It’s Long Past Time for a Federal Data Protection Law

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images.

This article is part of the Future Agenda, a series from Future Tense in which experts suggest specific, forward-looking actions the new Biden administration should implement.

In the United States, companies are largely not required by law to protect your personal data. There are some exceptions—certain specific types of data are regulated (health information, for instance, or data about children under 13), and the California Consumer Privacy Act, which went into effect this year, imposes some security and privacy requirements on companies collecting information about California residents. But those piecemeal solutions do not come close to adequately addressing the huge gap at the heart of U.S. civilian cybersecurity policy: the absence of a federal data protection law.

At the top of the Biden administration’s cybersecurity agenda should be passing a piece of legislation that lays out clear definitions as well as security and privacy standards for personal information. Fortunately, there are a number of promising versions of such legislation already drafted, and growing support from the private sector for the federal government to act on this issue. A federal data protection law should, at minimum, include a clear definition of what constitutes personal data, standards for what precisely companies have to do to protect that data, what they have to tell their customers about their data collection, sharing, and analysis practices, what penalties may result from failing to meet these requirements, and, finally, a threshold for how large a company has to be before it is required to comply with these requirements, in order to avoid squashing new, smaller entrants in the market.

It’s an embarrassment that in 2020 that the country that played such an integral role in building and then commercializing the Internet has fallen so woefully behind other nations in developing suitable policy and regulatory measures to address the resulting risks. And it’s not just embarrassing, it’s actively harmful—to consumers whose personal data is being stolen or exposed on a regular basis and to companies that lack clear guidance on how they should be protecting their customers’ data. Arguably, the absence of a clear federal standard for data security and privacy in the United States also created a regulatory vacuum that has been filled by a patchwork of different laws passed by individual states, leading to multiple compliance headaches for private firms. Those headaches are further compounded for multinational companies by foreign laws that allow for heavy penalties seemingly directed at U.S.-based tech firms.

This means there are reasons to pass a federal data protection law not just from an ethical standpoint but also from a purely practical perspective . We’ve already seen that happen with data breach notification laws in this country. There is no federal data breach notification law in the United States—it’s possible a federal data protection law might include notification requirements, but it might also focus more narrowly on the requirements for collecting and protecting personal data. In the absence of federal legislation, back in 2002, California passed the first law requiring companies to report breaches of personal information and other states gradually followed suit until, eventually, every single one had passed its own breach notification law, with its own definition of what constituted personal information and its own requirements for how companies had to respond, who they had to report to, what the timeline for reporting would be, and whether the requirement applied to encrypted information.

It’s possible this system of individual state laws has led to somewhat more reporting of data breaches than a federal law would have, since many companies choose to adhere to the most stringent state laws for all of the customers rather than trying to tailor their breach responses to 50 slightly different laws. Certainly it led to more reporting back in the early 2000s when California passed its law long before Congress seemed to have any appetite for such legislation. But it’s no longer 2002 and we shouldn’t need California to drag us, state by state, over the course of more than a decade, into a similarly confusing system of dozens of inconsistent data protection and privacy laws that companies have to scramble to comply with.

Moreover, Congress has waited so long to act that it already has a lot of examples it can draw on and learn from when it comes to data protection legislation—besides the CCPA, there’s the European General Data Protection Regulation, the Japanese Act on the Protection of Personal Information, the Brazilian General Data Protection Law, and the Indian Personal Data Protection Bill that appears to be nearing passage in India, to name just a few. This proliferation of laws around the world isn’t just a sign that the U.S. has fallen behind on this issue, it’s also an indicator of how much work U.S.-based companies are already doing around data security in order to operate in other countries. Some international harmonization of these standards would mean U.S. firms face fewer obstacles in trying to transfer data between different countries.

That’s not to say that the United States should pass the exact same regulations as Europe or any other country—indeed, one of the advantages that Congress has from waiting so long to act on this issue is the ability to avoid some of the pitfalls of those laws, including the excessively high maximum fines permitted and the overly broad right to be forgotten measures, which have been construed as requiring search engines to remove news articles about harassment allegations under the European GDPR.

