fortune--2020-02-04--How to watch the 2020 State of the Union address live online for free—even without cable

While no State of the Union is ever the same, it’s going to be hard to top the circumstances of Donald Trump’s 2020 address.
With an impeachment vote looming in the Senate, the Iowa caucus in disarray and the nation more politically divided than ever, we’re in a reality that even Hollywood would have trouble imagining. And given Trump’s fondness for going off script in speeches, that makes this year’s State of the Union even more unpredictable.
Trump will address the nation from the same House chamber he was impeached less than two months ago. Many political wags are curious if he will address the drama Tuesday night, if he will discuss his reelection or if he’ll focus squarely on his agenda for the coming year.
Hoping to watch, but won’t be in your living room? You have lots of options.
What time does the 2020 State of the Union address start?
U.S. President Donald Trump, center, arrives to deliver a State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2019. Alex Wroblewski—Bloomberg via Getty Images
Trump is scheduled to deliver the final State of the Union address of his current term on Tuesday, Feb. 4. The speech will start at 9 p.m. E.T.
Where can I watch the 2020 State of the Union?
The address will be widely covered by all major broadcast networks and cable news channels, each airing it live and having lots of analysis before and after the speech. Multiple online news sites will also stream the event, including Cheddar, Newsmax, Newsy and Yahoo!
How can I watch the State of the Union for free if I don’t have cable?
If you don’t have a cable or satellite subscription, the best way to watch any network-aired program for free on a big screen is with a good HD antenna. The 2020 State of the Union will be broadcast by ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and Fox—meaning you’re almost certainly going to be able to find at least one channel airing it with a strong signal over the air, which costs nothing beyond the equipment prices. Be sure to test the antenna in multiple locations in your home to find the most reliable signal.
Can I stream the State of the Union live online if I don’t have a cable subscription?
You can—and you have lots of options.
ABC
You can log into ABC.com to watch the address, though you will need to enter a cable service account number. If that’s problematic, the ABC News Facebook page will carry the address.
CBS
CBSN, the network’s online streaming news service, will air the speech. You can also watch on the CBS News Facebook page. And the CBS News livestream on YouTube will carry the State of the Union as well.
NBC
Free options include NBCNews.com, MSNBC.com, and the NBC News app, which will all simulcast the address. You can also watch it live on the Facebook page of NBC News
FOX
You can either log into Fox.com to watch the address or use the Fox Now app. The Fox News YouTube channel and Fox Business Network YouTube Channel will also both stream the address.
PBS
The PBS Newshour livestream on YouTube will carry the address.
CNN
Video coverage will stream on the CNN.com homepage and can be watched on the CNNGo streaming service.
MSNBC
Watch the address on the networks’ Website.
Bloomberg
Coverage will be carried on the network’s streaming online service.
C-Span
The network will broadcast the address live on its Website.
Sky News
Watch the speech on the U.K. news service’s online streaming service
White House
The website of the president’s residence and workplace will air a livestream on its official website.
Looking for a more complete streaming option that extends beyond the State of the Union? Here are a few more places to try:
Locast.org
This free service lets you watch local broadcast channels with no monthly fees or contracts. It only services part of the country, however.
Hulu with Live TV
You can try the service free for a week. Once that’s up, you’ll pay $45 per month.
YouTube TV
After a seven day trial, you can expect monthly charges of $50.
Sling TV
The lower tiered “Orange” plan on Dish Network’s Sling will run you $30 per month. A more comprehensive “Blue” plan bumps the cost to $45-per-month. You’ll have a 7-day free trial first.
AT&T TVNow
Formerly known as DirecTV Now, AT&T’s streaming service will run you $65 per month and up after a 7-day free trial.
What can I expect from President Trump’s speech?
Trump’s expected to focus on “the great American comeback” in this year’s State of the Union. Expect a victory lap about the economy, where he’s polling strongest with Americans. Other topics will likely include increased military spending and lowering health care costs. It’s unclear if Trump will discuss the recent Phase One agreement with China and ongoing trade disputes with other countries. But aids say this will be an “optimistic” speech.
Who is giving the Democratic response to the 2020 State of the Union?
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer speaks at the General Motors Detroit- Hamtramck assembly plant on January 27, 2020 in Detroit, Mich. JEFF KOWALSKY—AFP via Getty Images
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer steps into the national spotlight following Trump’s address, giving the English-language response to the State of the Union. (Rep. Veronica Escobar (D., Texas) will deliver the response in Spanish.)
Whitmer is especially noteworthy as it signals the Democrats view Michigan as a key battleground state in the 2020 election. Whitmer became governor in 2018, defeating then-Republican state Attorney General Bill Schuette. (Trump won the state in 2016.) She previously served in the state’s Senate and House of Representatives.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—2020 candidates’ positions, and records, on economic issues that affect women
—Bernie Sanders wants the future of the far left to be female. Is that enough?
—Michael Bloomberg’s radical plan to cut prescription drug costs
—Fortune Explains: The debt ceiling
—Millions have been purged from voter rolls—and may not even realize it
Get up to speed on your morning commute with Fortune’s CEO Daily newsletter.


fortune--2020-02-04--Amid mounting losses and layoffs, Deutsche Bank stages an unlikely comeback

Buttigieg and Sanders lead as Iowa releases 62 % of caucus results after delay

Deutsche Bank’s shareholders leapt on its full-year results last week with all the gusto of a man in the desert throwing himself at an oasis. But is the improvement of which chief executive Christian Sewing boasted real, or just a mirage?
Put another way, has Germany’s largest bank really freed itself from its toxic past and found a way to live in a milk-and-water world of low interest rates and dull-but-worthy credit intermediation?
At first glance, it doesn’t appear so.
The bank made a net loss of 5.3 billion euros ($5.9 billion) in the year, a fifth straight annual shortfall that brought aggregate losses since 2015 to over 13 billion euros. It still faces margin-crushing negative interest rates, a sharply slowing global economy and high and inflexible costs especially in its German branch network. Even if the bank were to hit all of its targets in the next three years, it still wouldn’t cover its cost ofequity, which analysts typically estimate at around 10%.
But at second glance, well, maybe. The “bad bank” into which Sewing shunted 288 billion euros’ worth of historic junk last July is winding itself down faster than expected, and at a more palatable cost to shareholders than forecast. At the “core bank,” the businesses that will become the nucleus of the future Deutsche Bank all posted increases in underlying revenue in the fourth quarter. Investors in particular cheered the performance of its asset management arm.
That upturn appeared to answer the question that has consistently dogged the bank’s management in recent years: how to cut a bloated cost base without also cutting the source of vital revenue?
Shedding businesses, cutting staff
When he took over in 2018 from John Cryan, Sewing snipped tentatively around the edges of Deutsche’s notoriously unprofitable investment bank. After a year of little to no improvement, he was forced to take more radical action. He dumped most of the bank’s business with hedge funds, exited global equities and vowed to slash the bank’s 91,000 payroll by a quarter over three and a half years.
Investors didn’t like it to start with, pushing the stock down over 7% on that day in July. But after last week’s numbers, they were coming around willingly enough. A flurry of analyst upgrades followed from JPMorgan to Royal Bank of Canada and Societe Generale. Deutsche Bank stock, already the best performing stock in the sector in Europe this year, jumped another 4.3% to a 14-month high.
Shares closed Tuesday up a modest 0.25% in Frankfurt.
“We can quite justifiably say that we are on the right path, and that our strategy is gaining traction,” Sewing told a press conference on Thursday.
Its regulators appear to agree: the European Central Bank has cut its capital requirement by 25 basis points for next year, and Deutsche will get a further 50 basis points in relief from 2021, after the Financial Stability Board cuts the surcharge it imposes on banks like DB—regarded as “global systemically-important bank”—to 1.5% from 2.0%.
Both moves acknowledge the progress made by Sewing and his team in de-risking what the International Monetary Fund once dubbed the biggest source of systemic risk in the global financial sector. They also create leeway for Sewing to take short-term hits on restructuring without needing to call on shareholders for more capital. The common equity tier 1 ratio—a key measure of financial strength—rose to 13.6%, well above the 13% it had guided for.
Piling on restructuring costs
One thing that leaps out from last week’s numbers is the sheer volume of adjustments needed to turn a reported loss in Q4 into an ‘adjusted’ profit. “Transformation charges, goodwill impairments, restructuring and severance expenses” were all rolled out as factors behind the high one-offs in the final quarter.
The difference between a ‘transformation charge’ and a ‘restructuring expense’ wasn’t clear. What was clear was the bank’s determination to cram as many of the restructuring costs as possible into this quarter’s results, so as not to pollute next year’s. But while the bank has moved as fast as it can to write down the affected asset values, it has only booked 40% of the expected severance costs over the period—and the number of people who actually left the bank last year was only around 25% of the total expected departures.
Investors can be forgiven for thinking they’ve been here before with Deutsche. Like Annie singing ‘Tomorrow,’ the turnaround with Deutsche Bank is always a day away: the cost of returning to profit has a habit of rising, and the bank’s original estimate of 7.2 billion euros in restructuring costs by 2022 had already risen by an additional 400 million euros. What toll could a lengthy coronavirus-, tariff- or Brexit-related disruption to the German banking sector add to that?
Moreover, in among last week’s good numbers—like a 31% rise in revenue from bond trading, an old powerhouse unit rediscovering its mojo—there were some rank bad ones. Underlying revenue at the private bank, which consists mainly of German retail branches, dropped 2%. And global transaction banking, which Sewing relentlessly talked up in his first year, saw revenue fall 6%. Meanwhile, analysts didn’t care for a 2% drop in commercial banking revenue—which happened despite a solid rise in loan volumes.
Standard & Poor’s Ratings Group warned that, at such a late stage of the economic cycle, “a substantial rise in risk appetite (at Deutsche) is unlikely to lead to a sustainable rise in profitability.”
Nor have the governance clouds that hung around the twin towers in Frankfurt for the last decade entirely lifted. Questions about the bank’s relationship with Donald Trump before his election in 2016 continue to linger. And, in the last two weeks alone, there have been reports of bank employees resorting to questionable tactics to win the business of Saudi and Chinese customers (a key development appears to be that the bank is now doing better at unearthing such things itself).
Ultimately, Sewing still has work to do to convince his investors that this turnaround is for real. Citigroup analyst Andrew Coombs wrote after the results that the stock’s performance this year has been due largely to a short squeeze, which in turn was driven by factors outside the bank’s control—most notably, the general pickup in bond yields as 2020 opened to an admittedly short-lived burst of optimism.
Like many others, Coombs think the market has now got ahead of itself.
His upgraded target price of 6.90 euros remains 18% below today’s 8.16 euros closing price.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—All of your questions on filing taxes in 2020, answered
—The health of the economy in nine charts
—Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s Sheila Patel on her 2020 outlook
—5 pressing questions to hone your investment strategy this quarter
—10 stocks that are poised for a stellar 2020


