Uber to Hire Former Attorney General to Probe Allegations

Uber

A leaked memo from Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, outlines how the company plans to respond to the allegations from a former employee:

First, Eric Holder, former US Attorney General under President Obama, and Tammy Albarran — both partners at the leading law firm Covington & Burling — will conduct an independent review into the specific issues relating to the work place environment raised by Susan Fowler, as well as diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly. Joining them will be Arianna Huffington, who sits on Uber’s board, Liane Hornsey, our recently hired Chief Human Resources Officer, and Angela Padilla, our Associate General Counsel. I expect them to conduct this review in short order.

The big question will be what the company does after the review.

Overcast 3.0

Podcast

My favorite podcast client, Overcast, has had a big update for 3.0:

Overcast 3 is now available, and it’s a huge update, mostly in the design and flow of the interface. I’ve been working on it since last summer, informed by over two years of testing, usage, and customer feedback.

MacStories has as great review (and I don’t just say that because there’s a nice screenshot of Encore in it):

The most notable visual and practical change in Overcast 3.0, however, is the new episode action tray. Inspired by Tweetbot’s tap-to-reveal action drawer in the timeline, Overcast’s action bar groups and simplifies actions that were previously hidden behind swipe gestures or other menus nested in an episode’s page. Upon tapping an episode in a list, Overcast will display buttons to share, star, play, add to queue, and delete the selected item.

I spent all of yesterday listening to my favorite shows in the new version of the app, and it’s still by far my favorite way to listen to podcasts.

Uber’s Institutional Support of Sexual Harassment

Uber

Susan J. Fowler, now an engineer at Stripe, wrote about her year at Uber:

Uber was a pretty good-sized company at that time, and I had pretty standard expectations of how they would handle situations like this. I expected that I would report him to HR, they would handle the situation appropriately, and then life would go on — unfortunately, things played out quite a bit differently. When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man’s first offense, and that they wouldn’t feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to. Upper management told me that he “was a high performer” (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn’t feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.

Mark Zuckerberg Lays Out Facebook’s New Mission Statement

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg has outlined a new mission statement for Facebook:

This is a time when many of us around the world are reflecting on how we can have the most positive impact. I am reminded of my favorite saying about technology: “We always overestimate what we can do in two years, and we underestimate what we can do in ten years.” We may not have the power to create the world we want immediately, but we can all start working on the long term today. In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.

For the past decade, Facebook has focused on connecting friends and families. With that foundation, our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community — for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.

Kara Swisher spoke with Mark over at Recode about the manifesto:

He is particularly concerned about the use of headlines as the only signal to online users. “In most news consumed on paper, the headline is not separate from the content,” he said. “Online the headline is often the only indicator and that is a problem.”

Zuckerberg seems to get how complex it is and how damaging fake news is to the Facebook platform. “Our community wants good information and no one ever said, ‘I want misinformation,’” he said.

The Economics of DistroKid

The founder of DistroKid has written a blog about the service and the growth they’ve seen in the past four years. DistroKid is a new kind of music distributor:

That means we help musicians & record labels get their music into online stores & streaming services (iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, Google Play, Amazon, and more).

Then we collect the royalties and pay out. Payments go either to the artist, or to any group of collaborators that the artist specifies, in any percentage.

This paragraph really stuck out to me:

You’re a dummy if you give any percentage of your earnings to a distributor. For goodness sakes. If you don’t use DistroKid, that’s okay — but please don’t give a cut of your earnings to any distributor unless they’re also massively promoting you and helping with marketing; the only way they’d deserve it. If we took 9% of earnings (we take nothing) there are a handful of artists who’d owe us more than $100,000 each for moving a few files around. That ain’t right.

The whole thing is definitely worth a read.

Spotify Moving U.S. Headquarters

Spotify will be relocating their U.S. headquarters to 4 World Trade Center:

The streaming service will move be moving from midtown to 4 World Trade Center in early 2018, and with the new digs comes a host of new jobs: Spotify will add 1,000 new jobs to its workforce by 2018. The company will retain the 800 employees working in New York.

I’m Donating to RAINN Today

Today’s a great day to donate to RAINN, just throwing that out there.

RAINN is the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization. RAINN created and operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline in partnership with more than 1,000 local sexual assault service providers across the country and operates the DoD Safe Helpline for the Department of Defense. RAINN also carries out programs to prevent sexual violence, help victims, and ensure that perpetrators are brought to justice.

Support that which brings joy and goodness into the world. Support that which helps people. With all the evil lurking in the shadows, I urge everyone to reject it from our music scene.

