresponding payment method to bypass the checks—and he wasn’t alone in doing so. WIRED spoke to three other workers in Pakistan and Kenya who said they had also joined platforms as minors, and found evidence that the practice is widespread.

“When I was still in secondary school, so many teens discussed online jobs and how they joined using their parents’ ID,” says one worker who joined Appen at 16 in Kenya, who asked to remain anonymous.

 

After school, he and his friends would log on to complete annotation tasks late into the night, often for eight hours or more.

 

Read more here:

Companies that provide Microsoft, Google, and others with AI data-labeling services are inadvertently hiring minors, often exposing them to traumatic content

 

 

 

— Techmeme

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Annual Holiday Toy Drive runs through December 11

Mercer County Executive Brian M. Hughes invites county residents, businesses and civic groups to join Mercer County employees in their annual Holiday Toy Drive. 

Toys can be dropped off at a number of convenient locations around the county, and the Mercer County Park Commission will ensure your gift goes directly to a deserving area child.

“The holidays are upon us, and as you shop for your friends and family, I encourage you to consider adding to your list a gift for a child whose family might be struggling at this time of year,” Mr. Hughes said.

“Even the smallest or simplest item can bring a smile to a child’s face, so let’s make this year’s collection bigger than ever.”

Click here or the flyer for drop-off locations.

For information, call (609) 303-0700.

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On Instagram, journalists and creators inside Gaza see a surge in followers as they document the Israel-Hamas war

—  One journalist has added more than 12 million followers.  The work highlights some of the challenges and dangers of covering the conflict.

 

 

NBC News:

 

Before early October, Motaz Azaiza’s Instagram account documented life in Gaza to about 25,000 followers with a mix of daily life and the ongoing hostilities between Israel and Hamas.

 

That began to change in the days after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel and the retaliation on Gaza. Since then, more than 12.5 million people have begun following Azaiza’s feed, which has become a daily chronicle of Israeli strikes.

Many other journalists, digital creators and people active on social media based in the region have seen a similar uptick in followers. Plestia Alaqad, a journalist whose work has been featured by NBC News, has gained more than 2.1 million, according to the social media analytics company Social Blade. Mohammed Aborjela, a digital creator, gained 230,000. Journalist Hind Khoudary drew 273,000 in the last five days of October. Photographer and videographer Ali Jadallah added more than 1.1 million.

 

Those surges have made Instagram, an app generally associated with lighthearted social media posts and lifestyle influencers, a suddenly crucial view into Gaza. The app has previously been embraced by some journalists, most notably photojournalists, but the sudden increase in followers appears to have no precedent.

 

The posts can at times be difficult to absorb. Most if not all appear to be firsthand videos rather than recycled content: People pulled from rubble, children crying over the bodies of their parents, and to-camera accounts of what the journalists are seeing and feeling.

 

The unfiltered coverage, as seen in the Instagram post below, adds a unique element to the broader journalistic efforts to capture what’s happening in Gaza.

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CzBI6aigIqX/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

 

It’s a role that Instagram may not fully embrace (parent company Meta has broadly moved away from the news), but it appears the company is doing little to discourage the growth of the accounts. The app has rules against graphic content but does make exceptions for posts that are “newsworthy and in the public interest.” Some posts are initially covered by a “sensitive content” warning.

 

Instagram and other social media apps have come under some scrutiny over concerns that pro-Palestinian voices have been censored or suppressed. Meta confirmed in October that the company had accidentally limited the reach of some posts but said the problem was a bug that did not apply to one specific type of content and denied any censorship.

 

Meta also worked with the people behind the account Eye on Palestine after the company said it had detected a possible hacking attempt. That account had already been among the most-followed accounts focused on Palestinians before the war, with about 3.5 million followers. The account is back online after a multiday outage and now has more than 7 million.

 

The emergence of Instagram also comes as the social media platform X, once the go-to destination for journalists and witnesses to breaking news, has come under fire for its shortcomings around misinformation related to the conflict. Telegram is also a popular app for unfiltered updates but has a relatively small user base in the U.S.

 

A Meta spokesperson declined to make anyone from Instagram available for an interview.

