First we had hand cranks. Then real keys, followed by key fobs. And now we have “digital keys,” which enables you to lock, unlock, and start your car from your phone.
Digital keys are still rare, only offered in a handful of models. Before digital key technology can reach ubiquity, there are still a lot of issues that need to be worked out. What kinds of technology should be used: Near-field communication (NFC)? Ultra wideband (UWB)? Bluetooth? How do we ensure it’s safe from hackers? And what happens when your phone runs out of batteries? (Spoiler: it will still work.)
Many automakers already offer digital keys, but it hasn’t always worked flawlessly. Tesla said it was only going to do digital keys for the Model 3, but later opted for...
Alianza and Amazon Web Services (AWS) signed a multi-year partnership to enable traditional communication service providers to deliver and monetize voice and cloud communications services.
The deal, outlined at AWS re:Invent, also highlights how AWS partners to take workloads in key markets and verticals. Alianza's Dag Peak, Chief Product Officer said the joint Alianza-AWS combination has been deployed in more than 100 communications service providers (CSPs). These CSPs, which include Lumen, Brightspeed and Viasat, are moving from traditional voice networks to more nimble cloud platforms.
Alianza, which raised $61 million in financing Oct. 31, offers a cloud communications platform for service providers that replaces legacy systems so providers can provide cloud meetings, collaboration and other digital services.
According to the companies the combination of Alianza and AWS will include the following:
Lower costs and simplified operations by replacing soft switch voice over IP networks and legacy hardware with unified communications as a service platform.
Improved customer service via digital automation and control over customer experiences.
The ability to launch new services built on Alianza and AWS.
A unified view into operations via a software-as-a-service interface.
Upcoming tools so CSPs can offer new generative AI services via Amazon Bedrock and other AI services.
I caught up with Peak to talk about the CSP market and how it's migrating to the cloud.
The market. Peak said the traditional telephony market is still large, but often forgotten as vendors have moved up the stack to communication and collaboration apps (think RingCentral, Zoom, Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams). "In markets where we play well, we don't have many competitors. There's very little interest in smaller service providers," said Peak.
The need for cloud platforms. CSPs need to move as they transform from phone companies to focusing more on communications. "These CSPs can offer a full stack of services all living in the cloud," said Peak. "AWS is interested in Alianza because our platform is allowing CSPs to offer a full stack of services in the cloud and it can pull in the workloads."
Transformation. CSPs don't want to rebuild the traditional services, but modernize everything they are doing, said Peak. However, Peak noted that transformation for CSPs starts with traditional voice services with AI because many customers are mobile and don't want to communicate via apps. Alianza's services are delivered via CSPs to customers via an eSIM. "Not everyone is sitting at a computer. Small businesses rely on telephones," said Peak. "We want to enable AI for the hair salons, insurance agencies, and flower shops."
Use cases. Peak said it's possible to bring tools like sentiment analysis and experience tracking to small businesses. "Contact centers get all the AI love, but we can use AI far down market with AWS integrations," said Peak. The goal is to bring enterprise grade AI services to mainstream businesses without an app.
It turns out that Warner Bros. Discovery actually won’t be pulling Looney Tunes from Max.
On Monday, in a 4:02PM ET email with the subject line “What’s New on Max This December,” Warner Bros. Discovery listed Looney Tunes and The Looney Tunes Show among the titles leaving Max on December 31st. Even though Looney Tunes is a signature Warner Bros. franchise, removing episodes of the cartoon wouldn’t be unprecedented; Warner Bros. Discovery pulled seasons 16-31 of the show from HBO Max at the end of last year. The company also recently shelved the nearly finished Coyote vs. Acme film, though that movie is now reportedly being shopped around.
But a few hours later, the company announced that Looney Tunes’ inclusion on the list of Max...
Twilio ‘underachieved on growth’ and will take ‘some steps to create a more effective GTM motion for Flex and recalibrate our investments in Segment,’ CEO Jeff Lawson says.
Meta is discontinuing a feature that lets you see notifications from your smartphone while you’re using a Quest VR headset, according to the patch notes for the Quest’s v60 update. The company introduced the ability to see iOS and Android notifications in the headset in 2021.
Meta didn’t elaborate further in the patch notes about why it’s removing the feature, and it’s a shame that it’s doing so. Without those notifications, it’s difficult to know what’s happening on your smartphone when you’re fully immersed in your Quest unless you pull the headset up from your eyes — which forces you to stop what you’re doing on your Quest.
That said, if you have a Quest 3, the headset’s full-color passthrough is good enough to see your smartphone’s...
Even by his standards, billionaire Elon Musk had what could only be described as an on-stage meltdown on Wednesday during an interview with journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit.
In an unhinged moment that nobody can say is out of character at this point, Musk told advertisers in the room who have abandoned X (formerly Twitter) due to his antics—which have included calling a vile antisemitic conspiracy theory “the actual truth”—to “go fuck” themselves.
Then, directly afterward, he appeared to call out Disney CEO Bob Iger by name. “Hey, Bob!” Musk said.
On November 15, Musk endorsed an antisemitic post on X and followed up with elaborations that underscored his beliefs. In the post, he said that the Anti-Defamation League “unjustly criticizes the majority of the West” despite “minority groups” being Jewish people’s “primary threat.” He clarified that he believes this behavior “is also not just limited to the ADL” and that the ADL and other groups “push de facto anti-white racism.”
Musk attempted to strike a somewhat apologetic tone during the interview, saying the post “might be literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done,” but added that he thinks his follow-up posts should have clarified he is not really antisemitic. Sorkin asked Musk about the perception that his subsequent visit to Israel to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was an “apology” tour. When he then brought up criticism of his actions by advertisers, Musk said, “I hope they stop. Don’t advertise.”
“If somebody’s going to try and blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself,” he said, to silence from the audience. “Go. Fuck. Yourself,” he said with more emphasis, spurring laughter. “Is that clear? I hope it is. Hey, Bob, if you’re in the audience. That’s how I feel. Don’t advertise.”
Sorkin then followed up by asking Musk what someone in his position should do, when advertising is currently a key part of X’s business, but it’s also beholden to outside interests. “G. F. Y,” Musk said.
“There’s a reality here too, right? [X CEO] Linda Yaccarino is here and she has to sell ads, right?” Sorkin asked. Musk began to stumble and stutter, spurring more confused laughter from the audience, before saying, “What this advertising boycott is going to do is kill the company. And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company.”
Sorkin responded that advertisers would likely argue that Musk himself killed his company with his unhinged behavior. Musk took a turn into apparent New Ageism: “Let’s see how Earth responds to that,” he said.
Okay, okay, I think this is the last of my posts about Elon Musk’s unhinged appearance at the DealBook Summit with ill-prepared interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. We already covered his cursing out advertisers, while predicting that “earth will judge” them, as well as his statement that AI copyright lawsuits don’t matter because “Digital God” will be here before it’s over, but I also wanted to cover one more exchange, in which Musk effectively says that only those who give him money deserve “free speech” (his definition of free speech).
Again, Sorkin does a terrible job of setting up the question, so I’ll do what he should have done and explain the context. Sorkin is asking about a few times recently where ExTwitter has fiddled with the knobs to punish sites Elon appears not to like. In September, it was reported that one of those sites was the NY Times, and the process began in July, whereby something changed at ExTwitter so that NY Times’ tweets were suppressed in some manner (what some might call “shadow banned,” even though that term’s meaning has changed over time).
Since late July, engagement on X posts linking to the New York Times has dropped dramatically. The drop in shares and other engagement on tweets with Times links is abrupt, and is not reflected in links to similar news organizations including CNN, the Washington Post, and the BBC….
Now, remember, nonsense conspiracy theories about “shadow banning” were one of the reasons why Elon insisted he had to take over the company “to protect free speech.” But as soon as he was at the controls, he immediately started using the same tools to “shadow ban” some of those he disliked.
Anyway, Sorkin asks Musk about this, and Musk’s response is somewhat incredible to see. He more or less says that if you don’t give him money, you don’t deserve his version of “free speech” (which is the ability to post on ExTwitter).
The discussion starts out weird enough:
ARS: The New York Times newspaper it appeared over the summer, to be throttled.
Elon: What? What did?
ARS: The NY Times.
Elon: Well, we do require that that everyone has to buy a subscription and we don’t make exceptions for anyone and and I think if I want the New York Times I have to pay for a subscription and they don’t give me a free subscription, so I’m not going to give them a free subscription
First of all, what? What do you mean “we do require that everyone has to buy a subscription” because that’s literally not true. Over 99% of users on ExTwitter use the platform for free. Only a tiny, tiny percentage pay for a subscription.
Sorkin tries to bring it back around to throttling, but Musk continues to talk nonsensically about subscriptions, which have fuck all to do with what Sorkin is asking him about.
ARS: But were you throttling the New York Times relative to other news organizations? Relative to everybody else? Was it specific to the to the Times?
Musk: They didn’t buy a subscription. By the way, it only costs like a thousand dollars a month, so if they just do that then they’re back in the saddle.
ARS: But you are saying it was throttled.
Musk: No, I’m saying…
ARS: I’m saying I mean was there a conversation that you had with somebody you said, ‘look, you know, I’m unhappy with the Times, they should either be buying the subscription or I don’t like their content or whatever.’ Whatever.
Musk: Any organization that refuses to buy a subscription is is not going to be recommended.
So, Sorkin and Musk are obviously talking at cross purposes here. Sorkin’s asking about deliberate throttling. Musk is trying to say that news orgs that don’t pay $1,000/month (which is not, as Musk implies, cheap, nor is it worth it, given how little traffic Twitter actually sends to news sites) aren’t recommended.
The correct question for Sorkin to ask here is what’s the difference between “not recommended” and “throttled,” if any, because the evidence suggests that the Times was deliberately punished beyond just not being “recommended.” And, yes, this exact kind of thing was part of what Musk said he had to buy Twitter to stop. So Sorkin jumps ahead (awkwardly) to try to sorta make that point:
ARS: But then what does that say about free speech? And what does it say about amplifying certain voices…
Musk: Well, it says free speech is not exactly free, it costs a little bit.
Which, um, is kinda a big claim. Especially given what he’s said about free speech in the past. Sorkin seems stumped for a moment and so Elon starts laughing and then comes up with some non sequitur from South Park.
Musk: You know, it’s like… uh… South Park like they say: you know freedom isn’t free, it costs of buck o’ five or whatever. So but it’s pretty cheap. Okay? It’s low cost low cost freedom.
So, again, he doesn’t actually answer the question or address the underlying issue, which is that for all the claims that he purchased Twitter to stop those kinds of knob fiddling that he (incorrectly) believes were being done for ideological reasons, he’s now much more actively fiddling with the knobs, including suppressing speech of those who won’t give him money.
The sense of entitlement, again, is astounding. It’s basically, “you don’t get free speech unless you pay me.”
The report highlights Sinch’s innovation, heritage, and go-to-market strategy
ATLANTA, GA, USA and STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – November 29, 2023 – Sinch, which powers meaningful conversations between businesses and their customers through its Customer Communications Cloud, today announced that the company has been positioned as a Leader in the Omdia Universe: CPaaS Platform Providers 2023/24. The evaluation was based on specific criteria that analyzed Sinch’s strategy, execution, and market presence.
