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Robinhood makes Wall Street feel like a game to win—not a place where you can lose your savings

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Wall Street has long been likened to a casino . Robinhood, an investment app that just filed plans for an initial public offering , makes the comparison more apt than ever . That’s because the power of the casino is the way it makes people feel like gambling their money away is a game. Casinos are full of mood lighting , fun noises, and other sensory details that reward gamblers when they place coins in slots. Similarly, Robinhood’s slick and easy-to-use app resembles a thrill-inducing video game rather than a sober investment tool. The color palette of red and green is associated with mood, with green having a calming effect and red increasing arousal, anger, and negative emotions . Picking stocks can seem like a fun lottery of scratching off the winning ticket; celebratory confetti drops from the top of the screen for the new users’ first three investments. But just as people can lose a lot of money gambling at the casino, the same thing can happen when you trade stocks and bonds—sometimes with disastrous consequences, such as last year when a Robinhood user died by suicide after mistakenly believing that he’d lost $750,000. I study how people behave inside game worlds and design classroom games . Using gamelike features to influence real-life actions can be beneficial, such as when a health app uses rewards and rankings to encourage people to move more or eat healthier food. But there’s a dark side too, and so-called gamification can lead people to forget the real-world consequences of their decisions. Games explained Generally speaking, games—whether played on a board, among children or with a computer— are voluntary activities that are structured by rules and involve players competing to overcome challenges that carry no risk outside of their virtual world. Read More …

Inside Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon’s alcohol- and snacks-saturated battle for Oscar buzz

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A month out from the 2021 Academy Awards telecast—which airs on April 25—the battle to win the love of Hollywood has turned into the year of the crate. Over the past few weeks, everyone from the indie studio A24 to indie stalwart Fox Searchlight (now a division within Disney) to Universal have dispatched across town crates of artisanal food to woo their way into the hearts—and stomachs—of the Hollywood press corps, the influential body of scribes who feverishly chronicle every twist and turn in the jostle leading up to the Oscars. Netflix, which leads this year’s nominations haul with a whopping 35 nominations for films, including Mank , The Trial of the Chicago 7 , and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom , has also been lavishing edible swag on reporters, but has become more known for gifting booze. To support Malcolm & Marie , a moody art film starring Zendaya and John David Washington—which looked like an early contender but ended up not nabbing any nominations—Netflix sent out bottles of top-drawer scotch. (I’m sure it didn’t go to waste.) Swag and Oscar campaigning have always gone hand in hand during awards season—the three (to six) month swirl of parties, dinners, brunches, and getaways sponsored by the studios and streamers to stir up buzz for their contenders. But in a season that has been turned on its head due to COVID-19—in-person screenings have been verboten , along with glad-handling galas—studios and screening companies have had to be more creative about how to get the word out about their films. Even the fall film festivals, such as Venice and Telluride, which are traditionally relied on to build early buzz and critical acclaim for films, went virtual in 2020, lessening their ability to fuel word of mouth and serve as showboating opportunities for stars and filmmakers. As a result, studios and streamers are coming up with new ways to transform their projects into events. Take Nomadland . The Best Picture frontrunner—it cemented this position by nabbing the top award at the Producers Guild Awards—stars Frances McDormand as a peripatetic Amazon worker who finds beauty and serenity amongst fellow RV dwellers in the American Southwest. The film premiered at festivals last fall, but when it launched on Hulu in late February and officially came out in theaters, Fox Searchlight announced a virtual global premiere. The tactic, in part, was to keep the film feeling fresh so far along in its run, and with the delayed Oscars still a ways off. (During campaign season, the fear of peaking too soon—what many believed killed A Star is Born ‘s Best Picture chances in 2019—haunts all awards publicists.) Invitees to the event were sent the aforementioned crate—stuffed with gourmet cheese, “humanly raised” salami, and trail mix—to enjoy while watching the film. This at-home viewing party atmosphere has become de rigeur this season in an attempt to replicate the feeling and fun of an Oscar screening/gala, and to elevate the living room viewing experience beyond turning on the tube in your pajamas (though you can still do that, of course). One publicist attributed the format to Netflix, which has been throwing “virtual premieres” ever since COVID-19 hit. Invitees who RSVP “yes” to a Netflix premiere see the film show up in their Netflix preview row, and are then sent popcorn or a DoorDash coupon to enjoy with the show Read More …