 

Foreign journalists covering the Israel-Hamas war are facing enormous challenges obtaining firsthand information, and that dynamic is having a deep effect on the world’s understanding of what’s happening especially in Gaza, according to organizations that monitor press freedom.

 

The obstacles for reporters are wide-ranging even for a war zone. These include physical danger to journalists, lack of access to Gaza itself and the logistical challenges of operating within Gaza such as electricity and internet blackouts.

 

Many major media operations including NBC News have sent reporters to Israel to cover Hamas’ attack and the ongoing conflict, during which more than 1,400 people in Israel have been killed and more than 200 have been taken hostage, according to Israeli authorities. More than 9,000 people have been killed in Gaza from the Israeli counteroffensive, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

 

Few foreign reporters are believed to be in Gaza, according to journalists outside the territory. Israel and Egypt control entry to Gaza and have not allowed in foreign journalists, according to a petition this week signed by nearly 100 French journalists demanding access to the strip, France 24 reported Tuesday.

 

Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor of Middle East studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar who closely follows social media, said the accounts are important “precisely because of the chaotic and toxic information environment that is so heavily mediated and sanitised.”

 

“It is so hard for anyone to get into Gaza that these journalists using Instagram are one of the only windows into bearing witness,” he said in a text message.

 

Those challenges were most apparent last Friday when a near-total communications blackout and Israeli bombing made it almost impossible to tell what was happening in Gaza. Also Friday, Reuters reported that Israel’s military had told international news organizations that it could not guarantee the safety of their journalists operating in Gaza.

 

As communication systems were gradually restored, voices from Gaza began to cut through the silence on social media.

 

A video of Khoudary and Azaiza uploaded on Saturday served as a sort of public service announcement confirming they were alive. Many commenters expressed their concern, worried that their lack of posts meant they had been hurt or killed. Neither responded to interview requests.

 

They both said they were struggling to get in touch with family members in other parts of the Gaza Strip.

 

“We don’t know where our families are and we don’t know if they’re ok and we really need to know what they’re going through because yesterday was a very bad night,” Khoudary said. “It was one of the deadliest nights on the Gaza strip.”

 

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cy8gT7PtfwX/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

 

More than 30 journalists and media workers have been killed in the conflict as of Tuesday, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a press freedom organization based in New York. Another nine journalists were reported missing or detained, it said.

 

Sherif Mansour, the Middle East and North Africa program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, said any journalist working in Gaza is in danger.

 

“In a way, the people who are needed the most are the ones who are most vulnerable right now,” Mansour, who is based in the U.S., said in a phone interview.

 

He said that Hamas has contributed to the censorship of journalists within Gaza including through harassment.

 

“It’s basically hard to get by or be able to do work, but there has always been enough people trying to tell the story,” he said.

 

A regular stream of videos and images has made it out of Gaza, but the spread of misinformation and unverified claims — often in the form of legitimate content that is old or inaccurately described — has added to the challenge of verifying information from the region. On Instagram, many of the Palestinian journalists are verified, which means Instagram confirmed the identity of the person behind the account.

 

Jones noted that declining trust in the media has pushed some people to seek information directly from firsthand sources.

 

“They are also providing unfiltered coverage that has a raw and authentic quality, and the current distrust of the mainstream media is not helped by the more sanitised (for understandable reasons) content,” he wrote.

 

 

CORRECTION (Nov. 3, 2023, 9:30 a.m. ET): A pervious version of this article misstated Marc Owen Jones’ position at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar. He is an associate professor, not assistant.

 

— Techmeme

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Ramona Singer not attending BravoCon after using a racial slur in text exchange

Ramona Singer, late of Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of New York City,” who will soon be seen on Peacock’s “Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip: RHONY Legacy,” will no longer be attending BravoCon as of Tuesday afternoon — after she used a racial slur in a text exchange with a Page Six reporter.

 

The reporter was asking Singer about an allegation made in Vanity Fair’s recent investigative story about Bravo and “The Real Housewives” franchise — an assertion that Singer had used the N-word in front of a “RHONY” crew member, which caused an investigation. In the text exchange with Page Six, screenshotted in the story, Singer denied she’d said the N-word, but then abbreviated it.

