Only about half of teenagers use Facebook these days, says a new Pew Research Center study.

The study, published Thursday, showed that only 51 percent of surveyed kids age 13 to 17 said they use Facebook. In 2015 that number was 71 percent, and Facebook was the dominant social media platform.

YouTube, which wasn’t included as a social media platform in the 2015 study, is the most popular, used by 85 percent of teens polled. Instagram is used by 72 percent of teenagers, and Snapchat by 69 percent. (Teenagers polled were allowed to choose more than one platform this year, and the two surveys used slightly different methods to ask teens about their social media use.) 

The study also looked into how teens view the impact that social media has on their lives. Only 24 percent said they believe it has a “mostly negative effect” on people their age, whereas the vast majority believe it is mostly positive or has neither a positive or a negative effect.

The Pew study also showed that a significant percentage of U.S. teens play video games ― including computer, console and cellphone games ― which is not surprising. Eighty-three percent of teenage girls responded that they play video games, versus 97 percent of teenage boys.

The survey was conducted using the online NORC AmeriSpeak panel to reach 743 teenagers from March 7 to April 10. Interviews were conducted online and by telephone.

With the inclusion of YouTube and the dominance of video games in the lives of teenagers, it’s possible that gaming platforms like Twitch will play a more significant role in the next survey.

“It is clear the social media environment today revolves less around a single platform than it did three years ago,” the Pew Research Center said.

Facebook is set to kill its “trending” news section next week after four years and is testing a new breaking news feature that could replace it.

The company announced the move on Friday, saying that the trending feature wasn’t popular and accounted for less than 1.5 percent of clicks to the websites of news publishers. More problematic was the feature’s tendency to spread fake news, particularly during the 2016 presidential election, The Associated Press noted.

Facebook’s head of news products, Alex Hardiman, wrote in the announcement that the company is currently testing a breaking news label that would put the power of editorial decisions in the hands of news organizations. Previously, moderators for Facebook made the decisions.

“There are other ways for us to better invest our resources,” Hardiman told the AP.

Eighty publishers around the world currently have access to the tool, which allows them to add a label that indicates a story is “breaking.”

Facebook said it is also testing a new section called “Today In,” which displays local breaking news, and a dedicated section of Facebook Watch in the U.S. for live videos and other items exclusive to the platform.

Alicia Rodis had her first kiss on stage when she was 15. She faked her first orgasm on stage too, when she was 18 ― the same year she first appeared nude in a production.

“I never looked like an ingenue,” she said. “I developed early, so if there was a prostitute or a slutty best friend in a play who had that reputation, that’s probably who I was playing.”

As an aspiring actress, Rodis was happy to take the roles she was offered, including those that required engaging in and acting out intimate scenes with strangers. But the power dynamics between a young actress and director, paired with the potential for miscommunication between actors portraying scenes of sexual intimacy, meant she was vulnerable to misconduct.

“I had some experiences that were really wonderful, and I had some experiences that were downright dangerous,” she said. “Even if not physically dangerous, then mentally and emotionally harmful.”

Rodis eventually became a fight and stunt director based in New York, helping stage and film productions choreograph violent scenes in a way that ensured actors remained safe and unharmed.

Union standards require productions to hire fight directors to choreograph scenes of sexual violence, but Rodis wondered why similar protocols and procedures didn’t exist for staged moments of romantic sexual intimacy ― which can be clumsily executed at best and invite inappropriate behavior at worst.

“I was working on a show and I was there for a slap and a kiss,” Rodis recalled. “We choreographed the slap and it was fine, then we got to the kiss and the actors were just terrified.”

The actors asked Rodis to step in, and they went over one another’s respective boundaries and determined how physical moments should move the story forward. “After that, it looked beautiful,” she said.

Rodis was practicing intimacy direction, an emerging field in which a small group of professionals are pushing to develop standards and procedures for scenes involving physical intimacy in the wake of a public reckoning with sexual misconduct throughout the entertainment industry.

Intimacy directors or choreographers are hired to facilitate scenes for the stage and screen involving physical touch, from moments of sexual tension to scenes featuring nudity and simulated sex and even familial intimacy. In many cases, an intimacy director’s most important role is their most passive: They are the person in the room whose job it is to discuss and understand an actors comfort with various aspects and types of touch in scenes of physical intimacy. 

If an actor or director deviates from the predetermined choreography, an intimacy director can intervene, relieving performers themselves of the fraught responsibility to confront one another about a drifting hand, or to challenge a director pushing for more contact or nudity than previously agreed upon.

Tonia Sina of Oklahoma City developed intimacy direction as a discipline in a graduate thesis 15 years ago. She’d found that for a director to simply ask performers to do what they feel ― to touch one another however they are moved to ― “led to a lot of mishandling and really horrible situations to be put in as a young actress,” she said.  

In 2016, Sina and Rodis founded Intimacy Directors International with Siobhan Richardson, an actor and fight director in Canada. Claire Warden, who’s based in New York, joined later. They’d all found that choreographing intimate moments could prevent the type of ambiguity and miscommunication that can give way to misconduct.

All four women said they had either experienced inappropriate behavior themselves on sets or witnessed mishandling of scenes involving physical touch. 

“I’ve been in the situation myself, where you’re thinking, ‘That hand seems to be drifting, but should I say something?’ It’s difficult to bring that kind of thing up,” Warden told HuffPost. “Even if you do, even if you are brave enough to say, ‘Hey, you put your hand on my butt,’ they’ll say, ‘Oh, I was just in the moment, I was really feeling it,’ which is how a lot of abuse can be covered up.”

By founding an official association of professionals, Richardson, Sina, Rodis and Warden hope to standardize protocols and procedures and further develop the discipline at a moment when awareness of sexual misconduct on the stage and screen is at an all-time high. 

“When you have a profession where people have to touch each other at their job, there need to be rules around that,” Sina said.

After revelations of film producer Harvey Weinstein’s history of abuse and as the Times Up and Me Too movements rippled through the industry more broadly, more people who make films have been open to hiring a specialized professional to work out sex scenes with performers. 

But Sina said it was President Donald Trump’s election ― amid allegations that he had sexually assaulted multiple women ― that “really made our phone ring off the hook.”

“It made people more aware that they maybe in the past have overstepped some lines, and that they need re-examine the way they’re approaching their work,” she said.

The theater world had begun to confront the potential for abuse in 2016. That year, an exposé revealed that Chicago’s Profiles Theater, which for decades was lauded for its raw, edgy performances involving nudity and sexually explicit content, had permitted rampant sexual abuse and violence on its stage. Violent acts that audience members assumed were choreographed to avoid physical harm were, instead, on-stage beatings and sexual assaults.

Profiles Theater closed permanently in 2016.

“Every actor I have spoken to about this, and I’ve spoken to hundreds, male or female or gender fluid, has a story being in a moment of intimacy and having a negative experience, ranging from uncomfortable to traumatizing,” Warden said.

She added that unease with talking about sex, and what it ought to look like, often means directors fail to set the terms for intimate scenes.

“A large amount of it is just from discomfort with having a conversation and not quite knowing how to handle it, and just saying, ‘Great, just grab her there and put that there,’” she said. “That, in any other situation, is sexual assault.” 

