Abstract of a paper published on Nature: The use of psychedelic substances at sub-sensorium ‘microdoses,’ has gained popular academic interest for reported positive effects on wellness and cognition. The present study describes microdosing practices, motivations and mental health among a sample of self-selected microdosers (n = 4050) and non-microdosers (n = 4653) via a mobile application. Psilocybin was the most commonly used microdose substances in our sample (85%) and we identified diverse microdose practices with regard to dosage, frequency, and the practice of stacking which involves combining psilocybin with non-psychedelic substances such as Lion’s Mane mushrooms, chocolate, and niacin. Microdosers were generally similar to non-microdosing controls with regard to demographics, but were more likely to report a history of mental health concerns. Among individuals reporting mental health concerns, microdosers exhibited lower levels of depression, anxiety, and stress across gender. Health and wellness-related motives were the most prominent motives across microdosers in general, and were more prominent among females and among individuals who reported mental health concerns. Our results indicate health and wellness motives and perceived mental health benefits among microdosers, and highlight the need for further research into the mental health consequences of microdosing including studies with rigorous longitudinal designs.
Enlarge/ Our lead characters, from L-R: Nynaeve, Mat, Lan, Moiraine, Egwene, Perrin, and Rand. (credit: Amazon Studios)
Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s Wheel of Time books, and they’re bringing that knowledge to bear as they recap each episode of Amazon’s new WoT TV series. These recaps won’t cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. If you want to stay unspoiled and haven’t read the books, these recaps aren’t for you.
New episodes of The Wheel of Time will be posted to Amazon Prime subscribers every Friday.
Andrew: I thought it would be best to start this first one off by establishing our Book Reading Cred.
A friend gifted me a paperback copy of The Eye of the World in what must have been mid-2003, which I have pinpointed so precisely because I know that Crossroads of Twilight had come out but that it hadn’t yet come out in paperback. So I burned through them all once or twice in high school, and then re-read the whole series again sometime in the mid-Sanderson era, and then did my last full-series re-read in 2019 after I talked about EotW on my book podcast.
Lee: Way back in 1997, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, a coworker at the friendly neighborhood Babbage’s suggested I try this fantasy series she’d been hooked on called “The Wheel of Time.” She loaned me her copy of Eye of the World, and then yeah, same thing—it was like falling into a mad vortex of dizzying addiction. The latest book at the time was the just-released Crown of Swords, book seven, and I blazed through the series in just a few months. There have been several re-reads since then, every time a new book landed (even the mess that was Crossroads of Twilight), but at this point it’s been probably a couple of years since I picked one up. However, I’ve got my wife to fill in the gaps for me—I infected her with WoT as I was infected, as is tradition, and she is if anything even more excited about the show than I am.
Andrew: My wife, sadly, had too many antibodies to catch Wheel of Time fever. Maybe from reading so much Tolkien? And like, I get it. It can be a hard series to sell to a skeptic. The conversation always goes something like “well, it’s fourteen gigantic books, and the first one especially is mostly a Lord of the Rings pastiche, and it spends a lot of time in this “men be like this/women be like this” space that hasn’t aged especially well…”
Lee: Half-hating the characters in WoT is a huge core part of the fandom! Maybe we can get her into it after the show!
Andrew: I mean, I saw A Knight’s Tale in her “watch it again” Netflix queue, so I know she’s watched sillier stuff.
All of that being said! When these books are good they are still really engaging. Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones comparisons are going to be inevitable throughout this project, so I will just break that seal now—those books and that series sort of revel in their blood-soaked nihilism, but Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson loved all their characters and very, very rarely deployed “surprise major character death” or “gratuitous sexual assault” as a driver of narrative.