 

As a result, according to a source, Singer will no longer be attending this weekend’s BravoCon, the three-day event in Las Vegas that will run from Nov. 3-5. Her name has already been removed from the BravoCon app.

 

In November 2021, Variety also reported that Singer had been investigated for making racist remarks during the filming of Season 13 of “RHONY,” which featured Eboni K. Williams as the show’s first Black cast member. That season turned out to be so toxic and unpleasant, and drew such poor ratings, that Bravo decided to split “The Real Housewives of New York City” into two different shows, one with an entirely new cast that premiered over the summer, and was well received, the other into a “Legacy” series with cast members from the show’s 13 previous seasons.

 

Though known to be a magnet for controversy, and a key player in ruining “RHONY,” Singer was nevertheless selected to be among the “Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip: RHONY Legacy” cast, along with Luann de Lesseps, Dorinda Medley, Sonja Morgan, Kelly Killoren Bensimon and Kristen Taekman.

 

Doing “Legacy” as a shorter “Ultimate Girls Trip” instead of an entire season was a solution born out of difficult financial negotiations with previous “RHONY” cast members — including Jill Zarin, who won’t appear on the series, after having spoken publicly about wanting more money in order to do so. “Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip: RHONY Legacy” will premiere in December, though the exact date hasn’t been announced yet.

 

BravoCon hasn’t even begun yet, but the drama is here already.

 

 

— Variety

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A Twitter user since 2007 reflects on leaving due to Elon Musk swapping stasis at the company for chaos

Leaving Twitter

I was on Twitter since 2007, and built a meaningful part of my career on it, and I won’t be posting at all for the foreseeable future

Benedict Evans:

 

 

—  Twitter always used to look a lot like Craigslist.

 

It stumbled into something that a lot of people found very useful, with very strong network effects, and then it squatted on those network effects for a generation, while the tech industry moved on. Twitter, as a technology company, has been irrelevant to everything that’s going on for a decade. It was the place where we talked about what mattered, but Twitter the company didn’t matter at all – indeed it did nothing for so long that people got bored of complaining about it.

 

Meanwhile, lots of people tried to build a better Craigslist and a better Twitter, but though a better product was pretty easy, the network effects were too strong and none of them really worked. Instead, we unbundled use cases one by one. As Andrew Parker pointed out in 2010, a whole range of people from Airbnb to Zillow to Tinder unbundled separate pieces of Craigslist into billion dollar companies that didn’t look like Craigslist and solved some individual need much better. This is often the real challenge to tech incumbents: once the network effects are locked in, it’s very hard to get people to switch to something that’s roughly the same but 10% better – they switch to something that solves one underlying need in an entirely new way.

 

Hence, Mastodon has been around since 2016 without getting much traction, but slices of conversation, content or industry have been unbundled to Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram, Signal, Discord or, more recently, Substack, which someone joked was Twitter’s paywall.

 

Meanwhile, Twitter itself drifted aimlessly for a decade, becoming known in Silicon Valley as a place where no-one could get anything done. This is a big part of why Elon Musk was able to buy it – $44bn was a top-of-the-market price, but even Snap was worth $75bn in January 2022, when he started building a stake – how much bigger should Twitter have been? And so, when he made his bid, there was, briefly, a lot of enthusiasm in tech: pent-up frustration with the existing product and a sense of how much better it could be; enthusiasm that there could be innovation and new product ideas (and, from a small but noisy group, frustration with the politics of Twitter’s content policies, of which more in a moment).

 

It didn’t work out like that. The last year swapped stasis for chaos. Stuff breaks at random and you don’t know if it’s a bug or a decision. The advertisers have fled, and no-one knows what will be broken by accident or on purpose tomorrow. The example that’s closest to home for me was that the in-house newsletter product was shut down – and then links to other newsletters were banned. Pick one! It’s hard to see anyone who depends on having a long-term platform investing in anything that Twitter builds, when it might not be there tomorrow.