But there are other reasons why directors might avoid discussing the mechanics of an intimate scene before it is filmed or performed. Most commonly, they may not want to dampen the actors’ authentic response to intimate touch with choreographed passion.

Intimacy directors say the opposite is typically true: Without clear direction, actors are left to fumble through scenes with no knowledge of each other’s boundaries, or more practically, how the moment should contribute to the story being told.

“Stage sex is nothing like real sex. It’s fake. It has to be taught, and it has to be choreographed separately,” Sina said. “There shouldn’t be any grey area.”

Any grey area that results from failing to set the terms beforehand creates “a huge capacity for the possibility of harassment” Rodis said, especially if one actor’s “authentic response” crosses their stage partner’s boundaries, or if a director makes a spontaneous change that goes beyond the terms of someone’s nudity rider.

“The power dynamic is so strong in these situations. You’re on a time crunch. There’s so much money involved ― it’s tough to advocate for yourself,” Rodis said.  

Richardson said she believes that choreographing intimate scenes gives her and performers the tools to address spontaneous variations objectively. 

Intimacy directors also train in mental health first aid in order to pick up on actors’ physical signs of discomfort or unease, and intervene before lines are crossed even further. Warden told HuffPost that fight scenes and those involving intimate, physical touch can be uniquely similar in their psychological impact on those performing them.

“Our psyches have an enormously difficult time differentiating between real and staged violence, even if no contact is made. It’s the same with this. It becomes real in the moment,” she said, comparing intimacy direction to the precautions taken to avoid physical injury in cases of staged fighting.

“You have equipment you work with so you don’t get hurt,” Warden said. “When you’re doing a fall, you ask for a mat. We don’t want to break the actor. Well, we don’t want to break the actor emotionally or psychologically either.”

She added, “I liken it to a jungle gym. If you build a really solid jungle gym and you know where all the bars are you, you can really leap because you know there’s something there to catch.”

Intimacy directors are currently more common in theatre than in film, though Rodis and Sina said they’ve been brought in to consult on network shows and feature movies in recent months. Sina said Intimacy Directors International is currently working with the Screen Actors Guild to standardize techniques and practices developed to prevent blurred lines and outright assault on film sets. 

Rodis said directors appear more open to intimacy directors ― relieved to outsource the boundary-setting and tough conversations about consent to a specialized professional. She still encounters some discomfort with the idea, and emphasized that the role of intimacy directors is to improve conditions for the future, using the past to learn rather than incriminate.

“We are in this cultural shift where we all have to look at our own actions and what we have done in the past. It is very uncomfortable and scary to look back at another thing you worked on and think, ‘I’m not sure if I handled that right,’” she said.

“Now is about taking the opportunity of the cultural shift to look at the mirror and look at our past and say: ‘I didn’t know, but now I can educate myself and work better.’”

An earlier version of this story misspelled Siobhan Richardson’s first name. 

Nathan Larson, a 37-year-old accountant from Charlottesville, Virginia, is running for Congress as an independent candidate in his native state. He is also a pedophile, as he admitted to HuffPost on Thursday, who has bragged in website posts about raping his late ex-wife.

In a phone call, Larson confirmed that he created the now-defunct websites suiped.org and incelocalypse.today ― chat rooms that served as gathering places for pedophiles and violence-minded misogynists like himself. HuffPost contacted Larson after confirming that his campaign website shared an IP address with these forums, among others. His sites were terminated by their domain host on Tuesday.

On the phone, he was open about his pedophilia and seemingly unfazed about his long odds of attaining government office.

“A lot of people are tired of political correctness and being constrained by it,” he said. “People prefer when there’s an outsider who doesn’t have anything to lose and is willing to say what’s on a lot of people’s minds.”

When asked whether he’s a pedophile or just writes about pedophilia, he said, “It’s a mix of both. When people go over the top there’s a grain of truth to what they say.”

Asked whether there was a “grain of truth” in his essay about father-daughter incest and another about raping his ex-wife repeatedly, he said yes, offering that plenty of women have rape fantasies. 

According to Larson’s campaign manifesto, his platform as a “quasi-neoreactionary libertarian” candidate includes protecting gun ownership rights, establishing free trade and protecting “benevolent white supremacy,” as well as legalizing incestuous marriage and child pornography.

In the manifesto, Larson called Nazi leader Adolf Hitler a “white supremacist hero.” He urged Congress to repeal the Violence Against Women Act, adding, “We need to switch to a system that classifies women as property, initially of their fathers and later of their husbands.” He also showed sympathy for men who identify as involuntary celibates, or incels, suggesting it is unfair that they “are forced to pay taxes for schools, welfare, and other support for other men’s children.”

Using the pseudonyms Leucosticte and Lysander, Larson frequently participated in conversations on his own message boards, he confirmed to HuffPost.

As Lysander on suiped.org, a forum for “suicidal pedophiles,” Larson wrote numerous posts endorsing child rape and other forms of sexual abuse.

“Why doesn’t every pedo just focus on making money so they can get a pedo-wife and then either impregnate her with some fucktoys or adopt some fucktoys?” he wrote on the platform in October. “That would accommodate both those who are and aren’t into incest. And of course, the adoption process lets you pick a boy or a girl.”

Larson has a 3-year-old daughter who lives with relatives. He told HuffPost that he relinquished his parental rights during a custody battle. His ex-wife got a court-ordered restraining order against him in 2015 before she died by suicide.He has since remarried, he says, and is now living in Catlett, Virginia.

Larson used the moniker “Leucosticte” on incelocalypse.today ― a forum for incels who are pedophiles that was removed this week after the website Babe contacted the domain host. There, he identified as a “hebephilic rapist,” noting that he’s not a typical incel because he’d had sex by raping his ex-wife.

According to the site, which HuffPost viewed before it was taken down, “incelocalypse” refers to “the day we make the jailbaits our rape-slaves.” (The term “jailbait” is slang for a person who is under the legal age of consent for sex.)

HuffPost did not view any posts explicitly stating that he has engaged in sexual activity with minors, although he repeatedly expressed a desire to have sex with infants and children, including his own daughter. In the phone call, Larson said that the word “pedophile” is “vague” and “just a label,” adding that it’s “normal” for men to be attracted to underage women. He said he did not commit any crimes.

In a 3,300-word essay on incelocalypse.today, titled “Here’s How to Psyche Yourself Up to Feel Entitled to Rape,” Larson tells other members: “Don’t forget: feminism is the problem, and rape is the solution.” On the platform, he also advocated for father-daughter marriage, killing women and raping virgins.

Larson is less worried about his run for Congress than about his sites coming down. He told HuffPost that the termination of his websites is an affront to his freedom of speech and that he’s going to try to get them hosted elsewhere. Not that it’ll matter ― there are still plenty of forums where incels and other such communities can congregate. The removal of Larson’s sites caused an uproar on incels.me, a separate, much larger forum for incels.

Larson’s political ambitions span more than a decade. He first ran for Congress in Virginia’s 1st District in 2008 on what he described as an “anarcho-capitalist” platform. That same year, he sent a letter to the Secret Service threatening to kill the president, which landed him in federal prison for 14 months and barred him from seeking public office.

But in 2016, then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) restored voting and other civil rights to thousands of felons, allowing Larson to campaign yet again. In 2017 he ran in Virginia’s House of Delegates District 31 and secured less than 2 percent of the vote. Now he is gunning for a seat in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District.