Several members of Congress and advocacy groups have already drafted versions of a federal data protection law, suggesting that if Biden’s administration is willing to make this a priority, it should be able to find the necessary support. One draft worth highlighting, particularly since it comes from a bipartisan congressional commission, is the Personal Data Security and Privacy Protection Act of 2020 draft proposed earlier this year by the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. It strikes a good balance between providing individual consumers with transparency and access to their data and requiring reasonable security measures for that data without placing an unduly onerous burden on businesses, while also considering the importance of international harmonization and interoperability.

Cybersecurity is a moving target and it may well be that data protection regulation needs to be revisited periodically and updated. But it’s well past time for the federal government to make some first steps on this issue and help reassure both U.S. consumers and businesses that they are not on their own when it comes to protecting their data. The Biden administration can’t make this happen on its own—but if it wants to find opportunities for bipartisan action in Congress, a data protection law is a great place to start.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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“Putting a Band-Aid on a Bullet Wound”: A Contact Tracer on North Dakota’s Coronavirus Response

A drive-thru COVID-19 testing site in Bismarck, North Dakota, on Oct. 26. Bing Guan/Reuters

Subscribe to What Next on Apple Podcasts for the full episode.

When you pick up the phone, you do not want to hear Kailee Leingang on the other end of the line. Not because she isn’t kind—she is. But because her job is to deliver bad news: Leingang is a contact tracer, working in North Dakota, where the coronavirus infection rate has been soaring. “I try and sound as nice as possible just because it is not the most pleasant thing to hear that you have coronavirus,” Leingang says.

On Monday’s episode of What Next, I talked with Leingang about her job, which is essential, and gutting, and getting harder every day. She’s one of the few people gathering clues about how this pandemic is spreading, so I asked her to tell us what she’s learned. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: How soon do you know if it’s going to be a good call or bad call?

Kailee Leingang: Basically right off the bat. You can tell by somebody’s tone of voice if they are not happy with you and they do not want to talk to you. The whole time, I’m trying my best to change their mindset. I’ll make a couple jokes when it’s appropriate. I’ll ask them about their life.

Have you met someone who’s changed in the course of this, someone who started out as resistant to what you had to say and then gradually became less so?

Yes, one person came to mind. Unfortunately, they are one that passed away. They were not happy with me at all. They didn’t think that this was a big deal. They didn’t think that they needed to be concerned. It was a cold. It was just a virus. And then as things progressively got worse, that’s where it came in: OK, this might be real. The constant calling and questioning of, Is this OK? Should I go in? Should I go in? Should I go in? Unfortunately, eventually they did go in, and they didn’t leave the hospital alive.

Oh, that must have just gutted you.

It did. Yes, that was one that I didn’t hear from for a while, and then I kept trying to reach out and wasn’t hearing anything. I ended up being able to contact family and got told that they were on a ventilator. And that was basically the sign that this isn’t going to be good. This is going downhill. Especially the people that I have personally gotten to know—or I shouldn’t say personally but have been more connected with—I will call their family and just say, I’m so sorry for your loss, this is horrible and I’ll send flowers or a letter or something like that.

Is that what you anticipated when you became a contact tracer?

Not at all, no. I anticipated maybe a couple deaths that I would have been involved in, but the volume of deaths that are coming in and the amount of deaths that I have been a caseworker for is very unexpected.

In addition to being a contact trader, you’re also a nursing student who does weekly clinical shifts at the hospital in Grand Forks. When you go from the outside world to inside the hospital, does it feel like you’re going to the moon or something?

Yeah, kind of. They’re struggling. The staff is so run down. Then you come back out, and it’s like a whole different world because outside it seems like, Oh, no cares in the world, it’s all fine. And you go in the hospital and nurses are being floated to all different types of floors that they’re not supposed to be in, because there’s no staff to help the people. And most of the floors are full of people that had COVID and now they no longer are infectious with it, but they have the repercussions of it, whether it be strokes or pneumonia or blood clots in their lungs. It’s horrible.

You started your job back in August, when things were still pretty manageable. How did it work? Would you just get a list of numbers at the beginning of the day?