 

There are various diagnoses for this. Tesla has sometimes been run in chaos as well, but the pain of that is on the employees, not the customers: you can’t wake up in the middle of the night and decide the car should have five wheels and ship that the next day, but you can make those kinds of decisions in software, and Elon Musk does, all the time. Perhaps it’s a fundamental failure to understand how you run a community. Or something else. But whatever the explanation, Twitter now feels like the Brewster’s Millions of tech – ‘Watch One Man Turn $40bn Into $4 In 24 Months!’

 

Meanwhile, beyond the chaos, there has been no sense for the actual users of where we’re going. There was a plan, both ruthless and chaotic, to reset a broken and grotesquely overstaffed company culture and turn it into a place that can execute, but no coherent sense of what it should be executing. What should those newly hard-core engineers be shipping? A ‘super app’? A universal content platform with no external links? Your financial life? Seriously?

 

And then, there are the Nazis.

 

This is a debate with baggage. Part of the criticism of Old Twitter was a perceived tendency to trigger-happy moderation, and there is in fact a pretty mainstream view in the content moderation world that you shouldn’t (or indeed can’t, practically) try to ban and block anything you don’t like (unless it’s actually illegal), but instead you should have a spectrum of what’s objectionable and control things within that by controlling visibility. Keep things out of the recommendations and suggestions, down-rank them in the feed and replies, and don’t let them monetise or advertise. There will be some bad stuff, but the worse it is the fewer people will see it. Meanwhile, pour your effort into stopping scammers and state manipulation, and think about how your product design might encourage or discourage the rest of us from being mean. Reasonable people can disagree about that. But.

 

But it didn’t work out like that. The teams that looked for bots, scammers and state actors were mostly fired, and the scammers, Nazis and propagandists all bought the ‘Blue Ticks’. These little badges used to mean ‘notable person’ (in a chaotic and inconsistent way typical of the old Twitter) and are now supposed only to mean ‘real person’ (but often don’t) – and they give you both amplification in all the algorithms and a share of revenue if you drive a lot of replies. The more you troll, and the more furious replies you generate, the more Twitter promotes you and the more Twitter pays you. We saw this at its logical conclusion in the last week, with deliberate misinformation promoted by what we used to call ‘fake accounts’ that now get promoted by the algorithm because they pay their $8/month. It turns out that social networks are harder than rocket science.

 

And then, there’s Elon.

 

I once called Elon Musk ‘a bullshitter who delivers’ – he says a lot of stuff, and yet, there are the cars and the self-landing rockets. People generally struggle with one or other of these – they will refuse to accept the problem in selling a car that can’t drive itself as ‘full self driving’, or they will say ‘he didn’t found Tesla!’, forgetting that he’s run it for the last 15 years. Most of what you see at Tesla or SpaceX really is his creation – but half of what he says is bullshit.

 

Until recently, though, the bullshit was mostly about cars or tunnels. It wasn’t repeating obvious anti-semitic dog-whistles. It wasn’t telling us that George Soros is plotting to destroy western civilisation. It wasn’t engaging with and promoting white supremacists. It wasn’t, as this week, telling us all to read a very obvious misinformation account, with a record of anti-semitism, as the best source on Israel. Of course, it had bought a Blue Tick.

 

In talking about this, I am reminded very much of talking about the last leader of the UK’s Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, who had somehow spent much of a career devoted to anti-racism, well, supporting and praising anti-semites (‘the world’s most unlucky anti-racist’). The Chief Rabbi declared that British Jews were afraid of a Labour election victory, and yet too many people with a tribal loyalty to the party just refused to read, see or hear any of this. They decided to blind themselves.

 

If you see a man claim that he’ll have ‘full self-driving’ working ‘next year’ for half a decade and can’t make fun of that just a little, you are probably blinding yourself too, but it does’t matter much. And maybe you don’t care much about this, or have decided not to see it. But I was on Twitter since 2007, and built a meaningful part of my career on it, and I won’t be posting at all, for the foreseeable future, because I think it does matter.

 

 

— Techmeme

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A California judge allows a group of lawsuits against Meta and others alleging social media is addictive for children to proceed based on a negligence claim

—  California state judge allows negligence claim to proceed

— Judge dismisses seven other claims filed by kids and parents

 

Joel Rosenblatt / Bloomberg:

 

 

Minors and parents suing Meta Inc.’s Facebook and other technology giants for the kids’ social media platform addictions won an important ruling advancing their collection of lawsuits in a California court.