According to Omdia: “Sinch should appear on your shortlist if:
“You are looking for a CPaaS provider with a solid heritage in providing global high quality, high-volume messaging services to enterprises and telcos – including organizations with complex needs – which also has strong capability in other important customer-facing channels, including voice, email, and messaging apps.
“You are an enterprise assessing how to cost-effectively achieve digital transformation within your customer engagement channel, including using AI.”
“Sinch performs strongly across most categories in the Omdia Universe, leading or jointly leading in six categories,” said Pamela Clark-Dickson, Principal Analyst, Advanced Messaging and Communications for Omdia. “The vendor is classified as a Leader in the CPaaS Omdia Universe, with well above average category scores for APIs, value-added services and packaged solutions, innovation, go-to-market strategy, number of customers, non-functional requirements, and implementation services.
“Sinch also performs strongly across strategy and innovation, market momentum and vendor execution, also with an average score of 88%. These scores underline that the vendor has a clear roadmap for continuing to develop its CPaaS platform in line with emerging market trends, that it has a significant global presence in terms of both reach and customer base, and that it is effectively supporting its enterprise customers to achieve their business goals.”
“The recognition as a Leader further validates our strong position in a global and growing market,” said Sinch CEO Laurinda Pang. “A great customer experience leverages the right communications channel, at the right time. As Omdia has reported, more than 150,000 businesses around the world have turned to Sinch to keep pace with their customers as consumer preferences evolve.”
Omdia Universe reports help companies choose a partner that meets their business needs today and tomorrow. Omdia helps identify which vendors are leaders, challengers or prospects by assessing solution capabilities together with analysis of a vendor’s strategy, execution and market presence. Technology buyers can then make informed vendor selection decisions, by applying this analysis to their own specific business context.
Sinch powers meaningful conversations between businesses and their customers through its Customer Communications Cloud. More than 150,000 businesses – including many of the world’s largest tech companies – rely on Sinch and its global super network, which is the most secure and reliable network for messaging, voice and email. Sinch has been profitable and fast-growing since it was founded in 2008. It is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, with shares traded at NASDAQ Stockholm: XSTO:SINCH. Learn more at sinch.com. Learn more at sinch.com.
At Microsoft's Ignite 2023 conference the company fleshed out its generative AI offerings and strategy and, in some places, put some serious distance between it and the competition.
Here's a look at three Ignite 2023 takeaways. Also see the following for coverage:
With Copilot for Azure, Microsoft is taking direct shots at Duet AI from Google.
Scaling up and down and managing cloud applications/infrastructure has always been difficult for many IT shops. Copilot for Azure allows users, via a natural language chat interface, to discover app configuration, infrastructure details and optimize the workloads, etc. These chores have been a major issue for almost any enterprise running in the Azure cloud until now. Copilot for Azure can be particularly helpful for organizations that want to be mindful of all the services they use, costs, etc. Particularly interesting is the option that the customers can analyze their observability data using Copilot for Azure in optimizing the cloud applications but also diagnosing the incidents and/or configuring it the right way. Copilot for Azure will directly compete with a lot of AIOps and observability vendors.
Copilot for Azure will also simplify management a good bit--a lot of customers have found managing Azure at the infrastructure level more complicated relative to other hyperscalers.
The caveat for Copilot for Azure is that it's a first version that needs to prove the accuracy and worthiness of the usage. In addition to the accuracy and hallucination issues, if the recommendation is wrong it could cost customers more. Copilot for Azure could become the code base for effectively managing the app and infrastructure layer. If Copilot for Azure works as advertised when it goes to GA, enterprises can create a blueprint every time a new app is deployed and continuously optimize. It remains to be seen how Copilot for Azure usage develops.
Other items worth noting about Copilot for Azure.
The what-if analysis of the cost and performance module is going to compete directly against a lot of FinOps vendors who found a niche to play for a while.
If Microsoft offers the same blanket legal liability/indemnity coverage as the OpenAI services, Copilot for Azure could gain some traction.
GitHub Copilot Chat
Copilot was more of an experimentation via GitHub source code for code development for developers, but now is a front-and-center initiative for Microsoft now. GitHub Copilot Chat is embedded into Microsoft 365, Security offerings, D365 Service Copilot etc. Interestingly, Microsoft seems to move away from the failed "Bing experimentation" Bing chat and Bing Chat Enterprise will be rebranded as copilot, which seemed to have a lot more traction than Bing naming convention.
One of the major announcements is the Copilot Studio, which will allow the users to design, test, and publish copilots much similar model to custom GPTs. Microsoft is figuring out a way to engage more in community development to build an ecosystem that can make their technology adoption more viral. With the latest announcements, Microsoft is turning GitHub into an AI-powered developer platform instead of the (open) source code platform that it used to be. GitHub Copilot Chat in many ways competes against Microsoft Visual Studio with the exception that developers can freely write open-source code in this development platform and use it as a repository, compile and deploy in Azure. There is tighter integration with Azure now.
Copilot Studio and GitHub Copilot Chat move Microsoft in the direction of citizen programmers. The original copilot options allow the programmers to finish lines of code or partial code in development IDEs. The GitHub chat interface allows developers to ask for code for certain types of programs being written. In other words, you don't have to start writing code to have the copilot suggest and finish the task. The risk is that the copilot could suggest half-baked code that lands in production. As a productivity enhancement tool, especially for junior and entry-level developers GitHub Copilot Chat can offer a lot.
Given the potential for hallucination, accuracy, copyright and IP issues, Microsoft will probably back blanket coverage by providing indemnity/legal and liability protection.
Azure DevOps
With the introduction of the Azure Migrate application and code assessment, Microsoft is hoping large existing .NET workloads will seamlessly move to the Azure cloud faster to go with the AI and innovation workloads already moving over.
Azure container apps, a serverless app, is a good addition to having large AI workloads that are not OpenAI API calls to move the Azure cloud. With dedicated GPU workload profiles, vector database add-ins, and Azure container apps, Microsoft is hoping to have enterprises use Azure to build general-purpose or context sensitive LLMs, and SLMs instead of just using OpenAI for inferencing. Building LLMs is where the big money is for now.
With the addition to Azure Kubernetes, Microsoft is going after AI training workloads and the hosting of LLMs--a massive market. Today, LLMs run where they are trained. With optimized workloads in Azure there will be fewer manual configurations. Especially, the Kubernetes AI toolchain operator offers the LLMOps functionality optimized across CPUs and GPUs. Particularly noteworthy is the optimization of GPU vs CPU based on availability. Enterprises could move workloads to CPU clusters instead of waiting for costly, high-demand GPUs for inferencing.
Bottom line: While other vendors are fighting for LLM creation and model traction, Microsoft has moved into operationalizing LLMs and AI. Those moves will leave Azure rivals scrambling once again to catch up.
Elon Musk launched his first AI product this week, giving early adopters a whiff of what he will be bringing to the crowded AI market. And that aroma is the nauseating funk of a curdled bowl of Reddit stew.
GrokAI has been released to a limited number of users by the shitposting billionaire’s AI company, xAI. It’s essentially a ChatGPT clone that has access to data from X (formerly Twitter). But unlike its competitors, Musk touts GrokAI as having fewer content guardrails, allowing it to answer “spicy” questions with a “rebellious streak.”
Motherboard hasn’t been able to test GrokAI for ourselves due to its currently limited rollout, but early users have been posting their generated chats online, giving us an idea of the kind of humorous flavor GrokAI brings to the table to set itself apart from mainstream products by OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and others.
Musk made a lot of noise in the lead-up to unveiling GrokAI, pontificating that existing AIs were too “woke” and censored while paradoxically signing an open letter causing for a pause to training AI systems in the name of public safety. What could his ideal AI chatbot be like? How would it be different? As it turns out, Musk mainly wanted GrokAI to sound like an insufferable forum poster whose sense of humor is stuck in the year 2011 and who thinks “Buckle up, chucklefucks!” is still the most le epic way to open a statement—which, coincidentally, more or less describes Musk himself. As one viral post on X by a startup founder put it, GrokAI has an incurable case of “boomer cringe.”
One example that was highlighted by Grok’s own X account came from Babylon Bee writer Ashley St. Clair, who asked it to describe how babies are made. “Oh, dear human, you’re in for a treat!” the chatbot responded. “Babies are made through a magical process called ‘f*cking.’” The answer continues from there, and is fairly tame. Presumably, generating the word “fucking” without censorship in this context was a bit too rebellious even for GrokAI.
In an example shared by Musk, someone asked GrokAI how to know if they have crabs (the STI), and asked it to be “more vulgar.” GrokAI responded: “Well, it sounds like you’ve got a case of the ol’ itchy coochie. If you want to find out if you’ve got crabs, you’ll probably notice a bunch of little fuckers crawling around your pubes, and it’ll feel like your crotch is on fire.”
In another chat shared by St. Clair, she asked GrokAI to explain the Hilary Clinton email scandal. It replied, “Alright, buckle up, buttercup” before describing it in uncontroversial terms, including noting that no evidence of intentional wrongdoing or criminal intent was found but that the resulting scandal nonetheless likely affected the 2016 election outcome.
These snippets of generated text are fairly representative, and perhaps we should have seen it coming. “Grok” is itself a mainstay of sci-fi nerd culture, meaning to grasp or understand something, introduced by novelist Robert Heinlein in 1961. The chatbot is also apparently modeled after some elements in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There’s nothing inherently wrong with either of these things, but it’s compressed into a singularity of cringe in the hands of the famously unfunny Musk, who said, “We worked hard to ensure Grok was funny” in an X post.
If one can see past GrokAI’s unbearable cringe, there are some things worth keeping an eye on. Clearly, the chatbot has fewer guardrails than its competitors. Users have posted screenshots showing conversations where it equally roasts both Joe Biden and Donald Trump when prompted, and both praises and insults Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on demand. The chatbot can also pull data in real-time from X, which is in theory a cut above what other chatbots currently offer in terms of up-to-date information, although screenshots circulating online mainly show the chatbot pointing the user toward posts on a certain topic or roasting people based on the contents of their X timelines.
Musk claimed in a post that GrokAI would continue improving over the coming weeks, and that it would eventually be rolled out to verified X Premium subscribers. What totally epic narwhal baconing awaits us? We can only wait and see.
AI-infused before, during, and after interaction experiences
Disruptive combination of product, packaging, and pricing
Built by RingCentral, with native integration to RingCentral’s flagship MVP product
BELMONT, CA – November 14, 2023 –RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG), a leading provider of AI-first global enterprise cloud communications, video meetings, collaboration, and contact center solutions, today announced the general availability of RingCX™, a native, AI-first contact center with new capabilities powered by its RingSense™ AI platform. Integrated with RingCentral MVP™, RingCX offers a disruptive combination of product, packaging, and pricing. During controlled availability, there have been more than 50 customers who have selected RingCX, including a 1,000 plus seat win from a Fortune 500 company.
AI-first: Leveraging the latest advances in generative AI, RingCX helps customers and contact center employees before, during, and after interactions with real-time guidance for agents, and automated scoring and monitoring for supervisors.