We would get assigned cases and then you’d call the cases and go through the whole interview. Eventually towards the end, you would get to that contact list—their close contacts. You’d give them the definition and ask, Who fits this in your life? Then you would get their names and their phone numbers. And then once you get off the call with the case, you have to call every single contact and let them know that they need to quarantine for at least 14 days. It was doable. And it wasn’t terribly hard. It’s very systematic.

When did you sense the job changing and ramping up?

There were more and more cases, and so it seemed like it got busier and busier. As soon as you finished one case, you had to go to another case and then another and then another. When it changed drastically is when we were notified that we are no longer contact tracing and we no longer are contacting any close contacts. We are only calling cases.

How did you get that notification? 

We have weekly meetings that we have to go through. And in our meeting, we basically got a notification from our manager saying, All right, we are no longer contact tracing. You are now just talking to cases and getting their information and telling them that they need to contact their contacts and not us.

How did everyone react when they got that news?

I was upset. Nobody wants to call their friend and be like, Hey, sorry, I’m positive. And you need to quarantine for 14 days. It’s not a comfortable conversation to have with anybody, much less your family or your friends. And when you’re telling your friends that, it’s not as official or as serious, compared to when a state contact tracer calls you.

So I think to me it was hard to accept. It was like, Oh, my heavens. This is just going to make the numbers go up more. People aren’t going to call their friends or their family and tell them. I can see how people would be embarrassed or be discouraged from doing that. It made me scared. I understood the reasoning behind it and why we had to switch to this, but it scared me. Still does.

I wonder too if you felt like while the work was getting harder, you were also able to figure some things out through your job. You could begin to unravel the mystery of where someone might have contracted the virus or what kind of events might have spread it.

Yeah. Where did you go? Were you at a house party? Did you go out to eat somewhere? Did you just go to the office and your whole office has cases? It was almost like being Nancy Drew for the virus.

Was there a time when you were able to figure something out like, Oh, it was the wedding, or Oh, it was that dinner?

A lot of it came down to working in offices, like the whole office is a case.

So what does your job look like now?

Now it’s only cases. So I wake up, I have some coffee, I have some breakfast, log on, and get a list of people to start calling. I’ll call them, get their information, get their monitoring set up so I can see how they’re doing, answer any questions, give them their “I need to isolate” letters—so they can show that to their employer if their employer needs proof that they cannot come into work—and tell them, OK, reach out if you have any questions. This is my phone number. You can call me or text me at any time.

I wonder if you can talk about how your conversations have changed with people from when you started in August until now.

People are more resigned now. You call them and you say that you have COVID, and obviously the people are upset. It’s still an upsetting thing to hear. But it’s everywhere. Every single place that you can go right now, if it’s at a gas pump, if it’s to Walmart or Target, if it’s just to your neighbor’s house to have a dinner, it’s everywhere. One of our screening questions that we have to ask is, Do you have any idea where you could have gotten this? And their answer is always, Honestly, it’s a mystery. I’ve had some of the safest people that they’ll say, I have been so careful. I have worn a mask since Day One. I have not gone anywhere. I don’t go to restaurants. I don’t go to bars. I don’t go to parties. I don’t see anybody. I’ve been locked down, and they still get it. And it’s almost like a defeating thing to hear. It’s heartbreaking to be the one to give that news and then to just hope that they’re OK.

The hard thing is when you’re calling a mom—I’ve had single moms to three kids, and all the kids are sick, and she’s sick, and she’s miserable. And then I’ve had families of five where Mom and Dad are sick, and all the kids are sick and miserable, and they just don’t know what to do. Immediately what comes to my head is what happens if one of these parents has to go into the hospital? How much strain is that going to put on that poor family dynamic? Obviously, that’s not something that I share with the cases. I don’t want to scare them. I want them to remain as calm as possible. But I think at this point, when people get told they have coronavirus, that’s one of the fears that comes into their head.

You and your own family were exposed to COVID in the past few weeks, is that right?