Lee: That’s a good way to put it. I’ve always thought of WoT vs. GoT as kind of like a Star Trek vs. Star Wars pairing—WoT is the Excelsior, all smug and superior and ready to smack you with that transwarp drive. GoT is the Millennium Falcon—dirty, loud, with some swearing, but it’s got it where it counts. Where WoT is all graceful lines, flowing slow motion dresses, stark and shining Whitecloaks, and a camera that can never hold still, GoT is dirt, mud, filth, and then you sh— yourself when you die. (Aes Sedai, on the other hand, clearly do not poop at all.) The differences aren’t just thematic, though there’s lots of that—the two shows visually are very, very different experiences.
Andrew: OK, let’s jump into these first three episodes. Which all, collectively, have kind of a “sweaty TV pilot” feel to me. There’s a lot to say about what they are and are not doing well individually, but as a group they are all doing a ton of heavy lifting—they have to establish a whole bunch of pro- and antagonists and start building their personalities and story arcs. They visit a few locations and talk about a bunch more of them. We either meet or hear about, by my count, three completely distinct subcultures (the Whitecloaks, the Tinkers, and the Aiel). It’s all a bit dizzying, and some of the introductions work better than others.
Lee: It’s a hard ask for a TV writer to get us into this story—you don’t have the luxury a book author has where you can just go ahead and take a thousand pages to do whatever. And Eye of the World is one of the biggest meals to get through in the whole saga. Folks who are coming into this show expecting to see their favorite scenes echoed back at them onscreen are going to have to realign their expectations, because as you say, we’ve got so much we’ve got to get into. What we see of the Whitecloaks is excellent, and Eamon Valda (Abdul Salis) is gratifyingly unctuous. We speed through the Tinker encounter without the aid of a major supporting character—I suppose we’ll get to that in detail, but something to be aware of is that a lot of swizzling has been done to shape the narrative for TV. If you’re still angry that Thom Bombadil didn’t show up on screen to sing you songs or that you never got to see the Scouring of the Shire, you might take issue with WoT’s streamlining for TV.
(Speaking of characters named “Thom,” Thom Merrilin has an absolutely electrifying introduction—though, sadly, the character lacks giant, white twirly mustaches. We’ll probably have more to say about Thom in a future piece.)
You’re an excellent book reviewer—folks, check out Andrew’s podcast!—and I’d love to hear your take. What is the right way for a monstrous book-to-TV adaptation to slim down? How do you balance the need to tell that story with the need to be a coherent, functional, standalone adaptation?
Andrew: Seconded on the Whitecloak introduction. It would be very, very easy to make them dour and joyless pricks, since as a group they are typically the most interested in imposing their rigid idea of what “goodness” is onto characters who we already know to be fundamentally “good.” Making the most prominent Whitecloak—and our introduction to the organization writ large—a slimy, horny sadist who murders Aes Sedai with a smile is one of the strongest moments we get here.
And that’s sort of what you need to do, right? TV shows especially rely on this kind of shorthand, the ability to tell us what we need to know about a person or a group of people with a combination of visual cues and one or two characters. Obviously, some of a book’s depth and complexity can be introduced later, once audiences have gotten a bit more comfortable. But in the early going in a show like this it’s all about combining performances and visuals to create memorable first impressions. The Whitecloak sequences are great at this. The scenes where Moiraine or Lan stand and monologue at the rest of the characters for multiple minutes, less so.
Lee: Moiraine is kind of the primary driver of plot for this batch of episodes, too, and Rosamund Pike has to carry a lot on her blue-draped shoulders. She gets to kick off the story—without any Age of Legends prologue to speak of—and she sets the world’s stage for us. I swear I don’t want to make this an extended book-versus-movie thing, but it is worth commenting that even in the first few minutes, the show updates the books’ canon a bit—in the world of the Wheel of Time, souls are reborn again and again after they die, spun out by the Wheel in new bodies. And in the show, a man can be reborn as a woman, or a woman as a man—something that was not in the books (Aran’gar and Osan’gar notwithstanding—though folks who have never read the books don’t need to worry about the reference).