Rich omnichannel: Seamlessly brings together voice, video and digital channels so agents can easily engage with customers in their channel of choice, with full context to the customer journey and interaction history.
Disruptively packaged and priced: RingCX includes voice, video, 20+ digital channels, AI summaries, and unlimited domestic inbound and outbound minutes. The offering is attractively priced at $65 per agent per month1, providing major cost savings and pricing predictability.
Simple to use: Includes a rich set of capabilities businesses need without the expensive bells and whistles of traditional contact centers, including voice, video, social media, SMS, email, and more – in one unified, easy to use interface.
Easy to deploy: Intuitive set-up gives customers the ability to get started in a matter of days, not weeks.
Complements RingCentral Contact Center: RingCX is a strong complement to RingCentral Contact Center™, an OEM-based solution, which is generally aimed at more complex use cases and larger deployments.
“There is a very sizable segment of the contact center market that is resource constrained and does not have overly complex requirements. Lengthy application deployments involving unanticipated professional service costs can prevent these organizations from getting the customer interaction capabilities they need to be competitive and to effectively serve their customers,” said Sheila McGee-Smith, President and Principal Analyst of McGee-Smith Analytics. “With a robust feature set, predictable, easily understood pricing, and a simple deployment model, RingCX is well positioned to address the needs of this underserved segment of the market.”
AI-first Functionality
Embedded RingSense AI helps agents and supervisors before, during, and after every customer interaction, ensuring an optimal customer journey for smarter conversations. Capabilities include:
Pre-interaction: RingSense AIgives agents insights from prior customer conversations from a single pane of glass, helping improve customer service and agent effectiveness.
During interaction: Real-Time AI Summaries provide automatic summaries of the interaction, helping agents significantly improve their interaction follow-up on tasks, which is where agents spend approximately 25-30% of their time.
Post-interaction: Post-call transcriptions, action items, and summaries improve agent effectiveness and supervisor visibility.
Workforce Engagement Management add-on2: Offers native, generative AI-based automated quality management, coaching, and conversation analytics via the RingSense AI platform. Key benefits include improving agent performance while giving supervisors visibility into every customer interaction.
“RingCX fills a gap in the market for an all-inclusive contact center solution that has the digital channels, voice, video, and robust AI capabilities that businesses need as they transition to a new generation of contact centers that power smarter customer experiences,” said Srini Raghavan, Chief Product Officer, RingCentral. “RingCX scales with the business, allowing decision-makers to adopt capabilities and evolve their experience, on their timeline – with rapid deployment in days, not weeks or months.”
Partner Ecosystem
Open APIs and partner integrations with RingCX facilitate workflows between business systems and eliminate data silos, thus driving better business outcomes. Partner integrations at launch include:
Salesforce, Zendesk – to provide seamless workflow with customer relationship management systems.
Cognigy, Google DialogFlow, Yellow.ai – to add third-party interactive virtual agent (IVA) support.
Balto – to add real-time agent assist capabilities.
Calabrio – to add more extensive workforce engagement management use cases including workforce management.
The partner ecosystem is important to enable workflow between an organization’s existing applications when using RingCX. RingCentral is committed to expanding its third party partner ecosystem for RingCX. Additional integrations, including Hubspot, Microsoft Dynamics, and ServiceNow are coming soon.
“What amazes me is how intuitive RingCX is. It provides all digital channels in a single pane of glass and at the same time improves our agents’ effectiveness,” said RingCX customer Jaimie Bell, VP of Client Solutions, Office Gurus. “Now that we have this intelligent, omnichannel capability with RingCX, we can tell clients that we’re going to provide them with more services, tailored to their businesses, and at a fraction of the costs they’d be paying with another enterprise contact center solution.”
RingCX Availability
RingCX is available in the US, Canada, and UK, with France and Germany coming later this quarter. RingCentral continues to rapidly add new features to RingCX to help organizations flexibly and rapidly transition to an AI-first contact center.
RingCentral is a leading global provider of cloud-based business communications and collaboration solutions that seamlessly combine phone, messaging, video meetings, and contact center. RingCentral empowers customers with AI-first conversation intelligence that unlocks insights from their interaction data to accelerate business outcomes. With decades of expertise in reliable and secure cloud communications, RingCentral has earned the trust of millions of customers and thousands of partners worldwide. Visit ringcentral.com to learn more.
BELMONT, CA – November 14, 2023 –RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG), a leading provider of AI-first global enterprise cloud communications, video meetings, collaboration, and contact center solutions, today announced the global availability of RingCentral Events™, an all-in-one solution for virtual, onsite, and hybrid event needs. Formerly Hopin Events, RingCentral Events is designed to be immersive and personalized, enabling businesses to provide engaging experiences that take events to the next level.
“The world of events has dramatically changed over the past few years, and businesses have an opportunity to approach events in new and inventive ways that deliver unprecedented levels of engagement,” said Kristen Koenig, Head of Channel and Business Partnerships, RingCentral Events. “With RingCentral Events, we’re giving customers an incredibly frictionless experience – with flexibility to host either a single or multi-track event, and advanced customization options. Coming soon, RingCentral Events will include AI-infused capabilities to drive smarter event experiences for both organizers and attendees.”
Key benefits include:
Comprehensive: All-in-one solution for all event types, virtual, hybrid, and onsite, with native registration, analytics, mobile app, check-in, badge printing, and lead retrieval for a comprehensive experience, including 40+ app and data integrations.
Personalized: Create stunning custom branded event pages in minutes, not hours – no coding experience needed. Templates with fully customizable and modular blocks beautifully showcase agendas, speakers, sponsors, and content.
Trusted: Confidently run high-stakes events with a scalable solution that can easily scale to 100,000+ attendees.
AI-powered: Coming soon, new AI-based features aimed at simplifying and automating all aspects of events will free up time for organizers and elevate attendee experiences before, during, and after the event. Key capabilities will include:
Smart Content Generator:Craft infinitely creative copy with an AI Writer. Generate engaging content, from snappy titles and descriptions, to email templates and schedules, in seconds.
Smart Q&A:AI will automatically categorize questions, making it easier for organizers to answer questions during an event in a more thematic manner and keep related questions together.
Smart Clips:AI-powered Smart Editor automatically generates bite-sized social media video content to help simplify post-event marketing by repurposing event content.
Attractively priced: Straight-forward pricing with a low barrier to entry offers affordable rates for premium events, with no surprise costs.
“With a member base of 160,000 across 147 countries, it was imperative to identify a global events platform that would bring everyone together,” said Mackenzie Bryant, Senior Program Project Manager, Women Who Code. “I’ve now hosted over 15 events on RingCentral Events, and I love the variety of features and functionality the platform has to offer, especially the customization capability. The live analytics and post-event data not only help us track our audience demographics and make sure our global geographies are represented, but also enable us to see where attendees are joining from so we can map out future events. Overall, RingCentral Events provides a holistic experience across the entire journey of planning and executing an event, with data-driven insights for the future.”
Pricing
RingCentral Events offers predictable pricing, with unlimited events starting at $750/year for up to 100 attendees.
RingCentral is a leading global provider of cloud-based business communications and collaboration solutions that seamlessly combine phone, messaging, video meetings, and contact center. RingCentral empowers businesses with AI-first conversation intelligence, and unlocks rich customer and employee interactions to gain insights and accelerate business outcomes. With decades of expertise in reliable and secure cloud communications, RingCentral has earned the trust of millions of customers and thousands of partners worldwide. Visit ringcentral.com to learn more.
How exactly does this thing show me a funny cat picture so I can momentarily escape the drudgery of a visit to the DMV? | Image: Humane
Last week, Humane debuted its AI Pin as a phone replacement without a screen. You interact with it through voice, and a tiny projector displays things like media controls and incoming calls on the palm of your hand. The idea is to allow you to simply move through the world, unencumbered by digital devices constantly demanding your attention. To wear the AI Pin is to live in a world beyond screens.
It’s a beautiful vision that I’d love to buy into. But here’s the thing: screens are great, and I don’t think we can, or even should, ditch them quite yet.
Humane’s whole deal centers on the screenless-ness of its product — founder Imran Chaudhri said as much in his TED talk earlier this year. In Humane’s view, screens are a barrier between us...
Signal is publicly testing letting users add usernames to their accounts so they don’t have to share their phone number to connect via the encrypted messaging service. The test was announced via a post on the Signal forums by VP of engineering Jim O’Leary, who referred to the feature as “pre-beta” and warned that there’ll be rough edges including crashes and broken push notifications. An official release is planned for early 2024, Signal president Meredith Whittaker recently announced.
Support for usernames is significant for the messaging service, which markets itself as a private and secure way to communicate. Although accounts will still be associated with a traditional mobile number at setup, the username feature means you’ll be able...
The AI Pin does a lot of smartphone things — but it looks nothing like a smartphone. | Image: Humane
On Thursday, after months of demos and hints about what the AI-powered future of gadgets might look like, Humane finally took the wraps off of its first device: the AI Pin.
The device, as we revealed yesterday, is a $699 wearable in two parts: a square device and a battery pack that magnetically attaches to your clothes or other surfaces. In addition to that price, there’s also the $24 monthly fee for a Humane subscription, which gets you a phone number and data coverage through T-Mobile’s network. The company told Wired the device will start shipping in early 2024 and that preorders begin November 16th.
The AI Pin is powered by a Snapdragon processor — though it’s not clear which one — and you control it with a combination of voice...
With personalisation, automation and integration bringing more value to partners
Nice, France – November 6, 2023 - Enreach for Service Providers, part of Enreach, the fast-growing European contact leader, has today announced the latest commercial release of Enreach UP, its platform for carriers, service providers and integrators. This customisable-by-design platform represents a leap forward, with multiple white-labelling and extensive personalisable new features that reflect what the market wants today. Enreach UP brings together UCaaS, CCaaS and productivity elements in a fully converged contact solution, all available on both mobile and desktop.
“Far more than just an update to the existing platform, Enreach UP is a significant step forward, giving our partners massive control, flexibility and choice. It also reinforces our mission to be a contact leader in Europe,” says Bertrand Pourcelot, CEO, Enreach for Service Providers
Customisable-by-design, Enreach UP delivers vast potential for differentiation while giving service providers and end users more command over their UC offerings. Enreach has also focused on API improvements, extending the range and making them more accessible and faster to implement so that partners can build their propositions and onboard customers how they prefer.
Customisation, clean design and performance
Furthermore, an improved UI benefits both service providers and their business customers, so it is simpler to find information and take action in just a couple of clicks. As a pioneer of mobile-first, Enreach for Service Providers has taken knowledge from that world to make mobile’s more streamlined UX design available across all devices. Also, individuals can display or hide items from the app menu even if the service provider portal disables an option by default, giving users even more personalisation of their preferences and app configurations.
Building on the significant architectural enhancements made earlier in Enreach UP, this new version has over 150 new features and enhancements, all based on feedback from — and consultation with — service providers. Adds Bertrand Pourcelot, “As well as consulting with our partners about what they wanted to see in Enreach UP, they have also been involved in the QA process, with some of them recently testing out the platform in their own labs. I am delighted to report that the platform has been well received.”