fortune--2020-02-04--“Make room to break the rules,” and other lessons from Paul Smith

This is the web version of Business x Design, a newsletter on the power of design. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
Tony Chambers here, co-chair of Fortune‘s Brainstorm Design conference.
How does a company stay relevant when the landscape in which it operates is changing so rapidly? One quintessentially British company seems to have the answers.
During my 15 years at the helm of Wallpaper* magazine, I had the privilege of an up close view of the inner workings of some of the world’s leading design and lifestyle brands. In furniture, fashion, food, watches, jewellery, hospitality, and automotive industries, I gained an unrivalled perspective—usually directly from the CEOs and creative directors—on what was and wasn’t working for their respective companies. Such insight is proving invaluable now while running my own design consultancy and co-chairing Brainstorm Design.
Of all the companies and individuals I’ve observed, there’s one that exemplifies the benefits of instilling a design-led approach to running a business. That’s British fashion designer and retailer Paul Smith.
This autumn will mark the 50th anniversary of Smith’s eponymous brand, which launched with the opening of his first shop in Nottingham. “Actually, it was just a room with no windows, but I called it a shop,” he told me. “We took £35 that first day. Not a bad start.”
Without any formal education in design or business, he grew and maintained a global brand (Smith retails in 73 countries) with a turnover of over £215 million ($279 million) and more than 1,500 employees.
Smith has kept the company independent, but compared to fashion behemoths such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci—who are owned by LVMH and Kering, respectively—Paul Smith’s global brand recognition is extraordinary. How is this? It requires hard graft, innovative design, and risk-taking, but for me, the major factor is personality.
Today, more than ever, the consumer wants to relate to a brand’s personality, and Paul Smith has personality by the bucketload. He stands for something, and that something is authentic and trustworthy. There’s the playful way he mixes traditional tailoring with an irreverent twist, or how he merges casual and formal attire with an assured confidence that somehow avoids arrogance.
“The reason I’ve managed to survive in business for so long is partly because of the sense of humour I inherited from my dad,” Smith says. Politeness, good manners and respect (not things you’d normally associate with the cutthroat world of fashion) are also synonymous with the man and the brand. As is a fastidious attention to all parts of the business. “I care deeply about all details—the cleanliness of the staff loos as much as the cut of a jacket.”
His relentless creativity and curiosity sets him apart, and If you’re ever lucky to spend time with him in his Aladdin’s cave of an office, you’ll likely see the many motivational notes he has scribbled on scraps of paper. Here are some that any business should heed:
“Start something new.” “Take pleasure seriously.” “Fight the bully.” “You can’t do it without doing it.” “Concentrate on the doughnut, not the hole.” “Every day is a new beginning.” “Work is not about shorter hours or longer hours, it’s about every hour.” “Make room to break the rules.” “Always ask ‘what’s the alternative.’ ”
More design news below.
Tony Chambers
VISION, EMPATHY, SCALE
This edition of Business By Design was curated by Margaret Rhodes.
Great minds. In theory, crowdsourced design glimmers with possibility. In practice, organizations from NASA to now-defunct gadget-maker Quirky have found that pooling thousands of clever ideas doesn’t necessarily yield a ready-for-market product. But for a recent makeathon focused on products for differently-abled bodies, the International Committee of the Red Cross redesigned the crowdsourcing process itself. To get a wide range of ideas from participants, the organization trained them in design thinking and how to put together a business plan. [Harvard Business Review]
Cole Burston—Bloomberg/Getty Images
One word: plastics. Canada will move forward with a nationwide ban on single-use plastics, slated to go into effect in 2021. The Canadian Environmental Protection Act requires a scientific assessment to make such decisions, and the results are grim in: In 2016, 29,000 tons of plastic garbage littered outdoor areas in the country. “Microplastics,” invisible to the human eye but present in drinking water, make up much of that garbage. Canada is hardly the only country with this problem, but the ban is a vote of optimism that thoughtfully-designed policy can turn the tides. [CBC]
Trouble in Iowa. The Des Moines Register’s highly-regarded caucusgoer poll was tabled this week amidst concerns about poorly-chosen font size. Pete Buttigieg’s team learned that some survey operators weren’t mentioning the former South Bend mayor to poll-takers—at all. The culprit appears to be a call center script an operator typed in an enlarged font, which forced some candidates’ names off the screen. A little scrolling—or better training at the call center—could go a long way. [The New York Times]
Decision makers. What keeps designers from the C-suite—training, or power? On their podcast this week, designers Jessica Helfand and Michael Beirut unpack a Fast Company op-ed in which user experience expert Don Norman argues that current design training could better prepare designers for business by focusing more on the ethics of their craft. He compares designers to soldiers, but Helfand and Bierut take issue with the metaphor: It implies that designers only take orders from on high. In fact, they too have power to shape the course of action. [The Observatory]
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Should your company take design more seriously? by Nate Berg
Airbnb brings in a Disney theme park hand to run ‘Experiences’ ahead of its IPO by Aric Jenkins
Why you shouldn’t feel guilty about paper packaging when you shop online by Mark S. Sutton
Fortune poll: Target and Walmart gain (a little) ground in the e-commerce war with Amazon by Lance Lambert
The next frontier of road rage is the parking garage by Andrew Moseman
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT—AROUND THE WEB
5 top designers imagine the workplace of 2040 from Fast Company
Can Design Thinking Save Business? from The Wall Street Journal
The Worst Video Game Ever from 99% Invisible
THE REBIRTH OF AMERICAN CITIES
What’s possible in the great reimagination of cities without cars
Three dispatches from the rapidly approaching future of car-free living: In Utrecht, a new neighborhood proposal includes a car-sharing plan that designates one car for every three households. In Vienna, policymakers are trying to incentivize locals to ditch cars by offering museum and concert hall tickets to those who walk, bike, or ride public transit. And on Wednesday, San Francisco’s ban on private cars—at least as it pertains to a congested downtown stretch of Market Street—goes into effect.
San Francisco follows New York City (which prohibits private cars from part of 14th Street), Barcelona (which has six car-free “superblocks,” and Oslo (its downtown district banned cars and added more bike lanes) in taking measures to prioritize pedestrians and bicycles over automobiles. London also has a low-emissions zone, and in September staged a one-day pseudo-holiday called Car Free Day. What once seemed like an unlikely experiment in urban planning is now enjoying a groundswell of support from residents and critics, many of whom are clamoring for bolder car-free policies.
In fact, so much excitement hovers around banishing cars, it can be easy to forget about the streets themselves. In the absence of vehicles, what happens to that space? When the architecture firm Snøhetta redesigned Times Square, they made it an open plaza for neon-dazed tourists wandering on foot. Most European cities simply expand bike lanes. But not everyone can walk or ride a bike.
In Curbed, journalist James Nevius writes about the great reimagining of American cities without cars. Multimodal streets, open-air plazas, and congestion pricing—for regulating streets that only partially ban vehicles—can all contribute to a healthier urban landscape.
Some matters aren’t as easily resolved. Exactly which communities, for instance, will get blessed with freshly-paved parks? How can designers best leverage the Americans with Disabilities Act to make these spaces equally useful to everyone? If an employee lives in a neighborhood underserved by public transit, where does she leave her car after the parking lots near her office are razed?
Designers involved in these projects will have plenty to consider. One line from Nevius’s essay, partly based on his time spent in European cities, serves as a good reminder of what’s possible:
“While American cities can seem new when compared to European counterparts, every major U.S. city—with the exception of Las Vegas—was founded before the introduction of the automobile. Although many have grown up so symbiotically with cars that it seems impossible to disentangle motor vehicles from the urban framework, urban planning in America is rooted in pre-car, mostly European models.”
If we were so easily able to orient our communities around vehicles, surely cities (and the designers thinking about them) are nimble enough to reimagine the world without them.


fortune--2020-02-04--‘Bombshell’s’ Charlize Theron and John Lithgow reflect on the film’s indelible impact