Moiraine is hunting, as we’re told, for the Dragon Reborn—the reincarnation of the man who, thousands of years ago, “broke the world” and ushered in an age of chaos and darkness. Though the first Dragon was a man, the current Dragon Reborn could be anyone of a certain age. There are long-term plot implications here, and a bunch of the first season is concerned with leading the audience on about precisely who this Dragon is. All Moiraine knows is that it’s almost certainly one of our five main characters—the rougeish Mat, red-haired Rand, brooding Perrin, pensive Egwene, or Nynaeve, the village Wisdom (think half doctor, half person who punches you in the face for disturbing the peace).
Andrew: If there’s one “well actually” moment I will entertain as a book reader, it’s the revelation that Egwene or Nynaeve could be the Dragon Reborn. On the one hand, I really appreciate a lot of what the show is doing to add nuance to the books’ dated and rigid gender roles. Two Rivers women in the books are intelligent and resilient, but they’re also a bunch of arm-crossing braid-tugging foot-tapping scolds. Two Rivers women in the show, from the glimpse we see, maintain that same sense of community but also get to drink and party and have sex. Rand and Egwene are doing sex to each other. And explicitly putting Egwene and Nynaeve on even narrative footing with Rand, Mat, and Perrin serves to emphasize how central they will be to the rest of the story moving forward.
On the other hand, the split between the male and female halves of the One Power is foundational to pretty much everything in the entire series (gender is strictly binary in Randland, though the show seems open to experimenting with this and I hope that it does). The Dragon Reborn is in danger, and Moiraine needs to find him, specifically because he is a man who will channel the corrupted male half of the One Power, dooming him to eventual madness. The last time the Dragon Reborn went mad, he snapped the world in half like a fresh Oreo. Even among people who believe he will save the world, there’s a belief that he must be tightly controlled. This is, again, pretty foundational stuff. And I’m still not sure how the decision to mess with that is going to play out long-term.
Lee: I agree—and there are some things in later episodes that really make me wonder how the One Power works in this adaptation. Though if we’re calling out changes, the one that stuck out to me was the fact that instead of making all three of The Boys (Mat, Perrin, and Rand) inept with The Ladies, Perrin (Marcus Rutherford) starts out married! He’s got a wife! And she’s not a wasting wallflower or nagging angry person—she’s an all-business blacksmith lady, who seems like she knows how to work the forge even better than Perrin does.
Andrew: A wife who the show tragically almost instantaneously murders so that Perrin can suffer from a Deep and Abiding Sadness. It’s one of the show’s cheapest shots, and it was my least favorite thing in all three of these episodes by kind of a lot!
Discussing this without trying to race through it to look at the narrative consequences is difficult—almost as difficult as adapting this series in the first place. And without spoiling things for non-book readers, Perrin’s choice about whether to “take up the axe” or “take up the hammer” makes up the majority of his character arc, and this is a difficult thing to see the consequences of. At first, I thought I was going to hate it—but the more I think about it, the more interesting it becomes. It’s fascinating to see these characters I’ve lived with in my head for 20+ years suddenly doing something new. I think I like it.
Andrew: That feeling of, “Ooh, I am excited to see how they change this!” is the healthiest attitude for a book reader to have going in, I think. The first season of Game of Thrones was a very straightforward, true-to-the-book adaptation of A Game of Thrones. The sheer length of WoT and how the scope and focus of the books change as they move forward meant that was always going to be a lot harder to do for Eye of the World. Honestly, for me, the fact that this show is happening at all is so wildly improbable that I am planning to just enjoy the ride. But that’s a kind of trust that the creative teams behind these adaptations can easily lose, as David Benioff and D.B. Weiss did by the time Game of Thrones had slogged through to its last seasons.
Zooming in a bit: what characters are working for you in these first three episodes? Who seems to have a handle on the character and who doesn’t? I have thoughts but I want to hear yours first.