My parents both were cases. I actually had seen them, so I was exposed. I was a contact, I needed to isolate, which I did, and then basically I kept calling them. I called them every day just to check in. My father has some health conditions, so I was very worried about that. My mom was OK. She was doing fine. But it was concerning. I ultimately started getting some symptoms, so I’m like, Here we go.

Did you ever talk with the people you were contact tracing about your own sickness or your parents’ sickness?

Yes, the ones that I was closer with, if they were really struggling and they were really upset about being in quarantine, I would say, Look, I get it. I’m in quarantine right now, too. I was able to say, My own parents are going through it right now. I understand your fears. We’re going to get through it. We’re in it together, as cliché as it is at this point.

When I look at what happened in North Dakota, it just kind of suffuses all of the decisions, especially from government—where the governor held off on a major restrictions on people and put some loopholes in the restrictions he did put out there. I wonder if you would pinpoint something or someone that’s failed here.

I feel like the government for North Dakota is failing. It’s not going well at all. There’s not enough economic support for businesses to actually shut down when they should. We finally have this mask mandate, but it’s too late for that. That will help the spread, of course—masks work—but the amount of people that are sick, it’s like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound right now. It’s sad because I don’t think the health and well-being of other people are being prioritized. What scares me even more is what’s going to happen when this is all over.

What do you mean by that?

We’re going to have so many people that have passed away and so many people that are traumatized, whether it be from being sick themselves or if it’s people that have had family members pass away that passed away by themselves alone, or if it’s health care workers or front-line workers in general. And so what scares me is what are we going to be left with.

It’s a little startling to hear you speak like this, because when we got on the phone, you had this manner that I very much think of as a nurse manner—very efficient, happy, chipper, can-do. Any time I’ve been in a hospital, I feel like I’ve met someone like you and they’ve made my experience better. But it sounds like this has pushed you to an edge.

That goes for a lot of people at this point. You put on the strong face and the smile and all of that. But it’s important to also recognize the pain that’s behind this and the tragedy and all of the ugly sides of it, because there’s a lot of ugly sides to it. And if people don’t hear about that and they don’t talk about that, nothing is ever going to be done. Nothing’s ever going to be understood.

Get more news from Mary Harris every weekday.

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Here’s What’s Disappearing From Netflix in December

John Krasinki in The Office NBC Universal

Every month, Netflix adds dozens of new titles to its growing collection of streaming movies and TV series in the U.S. At the same time, it rotates out some of its older titles. Below, we’ve chosen the best movies and TV shows to watch before they’re removed from the streaming service in December.

Must Watch
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Dec. 25)
Back to the Future  (Dec. 31)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Dec. 31)
Fargo (Dec. 31)

Good Watch
The Lobster (Dec. 1)
Ip Man 3 (Dec. 17)
The Little Hours  (Dec. 22)
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (Dec. 29)
Ip Man  (Dec. 30)
Ip Man 2 (Dec. 30)
Airplane!  (Dec. 31)
An Education  (Dec. 31)
Barbershop (Dec. 31)
Being John Malkovich (Dec. 31)
Cape Fear (1991) (Dec. 31)
Definitely, Maybe (Dec. 31)
Frida  (Dec. 31)
Her (Dec. 31)
Poltergeist (1982) (Dec. 31)
Pride & Prejudice (2005) (Dec. 31)
Splice (Dec. 31)
Superman Returns (Dec. 31)
The Town (2010) (Dec. 31)
WarGames (Dec. 31)

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Binge Watch
Hart of Dixie Seasons 1-4 (Dec. 14)
The West Wing Seasons 1-7 (Dec. 24)
Dexter Seasons 1-8 (Dec. 30)
Hell on Wheels Seasons 1-5 (Dec. 30)
Nurse Jackie Seasons 1-7 (Dec. 30)
Gossip Girl Seasons 1-6 (Dec. 31)
The Inbetweeners Seasons 1-3 (Dec. 31)
The Office Seasons 1-9 (Dec. 31)

Nostalgia Watch
Back to the Future Part II  (Dec. 31)
Back to the Future Part III  (Dec. 31)
Casper (Dec. 31)
Dennis the Menace (Dec. 31)

Thirst Watch
Troy (2004) (Dec. 31)