A state judge on Friday threw out most of the claims but said she’ll allow the lawsuits to advance based on a claim that the companies were negligent – or knew that the design of their platforms would maximize minors’ use and prove harmful. The plaintiffs argue social media is designed to be addictive, causing depression, anxiety, self-harm, eating disorders and suicide.

More than 200 such suits filed across the country have been assigned to two judges in California — one in state court in Los Angeles and the other in federal court in Oakland. Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl’s ruling applies only to the cases in state court. Her decision is part of a larger battle in which statewide social media bans pit concerns about privacy and national security against personal freedoms and the use of wildly popular apps – especially among young users.

In the California case, lawyers representing minors cleared a legal hurdle that allows them to pursue a claim that Facebook, Instagram, Snap Inc., TikTok Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube knew that the physical harms of social media were “foreseeable and substantial,” Kuhl wrote her the ruling.

The judge pointed to the “obvious inequality” between “unsophisticated minors” and the internet companies “who exercised total control over how their platforms functioned.”

Internet companies have long relied on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a federal statute that has consistently shielded them from liability over comments, ads, pictures and videos on their platforms. Importantly, Kuhl ruled that laws protecting free speech and Section 230 don’t stop the negligence claim in the collection of California cases from going forward.

Kuhl ruled the social media companies could be held liable for the allegations because they are “based on the fact that the design features of the platforms — and not the specific content viewed by plaintiffs — caused plaintiffs’ harms.”

“This decision is an important step forward for the thousands of families we represent whose children have been permanently afflicted with debilitating mental health issues thanks to these social media giants,” lawyers for the plaintiffs said in a statement. “We are determined to use every legal tool at our disposal to hold these companies accountable for their actions and reach a just resolution.”

Google defended its practices in a statement Friday.

“Protecting kids across our platforms has always been core to our work,” José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson, said. “In collaboration with child development specialists, we have built age-appropriate experiences for kids and families on YouTube, and provide parents with robust controls. The allegations in these complaints are simply not true.”

The other companies didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the ruling but they too have defended their practices in the past. Antigone Davis, Meta’s Global Head of Safety, responded to one of the lawsuits in March saying the company wants teens to be safe online and offers more than 30 safety tools for kids and families, including supervision and age verification technology.

The judge also tossed out seven other claims in the lawsuit, including an argument that the companies should be held liable for the defective design of their platforms. The concept of product liability was “created in a different era to solve different problems,” Kuhl wrote. Social media present “new challenges” under the law, she said, because they’re not tangible. “One cannot reach out and touch them,” she said.

Lawyers representing minors in the similar collection of lawsuits filed in federal court also face a request by the companies to dismiss the litigation.

The case is Social Media Cases, 22STCV21355, Superior Court of the State of California, County of Los Angeles.

 

 

— Techmeme

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‘The End We Start From’ review: Jodie Comer makes it through the rain in a gripping survival drama

BAFTA-winning TV director Mahalia Belo crosses auspiciously to the big screen with a lean, effective adaptation of Megan Hunter’s climate-change-themed bestseller.

 

It begins as a spatter of heavy rainfall — nothing out of the ordinary for acclimatized Brits, for whom an actual storm can even be cozily welcome after days of noncommittal drear and drizzle. But then it doesn’t stop, deep-set wet turns to invasive flooding, and what seemed a mere bout of inclement weather has swept you — and countless others like you — out of house and home. Megan Hunter’s speculative novel “The End We Start From” was a neat metaphor for the larger threat in seemingly minor signifiers of climate crisis; briskly adapted by screenwriter Alice Birch, Mahalia Belo‘s fine film version matches its pragmatic, coolly urgent vision of a world coming apart slowly, gradually, and then all at once.

 

Tight in budget and focus, this isn’t disaster cinema of the lurid Hollywood school, revelling in the grand spectacle of destruction. For much of the film’s running time, Belo turns our attention away from the sprawling geographical impact of the great flood and toward its devastating effect on the domestic sphere — as chiefly represented by two young parents (Jodie Comer and Joel Fry) raising a newborn baby with no permanent roof over their heads. That pivot may be a necessity for a modest British indie that’s more in the business of implication than illustration, but Comer’s dauntless, film-powering performance makes an outright virtue of it: The toughness and terror doing battle across her face are more than a substitute for a CGI waterworld.