Lee: Let me start real quick with with our Main Five—Rand, Mat, Perrin, Nynaeve, and Egwene. They’re all perfectly adequate, though Nynaeve (Zoë Robins) and Mat (Barney Harris) are probably given the most to do. Everyone except Rand (Josha Stradowski) has some nice character-building moments (though I expect the community to be divided as hell by Perrin’s wife, and seeing Mat’s cheerful horse-trading dad turned into an alcoholic domestic abuser stings a bit). The “which one is the Dragon!?” misdirection is strong—so strong that a major interaction between Rand and his father Tam is cut entirely out of the first episode. (I’m sure the whole “you’re not really my son” bit will show up later, but its absence is jarring.)
Andrew: There are definitely crumbs here vis a vis Rand’s origins (“no one has red hair in the Two Rivers” is expressed at least once that I saw) but yeah one benefit of not being in Rand’s head for 95% of the story is that he can blend in with the rest of them a little more.
Lee: On the Aes Sedai side, the ones we meet in the first few episodes are excellent—Moiraine is Moiraine, and I’d have to dig to find a real complaint about the way the character is portrayed. (The only critical thing I can think of is that Pike is maybe a little tall for the role, and that’s minor criticism indeed.) Lan (Daniel Henney) doesn’t really match my mental picture of “Brooding Conan-looking Man Mountain,” but he’s got a nimbleness and a careful, deliberate grace that I’m really enjoying. And he’s definitely got a face of planes and angles.
How about you?
Andrew: Yeah, he did not match up with Lan physically in my head, but the distance he maintains from all the non-Moiraine characters and the way he and Pike interact sold me on the performance. I think another early standout is Nynaeve, whose arc is tweaked for the show (she’s carried off by and escapes from Trollocs during the initial attack on Emond’s Field and catches up with the rest of the party from there, rather than following of her own volition), but in ways that are consistent with her character in the books. She’s a bit older and more capable than the other Two Rivers-ians (??), she’s driven by anger but also by her compassion. She’s doing a good job.
Lee: She is definitely less of a sullen rage-filled harridan in the show—I don’t think she’s thumped anyone with a stick even once. So far.
Andrew: There’s time!
The characters who have changed more are the ones who struggle more. Madeleine Madden, who plays Egwene, isn’t doing anything wrong, but she hasn’t left much of an impression yet. And Harris is just coming across as flat and unlikeable as Mat. Some of that might be the show’s fault! Because as you mentioned, show-Mat is substantially more unsavory and less Han Solo-ian than book-Mat. But I do wonder if the onscreen struggles contributed at all to his recasting for season two.
Lee: Yeah—too early to tell, but that would definitely follow from what we’ve seen so far. There’s certainly lots for him to do, since we get to Shadar Logoth relatively quickly and it’s the second big setpiece after Emond’s Field, and from the dagger springs a big chunk of Mat’s character arc for the first few books.
Andrew: To my memory we don’t actually get a PoV chapter from Mat until book three, so it’s also possible that if you were just reading EotW to research the role there would not be a whole lot to go on there.
Lee: Let’s address the giant gauzy elephant in the room: weaving the One Power. I am eager to hear another long-time book reader’s take on how it’s represented in the show—and we get to see a whoooooole lot of weaving when Moiraine throws down against the Trollocs on Winternight. Does it work for you?
Andrew: So… the One Power. Sometimes the show is using it to build up a cool set-piece, I suppose? The bit where Moiraine is pulling bricks out of a building to throw at Trollocs is cool, even though maybe she could have caused less property damage by picking up regular rocks off the ground. And then other times you’re just kind of watching people whisper and move their hands. (That said I do think the title sequence does some visually neat things with the whole “weaving” theme. It ain’t the Game of Thrones title sequence, but that’s maybe an unfairly high bar to set.)
Lee: I love the title sequence. I haven’t fast forwarded through it yet, which is unusual for me.