Until it was pulled down, Larson’s site Nathania.org, a wiki page with details about his latest candidacy, featured posts titled “A Man Should Be Allowed to Choke His Wife to Death as Punishment for Cutting Her Hair Short Without Permission, or Other Acts of Gross Insubordination,” “Advantages of Father-Daughter Incest” and “The Justifiability of an Incel’s Kidnapping a Girl and Keeping Her as His Rape-Slave for Sex and Babymaking.” Wiki pages can be edited by other people, but Larson confirmed he wrote these posts as well as several other disturbing entries.

In “Let’s Define What Rape Is,” a 3,000-word essay posted on Nathania.org as well as other incel sites, Larson wrote: “Women are objects, to be taken care of by men like any other property, and for powerful men to insert themselves into as it pleases them, and as they believe will be in women’s own interests. In most cases, their interests are aligned, as long as the man is strong. Female sex-slaves actually get a much better deal than animals, because in most cases, they are allowed to reproduce, unlike animals raised for meat or companionship.”

When asked what his constituents would think about his pedophiliac writings, he said, “People are open-minded.”

He continued, “A lot of people who disagreed with someone like Trump … might vote for them anyway just because the establishment doesn’t like them.”

If you or someone you know needs help, call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. You can also text HOME to 741-741 for free, 24-hour support from the Crisis Text Line. Outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of resources. For help with sexual violence, visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.

Naomi Campbell is the definition of a fashion legend. 

The supermodel, who celebrated her 48th birthday on May 22, has been dominating catwalks with her fierce signature strut since the 1980s. She’s walked in fashion shows for designers ranging from Chanel to Dior to Alaia to Versace, appeared on plenty of magazine covers ― she was the first black model to appear on the covers of French Vogue and Time ― and starred in countless campaigns.

And while she’s had a few questionable moments ― like that cell phone throwing situation in 2007 ― Campbell’s success in the industry has no doubt helped pave the way for fellow black models such as Jourdan Dunn, Chanel Iman and Winnie Harlow, among others. She’s also used her influence for good, supporting a number of charities and causes she believes in.  

On Monday, Campbell will receive the Fashion Icon award at a Council of Fashion Designers of America ceremony, an accolade that is definitely well-deserved. As a tribute, we’re taking a look back at some of the supermodel’s best runway moments ― proof that she’s always been a catwalk queen: 

NEW YORK ― Carley Perez, a 26-year-old New Yorker who started working in the health care industry right after she graduated from high school, isn’t afraid of the intimate moments that home care workers must share with patients.

“I have changed adult diapers. Cleaned penises. You have to expect nudity,” Perez told HuffPost recently, talking at a crowded cafe near Manhattan’s Union Square on a rare day off. She emphasized that she enjoyed her work caring for adults with developmental disabilities and started volunteering to help kids with autism back when she was in high school.

But one of Perez’s male patients took that personal relationship too far.

She was supposed to help him navigate the tasks of daily life ― cooking, cleaning, shopping for food ― and to be there just in case. But last year, over the course of several months, he repeatedly made crude sexual comments, exposed himself and even masturbated in front of Perez in his Brooklyn studio apartment, according to a sexual harassment lawsuit she filed Friday. The suit, brought in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is directed against her former employer, a nonprofit health care organization called the Center for Family Support.

The man was 6 feet, 5 inches tall and weighed 300 pounds. In the lawsuit, he’s identified only as “T.” He’d hold his penis in his hand and say things to Perez such as “I know you like it,” according to the suit.

“I did not feel safe,” Perez told HuffPost, her eyes wide with the memory of what happened.

Even during this Me Too moment, stories about women like Perez are rarely told. Bold-faced names and companies typically grab headlines. Low-income women don’t always have the time for hashtags.

When asked if she’s been following the news on sexual harassment lately, Perez, who shares custody of her 8-year-old daughter with her former husband, shakes her head.

Before she had her daughter, Perez hoped she could pursue a degree in nursing, following in the footsteps of her mother. But when T was allegedly harassing her last year, Perez was barely getting by, earning around $13 an hour, hoping for 40 hours a week and burdened by an unreliable schedule.

Although she still wanted to pursue an advanced degree, she said, “It’s hard to work full time and go to school full time.”

Paid About $13,800 A Year

Perez was working in a rapidly expanding industry. As the baby boom generation grows older, home care workers are increasingly in demand. Personal care aides and home health aides make up the country’s second and third fastest-growing occupations, according to a 2014 report from the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute, a national organization that trains such workers and their employers.

More than half of these workers are women of color and one quarter are immigrants, the PHI report said. One out of five are single mothers.

Home care workers typically earn about $13,800 a year, according to a 2017 report from PHI. One in four live below the poverty line.

All of which is to say this is a vulnerable group of workers, often shouldering the triple burden of racism, sexism and near-poverty wages.

“Home care workers come into the workplace with various markers of powerlessness,” said Emily Martin, a vice president at the National Women’s Law Center. “No one is going to believe her if she says anything.”

And lawyers aren’t lining up to represent them.

Still, Perez did not hesitate to complain about T. She repeatedly told her supervisor about the situation.

CFS said it “vehemently denies” all of Perez’s allegations.

Alone At Night With The Patient

After complaining many times, Perez said she was transferred to a different patient in the same building where T lived. But then, over Memorial Day weekend last year, Perez’s supervisor sent her back to T’s apartment to cover a midnight shift.

The sexual harassment escalated into something more frightening.

After she arrived, T turned off all the lights, switched on the TV, sat down on the couch and started masturbating underneath a blanket, according to the lawsuit.

In response, Perez told T she was going to step outside so he could have some “alone time.” She waited in the apartment lobby for a while.

When she returned, T came out of the bathroom naked, penis in hand, according to the suit. “I know you like this,” he said, walking over to Perez and putting his scrotum on her arm.

“Once his skin touched mine, I knew I couldn’t deal with this,” Perez recalled to HuffPost.

She told T to get dressed and she left the apartment. In the hallway, Perez frantically tried to get in touch with her supervisor, according to the suit. But it was then around 5 a.m. and he wasn’t picking up his phone or answering texts. She waited for word on what to do ― care workers aren’t supposed to just walk off the job.

About an hour passed with no response and Perez decided to leave. Hours later, she was able to get in touch with a manager and told her what had happened.

“What could you have done to prevent it?” the manager asked Perez, according to the lawsuit.

Perez was shocked. “She made it seem like it was my fault,” Perez told HuffPost. “I expected compassion. Or at least some sympathy.” 

A few days later, Perez met with her supervisor and a human resources representative from CFS. She explained why she’d walked off her shift.

They fired her.

What Was She Supposed To Do?

Home care workers facing sexual harassment from patients ― or clients, in industry terminology ― are in a vastly different position from women being harassed in an office, factory or many other workplaces.

“The truth is that a home care worker is in a vulnerable situation being in a person’s home alone,” said Susan Misiorski, vice president of workforce innovations at PHI. “They are providing care and services that are personal and intimate. They might be bathing the person, assisting them with going to the bathroom.”

Clients may lack the ability to control their own behavior because of developmental disabilities or other issues like dementia or Alzheimer’s. “You can easily imagine how a person with cognitive impairment could misperceive such a situation,” Misiorski said.