In a season accented by portrayals of beloved icons such as Judy Garland and Fred Rogers (brought to life by Oscar nominees Renée Zellweger and Tom Hanks to boot), Bombshell had the unique task of chronicling the downfall of cable news’s most predatory figure at the hands of his polarizing onscreen protégé.
The film’s producer and Oscar-nominated lead actress Charlize Theron—who plays ex–Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly—and Ailes’s alter ego, actor John Lithgow, joined Fortune on Jan. 12 for a live Q&A event in Los Angeles to discusws Kelly’s long-awaited response to their hot-button film, their Oscar-nominated makeup effects, and how Bombshell may portend a permanent shift in how we portray, and work to fight, sexual harassment.
Theron (left, with Liv Hewson) earned a best lead actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Megyn Kelly in “Bombshell.” Hilary B. Gayle—SMPSP
On Jan. 9, Megyn Kelly responded to Bombshell via a 30-minute, self-produced YouTube video wherein she discussed the film with her husband, Douglas Brunt, and three former Fox employees who’d been harassed by Roger Ailes. What did you think of the piece?
Charlize Theron: I thought it was very sincere. They are the real women who experienced Bombshell. Whatever your political persuasion, and how you feel about Fox News, there’s something really emotional about seeing them so open about something that’s deeply affected them, and will for the rest of their lives.
Many of the Fox News employees harassed by Ailes haven’t worked in TV since.
Theron: And that’s what’s so heart-wrenching. They were ambitious, good at their jobs, and may never work in broadcast again. This tells us how devastating workplace sexual harassment can be for women, in addition to the emotional scars of the actual abuse. [Former O’Reilly Factor contributor] Juliet Huddy has said she even lost her house—she lost literally everything. Devastating.
John, as the man playing the villain at the heart of this story, how have you felt about the overall reaction to the film? How did it feel, especially as one of Hollywood’s most established good guys, to play Roger Ailes?
John Lithgow: The reaction has been what we hoped, which is the acknowledgement that it’s important this movie was made at all. And it likely wouldn’t have been without Charlize! As for playing Roger, it was important to show different facets of the character. In researching him, we found many people who defended Roger and were loyal and devoted to him.
And likely many of those people never witnessed nor experienced his abuse.
Lithgow: Right—they never saw that side. He was powerful and charismatic. I had a driver in New York who’d driven and done security for him. He adored Roger, who was so generous that he left something for him in his will! It was important to bring those details into the movie. But overall, it was easy for me to embrace the role of the villain. Every good story needs one, and I’m really good at villains. (Laughs)
Theron: It’s powerful to see the seductive techniques predators use. We think of them as “bad guys,” but a lot of these women, including Megyn, faced a moral dilemma in that they really liked Roger. She was honest about the fact that he did contribute a lot to her career. She trusted him and he invested in her, similar to what we’ve heard about Harvey Weinstein. But at some point, you realize the danger of that seduction; the guy in the powerful position who makes you feel good, that there’s value to the relationship—and then he abuses it.
“There were moments I’d look in the mirror, and I couldn’t see where my skin ended and the prosthetics began,” says Theron (left) of her transformation into former Fox News anchor Kelly (right, in 2018). Theron: Hilary B. Gayle—SMPSP: Kelly: Nathan Congleton—NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images
Despite various gripes Megyn and her interviewees said they had with the film, they lauded Bombshell for its portrayal how of it feels to be harassed.Charlize, is the nuance of the moral dilemma you described the reason why these scenes often don’t feel real?
Theron: I think so. For the first time—maybe ever—we’re having honest conversations about what sexual harassment really looks like. For so long it lived in a “black and white” box. Now we’re talking about the nuance and gray areas; that victims often don’t do the “right thing” in the moment, but that doesn’t erase that the abuse took place. Until we fully engage how complicated this is, and that harassment looks, feels, and sounds different for every person, we’ll never rectify it for future generations.
Oscar-nominated makeup and special effects artist Kazu Hiro was the architect of both of your incredible physical transformations. To what degree is he the unsung hero of Bombshell?
Theron: He is. He built all the prosthetics for me, John, Nicole [Kidman], Richard Kind, who played Rudy Giuliani, and others. Close to 30 pieces I think? And he was brought out of retirement to do it.
So no pressure.
Theron: (Laughs) “Exactly. It felt really cool that I pulled him out of retirement. Then I heard [actor] Gary Oldman also pulled him out of retirement for The Darkest Hour. I think he was pulling a Cher thing like, “This is my final tour!” And then it wasn’t his final tour. (Laughs) But he’s just so good. He’s an artist; a sculptor. There were moments I’d look in the mirror, and I couldn’t see where my skin ended and the prosthetics began. We totally nerded out. I’d walk in and see John shaking his face, saying, “Look, my jowls move when I shake!”
“We found many people who defended Roger and were loyal and devoted to him,” says Lithgow of what he learned in researching to play the late, disgraced Fox News founder and CEO. Hilary Bronwyn Gayle—Lionsgate
Lithgow: Like a turkey. (Laughs) It was fun because, as actors, we’re so used to being vain. Charlize looked beautiful, though. In watching the Megyn Kelly piece, I was reminded of the miracle job Kazu did. The two of you were indistinguishable.
What do you remember about Kazu’s initial assessment of you?
Theron: He’d spent time with photos of me first. Then when we met, he did an internal nose cast—when putty is placed inside your nostrils—because he wanted to build two little plastic pieces that’d be inserted to widen my nostrils. So we started with that. It was very intimate. (Laughs) “You need to wax in there because the putty gets stuck in your nasal hairs.” I didn’t even know you could wax in there!
It’s L.A.— you can wax everywhere.
Theron: Apparently you can. So that’s how we met—with me getting a nasal-cavity mold.
Lithgow: Talk about a “meet cute.” (Laughs) My other great partner was Colleen Atwood, who was more than just a costume designer for me; she was a body designer. We had long fittings for my fat suit, and I’m happy to say I look very different in the film than I do in real life.
“Every good story needs one, and I’m really good at villains,” says Lithgow (right) about playing Ailes (left, pictured in 2012). Ailes: Charles Eshelman—FilmMagic; Lithgow: Hilary Bronwyn Gayle—SMPSP
How much did the fat suit weigh?
Lithgow: It was quite light. She gave me the choice of a suit that weighed the same as actual flesh. “Yes, I must do that!” Then I thought better and didn’t do that, thank God. It was very comfortable and I felt very light on my feet. Unzipping and taking it off each day was the best diet ever.
You’re nearly wrapped on what has been an exhaustive promotional tour for this film. What are you most heartened by in how the discourse about harassment and gender equity is evolving?
Lithgow: It’s quite a significant thing for Megyn to have done that video piece. It was supportive of the film. I would hate the experience of sitting in a theater and watching an actor pretend to be me; it’d be impossible to be objective. It was important to see her and those women do such a courageous thing.
Theron: The most touching part of this experience has been realizing all the male allies we have out there. We need you guys! I’ve met many men who haven’t had a harassment experience themselves but say, “That could be my daughter or my mother.” That’s how we’re interconnected on this issue, I think.
There’s also been a growing, broader acknowledgment that predatory behavior exists in all circles and affects women and men.
Theron: Exactly. It happens to all of us.
John, as a male actor who’s worked in Hollywood since the early 1970s, to what degree are you feeling a shift in how women are treated?
Lithgow: In the movie business’s first dozen years in the early 20th century, women were in charge as screenwriters, directors, and scenario writers. People didn’t know the juggernaut Hollywood would become. When it turned into that, it became a totally male-run operation. I think a shift is finally happening again, thank God, after all these years. I definitely feel it. The first woman director I ever worked with, 40 years into my career, was on [Showtime’s] Dexter [a decade ago]—a wonderful Brit named S.J. Clarkson. Since then, I’ve worked with about 10 or 12. That’s an enormous change. Now it’s very noticeable when there’s a gender imbalance in a production. The Bombshell set atmosphere was incredible.
Theron: We had a male writer, Charles Randolph, and director, Jay Roach, but mostly female producers.
Lithgow: And Charlize was always there. She’s a great producer, always watching from the other room.
Theron: I didn’t want to get fired! (Laughs)
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—HBO’s McMillion$ docuseries shows how cheaters scammed McDonald’s Monopoly game
—In the age of Twitter, seconds-long streaming delays can make or break live entertainment
—American Factory directors on capturing what “globalization looks like on a human scale”
—In the Dark podcast host Madeleine Baran on Curtis Flowers’ release, season three, and more
—Taika Waititi on Kiwi humor, directing as Hitler, and why kids should see Jojo Rabbit
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fortune--2020-02-04--Is there still appetite for direct-to-consumer businesses?