 

Pretty much everyone in “The End We Start From” is anonymous: The credits identify Comer’s protagonist only as “Woman,” while other characters are granted a single initial each. This could be any of us, the film appears to suggest. Personal idiosyncrasies and backstories are kept to a minimum, while humanizing detail comes via in-the-moment actions. Only the newborn gets a name — Zeb — as a gesture of the film’s guarded faith in future generations. He arrives as the flood begins, his mother initially stranded in her sodden East London basement apartment in as she goes into labor. Once she’s eventually taken to hospital, it’s clear there will be no homecoming.

 

The hospital, filling with water and patients, is no steady sanctuary: London cannot hold. So mother, father and baby bundle into their car and head northwards, through blaring traffic jams and officious roadblocks, to the well-stocked rural home of his doting parents (Mark Strong and Nina Sosanya). There, they live the tranquilly isolated survivalist dream for a time. But supplies run out, and tragedy strikes. Hitting the road again, this time with no destination, the young couple must resort to mass shelters, and in time, to unavoidable separation. Alone with her son, the woman encounters humanity’s most anarchic selfishness in times of crisis; in another young mother (a wonderful Katherine Waterston), an American with a dry line in gallows humor, she rediscovers such quaint notions as allyship and empathy.

 

With previous writing credits including “Lady Macbeth” and “The Wonder,” Birch has form in stories of resilient women in dire circumstances, told with terse rigor. But that’s countered with a hint of stoic sentimentality in “The End We Start From,” an acknowledgement that people sometimes need to spill their feelings (or start an off-key “Dirty Dancing” singalong) to endure another hopeless day. Fleetingly, the film takes the comforting forms of road movie — sometimes without a vehicle — and buddy comedy, but these phases are mere diversions from the protagonist’s increasingly solitary quest to build back life as she knew it. The film invites viewers to consider what they would do in such peril, without supplying any moral guidance as to the right course of action: Comer’s riveting performance, physically tense with desperation, makes us believe, at least while watching, that we’d do whatever she’s doing.

 

Making the leap from small-screen work on such projects as the BBC’s “The Long Song” and Netflix’s “Requiem,” Belo directs with assured restraint, consistently stressing the human factor. There’s no flashy formal flexing here, though Suzie Lavelle’s damp earth-toned lensing, Arttu Salmi’s clipped, on-edge editing and Laura Ellis Cricks’s subtly decayed production design all play their part in connoting a jittery state of emergency, even when we can’t see the cause. (The effects budget largely goes on eerie late-film images of a ruined Big Smoke, where roads have turned to rivers.) The light electronic intrusions in Anna Meredith’s excellent score are in line with the scarce sci-fi detailing elsewhere: At every turn, “The End We Start From” pushes for immediacy, the sense that this awful near future could be tomorrow.

 

 

— Variety

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Expert advises creators and business founders on ‘Founder’s Exit Paradox’

The departure of founders from their business creations, termed the “Founder’s Exit Paradox,” is a complex phenomenon characterized by emotional involvement and detachment.

 

Despite existing research, a comprehensive understanding and guidance that encompass emotional, relational and existential dimensions are lacking.  As founders face the intricate interplay between emotional attachment and separation, they encounter challenges in employing effective coping strategies.

 

Furthermore, departing from not only their ventures, but also the people who contributed to their success, partnerships and collaborators, adds another layer of emotional complexity. Additionally, the transition brings forth questions about finding meaning and purpose in post-exit life

Business Exit Authority Jerome Myers, PE, MBA, PMP explores a holistic framework that addresses the emotional, psychological and practical aspects of the Founder’s Exit Paradox (self-image, relationships, work, health, prosperity and significance) in a way that empowers them to navigate the departure journey with resilience, transform personally and leave a lasting legacy.

To address the emotional complexities of departing from one’s creation, founders must first grasp the nuanced dynamics of the Founder’s Exit Paradox.