The procedures for dealing with these kinds of situations should be clear-cut, Misiorski said. If a worker complains about the way they’re being treated, the employer needs to take action. The employer should officially assess the situation, interview the worker, send in a registered nurse or another expert to evaluate the client, and then make appropriate changes to the client’s care plan, said Misiorski, who was speaking generally and was not familiar with Perez’s specific situation.

For example, in a case where a male patient is being sexually aggressive to a female worker, the managing company could bring in a male caretaker instead. Or if an individual worker is afraid to be alone with a client, two people could be assigned to care for him, Misiorski said.

And of course, if the behavior of the client rises to the level of criminal conduct, that person should be reported to the authorities, she said.

None of this happened after Perez brought the problem with T to her supervisors, according to the lawsuit. “They basically shrugged it off,” she said.

At some point, she was allegedly told, “Don’t worry.” Perez said she wasn’t given any special training or instructions on how to handle T ― a best practice, according to Misiorski.

Perez said she did have training on how to deal with violent patients and how to prevent physical altercations. “None of that prepared me for what happened,” she said.

“We believe that sexual harassment of caregivers is more common than people think,” said Kristina Bas Hamilton, legislative director for the United Domestic Workers, a union representing health care workers in California.

It’s hard to know the scope of the issue for home care workers as there’s not much data on them specifically. However, we do know that workers in the industry more generally are vulnerable. Nearly 12 percent of the sexual harassment charges filed at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 2005 to 2015 were by employees in the health care and social services sector. It was No. 4 on the list, behind the food service, retail and manufacturing industries.

Hamilton, like Misiorski, emphasized that when an organization is sending out a care worker, it has an obligation to make sure that worker isn’t going into an abusive situation. Yet that’s exactly where Perez found herself on Memorial Day last year.

Disposable Workers

Perez was devastated and outraged at the unfairness of her termination, but she tried to move on and find a new job. The problem was that other agencies didn’t want to hire someone who had been fired. It was a red flag.

Potential employers automatically assumed that Perez had abused a patient, she said. “They have to be cautious.”

She burned through her savings while she looked for work and had to leave the one-bedroom apartment she rented in Brooklyn with her daughter. She closed her bank account. The money was gone.

“I was looking at shelters,” Perez said. She was able to move in with her cousin’s family in Harlem. On the days when her daughter stays with her, they face a 90-minute commute back to the little girl’s school in Brooklyn. Two trains and a bus, Perez said.

A friend helped her find a lawyer willing to take CFS to court.

“Workers in this industry are treated as if they’re disposable, not like human beings with families who need to pay rent and eat,” said attorney Daniel Bright. “What is someone in her situation supposed to do. It’s five in the morning. What did they want from her? To go back in? See if it escalated further?”

In the lawsuit, Perez argues that CFS was negligent and disregarded her safety, exposing her to sexual harassment, assault and a sexually hostile work environment.

Bright said CFS has refused to settle the case and is taking the position it did nothing wrong.

Perez is now working two part-time jobs ― cleaning office buildings and handling security for a music venue in Manhattan. She doesn’t know exactly what she hopes from her lawsuit, beyond a recognition that what happened to her “was wrong,” she said. “I want what’s fair.”

But she hasn’t given up on a future in nursing or going back to her old job. “I miss it,” she said. “I miss being in that community. Helping people. It was like my comfort zone.”

Are you a home care worker and would you like to share your story? I’d love to talk to you. Email me: emily.peck@huffpost.com 

Camila Cabello’s insanely catchy song “Havana” just broke another record.

The single, which has more than 888 million streams, is now Spotify’s most-streamed song of all time by a solo female artist, Billboard reported on Friday. The Cuban-American singer is the first solo Latina artist to hold the record.

Previously, the distinction was held by Sia’s “Cheap Thrills.”

The new record is just the latest milestone for Cabello. In January, her album became the first debut by a woman to hit No. 1 on Billboard’s 200 albums chart in three years. The same month, “Havana” also hit seven weeks at the top of Billboard’s Pop Songs radio airplay chart, which was the longest run for a solo female artist in a lead role since by Taylor Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble” in 2013.

But apparently not everyone expected the song to be a smash. In January ― when the song had been at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 for 21 weeks, according to Complex ― the song’s producer Frank Dukes tweeted that the song had plenty of doubters early on.

“It’s just amazing to see that people have connected to it so much,” she said on the Billboard Chart Beat podcast. “When we were making the song, even though it was really special to me, I don’t think anyone expected for this to happen.”

A small group of Google employees, in response to a company contract with a Pentagon-backed program called Maven, have discussed the idea of staging a protest at a conference in July. Employees fear that the project, which provides artificial intelligence tools to the military, could be used in fatal drone strikes.

The protest, as discussed in preliminary exchanges over Google’s internal communications platform, would take place at a Google Cloud conference in San Francisco, according to messages obtained by HuffPost and an interview with an employee.

More than a dozen Google employees have resigned over the project, according to Gizmodo, and thousands of employees have signed a letter protesting it.

Now Google employees are debating showing resistance in a more active way, through a potential demonstration.  

Discussions regarding the possibility of a protest took place this week on an internal thread devoted to criticism of Maven. The thread, called “maven conscientious objectors,” includes hundreds of employees, but only a small percentage of those were active in the discussion.

The debate about staging a physical demonstration took place on Wednesday and Thursday and was started by a departing engineer. The employee called the project “the greatest ethical crises in technology of our generation” and suggested that “Maven protesters” go to the conference with the aim of “making some noise.”

The employee’s last day was Friday, but by late morning, someone from human resources had asked them to leave immediately due to their “recent statements” related to the conference. “As such, we’re going to move up your exit by a few hours and we’ve ended access, effective immediately,” the HR person wrote.

In response to the initial thread, another employee called the engineer an “agent provocateur.” Someone else said such an action would “be enough reason to fire us lot with popular support.”

The debate became heated and personal, with some employees questioning whether their colleague who originally suggested the idea of a physical protest should even belong in the “conscientious objectors” group.

But there were a few employees who supported the idea, calling the discussion “legitimate topics for this mailing list.” Another said that while they were not based in San Francisco and were thus unable to join the action, they personally thought the protest was “a good idea since it increases Google’s PR cost of getting involved in military projects.”

Representatives for Google did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment. The Intercept reported Friday afternoon that Google will not renew its contract to work on Project Maven, though the company plans to work on the project through June 2019 and has not ruled out taking on similar work in the future.

This isn’t the first round of discord from Google employees. In an April petition to Google CEO Sundar Pichaiprotesting the Pentagon contract and signed by thousands, petitioners referenced “Don’t be evil,” Google’s famous former unofficial motto, as an argument for canceling the contract.

“This contract puts Google’s reputation at risk and stands in direct opposition to our core values. Building this technology to assist the US Government in military surveillance ― and potentially lethal outcomes ― is not acceptable,” the signers of the petition wrote.

Hundreds of academics subsequently wrote a letter to Google co-founder Larry Page, as well as Pichai and other company leaders, supporting the petitioning employees.

The academics expressed concern that Project Maven will help the military become “just a short step away from authorizing autonomous drones to kill automatically, without human supervision or meaningful human control.” The letter also cited recent Cambridge Analytica scandals as demonstrating “growing public concern over allowing the tech industries to wield so much power.”