This article originally ran in Term Sheet, Fortune’s newsletter about deals and dealmakers. Sign up here.
Casper could’ve potentially stayed private through 2020.
The direct-to-consumer mattress startup tried to raise up to $200 million in funding days before filing to go public, according to a new report in The Information. Company executives reportedly felt comfortable going down the IPO path after they felt the dust had settled following WeWork’s failed public offering attempt. But the fact that it didn’t raise more funding could be indicative of a larger trend in the direct-to-consumer world.
Casper took a 32% haircut on its valuation as it filed for an IPO, estimating that it would sell 8.3 million shares at a price range of $17 to $19 apiece—raising as much as $182.4 million.
My colleague Lucinda Shen wrote about why investors’ enthusiasm about direct-to-consumer businesses has waned in recent days. There are questions about their valuations, growth prospects, competition, and the fundamental strategies they pursue.
“I’m not optimistic that they are going to have a strong acceptance form public markets,” Sandy Kory, managing director at Horizon Partners, told Fortune. “Right now, markets are saying, if you are spending a lot on sales and marketing, and you have software unit economics, you might not make it.”
I’m not so sure. Private investors may be over the direct-to-consumer trend, but does the same remain true for the public investor?
Read more at Fortune.
REIMAGINING THE CALL CENTER: Talk to any Silicon Valley investor, and they’ll tell you how artificial intelligence has all sorts of fancy applications. But AI’s most interesting use case may not be so fancy after all.
Investors from venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock Partners have invested $21 million in Cresta, a call center technology startup co-founded by Sebastian Thrun, a high-profile Silicon Valley executive who founded Google’s so-called X moonshot factory and online education company Udacity.
My colleague Jonathan Vanian reports that Cresta’s software analyzes a corporate client’s call center transcripts to learn which phrases or words top salespeople have used that ultimately led to successful sales. Other agents are then prompted to use that language when they field customer calls, in an effort to increase sales. Read more at Fortune.
Polina Marinova
Twitter: @polina_marinova
Email: polina.marinova@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- Hinge Health, a San Francisco-based startup that offers a digital solution to treat chronic musculoskeletal conditions, raised $90 million in Series C funding. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, and was joined by investors including Lead Edge Capital, Insight Partners, Atomico, 11.2 Capital, Quadrille Capital and Heuristic Capital.
- Top Hat, a Canada-based company that makes software tools for teachers in higher education, raised $55 million in Series D funding. Georgian Partners and Inovia Capital co-led the round, and were joined by investors including Union Square Ventures, Emergence Capital and Leaders Fund.
- Finix, a San Francisco-based payments infrastructure platform, raised a $35 million in Series B funding. Sequoia Capital led the round, and was joined by investors including Acrew Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Activant Capital and Inspired Capital.
- Automox, a Boulder, Colo.-based cloud-native cyber hygiene platform provider, raised $30 million in Series B funding. Koch Disruptive Technologies led the round, and was joined by investors including CRV and CrowdStrike.
- Labelbox, a San Francisco-based training data platform for enterprise machine learning applications, raised $25 million in Series B funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, and was joined by investors including First Round Capital, Gradient Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins.
- Emerge, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based digital freight marketplace, raised $20 million in Series A funding. NewRoad Capital Partners led the round, and was joined by investors including Greycroft and 9Yards Capital.
- Inato, a Paris-based platform that helps biopharmaceutical companies increase the pool of available patients engaged in clinical trials, raised $14 million in Series A funding. Obvious Ventures and Cathay Innovation co-led the round, and were joined by investors including Serena and Fly Ventures.
- Accion Systems, a Boston-based in-space propulsion system company, raised $11 million in Series B funding. Boeing HorizonX Ventures and Shasta Ventures co-led the round.
- CUUP, a New York-based direct-to-consumer intimates brand, raised $11 million in Series A funding. Insight Partners led the round, and was joined by investors including Forerunner Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, and Bullish.
- Sendoso, a San Francisco-based sending platform, raised $40 million in Series B funding. Oak HC/FT led the round, and was joined by investors including Craft Ventures, Signia Venture Partners, Storm Ventures, Struck Capital, Stage 2 Capital, Felicis Ventures and Prologis.
- LoanStreet Inc, a New York-based developer of an online platform that streamlines the process of sharing, managing, and originating loans, raised $5 million in funding. Arbor Ventures led the round, and was joined by investors including Valar Ventures, Third Prime Capital, Rosecliff Ventures, Ride Ventures, The Gramercy Fund, Leland Hart, Sally Rocker, Rob Kiessling, and Richard Levin.
PRIVATE EQUITY DEALS
- One Equity Partners sold PeroxyChem, a Philadelphia-based manufacturer of peroxygen chemistries, to Evonik Industries AG (FRA: EVK), for $640 million.
- Grant Avenue Capital acquired the Heartland Rehabilitation and MileStone businesses from HCR ManorCare. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Globalization Partners Inc, a Boston-based provider of outsourced global professional employer organization and employment services, raised $150 million in funding from investors including Wincove Private Holdings TDR Capital, and Sands Capital.
- ORIX Capital Partners acquired a majority interest in Specialty Welding and Turnarounds, a Gonzales, La.-based provider of specialty welding and other highly technical turnaround services to the oil and gas refinery. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- HEPACO, a portfolio company of Gryphon Investors, acquired Evergreen AES Environmental Services, a provider of environmental remediation services. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
OTHER DEALS
- Beanfield Technologies Inc acquired Openface Inc, a Canada-based provider of fiber-based telecom services. Financial terms of the private transaction were not disclosed.
- Grab Holdings Inc. acquired Bento Invest Pte Ltd, a Singapore-based robo-advisory startup. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
IPOs
- Passage Bio, a Philadelphia-based biotech focused on rare, monogenic central nervous system disorders, filed to raise $125 million in an IPO. It has yet to post a revenue, and revealed losses of $45.6 million in 2019. Frazier Life Sciences (13.9%), Orbimed (19.6%), and Versant Ventures (14.8%), back the firm. It plans to list on the Nasdaq as “PASG.” Read more.
- Asana, a San Francisco-based software firm, says it has filed confidentially for a direct listing with the SEC. Read more.
EXITS
- Clearlake Capital Group agreed to acquire Innovative XCessories & Services LLC, a provider of coating solutions and vehicle upfit services to OEMs, from Olympus Partners. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
PEOPLE
- Tess Hatch was promoted to vice president at Bessemer Venture Partners.
- Pappas Capital named Karen LeVert as a venture partner.


fortune--2020-02-04--New Alphabet CEO, same old ABCs

New Alphabet CEO, same old ABCs

This is the web version of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top tech news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.
Good morning, Data Sheet readers. Tech writer Danielle Abril here filling in for Adam Lashinsky.
Did you catch Alphabet’s earnings yesterday? It was the first time Sundar Pichai spoke publicly as top dog. In December, Pichai was promoted from CEO of Google to head of Alphabet to much fanfare and speculation about the direction of the company.
And you know what Pichai told us about how the leadership change will impact that future? Nothing. Nothing at all.
“Before I talk about highlights of the quarter, I want to step back and give some early thoughts to my approach to managing Alphabet and other bets,” he said, only to repeat familiar goals of long-term growth, investments in artificial intelligence, and cloud expansion in his characteristic monotone.
Though Pichai gave little insight into what changes may result from the leadership change (he revealed a little more to Adam), he did offer up numbers Alphabet has never previously released: revenue totals for the company’s cloud computing business and YouTube ads.
I covered those numbers yesterday, along with Alphabet’s fourth-quarter earnings. While the rates at which YouTube and Google’s cloud business are annually growing (36% and 53% respectively) are very positive, it’s important to remember that together both represent only 15% of Alphabet’s overall revenue.
“It’s essentially a rounding error,” Brent Thill, analyst at Jefferies, told me after Alphabet’s earnings came out.
Meanwhile, the biggest chunk of Alphabet’s $161.9 billion revenue—its main ad business—is slowing. The latest results, up 17%, represent the company’s slowest quarter of revenue growth since 2015.
Alphabet’s results wrap up the quarterly earnings for the FAANG companies. Here’s how that played out: Apple and Amazon had better-than-expected holiday seasons, which boosted both stocks. Netflix also beat projections, giving its stock a slight bump, but cautioned that lighter subscriber growth was ahead.
But ad-based companies Google and Facebook suffered from the same downfall: a slowdown in revenue growth. And both stocks dropped following fourth-quarter earnings.
Coincidence? It’s too early to tell. But as regulations and privacy measures kick up, the two behemoths will be challenged to prove they can still deliver a return for advertisers.
It’s a tall order that may take some time to remaster. So perhaps Pichai’s even-keeled, long-term approach may come in handy after all.
Danielle Abril
Twitter: @DanielleDigest
Email: danielle.abril@fortune.com
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.
NEWSWORTHY
Egg freckles? They say they've been hard at work improving Siri, but Apple has to be disappointed by the latest competition pitting their digital assistant against Amazon's Alexa, the Google Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana. A team from the University of Alberta asked each virtual answer machine 123 questions on 39 emergency health topics, such as heart attacks and poisoning. Google and Alexa addressed the correct topic 90% of the time and gave useful and accurate answers in half of those cases. But Siri and Microsoft's Cortana performed so poorly that their responses could not be graded.
Pried from my cold, dead hands. It's the end of the line for lovers of the Blackberry phone, at least for a while. Blackberry said it was terminating its licensing deal later this year with Chinese phone maker TCL to produce keyboard-equipped Android phones that run its software.
We don't need no stinkin' badges. Productivity app developer Asana said on Monday that it plans to go public soon in a direct listing without Wall Street underwriters, as Slack did last year. The task-tracking and collaboration software maker was co-founded by Facebook's Dustin Moskovitz.
You had one job. It's not yet clear exactly what went wrong with the Democratic party's system for counting the results of the Iowa caucuses, but something went hella wrong. A mysterious and controversial app used for the first time to tally the results may be at fault.
You had one job, the sequel. Microsoft's collaboration and messaging app Teams went offline on Monday for all users for a few hours. The Slack rival hit a technical snafu when an online authentication certificate expired.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
With so much work to get done every day, all too often the solution is to spend more and more time at work. Time management coach Elizabeth Grace Saunders thinks that's a huge mistake, as she outlines in an advice column for the Harvard Business Review. She's got several tips and tricks to help people work smarter without just working more. How you end each day is an opportunity to gain control, she says.
The final part of increasing your mental clarity is to have an end-of-workday wrap-up. During this time, look over your daily to-do list and calendar to make sure that everything that absolutely must get done — specifically, those tasks that had a hard deadline — were completed. You also can do a quick scan of your email to ensure any urgent messages are attended to before you leave the office. For some people, it works well to do this as the last thing they do that day, say 15 to 30 minutes before heading out. For others, it’s better to put a reminder in their calendars for an hour or two before they need to leave. This gives them a more generous time period to wrap items up.
ON THE MOVE
Dropbox finally filled its vacant COO post, empty for more than a year, by hiring Olivia Nottebohm, who oversaw sales and operations at parts of Google Cloud and was earlier a partner at McKinsey...Also at Dropbox, CEO Drew Houston is joining Facebook's board of directors, becoming the eighth member of that exclusive body...British cybersecurity firm Darktrace hired a new CFO as it considers going public. Joining this month is Catherine Graham, who has helped four startups go public, including in her prior gig as CFO of online education company 2U...Netflix senior engineer Ruslan Meshenberg joins Apple's streaming TV effort as an engineering lead.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Iowa caucus voting app’s ‘security through obscurity’ seeds disinformation and legitimacy concerns By Alyssa Newcomb and Nicole Goodkind
If data is the new oil, these companies are the new Baker Hughes By Jeremy Kahn
Google tests photo printing subscription service By Chris Morris
Founder of Google’s Moonshot Factory and Udacity makes a big new bet By Jonathan Vanian
What you need to know about new IBM CEO Arvind Krishna By David Z. Morris
Coronavirus will take a bite out of Apple’s iPhone business. The question facing analysts: ‘How big?’ By Don Reisinger
The best reason to escape to Miami Beach for a weekend this winter By Alexandra Kirkman
BEFORE YOU GO
Many people have tried to fool mapping apps like Waze into diverting traffic away from their streets. But performance artist Simon Weckert took virtual traffic hacking to a new level. Weckert got a hold of 99 Android phones, piled them in a red wagon, and pulled them slowly through the streets of Berlin. Google Maps read the location and slow rate of travel as commuters trapped in a traffic jam and routed actual traffic away. Check out his video.
Aaron Pressman
On Twitter: @ampressman
Email: aaron.pressman@fortune.com