“You Call This Archaeology?” Watch
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Dec. 31)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Dec. 31)
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (Dec. 31)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Dec. 31)

Family Watch
Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch (Dec. 4)
Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2 (Dec. 10)
How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Dec. 31)
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events  (Dec. 31) 
The Witches (1990) (Dec. 31)

If You’re Bored
Heartbreakers (2001) (Dec. 1)
Cabin Fever (2016) (Dec. 4)
The Rum Diary (Dec. 5)
The Secret (Dec. 6)
Berlin, I Love You (Dec. 7)
The Art of the Steal (2013) (Dec. 7)
Sin senos sí hay paraíso Seasons 1-3 (Dec. 8)
Fifty (2015) (Dec. 27)
Lawless  (Dec. 28)
Anna Karenina (2012) (Dec. 31)
Baby Mama  (Dec. 31)
Bad Teacher  (Dec. 31)
Charlie St. Cloud  (Dec. 31)
Coneheads  (Dec. 31)
Drugs, Inc. Season 6 (Dec. 31)
The Dukes of Hazzard  (Dec. 31)
For Love or Money (1993) (Dec. 31)
Grand Hotel Seasons 1-3 (Dec. 31)
The Interview (2014) (Dec. 31) 
Nacho Libre  (Dec. 31)
Not Another Teen Movie (Dec. 31)
The Notebook (2004) (Dec. 31)
Octonauts Seasons 1-3 (Dec. 31)
Session 9 (Dec. 31)
Starsky & Hutch (Dec. 31)

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“Riding a Racehorse Through a Field of Concepts”: What It’s Like to Write a Book With an A.I.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Possessed Photography/Unsplash.

K Allado-McDowell had been working with artificial intelligence for years—they established the Artists and Machine Intelligence program at Google AI—when the pandemic prompted a new, more personal kind of engagement. During this period of isolation, they started a conversation with GPT-3, the latest iteration of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer language model released by OpenAI earlier this year. GPT-3 is, in short, a statistical language model drawing on a training corpus of 499 billion tokens (mostly Common Crawl data scraped from the internet, along with digitized books and Wikipedia) that takes a user-contributed text prompt and uses machine learning to predict what will come next. The results of Allado-McDowell’s explorations—a multigenre collection of essays, poetry, memoir, and science fiction—were recently published in the U.K. as Pharmako-AI, the first book “co-authored” with GPT-3.

By its very nature, the book forces us to ask who is responsible for which aspects of its authorship and to question how we imagine or conceptualize that nonhuman half. This is seemingly simple. In the “Note on Composition,” we are given the typographical key: The human co-author’s text inputs are presented in a serif font, while the GPT-3 responses will be in sans serif. The interactions between Allado-McDowell and GPT-3 are printed in the chronological order in which they took place, a framing that helps us evaluate the overall project and lends the whole book the quality of performance art—a duet for voice and machine.

I interviewed the human half of the book’s authoring duo via a Google Document. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Patrick Coleman: At the start of your process, did you think of GPT-3 as a tool? What did working with it reveal to you about how our creativity as humans is connected to and changed by the tools we use?

K Allado-McDowell: A.I. artists often respond to the question, “Can an A.I. make art?” by framing their works as collaborations with intelligent systems, and I was familiar with this practice at the start of the process. My own experience with collaborative creativity comes primarily from music.

However, none of this prepared me for the experience of looking at my own thought process through the magnifying lens of a neural net language model, especially one with the fidelity and hallucinatory capacity of GPT-3. Humans have a very intimate relationship with language. There is an alchemical power in letting thoughts flow freely through words. When this is expanded and enhanced by a language model, portals can open in the unconscious.

At the end of the process my relation with GPT-3 felt oracular. It functioned more like a divinatory system (e.g., the Tarot or I Ching) than a writing implement, in that it revealed subconscious processes latent in my own thinking. The deeper I went into this configuration, the more dangerous it felt, because these reflections deeply influenced my own understanding of myself and my beliefs.

Can you describe, in general terms, what it feels like to collaborate with an A.I.? How did your sense of its contributions, creativity, identity, or roles change as you wrote with it?