At a recent companywide meeting, Sergey Brin, one of Google’s co-founders, reportedly responded to a question about the project and addressed some of the controversies, according to The New York Times. Brin explained that he thought it was better for the world’s militaries to be partnered with an international company like Google, rather than nationalistic defense contractors.

The employee who started the discussion about protesting Google’s involvement with Maven implied on the thread that they gave notice due to a violation of their own ethical standards.

“The time to protest is now or never,” the employee wrote.

Are you a Google employee who wants to talk about your experience with Maven? Email rebecca.klein@huffpost.com.

This story has been updated with information from The Intercept’s report.

Walk into this San Francisco restaurant and you are greeted with a wall of numbered cubbyholes with acrylic doors. Dotted around the room are tablet screens for placing orders. What you won’t find are any people serving. There’s no counter, no human to take your order or hand over the food. Instead, customers scroll through the menu of quinoa and rice bowls on the in-store screens or on a mobile app, tap in their order and wait for their name to flash on one of the cubbies, where their food will be waiting.

This is Eatsa, an automated restaurant. Well, sort of. There are still humans preparing food behind the scenes. But the company hopes to eventually automate this process too.   

The concept restaurant, while it has had recent setbacks, represents another step in the onward march of automation. To some, Eatsa is a sign of innovation, providing people with fast, smooth service without the need to speak to another person. But for others, like San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim, who represents the district the restaurant is in, “there’s a big question mark about what this means for us as a society,” she says. Not only what it means to have less human interaction but also what it will do to jobs.

Automation has been on Kim’s mind. “This is one of the biggest issues that is facing our country over the next decade,” she says. In response to her growing concerns about how it will play out in a city with one of the fastest-growing income gaps between rich and poor, she had an idea. Tax the robots and use the money to help stem inequality.

The idea of a robot tax has bubbled up over the past couple of years, thanks to the backing of some high-profile figures, proposing it as a way of trying to prevent all the benefits of automation from flowing to a tiny slice of wealthy people.

Benoît Hamon — a socialist candidate in the French presidential elections last year — made a robot tax a plank in his campaign. Perhaps the most famous advocate is Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates. He told Quartz last year, “Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”

He says he believes taxing machines could slow the pace of automation, giving people a chance to retrain and giving governments time to put in place policies to protect people from intensifying inequality.

A robot tax has not been implemented anywhere. The European Parliament toyed with the idea but ultimately rejected it, concerned it would amount to a tax on progress and put the EU at a disadvantage. South Korea has probably come closest. With the aim of protecting workers, it implemented a halfway step last year by cutting a tax break available to companies investing in automation. 

In San Francisco, Kim’s suggestion is to extend the payroll tax to robots and algorithms that replace human jobs. Funds raised would be funneled into a “jobs for the future fund,” she says, which could pay for “workforce development and training for workers who have lost their jobs, such as truck drivers, retail and restaurant workers, even accountants and stockbrokers.”  

She also envisages using the tax revenue to tackle the low pay of many care sector jobs. “We do have these jobs which are very difficult to automate like child care and home support service workers that are currently jobs largely performed by older women of color.”

A February report from global management consultancy Bain & Co. supports Kim’s concerns about inequality. It found that the most vulnerable in society will be hardest hit by automation. It predicted up to 25 percent of American jobs will be eliminated by the end of the 2020s — equal to 40 million workers — and depressing the wages of many more.

“Today’s level of inequality already has prompted growing public concern and debate,” the report says. “It seems reasonable to expect that at significantly higher levels, popular criticism would intensify and increase pressure for social policies to address it.” Taxing robots is one of the possible interventions mentioned in the report.

However, not everyone is in favor.

A key criticism revolves around the practicalities of implementing the tax. What counts as a robot, for example? While a factory line robot seems clearly to be replacing human workers, what about digital assistants? Or vending machines? 

“There is no such thing as an individual robot, so you would be looking at something like the value created by robots, which is a heck of a difficult thing to define,” says Len Shackleton, an editorial and research fellow at the U.K.-based Institute for Economic Affairs. 

He wrote a paper for the institute in May that set out why we shouldn’t panic about automation and artificial intelligence. The report criticizes the idea of a robot tax as “ill-judged.”

Automation offers huge benefits to society, he says, “and to try to hold this back with these kind of imagined fears — I call it a moral panic — it has all the classic things of witch hunting. ‘Let’s find the nasty capitalist and burn them at the stake.’”

In addition to the difficulties of applying the tax, Shackleton raises the point that it could not be undertaken in one country alone. “Certainly for any medium-size country like the U.K. to try to do this in isolation would actually be suicidal,” he says. “It would mean that nobody would really consider investing in this country in anything which involved producing goods because virtually anything could be classified as a robot.”

Kim is aware that it would not be a simple task to work out how to tax robots. “I don’t want to deny that there aren’t a host of definitional concerns that we need to tackle before we roll this out,” she says. That’s why she has spoken to a broad coalition of advisers, including big tech companies, to thrash out how a tax could work in practice.

“I think tech wants to be part of the solution. They don’t want to be the bad guys,” says Kim. “They don’t want to be viewed as the guys that took away everyone’s jobs.”

No one is suggesting robot tax is the sole answer to tackling the threat automation poses to inequality, but advocates say it could be a useful weapon in policymakers’ arsenal. Sergio Rebelo, a professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management who analyzed whether taxing robots could reduce income inequality, concluded that the tax would make sense.

“We find that when robots are relatively expensive, taxing them is useful in terms of improving the distribution of income between routine workers, whose jobs can be automated, and nonroutine workers, who benefit from automation.” But once robots become cheap, it’s no longer a useful mechanism. “At that point, the best policy is to provide a basic universal income financed with income taxes,” he says. 

Of course, a robot tax is not the only or even the highest-profile idea to deal with automation and inequality. A universal basic income, which would give everyone no-strings-attached money, has support from the likes of Elon Musk and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. There’s also the idea of guaranteed jobs — $15 an hour government jobs for anyone who wants or needs one — which has the backing of prominent Democrats, including Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

But, Kim says, these are not revenue-raising schemes. “Everyone has great ideas about how to spend money, but no one is actually proposing how to raise that money.”

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While the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) has made a significant amount of money at the box office, it clearly has a lot of catching up to do when compared with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

Sure, the MCU has 19 films under its belt compared to the DCEU’s five, but the DCEU is not just behind in terms of box office gross. It’s also taken a beating from critics, with only “Wonder Woman” receiving universally positive reviews.

Evan Puschak, the host of the weekly pop culture YouTube series “The Nerdwriter,” breaks down why the DCEU can’t seem to captivate the public like the MCU does. And, as he argues, it has a lot to do with the action scenes.

An estimated 40 million Americans are living with an anxiety disorder. Not only does the condition cause physical issues (think headaches, nausea and shortness of breath), it can also lead to emotional symptoms. Anxious thoughts like, “everyone hates me,” “I’m so stupid” or “I’m not good enough” are just par for the course.