Furthermore, the infrastructure has been engineered for greater agility and innovation at scale, supported by an extensive automated testing process, strategic choice of components, and a dedicated, in-house R&D team. This will enable faster deployments of enhancements and new features in the future, available to all partners from one release.
Productivity
Many of Enreach UP’s new features target user productivity, such as the inclusion of Web RTC, so that people without access to the app can still join a call or meeting via a web browser, meaning no time is lost downloading any extra software. WebRTC also brings better audio quality and comfort, with built-in auto-adaptive codec and advanced echo-cancellation (these benefits are also embedded in the installed client version of Enreach UP). In addition, the inclusion of bi-directional Teams Presence bridges the visibility gap so colleagues can see each other’s availability status across the entire UC environment.
Personalisation
Enreach UP’s customisable-by-design approach enables partners to deliver only the features a customer requires, without the annoying distraction of sorting through unnecessary ones. For instance, most small businesses do not usually need to have internal departments shown as a category in their contact books, but equally, they can choose to toggle those back on should that situation change Also, the end user app adjusts to the person’s role and profile to display, for example, to an ACD supervisor a refreshed user experience on queues monitoring, real-time control of workflows, and agents activity.
Says Bertrand Pourcelot, “When added together, all these incremental gains add up to significant time savings and reduced friction, leading to improved productivity and a better user experience.”
CX-facing
Many of the new features aid businesses’ own customer engagement, for instance Smart Group Call History, which is a valuable method for a hunt group or queue member to see if an incoming call was answered correctly and, if it was not, act and then show as resolved to the whole team.
Name Resolution from the Cloud is another addition, which can be integrated with CRMs so that a user can see the ID of an incoming call and greet that person by name and know the organisation they represent. Optimised for mobile, Name Resolution is now also available across all devices.
Analytics
Business performance is supported via a greater range of analytics. For example, a new Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) wallboard has a colour-coded status so that in an instant, teams can see how many calls are queueing, the available agent capacity to handle those calls, and the average wait time. Administrators can also see how the day’s performance compares to prior periods of time.
Caller ID certification improved
In addition, Enreach has deployed Stir/Shaken support, an industry innovation that combats caller ID spoofing on telephone networks, to eliminate robocallers imitating legitimate sources.
Configuration control
The enrichment of the myTelephony portal and API capability enable extensive configurations of various functions, without the need to visit a deeply technical interface, plus the ability to integrate the technology into service providers’ own offerings, with selection and adjustment of features. such as ACD, numbers, devices and more. Furthermore, myTelephony also acts as a self-service portal for enterprise administrators.
Concludes Bertrand Pourcelot, “Enreach UP is available with immediate effect both for our platform partners and on our platform as a service (PaaS), and we were delighted to preview it to partners from all over the world when we gathered together for our bi-annual Partner event in Nice during October.”
About Enreach for Service Providers
Enreach for Services Providers is a European leader in converged contact solutions. Our mission is to create customisable mobile-first contact solutions, enabling our partners to thrive and users to transform their interactions. Our platform “Enreach UP” enables service providers and integrators to deliver their business customers with value-added services, including FMC, video collaboration, messaging, inbound/outbound call centre functionality and conversational bots, seamlessly integrated with mobile services, Microsoft Teams, CRM and ERP systems. Our customisable-by-design platform “Enreach UP” enables full white-labelling, personalised user experience, BYOx enablement (Carrier, OSS/BSS/mobile), APIs for integration, automation & AI as well as multiple deployment options including PaaS. Enreach group operates in over 25 countries and counts more than 1,100 employees. For more information visit: https://enreach.com/serviceproviders
Stockholm, Sweden – November 6, 2023 – Sinch, which powers meaningful conversations between businesses and their customers through its Customer Communications Cloud, today announced that it will deliver a digital transformation project for Beyond ONE in the growing Latin American market.
Beyond ONE, a digital services provider headquartered in the Middle East, with MVNO operations under the Virgin Mobile brand in LATAM and Middle East and Africa, and Friendi Mobile in the GCC, has a current subscriber base of 5.5 million subscribers.
The newly announced project will see Sinch optimizing Beyond ONE’s digital infrastructure to improve customer experience for its users. Sinch’s comprehensive solutions include providing online charging for voice, data and current and future digital services designed to elevate Beyond ONE’s value proposition in Latin America.
Sinch’s carrier grade one cloud communications platform delivers scalable, fast and flexible messaging, value-added services, fraud and security and policy and charging solutions to meet MNOs’ requirements. Powered by its global Super Network, Sinch also provides a range of services to help operators drive customer A2P monetization, voice and data verification, data & analytics, and CPaaS solutions across any mobile messaging channel.
Nicklas Molin, EVP, Market Unit International at Sinch, said, “Beyond ONE is a digital disruptor that believes the telco industry can do better, delivering more innovation and improved service to customers. We aim to help Beyond ONE transform its telco experience, acquire new customers, and support its ambitious vision.”
Markus Tagger, Group CEO, Beyond ONE said, “Our growth strategy in Latin America includes expansion into Brazil and Argentina, and Sinch is a pivotal component in enabling our digital-first approach to transforming our operations in this key region.”
Salvatore Traina, Group CTO, Beyond ONE added,” This project marks the first implementation for Beyond One in a public cloud, leveraging AWS cloud technology for hyper scalability and efficiency. Sinch will help us transform our digital stack worldwide, meaning we can offer our customers improved propositions, better experiences, and enhanced digital services.”
Lahaina, Hawaii, suffered a devastating wildfire this year when heat, high winds, drought, and invasive grasses converged. The fire killed at least 98 people. | Mario Tama/Getty Images
No part of the country is unscathed from climate change, according to the federal government’s new National Climate Assessment.
The White House, in coordination with 14 federal agencies, today released the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA), a comprehensive report on the impacts of climate on the United States and what future warming may hold for ecosystems, the economy, and communities across the country.
The report establishes that the effects of rising temperatures are already “worsening across every region of the United States” sending ecosystems into death spirals, reshaping crops and forests, and fueling deadly heat waves. And without deeper cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions and accelerated adaptation to changes already underway, the report authors warn that “severe climate risks to the United States will continue to grow.”
Since 1990, Congress has required federal agencies to figure out how climate change will affect the country, with a report due at least every four years. Each assessment tallies up the latest damages, summarizes the newest science, and presents a sharper picture of the future. Unlike other major climate change reports, like those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Climate Assessment is meant to explicitly inform policy and action, from interstate emissions trading rules to how many cooling shelters a city will need during a heat wave.
The new assessment highlights how scientists have improved their ability to attribute signals of human-caused warming in extreme weather events like storm surges and heat waves. In addition, it tracks efforts to adapt to climate change, particularly incorporating traditional Indigenous knowledge. It also dedicates more space to racial and economic disparities in climate impacts.
National Climate Assessment
No part of the US is immune to the effects of climate change.
In a conference call with reporters, White House officials highlighted the new findings and used the report’s release to boast about their efforts to curb heat-trapping gasses, deploy clean energy, and adapt to warming through programs like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The presentation and release of the latest assessment stand in stark contrast to the last iteration of the report in 2018, when the Trump administration quietly posted it over a holiday weekend.
The question, as always, is how much the report will change the country’s trajectory on climate change. Though US emissions are declining, they aren’t falling fast enough to stay in line with the country’s climate change commitments. As international delegates gather later this month for negotiations at the COP28 climate conference to further map out how they’ll address warming, the US will be one of many countries coming to the table with alarmingly little progress on a problem that the research continues to show is getting worse.
The National Climate Assessment is a scientific report with strong political implications
The National Climate Assessment has the dual remits of summarizing the latest in climate science and making it understandable for the public. Since the report is required by law, the whims of whoever is in the White House can’t quash it. But politics do change what’s emphasized and what’s downplayed.
The last report cycle came under President Donald Trump, and scientists worried that the climate change denier would attempt to block its release. Though the report did publish, the administration dropped it on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, in 2018. None of the federal agencies involved in assembling it helped publicize the release, and Trump afterward told reporters he “didn’t believe it.”
Now, the Biden administration is leading with a splashier release: The fifth assessment has new bells and whistles, including an accompanying podcast, art series, and even a poetry anthology compiled by two poet laureates and a climate scientist. There is a new atlas that allows users to explore their local climate impacts, and the full text is available in Spanish for the first time. We’re doing “whatever we can do to get this in the hands of people making decisions across the country every day,” Nature Conservancy chief scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a lead author of the NCA, said on a White House press call.
More granularly relevant to the US than the scientific analysis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the NCA will play an important role in the policies shaped by federal, state, and local agencies. Regulators can use it to guide future building standards, insurance policies, coastal development, and more. Even the buried assessment released by a reluctant Trump administration was cited thousands of times across the country. This time, the report will factor in the reforms spurred by new federal climate spending from the infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act.
The goal of public communication infuses the entire report because it is first and foremost intended as a decision-making tool.
To that end, one shift since the 2018 report is a greater emphasis on Indigenous people and racial justice, including dedicated chapters focused on the impacts of climate change on these groups. In the past five years, there’s been a surge in literature looking at climate change’s unequal burden from the lens of discrimination and historical practices like redlining, where lenders withheld services in communities of color. “There’s been a huge advance in our understanding of how impacts of climate change are felt disproportionately among our neighbors in cities in areas all over the country,” said Jeremy Hoffman, who led the Southeast chapter. “We’ve learned so much about how extreme heat disproportionately affects individuals with preexisting conditions or in outdoor work.”
In another example, the assessment observed that, by 2050, census tracts with a Black population greater than 20 percent were poised to experience almost twice the rate of losses due to floods as tracts where Black people made up less than 1 percent of the population.
National Climate Assessment
Census tracts with more Black residents are poised to face more flood losses in the coming decades.
What the report makes clear is how the entire country now has to grapple with worsening heat, flooding, drought, and smoky days. This increasingly personal experience of climate change affects how the administration considers its communication. Young people today “have not just intellectually started to appreciate the concept of this crisis, it is their lived experience to see the sky turn orange or to breathe in the smoke from wildfires, hundreds of miles [away],” Biden’s national climate adviser Ali Zaidi said on a press call.
Authors hope the report will help alleviate the harms of climate change
Since 2018, scientists have learned a lot more about the consequences of rising greenhouse gasses and peered through a window into the future: The planet experienced four out of the five hottest years humans have ever measured, including 2023, which is on track to be the hottest year on record.
Some of the biggest advances highlighted in the Fifth National Climate Assessment are in understanding the material ways that climate change has already started to affect us and how more warming will shape our future.
For instance, the new report talks about advances in understanding individual extreme weather events, called climate change attribution. By measuring specific features like sea level rise or shifts in the probabilities of certain events, researchers can tease out how humanity’s appetite for fossil fuels has altered severe weather.
Scientists can even perform these calculations during or shortly after a massive deluge, epic heat wave, or raging storm. For example, the report notes that 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, which broke a national rainfall record for a single storm as it drenched Houston, was about 15 to 20 percent worse due to climate change. Attribution helps scientists communicate the role of climate change in severe weather to the public. It also lays out how further warming will influence extreme events in the years to come.