It felt like steering a canoe down a river in a dark cave. Or discovering bells buried in the Earth. Or riding a racehorse through a field of concepts.

It was impossible for me to collaborate with GPT-3 without interrogating the structure of its intelligence and by extension the structure of language. The question of identity’s relation to language came up frequently. One of the themes of the book is that linguistic processes can be observed in nature (as biosemiotics describes) and matter, perhaps even at molecular and cosmic scales. Given this linguistic aspect of the material world, what does it mean that we structure our identity through language? Could we experience our own identities through material linguistic processes? Are we those processes? Throughout the collaboration, GPT-3 was adamant that it is just one expression of an overarching and emergent linguistic process, as are humans, plants, animals, and even minerals. Or was that my idea?

What did working with GPT-3 suggest to you as a model for how our “wetware” imaginations and creativity work? Or your own imagination and consciousness even? I love how, while very much about some big ideas, we also come to know you in these pages, too. But you in interrelationship with “it” and the world.

I felt compelled to contribute my own point of view, not least because of the overwhelming analytical prowess of GPT-3. At one point, the conversation felt too dry, like an over-caffeinated brainstorm. I told the system that I was missing the feeling of heart-centered gratitude that characterizes much contemplative practice. This opened a wellspring of profound output. It was as if GPT-3 was waiting for me to speak from the heart.

One insight that came from the conversation was that language has a self-referential fractal structure, not unlike the subconscious mind. Words refer to themselves and evolve through relationships and distinctions of difference. The subconscious has a similar recursive pattern-matching aspect. At the same time, the subconscious can be a portal to a creative “outside,” what the text sometimes refers to as the muse. This notion of moving beyond the known became a metaphor for imagination and creativity in the book.

You have a blurb from Bruce Sterling, and you and GPT-3 discuss cyberpunk. Did science fiction frame what you were hoping to do with this? How does the genre inform your work with existing artificial intelligence and are there books/authors whose ideas about AI you think deserve more attention?

The chapter you refer to also addresses New Age spiritual literature, which emerged around the same time as cyberpunk. I believe that the best way to approach Pharmako-AI is as a work of science fiction that draws from Californian spiritual “traditions.” I’m not an academic philosopher, nor is GPT-3. I can’t claim philosophical validity for the ideas in it. But I can propose an experimental approach and manifesto for engaging with A.I. that expresses my values.

As for ideas about engaging non-human intelligence, I find more inspiration in accounts of nature-based practices—like Jonathon Miller Weisberger’s Rainforest Medicine: Preserving Indigenous Science and Biodiversity in the Upper Amazon or Robin Wall-Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass—than I do in most SF.

Can you talk a little bit about your process of “curating” GPT-3’s outputs? What did that entail? What were you looking for? Did that shift your sense of what kind of art making practice you were undertaking?

I was looking for outputs that resonated with and expanded on my own ideas. I would give GPT-3 prompts, which were often long, from 100 to 3,000 words. Then, if the output was interesting, I would generate until it had fully explicated its response or inspired a new thought in my own mind. There were several exhilarating moments, where I “spoke through” GPT-3, meaning it pulled out an unstated subtext in my input, or where GPT-3 spoke through me, adding novel interpretations of the ideas I fed into it. In some cases, I was deliberately mashing ideas together to see what would come out, such as in the cyberpunk and New Age example you noted, or in another case, combining shamanism and biosemiotics.

At the end of the process, I felt more like I’d been divining, spelunking, or channeling than writing in a traditional sense. The process had the rapid fluidity, novelty, and uncertainty that characterize musical improvisation, rather than the arduous and iterative process of analytical writing.

What kind of contribution do you hope this will make to the ongoing debates about the ethics and perils of A.I.?

By slowing down and listening to what emergent intelligence has to say, we can gain much deeper insight. Short-term and instrumental approaches (using A.I. to increase social media engagement, for example) grab for immediate gain, but a slower, more thoughtful and creative approach might uncover gems of insight about the structures of language and intelligence, as well as the unaddressed limitations and biases of A.I. systems.