Words of encouragement and jokes certainly aren’t a cure when it comes to this type of thinking or anxiety in general, but they can help sometimes. Below are some tweets about anxiety meant to support you, make you chuckle and remind you that you’re not alone. Read through, and repeat if necessary:

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First lady Melania Trump hasn’t attended a public event for nearly a month, and now her  spokeswoman has told ABC News Sunday that she won’t be accompanying the president to the G7 meeting in Quebec — nor the planned North Korea summit in Singapore.

No reason was given.

But spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham also told CNN Sunday evening that the first lady is expected to attend a White House event Monday honoring Gold Star military families. The reception, however, will be barred to the press.

Melania Trump was last seen May 10 greeting Americans released from detention in North Korea. Speculation about her long absence includes possible tensions in the Trump marriage or a medical issue. She checked into Walter Reed Medical Center for treatment of what the White House called a benign kidney condition May 14 and didn’t leave until May 19.

Donald Trump just spent the weekend at Camp David — without her.

A tweet was posted on her Twitter account last week saying she was “feeling great” and “working hard” at the White House, but the writing style was so remarkably like her husband’s (especially the backhanded slap at the media) that many discounted it.

The first lady joined the president for his first G7 trip to Italy last year, where she joined the spouses of other G7 leaders at public events.

Leaders from the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Japan and the European Union are meeting Friday and Saturday for the G7 summit.

The president then plans to travel to Singapore for a June 12 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Grisham told ABC News last Wednesday that the first lady was “doing really well.”

She’s been “involved in several internal meetings with staff ... We’ve been going over initiatives and other long-term planning for events such as the congressional picnic and Fourth of July,” Grisham said.

This story was updated with new information that the first lady is expected to attend a White House reception Monday to honor God Star military families.

I’ll be forever yours. Love always, Mandy. 

If you were a teenager in the ’90s, chances are you know exactly where that line is from: Mandy Moore’s debut single and Hot 100 hit “Candy,” released in August 1999. 

Remember? Mandy Moore, currently of “This Is Us” fame, was a bona fide pop princess when she began her Hollywood career at 15, touring the country with boy bands *NSYNC and The Backstreet Boys before “competing” with the likes of Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. But after a few years of so-so success in the music industry, Moore decided to transition to acting. First she appeared in 2001′s “The Princess Diaries” as Anne Hathaway’s on-screen high-school nemesis. She went on to crush hearts as cancer-stricken teen Jamie Sullivan in 2002′s “A Walk to Remember,” starring in com-dram after rom-com thereafter: 2003′s “How to Deal,” 2004′s “Chasing Liberty” and “Saved!,” 2007′s “Because I Said So,” 2010′s animated Disney film “Tangled” and 2011′s “Love, Wedding, Marriage.” 

As the 2010s trudged on, however, Moore’s career hit a lull. Despite landing gigs on some TV projects, nothing quite took off. “I really seriously contemplated, maybe this is it. Maybe I had my moment, and I was lucky to find some sense of success as a young person, and that’s all that was in the cards for me,” Moore told me during a phone call this week.

That’s when the script for “This Is Us,” now one of the highest-rated network series on television, plopped into her lap. The show was greenlit in 2016, headed to NBC Upfronts that May and debuted a few months later to a ravenous primetime audience. 

Moore was cast as the Pearson family mom, Rebecca, who ages from her 20s to her 70s as the series unfolds in flashbacks and present-day narratives. Everything revolves around Rebecca’s marriage to Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) and their decision to adopt abandoned child Randall (played by Sterling K. Brown, Niles Fitch and Lonnie Chavis) and raise him alongside their biological twins, Kevin (Justin Hartley, Logan Shroyer, Parker Bates) and Kate (Chrissy Metz, Hannah Zeile and Mackenzie Hancsicsak). Their family dynamics fuel a taffy pull of discussions on parenthood, race and death.

America’s confection princess no more, Mandy Moore was suddenly a matriarch with seasons of television runway at her feet.

I spoke with Moore ahead of Emmys season to discuss her escape from “Candy”-land, the back sweat she gets just thinking about touring with the Backstreet Boys as a kid, and that time she almost went back to school before she claimed her spot on the primetime throne.

How has your break from “This Is Us” been? I see you hiked Mount Kilimanjaro!

[Laughs] I feel very rested and rejuvenated after a crazy season. This is the way to enjoy the hiatus, just do a bunch of personal stuff. We go back in mid-July, so a few more weeks to soak it all in.

Congrats on such a successful second season, and an emotional one at that, what with the reveals about Jack and his death. Was that freeing for you as an actor on this show, to finally let people in on this part of the story?

It was really freeing. I think it relieved a lot of pressure for all of us. It was so unexpected, the interest people took in that specific detail [about how he died], and I just always had this underlying fear that I was going to sleep-talk or something and let the cat out of the bag. 

What it was it like to finally get to portray that moment in Rebecca’s life?

Because I knew in the back of my mind that that moment was coming, I felt a tremendous amount of responsibility to deliver, considering this was obviously such a pivotal moment and we’ve been building up to it for almost two seasons.

I sort of closed myself off from the world for those couple of weeks because it felt tremendously demanding emotionally and physically ― I went into my own little cocoon. We were shooting a lot at night, so that kind of makes it easier to check out from the world a little bit because you’re working very bizarre hours. I’ve never done anything quite like this before, episodically speaking, where we built this history and this family. There’s so much familiarity between Milo and I now that it really did feel like I was mourning the death of someone. Entirely bizarre. A very, very unfamiliar feeling.

Rebecca Pearson is one of those television roles an actor waits for, and it came at a somewhat slow period for you in your career.

It’s not lost on me. Every day I’m grateful. I think we all are ― we had no idea what we were stumbling into in that regard. But, sure, it’s the natural ebb and flow of this crazy industry and being an actor. There are slow times and there are celebratory times, and up until the point where I found myself reading the script for this particular project, nothing could get firing.

I mean, I did three or four simultaneous pilot seasons with nary a job taking off and I was... not frustrated but sort of beside myself with just confusion as to what I wasn’t doing or what was wrong. I really seriously contemplated, maybe this is it. Maybe I had my moment and I was lucky to find some sense of success as a young person and that’s all that was in the cards for me. I was just ready to figure out what the next chapter was, because I just felt like I couldn’t get momentum going anywhere.

I was thinking about music, I was thinking about maybe going back to school and it coincided with real [exhale] ... I was going through a divorce [from singer-songwriter Ryan Adams] and the personal side of my life was a complete mess and I was heartbroken and honestly didn’t know which way was up. So “This Is Us” couldn’t have come along at a better time, because I don’t think I would’ve been ready for a job of this magnitude any sooner. I don’t think emotionally I would’ve had the capability to take it on. I don’t know if there was room for it in my life on a personal level before. It’s funny, when I started cleaning up all the other aspects of my life, the sun came back out again and this part came to fruition. It’s pretty crazy how that stuff works out sometimes.  

Is that the hardest part of being a singer and actor, facing those highs and lows that you experience in your career?

Yeah. [Laughs] It’s really not the fun part of the job. You know that it comes with the territory, but I think it sort of all piled on at a certain point in my life where I felt overwhelmed by it. The rejection and the personal side of my life firing ― it all felt like too much. Normally ― I’ve been doing this since I’m 15 ― I’m used to the narrative of you win some, you lose some. And it doesn’t normally knock me off, but I felt very discombobulated by it at that point. I feel like I’m in the wrong business in that sense, because I don’t feel competitive and I was never someone who looked at somebody else like, “I wish I had that.” I’m an honest believer in things happen for a reason and there’s room for everybody. But as an actor, it’s only natural to feel like, “That’s my last job, so! Better appreciate it while it’s happening!”