fortune--2020-02-04--When misogyny goes to the gym

When misogyny goes to the gym

This is the web version of the Broadsheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The Iowa caucus results are a mess, Greta goes for trademarks, and a gym excuses misogyny. Have a terrific Tuesday.
– Misogyny at the gym. I have a feeling many gym-goers are going to relate to this story.
A woman named Elena Bunbury last week posted a response she received from boutique London gym Gymbox after complaining about harassment from another guest. “So a random gym goer harassed me and my friend at our first visit to @GYMBOXofficial,” she wrote on Twitter. She then posted the gym’s reply, in which a Gymbox employee blamed Bunbury’s treatment on testosterone. “We are in a gym where where testosterone levels are especially high during workouts. This mean[s] that reactions to situations can be a bit extreme especially for men,” the email said. Bunbury criticized the gym for “justifying” such behavior.
Gymbox has since apologized—”[W]e recognize that in this instance our response to this customer’s complaint has fallen short of what it should be”—but that didn’t stop the incident from striking a chord. The Guardian compiled testimonials from women who’ve had similar experiences—or worse. One woman received obscene texts from a gym employee who’d stolen her phone number from the guest database. Another woman caught male guests filming her workout.
A survey in 2018 illustrated just how inhospitable the work-out world can be toward women, with 19% of female respondents saying they’d been sexually harassed at the gym. (Seven percent of men said the same.) And those women took drastic measures in response to such abuse; nearly three-quarters changed their gym attire afterwards, nearly half stopped doing certain exercises, and 37% changed gyms or stopped going altogether.
We often focus on mistreatment of women in the workplace; all this is an unfortunate reminder that misogyny, of course, infiltrates so many spaces. Such behavior should never be excused as part of the natural environment; no matter how severe, it’s a stressor that denies women the right to exist in an unguarded state.
Claire Zillman
claire.zillman@fortune.com
@clairezillman
Today’s Broadsheet was produced by Emma Hinchliffe.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Caucus chaos. Iowa caucus results are still yet to be released, after "inconsistencies" in reporting caused a messy delay Monday night. Meanwhile, many of the candidates have already headed to New Hampshire, where there's a primary next week. While awaiting official results, the campaigns of Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren—the two female candidates in contention—indicated that each senator had a big night, especially compared to perceived frontrunner Joe Biden. Washington Post
- Going public. When BlackRock fired two executives last year for having romantic relationships with subordinates, there was a reason the firm made the ousters public. The money manager, with $7.4 trillion under management, wants to show the younger, mission-driven members of its workforce that they are "free to point out problems in the workplace." Wall Street Journal
- Trademark Greta. Activist Greta Thunberg filed applications to trademark her name and her trademark Swedish phrase on protest posters, "Skolstrejk for klimatet," or "school strike for climate." She'll use the trademarks to discourage imposters and to set up a foundation. Adweek
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Sharon White, the former CEO of U.K. communications regulator Ofcom, is officially the new chairman of John Lewis Partnership, making her one of the most prominent black women in the British corporate world. Darktrace hired 2U's Cathy Graham as CFO. Tally hired Jan Chong, formerly of Twitter, as VP of engineering. Veronique Hakim joined HNTB as SVP and national transit and rail market sector leader.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- Future of funds. Thirty-seven-year-old Teresa Isele runs API, a $36 billion Swedish fund that's a linchpin of the country's pension system. She's leading the charge in revamping the fund's investment strategy and other Swedish funds following her lead. Bloomberg
- Song for safety. A new rallying cry of the #MeToo movement is the Spanish-language song " Un Violador en Tu Camino," or "A Rapist in Your Path." The song expresses that rape "doesn't happen in a political vacuum" but is tied to ingrained patriarchal systems of oppression. Women from the Chilean feminist collective called Las Tesis started spreading the song, most recently sung outside Harvey Weinstein's trial in New York. Guardian
- Post on Post. Last week, the Washington Post found itself at the center of the Kobe Bryant discourse after disciplining reporter Felicia Sonmez for, shortly after the basketball star's death, tweeting a link to a 2016 story about the rape allegation against Bryant. The Post then declined to pursue any long-term disciplinary action against Sonmez but didn't offer her an apology. Now Post staffers say that women are undervalued in the paper's newsroom and compare the Sonmez incident to one in which a male reporter who received a similar level of online harassment and threats was given much greater support, including security. A spokesperson for the newspaper says it "dispute[s]" this "narrative." Huffington Post
- Unfashionable behavior. What's it like to be a female photographer at fashion week? One photographer, Megan Cencula, writes of being "shoved, elbowed in the face, and called every derogatory name" by her male peers working in the close quarters and male-dominated field of fashion photography. Cosmopolitan
ON MY RADAR
Sheryl Sandberg is engaged to Tom Bernthal after being set up by her late husband's brother People
Classical music has a 'God status' problem The Atlantic
Hilaria Baldwin: There's no right way to deal with a miscarriage Glamour
J. Lo and the power of 50 New York Times
PARTING WORDS
"I’m flattered that people think that, but it’s like, where, though? What rule did I break? The rule about making classic pop music and dressing like a girly girl?"
-Billie Eilish, in a Vogue cover story, on being called a "rule-breaker"


fortune--2020-02-04--Coronavirus prompts the world’s gambling capital to do the unthinkable: close its casinos