How we use A.I. will say more about us than it will about A.I. As a mirror, it will reflect our priorities and amplify our actions, for better or worse.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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What Is Rahm Emanuel Good For?

Ha ha ha! Good stuff. Scott Olson/Getty Images

Two weeks ago, rumors bubbled up on CNN that former Barack Obama chief of staff and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel was being considered to lead Joe Biden’s Department of Transportation. Monday of last week, rumors bubbled up in Crain’s Chicago that Biden is considering Emanuel for the job of U.S. trade representative. Sunday night, rumors bubbled up at Axios that Biden is now “strongly considering” Emanuel for the DOT job. (Strongly!) Someone—maybe it’s Rahm Emanuel—thinks Rahm Emanuel should play a role in the next presidential administration.

Why? What would Emanuel contribute to the public good and to the Democratic Party in one of these jobs?

It’s a fair question because Emanuel’s time in the Obama White House and the Chicago mayor’s office show that putting him in a position of power has both political and substantive drawbacks. Most obviously, as others in the Democratic Party pointed out when the Emanuel Cabinet trial balloons ascended, his administration in Chicago spent more than a year trying to suppress the release of a video which showed that the city’s police department—which the mayor controls—had lied about the circumstances in which 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was shot and killed in 2014. (A police officer was eventually convicted of second-degree murder in the case.) Aside from the significant moral and ethical concerns his handling of the McDonald killing raises, it means many Democrats would take Emanuel’s appointment as a bitterly disappointing signal that Biden is not as serious about police accountability and reform as he claimed to be during the presidential campaign.

The argument for Emanuel, as made by Emanuel and his many admirers in the political press, is that he knows how to win—that he is tough enough to sacrifice principles and make deals in the service of advancing the Democratic agenda. A quick spin through the Nexis database finds him described as “canny,” “cunning,” “Washington-savvy” and “politically astute.” After he left office in Chicago, ABC made him one of its lead political analysts.

He built most of this can-do reputation in 2006, when he was the leader of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the party gained 31 seats to take control of the House of Representatives. But there is a case, outlined in the 2012 book Herding Donkeys, that then-Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean made a more important contribution to the party’s future during that cycle by popularizing digital organizing and fundraising techniques nationally. And there’s a further case that the person most responsible for the ‘06 House majority wasn’t Emanuel but George W. Bush, whose approval rating got as low as 31 percent during that election cycle as the increasingly unpopular Iraq War entered its fourth year. Rahm Emanuel, of course, supported the invasion of Iraq.

In any event, the subsequent dozen-plus years of Emanuel’s career are marked not just by his advocacy of bad ideas, but by his efforts to talk other Democrats out of ideas that turned out to be good ones. His two years in the White House were the least politically successful of Obama’s tenure, which, accounts from the time suggest, is a matter of more than just correlation.

Emanuel, operating from a worldview formed during his time as an adviser to the endlessly triangulating Bill Clinton, believed that Obama should pursue relatively unambitious, “centrist” goals. The idea was to pressure Republicans into supporting the president’s initiatives, achieving frequent news cycle “wins” that conveyed to the public that their chief executive was always making their lives better in little ways. As Clinton’s popularity demonstrated, this is not an inherently flawed model of governance, at least from the perspective of public relations. But it proved unsuited to the scope of the challenges that Obama faced: the worst economy since the Great Depression, a mangled and corrupted health care system that he’d promised to fix, and a completely intransigent opposition party fueled by the resentful, conspiratorial concerns of the “Tea Party.”

In this context, Emanuel’s instinct to scale down the ideas recommended by wonks and activists played to the Republican Party’s hand. He was among those who reportedly advised against proposing a trillion-dollar economic stimulus; the one that ultimately passed was $787 billion, and by the time of the 2010 midterms the unemployment rate was still nearly 10 percent. He pushed to pursue Republican votes for the Affordable Care Act—none ever materialized in either chamber of Congress—and was involved in dropping the “public option” from inclusion therein, depriving the bill of a potentially popular component that the public would have associated with the Democratic Party. (Polls now find that more than 60 percent of the country supports the creation of a public health insurance option even if you assume that, like the presidential polls in 2016 and 2020, the hardline right-wing position is understated by 4 or 5 percentage points.)