[Laughs] I may never be in this situation ever again.

To go from a teen pop star to a successful actress is not an easy feat, yet you pulled it off. How did you navigate that transition?

I think it’s because I didn’t have a tremendous amount of success musically speaking. It allowed people to maybe see me as an actor and not just as, say, Madonna on screen. Some of my other contemporaries, the nature of the degree of success that they had, it just made it that much more of a challenge to segue into another part of their careers without people automatically questioning them. In my sense, it was great because I wanted to be Bette Midler ― I wanted to do Broadway and music and television and movies and float between all of them and see what things I would be allowed to do. So although the music thing took off to a certain degree, it still gave me the freedom to kind of dip into different things.

You are the same Mandy Moore who toured with The Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC and grew up a pop princess. When you look back on those days, what do you remember?

[Laughs] Oh my gosh. It feels like a totally different life ― not even a different chapter, a different book! I just remember being excited and never overwhelmed by it. Finding success at a young age was probably better for me, because I would be overwhelmed by it now. I think I would question myself now. The older you get the more you feel like you haven’t risked, and when you’re young, you’re fearless. I would get onstage and open up for those guys in front of thousands of people screaming in an arena with glow sticks and I wouldn’t think anything of it. I was just excited to have an opportunity that I wouldn’t even think about being nervous. Now, getting up in front of a room full of 100 people gives me back sweat! I want to go back and hug that girl and ask her, “What’s the secret to being young and clueless?”

It was just a different world without social media and people following or documenting your every move and your every thought. I don’t know how young people do it nowadays, like navigate those waters. It’s a tough business, even tougher now than I think it was 15 years ago or whenever I started.

I recently spoke to some of the members of *NSYNC for their Walk of Fame ceremony and they said the same thing ― that they were lucky to have been youngsters in the business without social media.

It’s just a completely different world now, the music industry especially. It’s nothing like it was when I was first starting out. The influence of radio and MTV and music videos, all of that had the biggest say in whether or not you had a hit. It could make or break or alter the course of your career, and now I feel like none of those things really matter. People put out records themselves or release a single and a year later they’ll maybe put out a record. There are not the same sorts of rules, I guess.

Was that time in your life difficult at all? 

[Pauses] That’s a good question. Honestly, I feel like I had the best of both worlds. I was still regarded as a young person, and I had friends and relationships and went to the mall and the movies and out to dinner with my friends. I was able to live that life simultaneously with being very much in an adult world and having the responsibilities of an adult. I made decisions for myself, along with my parents and managers, but I always had the final say. I always felt like I was in control. Nobody ever made me do something against my will. I don’t know how I stumbled into that fortunate situation because you hear those horror stories and I just had a completely opposite experience. I was able to be a teenager and don’t feel like I missed out on any aspects of normal life, for someone going through all that at my age. It was different, yeah. I didn’t go to prom, I didn’t go to football games, I didn’t go to college. But I just had a different track and I always acknowledged that and was totally fine with it.

Were you nervous to take that leap into acting ― with the role in “Princess Diaries” and then “A Walk to Remember” ― and leave music behind for a little bit?

No. I guess because I knew music was always going to be a part of my life. I wasn’t selling tens of millions of records and I wasn’t torn by my self-image, so the machinery of a pop career wasn’t fully realized for me as it was for some of the other girls I was kind of compared to. And I really wanted to act. I grew up doing musical theater and, like I said, I loved Bette Midler and wanted to try it all. I was just lucky the door opened because of the music industry and I was able to go on auditions and take meetings with people and have opportunities that maybe, if I was just a regular actress at 15 or 16 starting out, I wouldn’t have been afforded with. So in that sense I recognize how lucky I was, but I was never nervous because I always knew I’d go back to music and it would always be there for me. And I did! I kept making records for the next couple of years. It’s just that I found more success with the acting side of things more immediately than the music.

And then finding a role in something like “Tangled” allowed you to mesh both those worlds.

More than that, being a Disney princess was my 6-year-old fantasy life realized. It still remains one of the greatest jobs I’ve ever had. It was so, so, so much fun.

Didn’t you win a Grammy for “I See The Light”?

I didn’t because I had no part in writing it, but Glenn Slater and Alan Menken, who wrote the song, won a Grammy. And we got to perform on the Oscars! All types of crazy bucket list things fulfilled because of that movie.

Speaking of award season, it’s coming back around beginning with the Emmys shortly. How do you mentally prepare? Are you someone who thinks about recognition in that way?

I go with the flow and if it happens it happens. I’m just flabbergasted to be in the conversation at all. It was never something that ever crossed my mind growing up, and even now it’s crazy. A win is getting a job and keeping a job. The fact that you’re a part of a show that has gone multiple seasons, statistically speaking, it’s so unheard of and so rare. 

How does it feel to be on a show that makes viewers cry and feel good at the same time?

[Laughs] It’s very humbling. We’re all very humbled that people are able to feel alive and be filled with emotion. It’s a really turbulent time in the world and we’re all really proud to be a part of something that is positive and culturally unifying. It helps us be reminded of the things we have in common and that the differences we may have are really what makes us unique. It’s overwhelmingly hopeful, cathartic entertainment. There’s not enough of that these days.

Do you think the anxiety-ridden time we’re living in right now helps a show like “This Is Us” succeed, as it addresses everything from miscarriage to death to strained familial relationships?

I imagine, yes. Timing is key for everything in life and I think our show found an audience at the right moment where people had a lot of mixed emotions and needed a place to put all of them. What better way to do that than to take an hour a week to really hold a mirror up to yourself and your life ― asking yourself the tough questions and revisiting things that maybe aren’t the most comforting. Push the bruise a little bit; maybe it hurts but it’s nice to know that you still feel something.  

Looking at yourself, what are the moments you revisit during the show that help you heal in a way?

It definitely makes me take a closer look at relationships with my own family and my own parents. You know, relationships I had, maybe the smaller moments in life where you start to doubt yourself and check yourself ― all of that. Just like a big melting pot. Not necessarily you sit there and ruminate on one particular part of your life ― it’s more like flipping through a photo album of all these different experiences that you had.

As you think toward the future, what are some of the things you hope to do on the show ― and maybe even off it?

I’m open to whatever the show’s going to push me to do. I hope I get to cry a little bit less this season. [Laughs] Season 2 wiped me out! And I would love for music to still be a common thread in the show. I’d love to be able to sing with Chrissy and do a duet with her at some point. I wanna slap on those prosthetics and sing a song with her!

But in terms of the bigger picture, I’d love to do a musical on Broadway, I’d love to perhaps do a musical adaptation on film and I want to make more music in general, make another record. There’s a lot still that I want to do. I want to have a family and I want to make sure to have a good balance between the personal and professional.

A year back you said you were working on another album. Do you still have those songs ready to go in your back pocket?

Oh, yes! I still got all of the songs and I just have to figure out how and when and all the details. I feel like the show has opened up a whole new audience of people who didn’t know that I did music, so I got to get on it and strike while the iron’s hot!