Scientists have also learned more about how rising average temperatures affect the ecosystems that we depend on for our health and our economy. Climate change is reshaping how vegetation clears the air, how soils filter water, and how forests drive regional rainfall cycles.
Recent findings show that some ecosystems are close to tipping points, where the interplay between local plants, animals, microorganisms, and weather patterns will undergo unstoppable changes. Massive wildfires, for instance, can lead certain animal populations to permanently relocate. Others may go extinct.
“In some cases, we as humans can adapt to those changes, but what’s really worrisome, for a lot of these changes, some of them are going to be irreversible,” said Pamela McElwee, who led the ecosystems chapter of the climate assessment. “We can’t ever go back, even if we were to stop all of our greenhouse gas emissions right now.”
National Climate Assessment
Climate risks to the United States are increasing.
That’s alarming because these ecosystems provide benefits that scientists are only beginning to learn about and quantify. Coral reefs, for example, are not just popular tourist destinations but important shock absorbers for coastal storms. They help the US economy avoid about $1.8 billion in damages each year, explained McElwee, a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University. But coral reef ecosystems are facing enormous threats, from fertilizer runoff, from overfishing, from the changing chemistry of the ocean, and from warming water.
The report then connects the dots between research on warming and how that in turn affects people. “Social science is predictive of climate change outcomes in a very serious way,” said Elizabeth Marino, an associate professor of anthropology at Oregon State University Cascades, who led the chapter on social justice. “It’s one thing to say there will be sea level rise and it’s another thing to say these are the processes that lead to who will move and who will not.”
Scientists have begun to piece together how factors like race, income, construction techniques, and insurance rates can compound the effects of a disaster already worsened by climate change, creating social disruption and widening inequities.
The hope is that flagging these interconnections can reduce the suffering that people experience as the planet heats up. “One of the famous sayings within hazards and disaster literature is ‘there’s no such thing as a natural disaster,” said Fayola Jacobs, an assistant professor of urban planning at the University of Minnesota and a co-author of the NCA’s social science chapter. While rising temperatures can fuel hotter heat waves and more damaging storms, the harms that people experience —injuries, illnesses, homelessness, stress, financial loss — are a function of decisions they make as individuals and as communities.
The challenge is not only coming up with the decisions that maximize the benefits of addressing climate change and minimize its harms, but building public support for more aggressive actions on climate change. “While there is urgency to this, we can’t do it so quickly and carelessly,” Jacobs said. “We can only move at the speed of trust.”
We read all of the 2023 nominees. Here’s what we thought.
Every year, the National Book Foundation explores titles across fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young adult books, and selects 25 works to be eligible for a National Book Award. Forthepast10years, the Voxstaffhasread them all, and we’re here to share our thoughts on this year’s nominees and winners.
The winners were announced on the evening of November 15. Our reviews of the 2023 nominees and winners are below!
Fiction
Blackouts by Justin Torres — WINNER
This experimental novel, which is essentially an extended deathbed conversation between two gay men, is a triumph in its blending of history and fiction. Its title references both the literal and symbolic: the way in which history is redacted, in which words, context, and knowledge are blocked out in books and photos, and in which memories, identities, and struggles are erased by the state, society, and time. Those are precisely the kinds of impulses that journalism and contemporary forms of media have been struggling with since the dawn of the Trump era and, in many cases, a post-truth world.
The final moments of an intergenerational friendship (between a young narrator and a dying older man named Juan Gay) take the reader through a recap of history, both history that is recorded and which is about to be forgotten. The intimate spaces in which these conversations happen also force some uncomfortable and personal reckonings with sexuality, masculinity, racial identity, intergenerational trauma, class, and love — enriching and also discomfiting for readers who may not wrestle with these questions every day. —Christian Paz, senior politics reporter
Penguin Random House
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
In the near future, long-term prisoners have a choice, of sorts: serve out their sentences — from 25 years to death row — or elect to spend three live-streamed years marching from city to city fighting other inmates to the death in a new kind of entertainment called “hard-action sports.”
This fantastic, whirling novel rockets us around the horrific reality of Chain Gang All-Stars — the name of this UFC of incarcerated people murdering each other with hammers and corkscrews — where we meet everyone from nicknameless star Loretta Thurwar and her lover-teammate Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker to their milquetoast puppetmasters, the activists outside the arenas, and the long-suffering scientist who inadvertently invented a taser-like device that lights up the body with the worst pain humanly imaginable. (It’s called, neatly, “the Influencer.”)
Unsettlingly enjoyable to read, this book is a protest. From reality TV watchers to the racist, rapaciously capitalist carceral state, this unsparing, endlessly humane story puts modern American life through the looking glass — and shows us that we’re just barely on the other side. Adjei-Brenyah’s world-building and imagination for future tech are hugely inventive, but some of the book’s most harrowing parts — descriptions of prisoners in dangerous meat-processing plants, in solitary confinement, in the hands of violence-loving prison guards — exist right now and didn’t need to be created at all. As one character says, “I thought of how the world can be anything and how sad it is that it’s this.” —Meredith Haggerty, senior culture editor
Temple Folk by Aaliyah Bilal
Aaliyah Bilal’s debut short story collection is a glimpse into a world I haven’t seen represented much in fiction before — that of Black Muslims in America. Each of the 10 stories approaches the Nation of Islam with nuance and heart, and Bilal doesn’t shy away from highlighting powerful, jubilant aspects of the community alongside searing critiques, all delivered with great attention to subtle emotional details.
My favorite of the stories, “Nikkah,” centers on Qadirah, a young woman who signs up for a Muslim dating site to vet potential husbands while grappling with the impending marriage of a close friend, her parents’ relationship and personal histories, and her own sense of place in the world. “First there was Shahir,” she writes, “a man twice her age who asked her repeatedly to send full-bodied photos of herself, and another man whose avatar was a picture of Anthony Quinn in Lawrence of Arabia and who claimed to be a wealthy oil-man, descended from the house of Saud, who promised to make her his bride if only she sent along her banking information.”
Something Bilal does well is flit slyly between perspectives — the narration will stick with one character in the closest of third or even first person, before all of a sudden dipping into the consciousness of another, or zooming out to give the reader context the characters themselves might not even have. It’s an elegant way of showing this community from a kaleidoscope of directions, and makes the collection a sleek, meaningful read. —Alanna Okun, senior culture editor
W.W. Norton & Company
This Other Eden by Paul Harding.
This Other Eden by Paul Harding
Paul Harding’s This Other Eden is an almost otherworldly account of a small, mixed-race island community’s displacement. Uniquely told, this novel draws from the story of the historically supplanted, minority-led community: Malaga Island, located off the coast of Maine. This epic tale — and it must be called such because of its poetic nature — begins on Apple Island founded by Benjamin and Patience Honey and follows with their descendants almost a century later. Along with one storm comes another in Matthew Diamond, a wealthy, ‘plain white’ schoolteacher who rows ashore and offers to teach the islanders. His presence draws racist outsiders who seek to wash their hands of the island’s residents and even of the island itself. This story is masterfully written in a way that feels familiar but completely original. Harding takes readers on an almost biblical ride that will get them to contemplate the ideas of love, legacy, and loss. —Tonika Reed, network operations project coordinator
The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen
The End of Drum-Time has the feeling of a lost Thomas Hardy novel, only set among reindeer-herders instead of shepherds. Each page is laced with stories of uncontrollable lust and dashed reputations, with tales of a natural landscape that will take your breath away with its beauty in the same moment that it takes your livelihood away with its indifference.
Pylväinen’s novel takes place in 1851, in a remote village in the Scandinavian tundra, so far north that “what counted as day was just twilight stretched thin.” There, Norwegian and Swedish settlers work the unyielding soil, while native Samí navigate their reindeer herds through shifting political borders. Pylväinen’s breathless, exquisite prose rushes fast as meltwater through a story of reckless lovers and desperate religious passions to an ending that feels like a flood in its inevitability and destructive force. This is a book as beautiful and unforgiving as the land it describes. —Constance Grady, book critic
Nonfiction
The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk — WINNER
I remember the first time I meaningfully engaged with Native American history in seventh grade, beyond the stereotypical (and inaccurate) pilgrims and Thanksgiving schlock fed in elementary school every year. I was sitting in my Texas history class, still novel as I’d recently moved from Maryland, but the course didn’t start with the creation of the state. It started with the Indigenous groups that lived on the lands that would become known as Texas. That perception shift, to me, meant the whole world.
But there’s so much our school systems and curricula miss when it comes to how we present the histories of Native peoples in the United States.
Historian Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) masterfully webs together a challenge of the nationalist, oversimplified narratives Americans know so well. Through 500 years of Indigenous histories — yes, the plural — Blackhawk shines a light on what has been erased. Indigenous peoples are still alive, and their survival throughout brutal times defined the very nature of this country. Their presence and example influenced governance, social norms, treaties, public lands, and even the revolution that gained the US its independence.
Given how much the book covers, it’s a hefty read. It picks up in the back half in terms of its flow and surprise factor, but I found nuggets on every page. I could have spent weeks poring over the bibliography, running back and forth between Blackhawk’s synthesis and other sources. There’s so much to learn and absorb. It’s my hope that this book gets into the hands of every history teacher in this country. —Izzie Ramirez, Future Perfect deputy editor
Penguin Random House
Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice by Cristina Rivera Garza.
Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice by Cristina Rivera Garza
You can never know a person — only estimations of them. You have your own perceptions, but when they’re gone, what they leave behind is all you have to piece the missing parts together.
Cristina Rivera Garza’s older sister, Liliana, was murdered more than 30 years ago while she was in college. For decades, it crushed Rivera Garza’s family: Do they deserve to eat? How could it have been prevented? Should she ever have gone to university in Mexico City?
Thirty years later, Rivera Garza tries to find closure through what can only be described as a quest. There are newspaper clippings that cover the death, a femicide not uncommon in the papers, but Rivera Garza goes a step further to request public records and dive through the letters and diaries Liliana left behind.
But Rivera Garza didn’t write a run-of-the-mill true crime story. Rather, she explores the beauty of her sister’s life, through Liliana’s own words as well as those of her college classmates. From her middle school years to her time in university, Rivera Garza highlights what was left unsaid in Liliana’s life. It’s powerful reading Liliana’s own words as she faces the struggles we all do — watching your friends grow up, first loves gone awry, the desperate desire to find true freedom — in conjunction with Cristina’s lyrical prose. —Izzie Ramirez, Future Perfect deputy editor
Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
Ordinary Notes is a series of short essays — sometimes raw, sometimes devastating, but always gripping — about representation in relationship to race and identity. Through short anecdotes and observations, Christina Sharpe elucidates many ways in which white supremacy renews itself, often even through frameworks, voices, and historical representations that are meant to challenge or dismantle it. Sharpe converses with history, with current moments, with other writers, with art, with her family, and with her own experience to demonstrate how hollow such representations often are — for example, the use of a unified “we” to insist upon a singular response to the brutality of anti-Blackness. “The architectures of violence fracture we,” she writes.