Macau, the world’s most lucrative casino hub, isn’t taking any more chances when it comes to containing the spread of the deadly novel coronavirus.
Having already restricted travel and cancelled public events since late late month, the chief executive of the Chinese casino enclave on Tuesday announced he would shut down the Special Administrative Region’s economic powerhouses: the 41 casinos that contribute over 50% of the island’s GDP for at least 15 days, starting at midnight.
“Of course this was a difficult decision, but we must do it, for the health of Macau’s residents—this is our only goal,” chief executive Ho Iat Seng said during a press conference on Tuesday morning.
The decision was confirmed during a second press conference held by Macau Finance Secretary Lei Wai Nong in the afternoon, who said the hotels, shops and restaurants at the casino resorts would remain open because they had “sufficient risk control measures.”
Macau’s casinos have only been forced to close once before, for a period of 33 hours when a typhoon struck the island in 2018. The brief closure cost Macau’s six casino operators an estimated $184 million in revenue, but Ho says that Macau can “still bear these economic losses right now.”
Money down
As the world’s most densely populated region, where over 620,000 people are crammed into a space 26 times smaller than Singapore, Macau’s risk of contagion is extraordinarily high. So far, the Wuhan virus has infected 10 people on the island, but the city began enacting quarantine measures during Chinese New Year—ordinarily the gaming industry’s busiest time.
“Chinese New Year is usually the biggest week in the whole year for casinos in terms of financial contribution to their bottom lines,” said Ben Lee, managing partner at Macau-based gaming consultancy IGamix. “The other golden week holidays—like National Day and Labor Day—are good too, but Chinese New Year is when people really throw caution to the wind and go out to test their luck.”
An attendant checks the temperature of a tourist at the entrance to the Galaxy Macau casino and hotel in January. The Chinese territory decided to close its casinos on Tuesday. Billy H.C. Kwok—Bloomberg/Getty Images
In 2019, Chinese New Year was in early February. Casino gaming revenue for that month hit $3.17 billion. This year, the holiday fell in January and gaming revenue for the month was $2.76 billion—11.3% down on the year before, with tours from mainland China during the actual four-day holiday falling 75.1%.
The Lunar New Year often provides a long tail of earnings too, Lee said, as junket operators host dinners and other festivities for high stakes rollers in the weeks following the official holiday. This year, however, that long tail was severed by the Macau government, which ordered cinemas and theaters to close in January and prohibited large gatherings, such as banquets, to contain the spread of the flu. Yet the casinos, Macau’s undisputed economic engine, remained open.
“We’re not going to see the revenue from junket dinners, where up to 8,000 VIPs would come to Macau for three to four days and gamble,” Lee said, adding that the ban on gatherings has forced iGamix to downgrade its projection for casino earnings in the month ahead. Already the consultancy was anticipating a revenue decline over the year before of 35% due to the viral outbreak. That contraction could now expand to over 60%, owing to the government response.
Safe bet
The coffers of the Macau government, which implements a 40% tax on casino revenues, will no doubt take a hit during the next two weeks. However, since the government typically runs a massive surplus—roughly 50% of earnings, Lee said—the impact of the short closure won’t be so pronounced and the move will likely earn Ho’s administration additional kudos from the public.
“Shutting the casinos is a great idea,” said a sales agent at a shop in the Venetian Macau resort, owned by Las Vegas Sands. She asked to be identified only by her last name of Vong. She and her colleagues had crowded around an iPad to livestream the chief executive’s press conference on Tuesday. “It’s a little bit dangerous being outside, and there was already one case discovered inside a casino,” she said.
Rumors that several of Macau’s coronavirus patients had stayed at casino resorts in the city began late last month and, speaking during Tuesday’s press conference, chief executive Ho confirmed at least one case of coronavirus that had been contracted by staff at the Galaxy Macau resort—possibly the city’s first example of human-to-human transmission.
Aside from keeping the casinos open, the Macanese government has acted swiftly to restrict contagion since the city’s first case of coronavirus was confirmed on January 22. The authorities procured 20 million surgical masks and fixed a quota and a price for their sale. Bus drivers on the island are now entitled to deny service to passengers not wearing masks.
The staff at the Venetian—like everyone else in Macau—have their faces swaddled in surgical masks. Guests are required to follow suit in order to access the casino at the heart of the integrated resort, where access is restricted to those who pass a series of temperature checks: one at the entrance to the hotel and a secondary screening on the outskirts of the cavernous casino hall.
A sign at the gateway warns gamblers that failing to disclose any recent visits to China’s Hubei province—which is ground zero for the current epidemic—could result in a two-year prison sentence, as decreed by the government. Said Vong: “I think if we compare the government of Hong Kong to the government of Macau, ours is handling this better.”
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Global companies enter lockdown mode as coronavirus rocks China
—Deutsche Bank’s “annus horribilis” reveals the true cost of negative interest rates
—As the coronavirus spreads, these stocks are the most exposed
—Mysterious GPS outages are wracking the shipping industry
—Fortune Explains: Tariffs and trade wars
Catch up with Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily digest on the business of tech.


fortune--2020-02-04--Walgreens will pay $7.5 million over phony pharmacist who filled 750,000 prescriptions

Walgreens will pay $7.5 million to settle with California authorities after an employee was criminally charged with impersonating a pharmacist and illegally filling more than 745,000 prescriptions in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Kim Thien Le has pleaded not guilty to felony impersonation charges. Prosecutors said that from late 2006 through 2017, Le used the license numbers of registered pharmacists in order to impersonate them and dispense prescriptions at Walgreens stores in Santa Clara and Alameda counties.
The prescriptions allegedly included more than 100,000 for opioids such as fentanyl, morphine and codeine.
Le herself didn’t have a pharmacist license, prosecutors said.
The district attorneys in both counties filed a consumer protection action against Walgreens. Prosecutors on Monday announced that the pharmacy giant agreed to settle. The company will pay $7.5 million in penalties, costs and remedial payments.
“The burden is on the company to make sure its employees are properly licensed and to complete a thorough background check,” Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley said in a news release announcing the settlement.
In a statement Monday, Walgreens said Le hasn’t worked for the company since 2017.
“Pharmacy quality and safety are top priorities, and upon learning of this issue, we undertook a re-verification of the licenses of all our pharmacists nationwide,” the statement said.
The complaint alleged Walgreens failed to vet Le thoroughly when it promoted her to positions requiring a license and failed to make sure that its internal systems were strong enough to prevent an employee from evading them.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Global companies enter lockdown mode as coronavirus rocks China
—Deutsche Bank’s “annus horribilis” reveals the true cost of negative interest rates
—As the coronavirus spreads, these stocks are the most exposed
—Mysterious GPS outages are wracking the shipping industry
—Fortune Explains: Tariffs and trade wars
Catch up with Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily digest on the business of tech.


fortune--2020-02-04--Hong Kong protests birthed a new hospital worker union. The coronavirus has prompted its first strik

Hong Kong protests birthed a new hospital worker union. The coronavirus has prompted its first strike

Thousands of public sector healthcare workers in Hong Kong on Tuesday went on strike for the second day in a row to demand immediate closure of the city’s border with mainland China to prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus.
The Hospital Authority Employees Alliance (HAEA) said on Tuesday evening that more than 7,000 union members—around 10% of public hospital workers—joined in the second day of the strike, an increase from the previous day, when around 2,700 workers participated.
Hong Kong confirmed its first coronavirus-related death on Tuesday morning. It is the second death to occur outside of mainland China, where the outbreak originated. The coronavirus has infected 17 people in Hong Kong, including the 39-year-old man who died.
On Tuesday evening, the HAEA said it will continue the strike into a third day, and reiterated its main demand.
“The closing of the border must be immediately implemented and there is absolutely no room for negotiation,” the union said in a statement.
The union also repeated its demand to meet with the city’s chief executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor.
“If Carrie Lam has any intention to truly tackle the infection spreading in Hong Kong, she must have a public meeting with the HAEA tomorrow at 10 a.m.,” the HAEA said.
The workers are part of the Hospital Authority Employees Alliance (HAEA), an 18,000-member union of public hospital system employees formed in December in the midst of the anti-government protests.
On Monday evening, Lam, who’s so far refused to meet with the union, appeared to give the workers at least a partial concession. She announced that four border crossings between Hong Kong and mainland China would close, leaving just three open: Hong Kong International Airport, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, and Shenzhen Bay Port.
Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam speaks at the Central Government Complex on Feb. 3, 2020 in Hong Kong. The government announced they will shut down all but two of the border crossing stations with mainland China. Anthony Kwan—Getty Images
Lam also announced on Tuesday morning that government officials were barred from wearing surgical marks in order to save supplies for medical staff. One of the hospital union’s demands is that the government provide adequate face masks, which are in short supply in Hong Kong. The move was a reversal, since officials—including Lam herself—have worn masks in press briefings in the last few weeks.
At the same time, Lam did not concede to a total border shutdown nor to the demand that workers not face disciplinary action for striking, two of the union’s five demands. A subsequent dialogue between the HAEA members and the Hospital Authority, the organization that manages all the public hospitals in Hong Kong, broke down, and union members voted to continue striking. HAEA’s three other demands relate to medical preparedness—more face masks to curb the shortage, sufficient isolation wards for coronavirus patients, and support and protective gear for staff working in the wards.
The first day of the strike, which on Monday included 300 doctors and 900 nurses, “seriously delayed” services in hospitals, according to the Hospital Authority.
The novel coronavirus has infected almost 21,000 people worldwide and caused 427 deaths as of Tuesday.
Another five demands
The hospital workers’ union’s five demands echo the message of the broader political protest movement that calls for “five demands, not one less”—an unsurprising tribute, since the union emerged from the antigovernment demonstrations that gripped the city last year.
The protests, sparked in June 2019 by a now-withdrawn bill that would have allowed for extradition to mainland China, developed into a broad movement calling for democratic reforms in Hong Kong, and energized workers across numerous sectors in a city known more for its friendliness to finance, free trade, and open markets than for politically-charged organized labor movements.
During the second half of 2018, Hong Kong’s labor department received 10 applications to form new trade unions. During the same period in 2019, when the protests were in full swing, the department received 135 applications, including from the HAEA.
Staff members of Hong Kong’s Hospital Authority, which employs 75,000 people citywide, queue up to sign a letter of petition in support of a planned strike by hospital workers, near the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Hong Kong on Feb. 4, 2020. ANTHONY WALLACE—AFP via Getty Images
The massive uptick in trade union registrations, as well as the landslide victory of pro-protest candidates in local elections in November, reflected the movement’s growth beyond street protests to incorporate labor organizing and electoral politics.
“This is an atypical strike in the recent history of Hong Kong. Strike rate has been extremely low since the 1990s,” said Chris Chan, an associate professor of sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who researches labor and social movements in Hong Kong.
Chan said the HAEA has support from “many other trade unions,” including the bus driver unions and the Hong Kong Dragon Airlines Flight Attendants Association.
Dragon Airlines is the budget carrier of Hong Kong’s flagship airline, Cathay Pacific. Unions representing flight attendants from both carriers warned they would consider strike action if the airlines did not suspend flights to mainland China over coronavirus fears.
Cathay Pacific said on Tuesday it was cutting 90% of its mainland China capacity for two months, citing a drop in passenger demand because of the outbreak.
Refocused attention
The coronavirus is highly infectious and spreads through cough and sneeze droplets in the air, so crowded gatherings and marches pose an obvious public health risk.
The sudden outbreak had the potential to derail the Hong Kong protest movement and also presented an opportunity for Lam and the government to “assert leadership and demonstrate competence,” said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
Instead, the government’s initial response to the outbreak was critiziced for being slow and inadequate, even by pro-establishment politicians, and the outbreak refocused protesters’ attention.
On Telegram, the encrypted messaging app popular with Hong Kong protestors, the public channels devoted to sharing protest updates are now occupied with news about the coronavirus from an anti-government perspective—from the latest infection rates and death tolls to comics criticizing the government handling of the epidemic and photographs of the striking medical workers.
A poll by the Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute (PORI) found that 11% of Hong Kong people were satisfied with the government response to the outbreak.
People rallied in Hong Kong’s Central district on Monday and Tuesday in solidarity with the medical union’s demand for a full border closure.
According to the PORI poll, 80% of Hong Kong people support barring mainland China residents from entry to Hong Kong, and 61% of people support the medical workers’ strike.
Tsang said the level of public support for a medical strike “in the midst of a public health crisis […] reveals how much disaffection there remains in Hong Kong” towards the government.
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fortune--2020-02-04--OPEC nerves grow as coronavirus forces China to slash oil imports