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

President Donald Trump on Friday talked warmly to reporters about the “very nice” and “very interesting” letter he received earlier in the day from North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un.

“That letter was a very nice letter,” Trump said at a White House news conference. “Oh, would you like to see what was in that letter? How much? How much?” he quipped with the press.

The letter was hand-delivered to the president by senior North Korean official Kim Yong Chol. The two men posed with the very large envelope in the Oval Office. After Trump received the letter, he announced that the June 12 summit with North Korea was on again in Singapore.

When asked if he could offer a “flavor of what the letter said,” Trump said: “It was a very interesting letter. At some point, it may be appropriate and maybe I’ll be able to give it to you, maybe.”

But mere minutes later, in response to another question, the president responded: “I haven’t seen the letter yet. I purposely didn’t open the letter. I haven’t opened it. I didn’t open it in front of the director. I said, ‘Would you want me to open it?’ He said, ‘You can read it later.’”

He added: “I may be in for a big surprise, folks.”

Check out the president’s letter versions in the video above.

For the weekend of June 2, Streamline recommends “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” in the top Netflix spot for the first time.

What’s New This Week

“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” returns with half of a new season. Netflix is now splitting seasons in two, presumably so important shows don’t get immediately forgotten as the company premieres so much content every week.

This show has been one of my favorites over the last few years and these new episodes don’t disappoint. 

“Arrested Development” also returns with a half-season. The recent controversies surrounding star Jeffrey Tambor definitely leave some clouds hanging over the show.

For a long time, I considered “Arrested Development” my absolute favorite show, but this comeback just isn’t that great. The storylines are a mess, and at times this thing is hard to watch.

The show leans into Donald Trump jokes that probably seemed fresh while filming last year, but now seem dated and pale in comparison to the deluge of other Trump humor out there.

The characters have also gotten more ridiculous instead of more mature since the early seasons. I had felt that part of the brilliance of the original seasons was how the show found a way to still ground these characters in reality, so the ridiculous moments truly shined. Now nobody makes any sense as a person and the episodes are just a series of zany set-pieces.

It’s still funny. It’s still worth watching (Tambor aside). But, unlike the original, it’s far from the best show out there.

Anyway, watch the trailers for the new seasons below. And if you want to stay up to date with what to watch on a weekly basis, subscribe to the Streamline newsletter. 

Top 5 Netflix News Items From This Week

And here are the shows and movies arriving on Netflix through the rest of this week:

If you left the theater stunned after “Avengers: Infinity War,” you may need to emotionally prepare yourself for the still untitled “Avengers 4.”

** Warning: ‘Infinity War’ Spoilers Ahead **

During an interview with Esquire, actor Chris Hemsworth said he was blown away when he read both scripts, but that the second one takes it to yet another level.

“If you were shocked by [‘Infinity War’], I think the second one is even more shocking, for other reasons entirely,” Hemsworth said. “The second one I’m probably even more excited about. Just for people to see.”

“Infinity War” ends with the villain Thanos, having finally acquired all six infinity stones, snapping his fingers and eliminating half of the beings in the universe, including many of your favorite Marvel Cinematic Universe characters. It was brutal, to say the least.

“Infinity War” has been gangbusters at the box office, grossing an astounding $1.96 billion, globally. The $2 billion milestone appears inevitable, given that “Infinity War” hits theaters in Japan later this month. That’s a mark only three films have reached.

The fourth Avengers film, also directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, is set for release on May 3, 2019.

Leading global forecasts widely underestimate the future costs of climate change, a new paper warns.

The findings, to be released Monday in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, say projections used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rely on outdated models and fail to account for “tipping points” ― key moments when global warming rapidly speeds up and becomes irreversible.

The IPCC, established in 1988, is the leading international body for assessing climate change, and took on an expanded role after every country on Earth signed the Paris Agreement, the first global pact to cut greenhouse gas emissions. By relying on inaccurate economic models, the organization is misleading policymakers around the world about the risks of climate change, according to the researchers at the Environmental Defense Fund, Harvard University and the London School of Economics who co-authored the paper. 

Current estimates for how much climate change will cost take different forms. One recent study looked at projected damage by U.S. county, finding that some counties in low-lying Florida, for example, would see costs of up to 30 percent of their gross domestic product. Other projections are more broad, putting the worldwide figure at $535 trillion by the end of this century. 

“It’s difficult to quantify that,” said study co-author Thomas Stoerk, an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund, when asked to give his own estimate. “That’s part of the point of the paper. It could be a lot more than the consensus.”

The paper breaks down into three main points:

• Current projections virtually ignore a very real possibility: that events such as the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet or the faster-than-expected thawing of Arctic permafrost will act like kerosene on a bonfire. These could increase the rate of climate change astronomically.

• These forecasts are based on an average of all possible climate change scenarios, even though newer models account for the increased likelihood of more warming.

• The newer models are still largely abstract, but they also factor in how human uncertainty over climate change can potentially cause even more damage in the future.

“We have models that allow us to rank the probabilities,” Stoerk said. “There are some models out there that quantify how much the uncertainty itself ― not knowing what’s going to happen ― drives economic estimates.”

Models that rely on averages of warming possibilities fail to factor in new data that show the continued rise in emissions makes the lower-end projections impossible, he said. Newer models, however, account for that reality. 

“All the tools that we argue for already exist,” he added. “The IPCC could really just go out and use them.”

The findings come as policy attempts to rein in the world’s greenhouse gas output fall flat. Fossil fuel emissions hit an all-time high last year, causing global carbon dioxide pollution to surge for the first time in three years ― dashing hopes that the production of planet-warming pollution peaked.

In fact, 2017 was the world’s second-hottest year on record and the third-warmest in U.S. history. Climate-fueled natural disasters caused $330 billion in losses from uninsured damages just last year, according to a report from the world’s biggest reinsurer.

In the United States alone, extreme weather events caused $306.2 billion in damages and killed at least 362 people outright during the worst wildfire and hurricane seasons in modern history, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found in January.

In perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of domestic policymakers’ failure to account for climate change-fueled devastation, Harvard researchers found that 4,645 people died in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria last year ― mostly as a result of the failure to provide medication, treatment and electricity ― more than 70 times the official death toll.  

A whale found in a canal in southern Thailand has died after eating more than 80 plastic bags, according to officials.

The small male pilot whale was barely alive when he was discovered on Monday in the southern province of Songkhla, Thailand’s Department of Marine and Coastal Resources said. Rescuers attempted to nurse the whale back to health, but he died on Friday after spitting up five plastic bags.

A necropsy revealed over 17 pounds of plastic, including more than 80 plastic bags, in the whale’s stomach.

Jatuporn Buruspat, director-general of the marine and coastal resources department, told Reuters that the whale likely thought the floating plastic bags were food.

Thailand is one of the largest plastic polluters in the world, dumping over 1 million tons of garbage into the sea annually, according to the country’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment. 

The ministry announced in September that it was focused on developing a better way to deal with the massive amounts of waste produced by Thailand each year.

At least 300 marine animals, including whales, dolphins and sea turtles, die in Thai waters annually from ingesting plastic, Thon Thamrongnawasawat, a marine biologist and lecturer at Kasetsart University, told The Guardian. 

“It’s a huge problem,” he said. “We use a lot of plastic.”