I’d always imagined the weaves as being different colors for each element, too—though at least so far, we haven’t really gotten a solid Aes Sedai-to-Novice level explanation of the different facets of the power and how the elements work. But I do like the way they’re shown on screen—and I’m also glad that the production has chosen to go with “subtle hand movements” for weaving, instead of crazy flailing. Robert Jordan’s prose is, to my recollection, a little ambiguous on exactly what kind of motions are employed, and I was a little worried that we’d get Aes Sedai looking like they were going all Flashdance as they did their thing.
Andrew: There’s a bit of variation between Aes Sedai on the hand movement question in the books—some people can only throw fireballs by making physical throwing motions because that’s how they learned to do it. Which, as someone who is continually persecuted for my two-finger typing style, I understand.
Lee: Indeed! And Eamon Valda seems to have capitalized on that with his whole “cutting off Aes Sedai hands” fetish. It’s not in the books, but man, it’s creepy and it works for me.
I have one big reservation about what we see of the One Power—but I’ll hold that reservation until after we get a little more Logain screen time under our belts. I might be misreading things, but the show might be going to swerve in a very different direction here from the books when it comes to how gender and channeling works. Maybe. (Now you have to imagine me giving you my very best Aes Sedai cool knowing stare.)
Andrew: We just haven’t met that many channelers yet, but yes, one Big Question that the Dragon Reborn misdirect raises is: what else has changed about the world and the magic system that makes it even possible for a woman to be the Dragon Reborn?
Lee: Exactly so. There’s what I think might be a clue in the later episodes—we’ll get there!
We’re getting pretty long here and I don’t think we’ve either of us really said if we enjoy it so far. I mean, I’m going to keep watching no matter what, because I’m a hopelessly devoted WoT sucker and also because I signed up to go on this journey with you for work so I’m getting paid, but I actually am enjoying it—in spite of the changes, which the neckbeard in me wants to keep calling out. The show is definitely taking a bold tack with how things are moving, striking out in a direction that is aslant from the books. And that’s okay!
Andrew: Yeah I think I mentioned this before but the route this thing took from book to screen was just so improbable that at the moment I am just enjoying that it exists at all. And I spend a lot of time thinking about and analyzing adaptations and why things get changed the way they do, so on a sort of detached academic level I am having a lot of fun with that.
Jeff Bezos allegedly summoned this (and the upcoming LotR series, which I assume one or both of us will also be writing up) with a demand for his own Game of Thrones (I imagine him screaming and stomping his feet like Veruca Salt demanding a goose that lays golden eggs). So far, I don’t think this is that. I find it hard to put myself in the head of a non-book-reader for this, but so far it’s a bit lore-dumpy and too many of the characters have yet to come into focus.
But! I think there is a lot of potential here. And I’m really glad that, at a bare minimum, it has been given the runway of a second season to find its feet.
Lee: That takes the pressure off—and also means we can watch this stuff without worrying about falling in love and then having that love taken away. (Good thing this show isn’t on Fox.)
Andrew: The network TV version of Wheel of Time is not something I want to see.
Lee: This has been fun—and if you folks in the audience have enjoyed it, then good news: we’ll be back next week doing another one of these! Now that we’ve got this giant three-episode chunk out of the way, with all its necessary table-setting, we’ll likely be focusing next time on more episode specifics. There are definitely some interesting things ahead—especially if you’re amenable to allowing the adaptation to take its own path to get to the story’s eventual destination.
Days after a Pennsylvania lab was locked down because a worker discovered vials labeled “smallpox” in a freezer, the CDC says there’s no reason to fear a viral outbreak. Late Thursday night, federal officials announced that the vials did not contain the deadly and eradicated variola virus. Instead, they held a related…
Glassfish is an open-source application server used for deploying Java applications. It supports different Java-based technologies including, JPA, JavaServer Faces, JMS and RMI. In this tutorial, I will show you how to install the Glassfish server with Nginx as a reverse proxy on Debian 11.