Oil climbed to near $51 a barrel in New York as officials from OPEC+ gathered on Tuesday for an urgent meeting to assess the impact of the coronavirus on global demand, and how the group should respond.
Under increasing pressure after crude prices sunk below $50 a barrel for the first time in more than a year on Monday, technical experts from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies will meet at the cartel’s Vienna headquarters on Tuesday to evaluate the disease’s impact. The outcome of the discussions may determine whether the group convenes an emergency meeting to consider new output cuts later this month.
So far, the virus has upended trade flows and probably led to a 20% cut to China’s oil demand — the world’s biggest importer– as cities are quarantined and factories are halted. Refineries are curbing operations and shutting plants, while the nation’s top processor is seeking to re-sell millions of barrels of West African crude it no longer needs because of the squeeze to consumption. The crisis could wipe out a third of the growth in global consumption this year, said BP Plc Chief Financial Officer Brian Gilvary.
“The problem for OPEC+ is that the size of the demand destruction in China is not known,” said Petromatrix analyst Olivier Jakob. “It is therefore difficult for market participants to be convinced that an additional cut of 1 million barrels a day will be enough. In the current environment, a cut of 0.5 million barrels a day is going to be quickly discounted.”
West Texas Intermediate for March delivery added 70 cents to $50.81 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange as of 11:39 a.m. in London. The contract slumped 2.8% on Monday to the lowest since January 2019. International benchmark Brent gained 0.7% on Tuesday, trading at $54.82 a barrel.
Though oil’s near-term contracts were recovering, there was no similar move in the oil market’s structure. The nearest Brent spread was languishing in a bearish contango structure — indicating oversupply — trading about 6 cents weaker than Monday’s close.
The prices of commodities from energy to metals have stabilized, while iron ore and crude in China recovered some ground. The tentative recovery came even as steel mills and processing plants remain shut throughout the country. Officials are reviewing whether to soften the economic growth target for 2020 and authorities in Beijing are hoping the U.S. will agree to some flexibility on pledges in their phase-one trade deal due to the virus outbreak.
An OPEC+ ministerial meeting is scheduled for March, but the group is considering whether to hold that gathering earlier to respond to the virus. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz discussed the market by phone on Monday and confirmed “readiness to continue cooperation.” Russia is ready to participate in any OPEC+ meeting that is called, a Kremlin spokesman said on Tuesday.
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fortune--2020-02-04--The best reason to escape to Miami Beach for a weekend this winter

A world-class art scene, powder-white beaches, and a soigné vibe are just a few attributes that have long propelled Miami’s South Beach to the top of travel wish lists for discerning sun-seekers the world over—as evidenced by the record-breaking 23 million people who visited the city in 2018. And for culture vultures seeking a steamy respite from winter’s unforgiving icy clutches, a bold new production offers another reason to head to the sexy seaside mecca soon.
Faena Hotel Miami Beach, one of the city’s most fashionable addresses, has amplified its reputation for stylishly singular experiences with a dazzling new theatrical version of Peter Greenaway’s groundbreaking film, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover. The visually stunning revenge tragedy—which stars Helen Mirren as the fed-up wife of a boorish crime boss who begins a torrid affair with a bookish guest at her husband’s London restaurant—artfully melds lust, food, and violence as it hurtles toward an unforgettable and grotesque end. The movie floored viewers and enraptured critics upon its 1989 debut, making Mirren a bona fide star in the process.
Now, thanks to the considerable creative vision of master hotelier and cultural impresario Alan Faena—an Argentine developer credited with transforming the once-abandoned docklands of Buenos Aires’s Puerto Madero district into an epicenter of cool—the show is becoming one of the hottest tickets in town, just as South Beach’s high season shifts into top gear.
The Sun Bar, one of the hotel’s alfresco gathering spots, serves an array of inspired cocktails and small plates well into the night. Bill Wisser
The show’s international creative team, Unigram Theatrical, transforms the 3,000-square-foot Faena Theater—swathed floor to ceiling in rich red velvet paneling tinged with gold—into a seductive re-creation of the iconic film’s Le Hollandais restaurant. It’s “a place where opulence and indulgence shake hands,” a cast member proclaims as the delectable action begins to unfold. The show playfully blurs the lines between cast and audience, immersing guests in the story to entrancing effect: One minute, a dashing waiter takes your drink order with a flirty wink, and the next he’s belting out a ballad as the loutish thief and his long-suffering wife trade zingers at a table nearby.
Haute cuisine remains a central element of the reimagined retelling, enticing diners to indulge in an extravagant three-course feast as the narrative develops. James Beard Award–winning Michelle Bernstein, one of Miami’s most influential chefs, transports foodies across settings and time periods with decadent European fare prepared with a South Florida twist. “The first course—like us—came from the sea,” announces the cook, as the audience tucks into an elegantly deconstructed ceviche of grilled scallop, tuna sashimi, and saffron-infused leche de tigre. Later, a white chocolate sphere with passion fruit mousse and “bloody berry gelée” (a harbinger of the lover’s eventual fate) makes both a gorgeous and scrumptious dessert.
The show’s most compelling creative departure manifests itself in the music. The soaring soundtrack replaces composer Michael Nyman’s hauntingly elegiac film score with a rollicking medley of 1980s anthems—performed with winning gusto by the gifted cast—that bring an exuberant levity to the proceedings, even as they take a disturbingly dark turn. At one point, the wife and her lover sneak off to the bathroom for an illicit rendezvous to the fitting strains of Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now.” Other inspired selections include Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere,” Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love,” and Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House.” Boy George himself composed the show’s eponymous original song, the ultimate tip of the hat to such an iconic musical era.
Alan Faena’s dazzling theatrical interpretation of “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover” brings the acclaimed avant-garde film to life this winter at the Faena Theater. Courtesy of Faena Theater
The show, which runs from Thursday to Sunday through May 2020, is just the latest excuse to experience the Faena Hotel Miami Beach, a stunning study in over-the-top opulence, even by South Beach’s exalted standards. Designed by a top-notch creative team that included Moulin Rouge director Baz Luhrmann and his wife, the Oscar-winning production and costume designer Catherine Martin, the 169-room hotel—formerly The Saxony, among Miami Beach’s first luxury resorts—made countless headlines upon its hotly anticipated opening in November 2015.
The hotel’s achingly chic ambience, infused with scads of South American sultriness, casts a spell starting in the lobby (referred to as “the Cathedral” in Faena-speak), where a series of eight larger-than-life, Baroque-flavored murals by Argentine artist Juan Gatti—the so-called “Michelangelo of the Faena”—set a showstopping tone. A magnet for a sophisticated clientele keen to luxuriate in its artfully outfitted rooms, kick back on its 100,000 square feet of pristine beachfront, or soak up a bit of its ineffable magic for a few fleeting hours, its considerable charms—both aesthetic and unquantifiable—are difficult to resist.
Just ask the standing-room-only crowd at The Living Room, Faena’s lushly appointed, close-quartered cocktail lounge that’s one of Miami Beach’s most exclusive haunts. Devotees are willing to queue up before the velvet rope in hopes of jockeying for space alongside a spirited mix of Miami glitterati, boldface names, and intrepid out-of-towners, all swaying and sipping to the infectious beats of its signature live music until the lights go down.
Damien Hirst’s “Gone But Not Forgotten,” one of many showstopping artworks on display at the Faena Hotel Miami Beach, presides over the resort’s aptly named Mammoth Garden. Courtesy of Faena Hotel Miami Beach
If you’re worse for wear the next morning after one too many margaritas—and you’re lucky enough that it’s Sunday—you’ve come to the right place, where the Sunday Asado Buffet is the brunch offering extraordinaire of the hotel’s Los Fuegos restaurant, Argentina celebrity chef Francis Mallmann’s first foray outside South America.
After sampling a smorgasbord of indulgences like fresh oysters, stone crab claws, and homemade pecorino-and-caramelized-onion empanadas, make a beeline for the outdoor grill, where smiling chefs serve up slow-cooked rib eye and salt-crusted wild salmon in the literal shadow of Damien Hirst’s “Gone But Not Forgotten,” a three-meter-high gilded woolly mammoth skeleton that takes pride of place a stone’s throw from the pool. It’s an apt juxtaposition in a setting where the raison d’être is all the world’s a stage.
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fortune--2020-02-04--If data is the new oil, these companies are the new Baker Hughes