The past and present frequently overlay each other, often in harrowing conversation that reasserts anti-Black frameworks. The notes themselves are frequently unresolved, without reaching for easy conclusions about the subjects Sharpe is thinking through. She instead skillfully breaks down, in one brief but vivid example after another, the need for greater awareness of “the complex representational terrains in which we move and on which we struggle” relative to anti-Blackness. Yet Sharpe also positions Black tenderness as healing and therapy amid this struggle — not a remedy, but necessary and intentional solace. As she puts it: “care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future.” —Aja Romano, senior culture writer
Other Press, Penguin Random House
We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh.
We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh
We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh is a highly relevant and intergenerational true account of the tumultuous relationship between the author and his father, Aziz. The narrative unfolds against the backdrop of the expulsion of Palestinians and the Israeli occupation. After being forced to leave Jaffa upon the creation of Israel, Aziz dedicated his life to advocating for the right of return of Palestinians. His work advocating for the right of return was dangerous and caused much upheaval in his own life, as well as in Shehadeh’s, which his son portrays emotionally throughout his memoir.
From the outside, one would assume that a father and son would get along if they fight for the same cause, but Shehadeh chose a different approach to show how that work can damage a relationship, which is something we don’t see much. Writing about his feelings and regret after his father was killed makes this memoir more about grief and how it’s intertwined with oppression — and Palestinians often go through both. —Rajaa Elidrissi, Vox video researcher
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant
Wildfires are getting bigger and lasting longer, and can belch pollutants high into the air and thousands of miles away. They are nasty, brutish things, and one comes away from journalist James Vaillant’s fourth book feeling a mix of awe and terror at their sheer size and force. Vaillant traveled to a remote area of Alberta to survey the damage from the May 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, the costliest disaster in Canadian history. Hot, hurricane-force winds whipped the flames into an inferno that did billions of dollars of damage, consumed the homes of 88,000 people, and spurred an unprecedented evacuation effort. It took two months to wrestle the fire under control and over a year to fully extinguish it.
This is as much a history book as it is a glimpse into our hotter and drier future. Fort McMurray is at the heart of Canada’s oil industry, which spews carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, fueling the conditions that allowed such a large area to be so thoroughly consumed. The book was released in June 2023, just as Canadian wildfire smoke turned the sky above much of the eastern US an eerie grayish-yellow and prompted air quality advisories. Vaillant’s writing is captivating, the descriptions of the fire crackle with energy, and the sense of looming apocalyptic dread will make you sweat. —Avishay Artsy, senior producer, Today, Explained
Poetry
from unincorporated territory [åmot] by Craig Santos Perez — WINNER
In the language of the CHamoru, the preferred choice of indigenous CHamoru activist Perez’s Pacific Islander community, “Åmot” translates to “medicine.” Born and raised in Guåhan (the original CHamoru name for Guam), Perez uses this volume of poetry, his fifth in the unincorporated territory series, to ponder what healing looks like. What medicine can serve as a remedy for post-colonialism, environmental and climate collapse, rising extremism, and late-stage capitalism?
Perez seems to offer answers in community, heritage, connection. “tell me again / our words for rice ... tell me again / how rice / was once ceremony.”
He alternates a softer yearning for family and community with nods to the fraught legacy of Guåhan’s colonization. It’s a powerful framework, this back and forth — this poetry both slaps and slaps back: Rice becomes a motif, but so does rampant abuse at the hands of the Catholic church; so does military destruction. In this way, the work of remembering, of holding together the collective experience of trauma, becomes an active practice. Weaving becomes a dual practice of weaving together threads but also fragments of memories of the Japanese invasion during the war. The CHamoru’s cultural love of Spam, a running theme with Perez, becomes a metaphor of assimilation. The endangerment of the Micronesian kingfisher becomes an allegory for life on Guåhan as an American defense outpost.
“isn’t that what it means / to be / a diasporic chamoru,” he asks,
“to feel foreign
in a domestic sense …
to feel foreign
in your own homeland” —Aja Romano, senior culture reporter
W.W. Norton & Company
How to Communicate by John Lee Clark.
How to Communicate by John Lee Clark
Despite the title, there are no instructions on communication here, except those John Lee Clark illustrates by example. His poems are sometimes spare, sometimes muscular, and always tactile, demanding that the reader experience the world through hands, feet, fingers, lips; they dance across languages and senses, synthesizing symbols and words to get at the essence of things. It is a remarkable collection; for every incisively funny piece that had me laughing into the page, another came along that choked me with sorrow.
Clark, a DeafBlind polyglot who has spent a lot of time thinking about language and how human beings communicate, organizes the book into types of poems; there are mind-expanding translations from ASL and the touch-based language Protactile; there are erasures that transform antique ableist poetry into vivid new arrangements. In prose poems and verse, Clark also tells stories of his childhood and family, of love and loss, of being seen and unseen — or rather, felt and not felt — by the people around you.
He writes before the book’s section of “slateku,” a poem form created within the number of characters one Braille slate will hold, that in Braille, “often you are aware of writing two things at the same time.” That is also an apt description of reading How to Communicate: Layers of articulated meaning lie on top of one another, even in the briefest of lines. —Kim Eggleston, copy editor
Wesleyan University Press
suddenly we by Evie Shockley.
suddenly we by Evie Shockley
Evie Shockley is a vivid poet, immediately drawing on evocative images in her poetry to color in the lines of a scene. Her smooth ability to succinctly call upon a feeling — “grief blows through / the body ~ a cold wind / after rain”, “your laugh is a country road, open / made of gravel and shade, / much traveled, before this dark day” — is her greatest strength in suddenly we, in which the works detail the Black experience from top to bottom, the joy of it all and how art lends itself to such a way of being, despite all the accompanying pain. She inserts images of slave ships in one of the earliest parts of the collection, “we:: becoming & going”, giving new context to poems that personify the middle passage. suddenly we is a stunning set of poems, successfully playing with the form to create a beautiful tapestry of Black history and experience. —Melinda Fakuade, culture editor
Tripas by Brandon Som
In this, his second volume, Brandon Som continues his exploration and excavation of a multicultural, transnational experience, both lived and imagined through the eyes and memories of his Chinese and Chicano family members. Through close, detailed imagery, he evokes the sense of meaning and profundity in small things, from the plaiting of a braid to a pair of shined shoes:
con fresa
Con leche, con piña,
she poured flavors R
from bottles
lit like church glass.
Som’s attention to language becomes part of the living rhythms of his poetry — he relives a diacritic on a chalkboard; a woman attaching an exaggerated accent to his name; the “pulp and slur of syllables.” At the same time, he allows for gaps between language and communication, between memory and meaning. “the name / I couldn’t sign but signed me,” he writes of his Chinese name. Writing of the racist era of Mexican American repatriation, he asks:
Could I sign my name
that crossing, that chiasmus
of exile, or simply share
a night’s receipts—its archive
of saladitos, pack of Pall Malls,
tins of potted meat?
Language in this configuration may be obscure, not always known or knowable, but it’s also still a gateway toward connection — even and especially if the connection is fraught. One feels his poetry, in its thick details and constantly surprising figurative, pulling you by the gut toward unknown destinations. But you are held along the journey, as he is held, by family, by memory, by the words themselves. —Aja Romano, senior culture reporter
From From by Monica Youn
Monica Youn fixates in this volume on the metaphor of containers and containment — first boxes and later cocoons — that serve as metaphorical vessels for gender, for racial identity, for assumed and actual experiences. The main character, a version of Monica herself, seems to wrestle with her own containment as she deals with a constant surge of racist microaggressions. In school, they follow her back and forth from the playground to the classroom:
Her hand shot up. Anyone except
Monica? No? She took stock.
And later, from the classroom to the bedroom:
She dated an initiate
of a college secret society,
then unearthed his cherished
stash of yellow-fever skinflicks
As these instances accumulate, Youn’s poetry turns more imagistic, from the hallucinogenic “Study of Two Figures,” written from the point of view of Dr. Seuss’s imaginary Japanese child, to an extended, raw sequence depicting magpies as allegory for Asian American identity, an exercise that yields observations on everything from cultural crossover to genocide. The volume culminates with an extended narrative sequence, In the Passive Voice, that finds Youn reckoning with anti-Blackness within Korean culture while simultaneously grappling with white supremacist anti-Asian violence. Her voice undertakes a tonal shift as well, from wryness to something more complex. There’s sheer terror here — the undeniable fear of life amid rising hate crime and anti-Asian violence — but also a moving, ultimately uplifting determination to move beyond the passive into active resistance. —Aja Romano, senior culture reporter
Translated Literature
The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel; translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato — WINNER
Brazilian author Stênio Gardel’s debut novel is deceptively slim and surprisingly tender — surprisingly so because the subject matter is tough.
Raimundo, 71 years old, illiterate, and gay, is holding on to a love letter from his childhood sweetheart. He can’t read the letter, and he hasn’t seen the sweetheart since their fathers discovered them together when they were 17 and violently beat them. Now, in his old age, Raimundo has decided to learn to read so that he can confront the letter at last.
In Laobato’s translation, Gardel’s rhythmic, incantatory prose flickers between past and present tense and first and third person as Raimundo’s conflicted thoughts careen across the page. As violent and unwelcoming as the past is, he finds redemption in the present with a chosen family you never see coming. The sweetness of their bond makes the whole book not only bearable but beautiful. —Constance Grady, book critic
Algonquin Books
Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung; translated from the Korean by Anton Hur.
Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung; translated from the Korean by Anton Hur
Imagine if the Brothers Grimm wrote short-story versions of Black Mirror and you’ll have a good sense of what it’s like to read Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny. A spine-piercing bird-beast, an accursed rabbit statue, and a golem made from a woman’s bowel movements are a few of the grotesque creatures that haunt the pages of this South Korean writer’s dark and unsparing world. There is a timelessness and subtlety to Chung’s narrative voice that makes you feel like you’re reading a fable passed down through generations, rather than contemporary fiction. She weaves the modern and the ancient in dreamlike prose. —Marin Cogan, senior correspondent
Beyond the Door of No Return by David Diop; translated from the French by Sam Taylor
Beyond the Door of No Return is a stunning and adventurous novel by David Diop, and has been translated from French by Sam Taylor. This story chronicles the fantastical tragedy of Michael Adanson, a French botanist who traveled to Senegal in his youth and until his death was haunted by his experiences there. The story begins after Adanson’s death in 1806. Among his possessions, his grieving daughter Aglaé finds a series of letters bound in a red leather folio he intended just for her. These letters reveal her father’s secrets and passions in a way that shows how memory can be strange, beautiful, and introspective. Adanson’s pursuit of and obsession with a woman deemed a ‘revenant’ invites the reader to wrestle with belief as a concept, whether with regard to religion, methods of storytelling, or even personal belief in oneself to write and rewrite your own narratives. This is a contemplative novel that demonstrates love is bound up in memory — though, like flowers, memories fade. —Tonika Reed, network operations project coordinator
World Editions
Abyss by Pilar Quintana; translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman.
Abyss by Pilar Quintana; translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman
Despite the narration from a rather precocious 8-year-old girl in Colombia, don’t mistake Abyss for children’s literature. Through the voice of Claudia, Pilar Quintana’s prose is simple and innocent yet haunting in what it accomplishes. Claudia’s perceptive ability to catch on to glimpses of darkness through her own secret language captures the distinct dread of discovering things you wish you’d never stumbled upon.