 

This understanding involves recognizing the interplay between emotional involvement and detachment, along with the amalgamation of behavioral, affective and cognitive processes. Jerome can extrapolate: 

  • Leveraging Coping Orientations
  • Integration of Positive Psychology Principles
  • Adoption of the Red Pill Model
  • Barrier Recognition and Dismantling
  • Promoting Awareness, Destigmatization, and Community Building
  • Fostering Personal Transformation and Legacy
  • Ongoing Self-Reflection and Adaptation

 

About the Expert

An award-winning engineer turned business strategist, Jerome uses his rich experience and innate understanding of human emotions to ensure that your journey from the corporate world to entrepreneurship is a fulfilling one.  At the helm of a division of a multibillion-dollar Fortune 550 company, Jerome created a thriving $20M operation with 175 dedicated team members. Now, he employs that expertise to advise leaders across diverse industries, from real estate to healthcare, guiding them to double their revenue, harmony in their work-life integration, and ramp up their charitable contributions.

His multifaceted experience also extends to the realm of real estate and academia. Jerome wears the hat of a general partner in a multifamily real estate portfolio and lends his strategic acumen to the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University Entrepreneurship Advisory Board, driving entrepreneurial progress.  But, Jerome’s efforts to guide newly-exited operators (NEOs) doesn’t stop there. As the host of the DreamCatchers podcast, he assists founders in addressing the six centers of doubt they will face following a significant life transition. Self-image, relationship, work, health, prosperity, and significance; none of these challenges are insurmountable when navigated with the right guidance and perspective.

Jerome’s transformative program, the NEO Navigator, maps out the eight key exits a founder might encounter, from leaving a corporate role and becoming a ‘Chief Everything Officer’ to finally transitioning into roles of thought leadership and board chairmanship. He provides strategic guidance for each stage, culminating in successful business exits and the creation of a diverse post-exit investment portfolio. The ultimate goal? To help founders contribute to the causes they hold dear and leave a lasting legacy.  Whether grappling with the early stages of leaving corporate America or strategizing post-exit portfolio building, Jerome’s insightful advice and empathic approach helps founders navigate each transition with grace and confidence.

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‘Monk’ reunion movie starring Tony Shalhoub sets December premiere date at Peacock

Tony Shalhoub returns as the Defective Detective in Peacock’s “Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie,” premiering on Dec. 8.

— Steve Wilkie/PEACOCK

 

“It’s been twelve years since the world has seen a fresh installment of ‘Monk.’ The world has changed mightily in those intervening years and ‘Monk’ 2023 reflects the changing world,” executive producers Andy Breckman, David Hoberman and Randy Zisk said in a joint statement.

 

The “Monk” reunion movie will see Shalhoub reprise his role as Adrian Monk, a consulting detective with obsessive-compulsive disorder and a wide range of phobias. Per the official logline, the film sees Monk return to solve one last and “very personal case involving his beloved step-daughter Molly, a journalist preparing for her wedding.”

— Traylor Howard, Tony Shalhoub, Jason Gray-Stanford and Ted Levine. By Steve Wilkie/PEACOCK
— Tony Shalhoub as Adrian Monk. By Steve Wilkie/PEACOCK

 

Original series stars Ted Levine, Traylor Howard, Jason Gray-Stanford, Melora Hardin and Hector Elizondo reprise their roles in “Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie,” with Caitlin McGee and James Purefoy joining as new cast members.

 

Series creator Breckman wrote “Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie.” The film is directed by Zisk, who executive produced and directed episodes of the TV series. Shalhoub is executive producing alongside Breckman, Zisk and Hoberman, executive producer of the original series. UCP is the studio.

— Tony Shalhoub as Adrian Monk and Melora Hardin as Trudy in “Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie.” By Steve Wilkie/PEACOCK

 

“In coming back, we wanted to do a film that was worthy of our legacy. ‘Mr. Monk’s Last Case’ is a story that is powerful, emotional, funny, heartwarming, and has something to say about the human condition,” Breckman, Hoberman and Zisk continued in their statement.

 

The original series ran for eight seasons and accumulated eight Emmys over the course of its run, with Shalhoub winning best actor in a comedy series three times.

 

 

— Variety