Artificial intelligence runs on data. And today, in most cases, that data needs to be labeled by humans.
This is particularly true when using computer vision to identify tumors on medical scans, spot roof damage from aerial photography or figure out whether an object crossing in front of your self-driving car is a plastic bag or a mother pushing a stroller. But it’s also true for speech recognition: To train the software, someone must provide an accurate transcript to match an audio recording.
Data labeling for machine learning has spawned an entirely new industry, and the companies springing up to help businesses label their data are among the hottest “picks and shovels” investment plays for venture capitalists hoping to cash in on the current A.I. gold rush.
The latest datapoint in this data labeling boom: Labelbox, a San Francisco startup that operates a software platform for helping companies manage their data labeling tasks, on Tuesday announced it had received $25 million in additional venture capital funding.
The money is from prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose managing partner Peter Levine, is joining Labelbox’s board; Google’s A.I.-focused venture capital fund, Gradient Ventures; and Kleiner Perkins, another of the Valley’s best-known firms.
The investment, which is Labelbox’s Series B, or second round of institutional financing, brings the total that the not-quite-two-year-old startup has raised to $39 million.
Labelbox competes with a number of other labeling companies: there’s Scale AI, another San Francisco data labeling platform that has raised $122 million since its founding three years ago, as well as companies that specialize in running teams of human data labelers on a project basis, such as Hive, Cloudfactory, and Samasource, the startup founded by Leila Janah, who died last month at age 37, but who saw data labeling as a way to bring decent wages and skilled work to people in the developing world.
Alexandr Wang, the 23-year-old founder and CEO of Scale AI, which has worked with a number of self-driving car companies, says that the “dirty secret” of artificial intelligence is that getting the software to work well in the real world requires a large amount of high-quality data.
“Where the rubber hits the road is what does the data these A.I. systems are trained on look like?” he says. “Is that data biased? Is that data high quality? Does that data have noise? Is that data comprehensive?”
Providing labels can be relatively low-skilled work (identifying “cats” in videos) performed by thousands of contractors in traditional outsourcing hubs such as India, Romania, or the Philippines, or it can be much higher-skilled work performed by radiologists (outline the exact contours of a tumor on a medical scan) or lawyers (identify a non-compete clause in a contract). Often companies have a need for both general and more expert labeling and employ a combination of outsourcing firms, freelancers, and in-house experts to affix these annotations. The labels can be in the form of bounding boxes around objects, tagging items visually or with text labels in photographs, or entering a classification into a separate text-based database that accompanies the original data.
Wang says that with such complex work flows, data governance—how companies track what data they are using, who’s using it, and what they are doing with it— is critical. “It isn’t sexy, but it really matters,” he says. Companies trying to deploy machine learning are often slowed because they don’t have systems in place to manage data labeling efficiently, he says.
Both Scale AI and Labelbox provide tools to help companies’ machine learning and data science teams analyze the data once it is labeled, allowing them to identify blindspots and biases. For example, are men overrepresented in your X-ray data (bias)? Or did you have too few examples of cats running across the road in order to train your self-driving algorithm to brake for them (a blindspot)? “Every A.I. company needs tools to edit, manage, and review labels,” Manu Sharma, Labelbox’s co-founder and CEO, says.
Michael Phillippi, vice president of technology at Lytx, a San Diego company that sells systems that allow trucking businesses to assess and track drivers’ behavior through cameras and sensor data, says it takes about 10,000 hours of labeled 20-second video clips to train a prototype A.I. system to detect something like driver distraction. To put that system into actual production, though, requires four to five million hours of video, he says. That is a lot of labeling.
John-Isaac Clark is the CEO of Arturo.ai, a spin out from American Family Insurance that specializes in machine learning software to analyze images, including satellite and aerial photography, for the insurance industry. He says that large, well-labeled data sets are especially important for training A.I. software to correctly identify “edge cases”—unusual or rare situations.
Humans can often use common sense to deal with these situations, even when they haven’t encountered them before. Most A.I. systems, in contrast, need to have seen multiple examples during training to correctly handle them.
Both Arturo and Lytx are Labelbox customers. Clark says Labelbox enabled Arturo to reduce the number of employees it needed to supervise its data labeling contractors from four to just one.
Sharma and his co-founder Brian Rieger, who is now the Labelbox’s chief operating officer, met when they both worked in aeronautics industry, helping to design and test flight control systems. Sharma later worked for Planet Labs, a company that analyzes gigantic datasets of satellite images, where he realized the difficulty companies had with managing labeling tasks for A.I. training data and began thinking of creating a company to address this problem. His other co-founder, Dan Rasmuson, now Labelbox’s chief technology officer, had encountered similar problems working at a company that sold drone imagery.
Labelbox’s software supplies a set of labeling tools for both images and text, as well as a way to distribute data to labelers in such a way that multiple labelers can work on the same data simultaneously without duplicating any labels.
Some companies in the labeling space, such as Scale AI and Hive, provide labeling services themselves. In fact, Scale AI uses its own A.I. software to automatically generate labels for certain kinds of data. These labels are then checked by humans to ensure accuracy, Wang says.
Automatic labeling, he says, allows Scale AI’s customers to benefit from the work Scale AI has done in the past—if it has already built a system to detect cars in videos, for instance, customers may not need to train their own system from scratch. Even in cases where customers want to build their own models, he says, automatic labeling makes the process more efficient.
Labelbox, meanwhile, has taken a different approach. It doesn’t perform any labeling itself. Instead, it’s a tool for managing labeling projects and data across different contract labelers, who often work for large outsourcing firms. The software also allows Labelbox’s customers to audit the quality of labeling contractors. Labelbox gets paid based on how much data a customer runs through the software.
Andreessen Horowitz’s Levine compares Labelbox to Github, the software code repository that many companies use to manage their code. Acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion in 2018, it was an Andreessen Horowitz investment. “Labelbox has the potential to fill a similar role for data in the AI/ML world,” Levine writes in response to emailed questions, using shorthand for artificial intelligence and machine learning. He says the platform can serve as “a single source of truth” for training data across an organization.
This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Labelbox chief technology officer Dan Rasmuson’s last name.
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fortune--2020-03-30--Barred from hospital births, doulas adjust to the coronavirus crisis

Macy ’ s has ‘ lost the majority of our sales ’ and will furlough most employees

As the coronavirus spread throughout New York, hospitals took the extreme action of limiting visitors who could transmit the virus. Several placed limits on visitors to delivery rooms, including the partners of women in labor.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo stepped in this weekend, forcing hospitals to allow non-symptomatic partners to be present during delivery. But Cuomo left in place another ban: one on birth workers like doulas, the nonmedical professionals some women hire to act as guides and advocates through the birth process.
“We’re really grappling with it as a profession,” says Domino Kirke, cofounder of the Brooklyn-based doula collective and training program Carriage House Birth.
Carriage House Birth includes about 100 doulas, whose work is by nature physical. On a sliding scale of fees from volunteer up to $4,000, the collective’s doulas spend time with pregnant women preparing for possible birth scenarios, advocate for them during labor, and help with breastfeeding or postpartum depression in the “fourth trimester” after birth. Kirke became a doula 11 years ago, six months after the birth of her own son.
Despite the ban, it’s work that many pregnant women consider essential. And it’s also a profession that doesn’t easily translate to the virtual realm, a reality that women who have already paid for doula services are well aware of. “There’s a feeling of abandonment and loss,” Kirke says. “We’re letting people go through the roller coaster of emotions, that they won’t have the team they paid for or envisioned.”
While doulas’ inability to accompany their clients to the hospital compromises their ability to do their job, Kirke says she and others in the profession expected the restrictions as the extent of the crisis became clear—“we were hunkering down”—and she’s torn about lifting them. “As someone trying to protect newborns…it’s a numbers game. The more bodies in the room, the greater likelihood someone could walk out of there infected,” she says.
As women nearing their due dates contend with these ever-changing restrictions and worries about the pandemic’s effects on hospitals, doula organizations are adapting. Brooklyn’s Ancient Song Doula Services, which serves women of color and low-income women, is offering virtual doula training to nurses and health care professionals interested in filling the advocate role while doulas are unable to be present during births. Founder Chanel Porchia-Albert notes that the patient advocacy role played by doulas is doubly essential for women of color, who face a greater risk of complications or death. “There’s the risk of fear-based coercion, reprisal for refusal of care,” she notes. Doulas across organizations are doing virtual prenatal appointments and appearing on FaceTime during labor.
Home-birth midwives—who typically take only three to five clients a month—are dealing with an influx of inquiries from women looking to radically alter their birth plans. Kimm Sun, a New York home-birth midwife who says that the number of calls she’s gotten in a single day has now exceeded the number of patients she typically takes per year, urges doulas to do what they do best: advocate. “They can go out and do the work of making sure the Department of Health and the government and the city are trying to get equipment to the hospitals. If they do that, there’s a big chance they’re not going to have to put in the policy of [isolating women],” Sun says.
Kirke herself is six months pregnant. She’s hoping New York will have passed its peak in the virus crisis by the time she gives birth and that the rules at hospitals will be more relaxed. “I’ve been laughing to myself,” she says. “Maybe I’ve been a doula for 11 years so I can be the best doula to myself.”
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