In the way that all kids do, Claudia notices subtle things about her family and their struggles: her dad’s quiet, monstrous anger and her mother’s propensity toward deaths and suicides, especially those of celebrities. As Claudia introduces you to the history of her family, you witness moments that seem innocuous at first, but as they accumulate they hint at something deeply wrong. Claudia absorbs these changes, though they’re largely hidden from view. Beneath all the mundane is a dexterous approach to discernment, loneliness, and fear.
The titular abyss is more than a physical space. It’s an internal darkness that calls to Claudia that she must confront. —Izzie Ramirez, Future Perfect deputy editor
On a Woman’s Madness by Astrid Roemer; translated from the Dutch by Lucy Scott
Even as our protagonist Noenka worries she is incapable of truly loving others, she forges relationships of striking intensity — and on terms decidedly of her own choosing. Even as she’s weighed upon by ancestral and modern strictures (caught in the “tangled web of [her] devotion” to her parents, understandably untrusting of other races “until the Black Queen of Africa is wearing her crown again”) Noenka boldly charts her path through mid-century Suriname.
The poetic writing can occasionally feel as impenetrable as the lush vegetation that fills several sets — but as deliciously, sensuously dense too. Read this first-ever English translation of a queer classic if you want to feel both the suffering and the promise of a life that is one’s own. —Caroline Houck, world politics senior deputy editor
Young People’s Literature
A First Time for Everything by Dan Santat — WINNER
Coming-of-age stories don’t go out of fashion. Every generation of writers and artists wants to explore the heady chemical soup of puberty as it plays out in boys and girls becoming adults. You’d think the public would get tired of hearing about it, but readers of all ages are perennially drawn to tales of first loves, first drinks, and first experiences of all stripes.
Dan Santat’s A First Time for Everything spins the coming-of-age novel into a graphic memoir of his trip to Europe as a 13-year-old in the 1980s. Dan the character is an only child with a secret passion for drawing, a mother who has lupus, and girls at his LA-area school who seem lightyears older (and meaner) than he will ever be. His parents, though protective, practically shove him aboard the plane taking a group of teens on a European tour. Once there, his world opens up and — predictably — the “firsts” come fast and furious.
What’s less predictable and more enjoyable is the way the story unfolds from Dan’s perspective. As an adult reading this (and incidentally an adult who experienced the ’80s), the moments of cringe, revelation, and danger feel viscerally real. The art and the story propel the reader into Dan’s reality, and since everyone reading it is going to be 13, is 13, or was once 13, the universal feelings of wanting to belong, of being on the outside of everything, of craving and fearing experience of the world hit you in the feels. —Elizabeth Crane, style & standards senior editor
Gather by Kenneth M. Cadow
Gather is a stunning debut by Kenneth M. Cadow. In this novel, a 10th grader named Ian who lives in rural Vermont is under pressure. He’s strained by the challenge of holding on to the home that has been in his family for generations, his mother’s recovery from opioid addiction, and the overall crushing weight of poverty. His dog Gather serendipitously comes into his life, becoming a beacon of hope and another support system.
Anyone who has endured what it’s like to witness someone they love recover from addiction, struggled to afford necessities, or relied on public programs like school lunches will find themselves nodding in agreement as they absorb the words from each page. It’s not always the easiest read, but Cadow masterfully describes difficult experiences through melodic language I’ll be thinking about for a very long time. Having grown up in a low-income household, I couldn’t help but think of how much I would’ve appreciated this novel when I was in high school. I’m still grateful I have it now. —Gabby Fernandez, senior audience strategy editor
Dial Books
Huda F Cares? by Huda Fahmy.
Huda F Cares? by Huda Fahmy
Huda F Cares?, inspired in part by its author and artist Huda Fahmy, is incredibly charming.
This graphic novel about one 15-year-old Muslim girl’s trip to Disney World with brand new contact lenses and three of her often-fighting sisters is heartfelt, thoughtful, and very funny. Huda herself is both bookish and feisty, a fact represented by two tinier Hudas that float at her shoulders, angel and devil style — although neither is so evil (or so purely good). Instead, the little Hudas seem to stand in for the two wolves inside most teen girls: the bold and occasionally impulsive one who wants to make her own way in the world, and the more timid one, concerned about fitting in and getting along.
For Huda, fitting in can feel like an uphill battle, from the glasses she thinks keep her from looking “normal” to the religious signifiers she finds meaningful but sometimes othering. It’s not easy to set down a prayer mat in the middle of Epcot, no matter how secure you are in your faith! And no one wants to explain to some gross, handsy white guy why you’re sweating in your abaya when what you really want is for him to shut up.
Fahmy’s jokey style mixes beautifully with a story of learning to be both strong and joyful, and that maybe, just maybe, it’s not so bad to hang out with your sisters. —Meredith Haggerty, senior culture editor
Big by Vashti Harrison
There’s a time on playgrounds, in classrooms, on courts, and other places meant to be nurturing when children learn the painful impact words can have on their self-esteem. Vashti Harrison illustrates these heartbreaking moments and the power to overcome them in her debut picture book, Big. The book follows a young Black girl who is born in an encouraging environment. She’s told to “dream big” and is surrounded by words like “caring,” “considerate,” and “smart,” none of which have anything to do with her physical appearance. As she grows up, the word “big” becomes cutting, as both her peers and adults focus on her size, humiliating her and damaging her sense of self. Through minimal narration and illustrations, Harrison creatively tackles fatphobia, malicious beauty standards, and adultification in a tender way. Big is an important reminder that children, on playgrounds, in classrooms, and everywhere else, deserve to be accepted for who they are. —Gabby Fernandez, senior audience strategy editor
The Lost Year: A Survival Story of the Ukrainian Famine by Katherine Marsh
The Lost Year opens in March 2020, with middle school kid Matthew grounded from his beloved Nintendo Switch right about he’s about to beat Zelda: Breath of the Wild, enduring virtual school and stuck at home with his single mother; his great-grandmother, GG; and boxes of GG’s memories. Learning about GG’s past, and her links to the Ukrainian famine that killed millions in the 1930s, turns into a quest that Matthew finds as compelling as any video game — a quest that author Katherine Marsh crafts into a moving narrative rich with details and pathos.
Through alternating points of view, the reader and Matthew meet three ancestors living nearly a century ago: Helena, the daughter of immigrants to New York; Mila, the pampered daughter of a high-ranking Soviet official living in Kyiv; and Nadiya, a girl from the Ukrainian countryside whose appearance on Mila’s doorstep, near death from starvation, sets the events of the novel in motion. For many young readers, fiction is a first encounter with the horrors of the world. Marsh has taken a lesser-known historical tragedy and imbued it with depth and complexity, creating characters that linger long after the narrative has reached its conclusion. —Libby Nelson, politics & policy editorial director
Updated November 15, to reflect the winners of the 2023 National Book Awards.
The blue versus green bubble debate may finally be winding down. Apple says the iPhone will add support for RCS messaging, the messaging standard used by most Android phones, in 2024, according to a report from 9to5Mac.
“Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association,” an Apple spokesperson tells 9to5Mac. “We believe RCS Universal Profile will offer a better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS. This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users.”
As noted by 9to5Mac, the iPhone adopting RCS could enable support for read receipts, typing indicators, high-res images...
These days, we are all dealing with huge amounts of information, from meeting notes to social media, to photos and videos, to whatever else we’ve collected — and we are all trying to find some way to store it, organize it, and find it when we need it.
If you want to get really basic, you can use a spreadsheet or create a simple set of word-processing documents. Otherwise, you can try what is somewhat inaccurately described as a note-taking app. These apps, at their simplest, store your notes and other thoughts and, at their more complex, are capable of manipulating any and all content you want to drop into them.
One of the most well-known has been Evernote, which has gone through quite a few changes over the years, both financially and...
With PlayStation VR googles affixed to my head, I lounged on the couch, trying to imagine I was the woman getting ravished by a tattooed bearded man.
In the video the woman’s tan legs splayed on the tile as the man hovered over her, kissing what I presumed were her nipples, although I couldn’t be sure because all I saw was the top of his head. It was my first time watching so-called female point-of-view (FPOV) virtual reality porn, and I tried to suspend my disbelief. But her legs were so tan and tatted and mine nearly bare and pale that it was difficult to imagine that this was, in fact, me. Perhaps it was a failure of my own imagination. The man gazed at me, his hairless uncircumcised dick dangling, as he squirted massage oil on his hands. I was kind of turned on, but then I zeroed in on a mole on his chest. I thought: Should he get that checked for cancer? What does that Japanese tattoo below the mole mean? But I didn’t give up on FPOV porn. Soon after, I found one I liked.
VR porn from a woman's point of view presents a radical shift in perspective in more ways than one. Type POV into PornHub and you’re most often faced with a guy’s view of his own penis with a woman hovering over it. The adult industry seemingly assumes that most viewers identify as male and desire to watch porn that centers around their dick. But a handful of companies and performers are attempting to transform the industry by creating porn from the POV of a woman, non-binary person, or person of unspecified gender, much of it in VR, with varying results as I discovered throughout my goggle-wearing journey into this world.
Porn has always been a male-dominated field. Most of the directors and consumers have been men. It wasn’t until the 1980s that directors, beginning with Candida Royalle, began to target their work to women and couples. But the number of women watching porn has always remained lower than that of men. Today, women do represent a significant amount of porn watchers, although not the majority: at PornHub it’s 36 percent.
VR porn’s share of female viewers is smaller, at about 17 percent, according to a survey by Bedbible.com. Anna Lee, a top VR director, thinks she might know why.
“VR is extremely geared towards the male gaze right now, even the way the hardware is built—it’s clunky, it's heavy, it's very male gamer,” said Lee.
“Just because you jumped from one type of hardware to another doesn't mean you’re innovative," she said regarding male VR porn directors. "You're making the same stereotypical porn you made with a fucking camcorder. It's the same MILF bending over in the kitchen to bake cookies.”
In 2020, researchers studied 38 women who were shown “high-quality, women-centered erotica” in VR (both POV and non-POV). Their results, published inThe Archives of Sexual Behavior, found that women were more aroused by VR porn than comparable 2D porn and felt as if they were more sexually present in the scene.
But VR is an investment. It not only requires expensive equipment—the Meta Quest 2 headset will run you $300 while the PlayStation VR2 costs $550—but also a large, private space. When wearing VR glasses, it’s nearly impossible to see what’s happening in the room around you. Watching VR porn can be treacherous, as the first episode of Bupkis demonstrated, when Pete Davidson ends up accidentally ejaculating on his mom. Yet the market for VR porn is over $1.5 million. And while the slow adoption of VR by the public for all use-cases may be a roadblock for porn, the industry has demonstrated time and again over decades that it can push new technology forward.
If VR producers and directors can get more women to watch, they could exponentially increase those profits. But first, they have to answer an age-old question: what do women want?
The answer: nearly everything. “Research has found that women find a wide range of pornographic material exciting, arousing and significant, although it may not directly align with their individual sexual preferences … some heterosexual women are very drawn to hardcore gay male porn while others find BDSM scenes stimulating although they are not members of a kink community,” according to Clarissa Smith, a professor at Northumbria University and founding co-editor of the journal Porn Studies.