Searching for data or photo lockers will lead you to many apps. Some of them are genuinely secure—others, less so—but given that you’re dealing with secure data (documents, photos, security codes, or bank details), you maybe don’t want to trust a third-party iPhone app that happens to have a thousand 5-star reviews.…
Amazon announced a new version of its Halo fitness band at its September hardware event, and now you can lock in a pre-order. Halo View, Amazon’s first wearable with a display, is $50 during the pre-order period. It’ll typically cost $80.
The device, which will ship sometime in December, comes with a year-long Halo membership. The plan includes workouts and nutrition guidance, and it typically costs $4 per month.
Halo View has a similar design to Fitbit’s Charge bands. The AMOLED color screen displays details about your live workouts, activity history, blood oxygen and sleep scores, among other things (some of those features are exclusive to the Halo subscription). You can view text notifications too.
The swim-proof device contains a skin temperature sensor, heart rate monitor and an accelerometer. Amazon claims the battery runs for up to seven days on a single charge, and that it will fully recharge in two hours.
Although Halo View doesn’t have a built-in microphone, there is integration with Alexa. If you connect to the voice assistant through the Halo app settings, you can ask an Alexa-enabled device to tell you about your health summary, sleep quality and other information.
Amazon says privacy was a key consideration in how it designed Halo. “There are multiple layers of protections in place to keep data safe and in your control,” the company claims. It also pledged not to sell health data that’s linked directly to you. You’ll have the option to download your health data or delete it from the Halo app at any time too.
Alder Lake and benchmark leaks have gone hand-in-hand, and that continues to be the case now that Intel has launched its initial batch of 12th Gen Core processors. The leaks keep coming because there are more Alder Lake CPUs on the horizon, both on the desktop and the first mobile/laptop parts. Regarding the latter, a Core i7-12700H has for
One does not normally expect a lot of disagreement over a 13-line patch
that effectively tweaks a single line of code. Occasionally, though, such
a patch can expose a disagreement over how the behavior of the kernel
should be managed. This patch
from Drew DeVault, who is evidently taking a break from stirring up
the npm community, is a case in point. It brings to light the question
of how the kernel community should pick default values for configurable
parameters like resource limits.
New research shows that feral hogs are hungry wrecking balls in the Southeast’s salt marshes. Their appetite for mussels could end up undoing a key symbiotic relation that keeps marshland intact, right at a time when coastal ecosystems are coming under increasing pressure from climate change. As if we needed any more…
The state parliament of Schleswig-Holstein in Northern Germany has already produced plans to make the state government almost 100% open source by the end of 2026.
So far, 2021 has been a banner year for nonsense words. The metaverse—more of a concept than an actual entity at this point—was embraced as the central initiative of Facebook Meta; NFTs, which are quite literally intangible assets, have taken on a life of their own, and now, DogPhone is here to be exactly what it…
Apple does not have a good track record in terms of letting customers repair their hardware. The last decade-plus has seen Apple’s computers become essentially impossible for users to service or upgrade, and the iPhone has always been a locked box. Adventurous owners might follow guides from iFixit to try and do repairs themselves, but it’s a dangerous proposition. Remember, it was just earlier this year, when we discovered that replacing the display on an iPhone 13 would disable Face ID (something Apple eventually made an about face on).
So Apple’s announcement earlier this week that it would start selling parts and tools directly to consumers and offer repair guides was a huge surprise, and a move immediately hailed as a victory for right-to-repair activists. “One of the most visible opponents to repair access is reversing course,” said Nathan Proctor, a senior Right to Repair campaign director at Public Interest Research Groups (PIRG). “Apple’s move shows that what repair advocates have been asking for was always possible.” iFixit was similarly pleased, saying that the move is “exactly the right thing for Apple to be doing.”