This viral TikTok perfectly explains how the COVID-19 vaccines work

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A few weeks ago, several epidemiologists and doctors who usually take to Twitter to share news articles, studies, and reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began sharing the same TikTok meme. The TikTok video is a short skit by an actor named Vick Krishna who turns the mundane process of vaccination into a good-versus-evil thriller to explain how the mRNA vaccine works. It’s been viewed 6 million times on TikTok alone, and has been shared on other social platforms and in text messages where it’s harder to measure its reach. I immediately sent the video to everyone in my life who had displayed even the slightest tone of skepticism in regard to the COVID-19 vaccine. Most people who show a little wariness toward the new vaccines are not anti-vaccine, per se, they just want to fully understand what it is they’re having injected into their body. Unfortunately, there are few resources that plainly explain vaccine technology . And in the absence of good and easily understood explainers , misinformation thrives. But Krishna’s video isn’t just a good explainer of how the technology works. It’s also entertaining enough to go viral, a rare achievement for wholesome health information on social platforms that are designed to promote salacious, outrageous, and enraging content—the very stuff that pandemic-related misinformation is made of. Last May, Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University and an expert on disinformation, eloquently laid out the problem : Algorithms enable COVID-19 misinformation to spread quickly and reach millions, while facts about the pandemic and health languish, seen by a only a few. “Do we need to have an enormous pro-vaccine movement waste tons of resources on that [content] just because social media has decided to preference the voices and positions of people who will go online and advocate for dangerous or mistaken points of view? What would be the value in that?” Donovan said. “Nevertheless, that’s one of the only solutions on the table.” More commonly, memes about the vaccine tend to play on negative tropes. For instance, there is a seemingly harmless TikTok meme, best identified as “me after I get the COVID-19 vaccine,” where people show videos of themselves rhythmically convulsing or barking like a dog or feigning other strange side effects. These are meant to be playful, but they actually play on anti-vaccine ideas that the shots are in some way harmful. This meme has been replicated and reposted an incalculable number of times on TikTok and Instagram Reels, then reposted on YouTube and Twitter Read More …

Could 13,000 smart thermometers keep Nebraska COVID-19-free?

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The vast majority of Nebraska is composed of rural territory: wide swaths of land occupied by pockets of roughly 2,500 people. Despite the state’s diffuse populous, it, like others, has struggled to contain the spread of COVID-19 over the past year. School officials are especially wary, despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recently released guidelines that reduce social distancing for students to 3 feet. Towns in rural Nebraska and several other regions around the U.S. are investing in new measures to keep schools safe from COVID-19 and future viral outbreaks. To finance these initiatives, they’re turning to local government organizations as well as corporate sponsors. A health tech company called Kinsa has sent some 21 school districts and six private schools in Nebraska 13,000 of its smart thermometers to help keep better track of sick students. School principles and nurses get a digital dashboard where they can view students’ anonymized symptom and fever data, broken down by grade. Parents are encouraged to take their children’s temperature before coming into school, where students are also required to wear masks. “Nebraska is very independent,” says Burke Harr, a former state senator who now counsels the Nebraska Cooperative Government, a group that ensures 93 small counties and towns in the state have the funding for roadway repairs and other common local infrastructure. “We were trying to find the least intrusive way to help predict where COVID may or may not be and to stop its spread or to at least alert us of where there was an issue.” In May 2020, Nebraska saw a small spike in cases, a significant portion of which were coming from meatpacking plants. Then in November, the state saw a steep incline, reaching a peak of 3,500 new cases per day. Some of the most high-risk areas were also some of the least populated. Boone County, for example, currently has one of the worst rates of COVID-19 infection in the state and has a population of only 5,200. “It hit rural Nebraska because there were less precautions taken,” says Harr, noting that in some parts of the state you’d be hard-pressed to find someone wearing a mask. “There isn’t the compactness of the cities, but there were spreader events Read More …

Meet BetterUp, the Silicon Valley startup where Prince Harry now works

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Prince Harry is now working for a company called BetterUp, a coaching platform for employers, as its Chief Impact Officer. He says joining BetterUp is an extension of his desire to help people lead more meaningful lives. But what exactly does BetterUp do? Founded in 2013, BetterUp aims to offer more people the opportunity to access expensive executive coaching that can help them be more productive and achieve personal goals. It combines individual one-on-one coaching with a series of educational resources and practice exercises to help people excel at work. To do that, the platform focuses on giving people tools for tackling their work, advocating for promotions, and offering advice on other aspects of their lives that may be inhibiting their growth at the office. This includes coaching on better eating habits and effective parenting. The upper echelons of management are usually the only ones with access to this kind of coaching, but BetterUp is trying to bring it to the corporate working masses. The company charges employers a monthly subscription fee per employee for access to the platform and its coaches. Clients include Airbnb, Google, Hilton, and Warner Brothers, and individuals can also sign up for the platform through a free trial. Read More …