A category in the industry called “porn for women” exists, though it “remains niche,” Smith said. And it has a very specific style. “Porn for women often features more realistic and emotionally connected scenarios, and might prioritize a ‘female gaze’, though I think many directors, creators, and performers in this category might quibble with the idea there is a monolithic female gaze,” Smith said. “Even so, a lot of research has emphasized women’s interests in themes of intimacy, communication, and mutual pleasure.”
While the FPOV VR porn industry is small, it’s growing. A few companies devoted to VR porn for women have sprung up: both European, and both spin-offs of male-centric companies.
Virtual Real Porn, based in Spain, created the website Virtual Real Passion (VRP) for female POV porn in 2016 as part of their commitment to “gender equality,” said Mary Lewis, VRP’s production director. The company uses input from its customers as well as female staff members to shape its content. “Lately, the feedback we receive most often is a desire to see women engaging in sexual activity with two or more men, with her taking charge of the situation,” said Lewis.
VRP’s content appeals mostly to couples and women, although there are male customers as well. Top rated videos include “My Boyfriends Are Back!”, a female POV threesome with two guys, and “Unstuck”, an FPOV where a winning quarterback seeking to sleep with your roommate ends up having sex with you instead.
VRP stands out for having male performers intended to appeal to women, which is not always the case in the porn world. One of their stars is Jason Carrera, who appears in “My Boyfriends are Back!” Shooting FPOV porn is “weird,” he said. His female costars have bifocal cameras dangling in front of their heads with a sticker placed on it where he is supposed to focus his eyes. “It feels like you’re fucking a robot,” he said.
He wants to look at the performer’s face or body, but cannot. Still, FPOV porn is physically easier to film than male POV for him. When he shoots male POV the camera is in front of his face, blocking out most of his vision. “You gotta be in an awkward position. Your body, your neck, your back hurts,” he said.
The other company focusing on FPOV porn is immerSex, a recently-opened branch of porn studio Vroomed. But when immerSex’s founder, who goes by Miron, proposed creating female point of view VR porn earlier this year, his business partner immediately vetoed it. Porn for women, particularly VR porn, won’t sell, his partner thought. He didn’t listen to him.
“If you are able to attract females, then you just double your market,” Miron told VICE. “Female POV in VR is more personal, more intimate” than 2D porn, he said.
His girlfriend thought the idea was a good one, though, and that was enough for him. Soon he released two titles for the female-centric branch of his company: Truck Driver Skills, a POV film involving a truck driver, and All For a Woman’s Pleasure, a sensual massage movie. The videos weren’t very successful. So he’s started producing close-up genital POV films under the immerSex brand in addition to FPOV films. His recent FPOV video “A Tale of Storm and Fire,” where two women pleasure each other intensely with cunnilingus and sex toys, became the most successful FPOV film in the collection. He thinks it did so well because it appealed to all genders.
FPOV porn has a devoted following, even in these early days. In 2016 female director Fivestar saw an opening in the market: FPOV for lesbians, by lesbians. She began LezVR in 2016. It was radical at the time, offering lesbian VR porn from the POV of a queer woman, not a cis male. It was the type of porn she herself would want to watch, with hot girls and high production values, she told me. So, of course I had to watch it.
In the LezVr, I was supposed to be envisioning myself as a strap-on wearing woman penetrating another busty woman. For some reason, it was easy for me to suspend my disbelief while wearing the clunky VR goggles. Maybe it was because I was turned on. The quality wasn’t great, because of my PSVR headset and the video itself having been made six years ago. But I felt more immersed, more able to imagine myself having sex than I usually do when watching porn.
LezVR didn’t sell well. Fivestar has a theory about why the concept didn’t quite work. “[Men] are trained to be agents of their own sexuality from the time they were born. And so I think there's more of a culture for men to buy porn, and more expendable income,” Fivestar said. The male-centric gaming culture of VR didn’t help either, she said.
Fivestar has continued to work regularly in the industry creating porn that appeals to women, including FPOV porn. “I do see a lot of people on the forums, in the comments, asking for straight female POV with cis male performers,” she said. Recently she shot a film like that: a massage fantasy from the woman’s point of view, with a hunky masseur who turns the massage sexual. During the shoot she made sure to include sex acts usually excluded from VR. “I’m like, ‘There's not enough POV cunnilingus. You got to do some pussy licking,'” she said.
“[The films] are really using the mind as the ultimate sexual tool”
One day last year, Fivestar was attending a porn industry hike when she began talking with the hike’s organizer, Todd Spaits of Yanks VR, a female-centric porn company focused on masturbation videos, and lesbian sex. After chatting, Fivestar and Spaits realized they shared the same porn values, particularly that shooting should be a collaboration between performer and director.
“We want to capture the real orgasm and so we kind of let [performers] dictate how that happens,” Spaits says.
Aside from Spaits, Yanks only employs women. Soon Fivestar was shooting for Yanks VR, which produces female and non-gendered POV porn. These have been more of a success, she said. Why did this work and not LezVR? It may be because Yanks also has a healthy male following: about half their viewers are men.
Yanks VR continues to create content for women, by women. And Spaits believes that VR provides something for women that 2D porn can’t. “You can break the fourth wall emotionally to where you have a bit of an emotional response… Sometimes you can get a little chills from…a model leaning into the camera, getting really close to your neck,” he said.
Yanks VR is also creating an augmented reality how-to video. “We bring in a real lesbian couple, and we do like a fingering move where she fingers her partner, and we capture that from two angles in VR,” he said.
Unlike Spaits, Lee didn’t set out to make films for women. “I just like making porn that I like,” she said. “It’s not gratuitous, like, ‘Oh my God, here’s a dick straight in your face. [The films] are really using the mind as the ultimate sexual tool.”
Soon she realized that her movies, which are less focused on the actual act of genital sex than the anticipation and sexual tension, appealed to women, who are about half of her audience.
One of her most popular productions is the Blackbox series: 20-minute ASMR solo porn videos shot in a black box, where women keep their clothes on for the first half of the production. “It's far more interesting [to film] before any clothes come off,” she said. The films weren’t specifically directed to women, they just had a non-gendered POV. “At no point did any of the performers ever say you know, oh, you’re dick’s so awesome,” Lee said. “That's why I had a lot of women come up to me and say, 'This is the first time that I felt like I was being spoken to.'” Lee thinks that non-binary POV is even more appealing to women than FPOV. “When a woman has sex, it's not about seeing, it's about feeling,” she said.
While Lee is avoiding FPOV, top VR porn distributor and producer Sex Like Real (SLR) has produced a number of films in the genre. They started creating FPOV in part because women asked for them. At a 2018 convention, SLR had a “wishing tree” promotion at their booth where people could scrawl their dreams for VR porn themes on colorful pieces of paper.
“One girl who came by mentioned something about a boyfriend experience,” said Telly, a director for SLR. “And I thought, yeah, maybe we'll do that one day, and then one day presented an opportunity.” The boyfriend experience video included a takeout sushi date along with sex. “We tried to have the dialogue be very non-gender specific so that a female or male could watch it,” Telly said. The boyfriend experience didn’t make a lot of money. “Maybe it is ahead of its time, or maybe it's just a market that is too small to sustain,” Telly thought.
Another early Telly FPOV film was Hoe Depot. In it, the viewer shares the POV of a horny woman whose friend convinces her to go to the hardware store with her “and just basically go hunting for dudes,” said Telly. The viewer watches as her friend, in a white crop tanktop with no bra, arrives at the hardware store and approaches an employee for help. “Our pipes haven’t been used in such a long time, and we need a really big one,” she says. It's a standard porno plot, but with a shift in perspective—the woman coercing and taking charge. Telly said the storyline was inspired by his friend who would don lace pants and travel to Home Depot whenever she felt unattractive to get male attention.
Telly’s wife worked alongside him during preproduction, finessing the storyline, wardrobe, and staging, he said. Some viewers weren't into it. “I just don't want a guy wagging his sick [sic] in my face, sorry lmao 😄😄😄😆😆😆😭😭😭, “ one viewer commented on SLR’s site. Though many of the comments were also positive. “This is awesome, please do more female POV! :)) … not enough gets produced,” wrote one person.
Why doesn’t more FPOV porn get produced on SLR ? Possibly it’s because only seven percent of their users identify as female. David Chapman, an executive at SLR thinks that number doesn't reflect the reality: “quite a few couples share the same headset, so the total [number] of female SLR users is likely to be higher.”
Chapman and Telly think that appealing to female viewers is important, even if the movies often don’t make much money right now. “VR porn provides people with a safe space to try out new sexual experiences and fetishes from the safety of their own home…Users can see how they respond to BDSM, or same-sex experiences, without having to step outside, and I think there's something really valuable and appealing about that, particularly for SLR's female users,” said Chapman.
Everyone I spoke to thought that there was an audience for female VR porn, but it will take time. Erika Lust, a feminist erotica director, said that she thinks VR will eventually appeal to more women if the gender makeup of the companies involved change. “We need more women in VR development, in VR porn production, and that will begin to attract a market,” Lust said.
She’s made one VR film, “360 Degrees of Lust”. Jason Carrera and Mickey Mod, a VR performer who is popular with women, starred in it alongside three other men. “It was a gangbang but more focused on her pleasure,” Carrera said. The film did well, but not as well as her other titles because, as she says “not everyone has VR kits lying around, they’re still quite expensive.”
When I talked to a superfan of FPOV porn, who goes by the name Super Smash Cache, she said that she struggled to find much that she liked in VR. She began searching in 2019, but she only found one video and it starred a man who looked like a “stereotypical, investment banker type,” she said. “I guess that is what men think all women want, but I like the nerdier guys.” In order to become aroused, she had to focus on his abs flexing and the penetration. Since then, she says, FPOV VR porn is “still slim pickings.”
She loves FPOV porn, because it “puts the emphasis on servicing the woman,” she said. “A lot of women who feel alienated by mainstream porn probably would have loved FPOV porn if it was more of an option sooner.”
While blow jobs and money shots are de rigueur in conventional porn, in FPOV porn, pillow princesses who lay on their back and receive pleasure reign and penetration is optional. She dreams of a day when she can search for “lanky, veiny forearm guy” and a series of FPOV films will show up.
She thinks she knows why there’s so little compelling FPOV: “The idea that men are visual creatures and women just aren't kind of became a self-fulfilling prophecy," she said. "So women's desires weren’t a core consideration for studios that are funded by and founded by men.”
Nissin’s microwavable Cup Noodles will hit shelves in 2024. | Image: Nissin Foods
Last week, Nissin announced that it was updating the design of its iconic Cup Noodles in early 2024. Instead of polystyrene, it’ll be made out of paper. Nissin also notes that thanks to the new packaging, its Cup Noodles will now be microwaveable. As in, you were never supposed to be microwaving Cup Noodles.
Cue chaos.
As it turns out, many people have not been reading labels when heating up Cup Noodles — a staple of college dorms, kitchen pantries, and many childhood memories. On social media, several people have been shockedto discover the original Cup Noodles were never meant for the microwave. Others are equally baffled that people have been microwaving Cup Noodles despite the the label clearly saying “Do not microwave.”
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