Both groups caveated their statements by noting a few catches; PIRG says that Apple’s plans weren’t as comprehensive as the right-to-repair legislation being discussed in more than two dozen states, while iFixit wants to “analyze the legal terms and test the program” before it can say just how much credit Apple deserves. But regardless, it’s still a major about-face. So what led Apple to this move?
Proctor told Engadget in an email exchange that he thinks “combined pressure from consumers, regulators and shareholders has shifted Apple’s thinking.” But he was also quick to point out that there was pressure coming from inside Apple itself. “We saw from some leaked emails from 2019 that many inside Apple never wanted to be hostile to repair in the ways that Apple has been at times,” he said. You probably saw that [Apple co-founder Steve] Wozniak called [out] the practices, but leaked emails show internal concern they were doing the wrong thing.”
Apple has made some other movies recently that show that potential government scrutiny and oversight could be driving change at the company. In 2020, Apple finally let users set different browser and email apps as default on the iPhone and iPad, and Siri has gotten smarter about learning your preferences for different music apps when you ask it to play tunes.
While it’s likely that Apple is thinking about government pressure, this change might also simply be part of the company listening to its users and correcting some mistakes it made over the last five years or so. Take the new MacBook Pro, perhaps the biggest “mea culpa” Apple has ever offered; the company reversed its trend of pursuing thin and light design at all costs and instead actually made the both the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros thicker and heavier than their predecessors. The company also added back ports it had previously removed, killed the unpopular Touch Bar, and generally made a laptop that made it seem like they were listening to consumer feedback. The same could be said for its new home repair program.
Regis Duvignau / Reuters
Apple’s move this week can also be seen as an extension of a program the company launched last year, when it started providing parts and training to third-party repair shops that met Apple’s qualifications. Obviously, this isn’t the same as making it easy for anyone to do repairs, but opening up access means the repair landscape for Apple products has changed significantly in the last few years.
However big of a change this new plan is, though, Proctor and PIRG see this as a first step, something Apple will need to keep up and expand to really meet what right-to-repair activists think consumers deserve. “I think Right to Repair knows what it wants, and it will be really hard to convince us to settle for anything less than an open market for repair,” Proctor said. “If they had done this step years ago, maybe we would have to settle, but we have the momentum, and we are going to empower repair as much as we can. I think most legislators agree: this is just one company and a limited program. The floor got raised, but we aren’t near the ceiling yet.”
iFixit has a similar view on the situation. “[Apple] pioneered glued-in batteries and proprietary screws, and now they are taking the first steps on a path back to long-lasting, repairable products. iFixit believes that a sustainable, repairable world of technology is possible, and hope that Apple follows up on this commitment to improve their repairability.”
As for what’s to come, it sounds like Apple is committed to making this just a first step. The company said that repair options would initially focus on commonly-repaired modules in the iPhone 12 and 13, like the screen, battery and cameras, but it says that more options will come in the following year. We don’t know if Apple will ever give right-to-repair activists everything they want. It seems unlikely that Apple will make an iPhone where you can just pop it open and drop a new battery in, like the phones of old.
Apple can often be a bellwether for the rest of the industry — just look how quickly other phone-makers dropped their headphone jacks. So, it’s possible we’ll see some other big consumer electronics companies make similar moves. “I think other companies will follow,” Proctor said. He also noted that Google had just released software that lets a replacement display on the Pixel 6 be properly calibrated to work with the in-screen fingerprint sensor.” We see a lot of changes in the works, and we are hopeful we can set a new baseline [for] access to repair.” If that happens, we’ll likely remember Apple’s about-face as a major catalyst for these changes — assuming the company follows through with its new stance and makes it easier for owners to repair a wider variety of its products.
Long gone are the days of the monoculture, when everyone settled for watching one of the same three shows every night (because that’s all that was on). Today, the only thing that unifies our viewing habits is how much time we all spend figuring out what to watch—there’s so much good stuff out there, figuring out how…
When Microsoft released its next-gen consoles, the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S, nearly a year ago, it was tough to want for much. After all, both machines used the same interface and UI as their seven-year-old predecessor, the Xbox One. Familiarity allows little room for desire. Why change what (mostly) works?