Queens of the Stoned Age

Suketu Mehta, writing for GQ:

There are a thousand ways to buy weed in New York City, but the Green Angels devised a novel strategy for standing out: They hired models to be their dealers. In the eight years since the group was founded—by a blonde, blue-eyed Mormon ex-model—they’ve never been busted, and the business has grown into a multimillion-dollar operation. Suketu Mehta spent months embedded with them at their headquarters and out on their delivery routes to see where this great experiment in American entrepreneurship might lead.

This entire article is fascinating.

Kid Rock Eyed as Potential Senate Candidate

Roll Call:

A surprising name has been thrown out as a potential Republican contender for Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow’s Senate seat next year: Kid Rock.

The rocker’s name came up as a possible candidate at a Michigan Republican Party convention last weekend. There have been no official decisions announced as of yet.

One step closer to Idiocracy.

SoundSource: Taking Control of Your Mac’s Sound

Rogue Amoeba has released their new Mac app SoundSource:

From SoundSource’s menu bar icon, you can instantly configure the audio devices your Mac uses for Input, Output and Sound Effects. In seconds, you can adjust the volume for each of your audio devices or switch between connected devices. SoundSource can also enable the soft play-thru of audio from input devices. Use the Play-Thru window to monitor any connected input, such as a microphone, right through your headphones or other output.

Against the Current’s Chrissy Costanza Talks About Reading & Leeds Lineup

Against the Current

Against the Current’s Chrissy Costanza talked with Alternative Press about the gender disparity at this year’s Reading & Leeds Festival:

So I started looking into it a little bit more because I didn’t want to speak without knowing what I was talking about. And I saw one site posted, “Who else do you want to see added to the Reading & Leeds lineup?” and I scrolled through the comments. [In] literally 350-something comments, I think there was like a handful of Paramore’s, one PVRIS comment, and that was it as far as girls go. Everything else was male bands and I was like, “Well, we’re all screaming about how there’s no girls on this [festival] and it’s like, you guys, the girls, the fans—I’m watching you guys comment. None of you are asking for girls. None of you—you’re all asking for guys, like every single one of you.” So how is Reading & Leeds supposed to put girls in their festival if you aren’t even supporting each other at this point? If we can make up over half the fans, women are the ones who are most actively commenting on all these things, the most active presences on social media. We have so much power and we’re not using it.

Dear anyone looking to book great artists for your festivals: this thread is full of them.

Google Adds Sharable Location Lists in Maps

Google

Google has launched sharable location lists in Google Maps:

The new feature adds another layer to the already-existing “save” option in Google Maps. Once you pinpoint a desired location, you can hit the “save” button to reveal a number of premade lists including “Want to Go,” “Starred,” and “Favorites.” Then you can choose the list you want the location to live in, or create a new list with a personalized title like “Vacation.” In Google Maps’ menu, you can find all your saved lists in the “Your Places” folder when you want to recall saved locations. Now each list will have a “share” button as well, which lets you grab its link to share with others or share it via different social networks. This should make it easier to share things like favorite restaurants and shopping locations with visiting out-of-town family and the like.

This is a really cool feature. I’ve used apps like Relay and Rego in the past to achieve something similar.

Facebook Tries to Offer Music Labels a YouTube Alternative

Facebook

Lucas Shaw, writing for Bloomberg:

The world’s largest social network has redoubled its efforts to reach a broad accord with the industry, according to interviews with negotiators at labels, music publishers and trade associations. A deal would govern user-generated videos that include songs and potentially pave the way for Facebook to obtain more professional videos from the labels themselves.

Disney Severs Ties With PewDiePie Over Anti-Semitic Posts

YouTube

Disney has severed ties with YouTube star PewDiePie after a series of anti-semitic posts. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Mr. Kjellberg said in a video a few days later that the Jan. 11 clip was a joke that went too far. Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which owns YouTube, pulled ads that run on its videos from the Jan. 11 video within days of its posting, before it was taken down this past weekend. YouTube hasn’t pulled any of the nine videos in question, though PewDiePie’s account took down three of them. Google hasn’t removed ads from any of Mr. Kjellberg’s other videos.

Being a piece of shit is all the rage in 2017.

An Oral History of The Beatles’ First U.S. Concert

The Beatles

This weekend marked the anniversary of The Beatles’ first U.S. concert, the Washington Post has an oral history:

I never was a screamer. It was all about the music for me. The concert started with some warm-up groups, and I was relieved because I had heard about the screaming that went on in England. And I thought: Nobody’s screaming. This is going to be nice; we’re going to be able to hear them. (Laughs.) When they started playing, you couldn’t hear a thing. It was unbelievably loud, like white noise. I remember the policeman near me stuck bullets in his ears.