In recent years, Amazon has killed or undermined privacy protections in more than three dozen bills across 25 states, as the e-commerce giant amassed a lucrative trove of personal data on millions of American consumers. From a report: Amazon executives and staffers detail these lobbying victories in confidential documents reviewed by Reuters. In Virginia, the company boosted political donations tenfold over four years before persuading lawmakers this year to pass an industry-friendly privacy bill that Amazon itself drafted. In California, the company stifled proposed restrictions on the industry’s collection and sharing of consumer voice recordings gathered by tech devices. And in its home state of Washington, Amazon won so many exemptions and amendments to a bill regulating biometric data, such as voice recordings or facial scans, that the resulting 2017 law had “little, if any” impact on its practices, according to an internal Amazon document.
The architect of this under-the-radar campaign to smother privacy protections has been Jay Carney, who previously served as communications director for Joe Biden, when Biden was vice president, and as press secretary for President Barack Obama. Hired by Amazon in 2015, Carney reported to founder Jeff Bezos and built a lobbying and public-policy juggernaut that has grown from two dozen employees to about 250, according to Amazon documents and two former employees with knowledge of recent staffing. One 2018 document reviewing executives’ goals for the prior year listed privacy regulation as a primary target for Carney. One objective: “Change or block US and EU regulation/legislation that would impede growth for Alexa-powered devices,” referring to Amazon’s popular voice-assistant technology. The mission included defeating restrictions on artificial intelligence and biometric technologies, along with blocking efforts to make companies disclose the data they keep on consumers.
The document listed Carney as the goal’s “primary owner” and celebrated killing or amending privacy bills in “over 20 states.” This story is based on a Reuters review of hundreds of internal Amazon documents and interviews with more than 70 lobbyists, advocates, policymakers and their staffers involved in legislation Amazon targeted, along with 10 former Amazon public-policy and legal employees. It is the third in a series of reports revealing how the company has pursued business practices that harm small businesses or put its own interests above those of consumers. The previous articles showed how Amazon has circumvented e-commerce regulations meant to protect Indian retailers, and how it copied products and rigged search results to promote its own brands over those of other vendors on its India platform.
If you’re looking for an alternative smartphone to an iPhone, Samsung handset or Pixel, you can’t go far wrong with the OnePlus 9 Pro. It has many of the bells and whistles you’d expect from a premium smartphone. Just before Black Friday, you can pick up the OnePlus 9 Pro from the OnePlus website, Amazon or Best Buy for $799, $270 less than the regular price.
We gave the OnePlus Pro 9 a score of 88 in our review, calling it the best OnePlus phone to date. The IP68-rated device has a 6.7-inch, 3,216 x 1,440 screen with brightness of up to 1,300 nits and a 120Hz maximum refresh rate. It includes dual speakers, a microSIM slot and a USB-C port that’s compatible with the OnePlus Warp Charge adaptor.
The OnePlus 9 Pro features Hasselblad lenses on the rear, including a 48MP main camera, 50MP ultra-wide camera and 8MP telephoto camera. The array can shoot 8K video at 30fps, but we had reservations about the telephoto lens, which sometimes overexposed images in scenarios with a lot of light.
The device is powered by a Snapdragon 888 processor, which is plenty capable. It comes with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The dual 4,500mAh battery cells should get you a full day of use on a single charge.
The standard OnePlus 9 is on sale too. You can pick it up for $599 at Amazon and Best Buy — $130 off the regular price. It has a slightly smaller 6.5-inch, Full HD display and also runs on a Snapdragon 888 with the same RAM and storage as its larger sibling. Although it too has Hasselblad cameras, the OnePlus 9 has an older 48-megapixel sensor to reduce the cost.
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