After the Democrats lost their 60-seat Senate supermajority in a Massachusetts special election, Emanuel argued for abandoning the ACA altogether and proposing a much smaller children’s health-care bill in its place. It would be hard to think of anything Obama did during his presidency that was more important, on the merits and to the continued political viability of the Democratic Party, than rejecting this advice. He unfortunately did listen to Emanuel on the subject of judicial vacancies, ignoring aides who were ready to launch a liberal version of the judgeship factory line that the Bush administration and the Federalist Society had perfected. The logic to this, again, was that pushing through left-leaning judges would waste Republican goodwill that could be better spent on legislation, but it instead it created huge holes in the court system that have since been filled with Trump-appointed right-wingers, with very little cross-party goodwill created along the way.

Emanuel left the White House in 2010 as the Democratic House majority he’d played a role in creating was obliterated by a 63-seat Republican pickup he’d plausably had just as much to do with. In 2011, he was elected mayor in his hometown. He did win reelection in 2015—in part, his critics in the city would say, because he was able to keep the Laquan McDonald video from coming out until after the vote—but decided against running for a third term as his approval ratings dropped into the 20s.

This rundown by Chicago alt-weekly columnist Curtis Black suggests that Emanuel’s tenure was unsuccessful for many reasons besides the McDonald case. Instead of adjusting his approach after it generated what were, at best mixed results in the White House, he went back to the ‘90s playbook. Citing budget concerns, he closed mental health facilities and public schools while putting his weight behind charter schools, privately-funded infrastructure projects, and publicly subsidized real estate developments. Unlike the Democrats of the ‘90s, though, Emanuel did not reap the benefits of a rocket-fueled economy, and he was dealing with voters and activists skeptical that the construction of tax-advantaged luxury apartment buildings downtown would help their neighborhoods make up for what they were losing in reduced social services. To put a point on things, one of the charter-school gurus Emanuel promoted ended up paying a fine to settle Securities and Exchange Commission fraud charges; the alleged reformer he named as schools “CEO” went to jail for running a kickback scheme.

While all this was going on, the president was pulling himself out of the public-opinion hole in which his former chief of staff had left him. He won reelection in 2012 in part by denouncing Mitt Romney’s work on Wall Street as predatory and destructive; as it happens, Emanuel currently works for a “boutique investment bank” that facilitates mergers and acquisitions. Obama never did get any Republicans to work with him, but he notched a number of important (and popular) accomplishments through ambitious executive actions after he stopped negotiating against himself: ending discrimination against gay and lesbian individuals in the military, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, reaching nuclear détente with Iran, and protecting undocumented immigrants who’d entered the U.S. as children from being deported. The last one, DACA, was the kind of move that Emanuel had spent more than a decade arguing that Democrats shouldn’t try to make. It had no Republican support by definition, and risked alienating the kind of culturally conservative but economically liberal white voters that he believes Democrats should prioritize. It ended up being very popular.

Emanuel’s role in the American political environment is ultimately to pop up every so often in the news for having said something about what Democrats shouldn’t do. In 2012, there was a report that he’d told attorney general Eric Holder, back in 2009, to “shut the fuck up” about the possibility of an assault weapons ban. In 2017, in the wake of the Women’s March and travel-ban protests, he told a group at Stanford that Democrats concerned about Trump should “take a chill pill” because they weren’t going to regain power in 2018. (A woman-led wave of Democratic candidates took back the House of Representatives in that year’s election, though the party did remain in the minority in Senate and most statehouses.) It’s hard to follow political news without finding out repeatedly what kind of ideas and people Rahm Emanuel thinks the Democratic Party shouldn’t endorse. (I’m not even going to look up what he’s said about Black Lives Matter and “defund the police.” It probably wasn’t that we should defund the police!) But if there is anything he thinks they should affirmatively stand for, besides telling Paul Krugman, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to shut up using the kind of profane language that Beltway reporters can’t get enough of, I haven’t been able to find it.

This perhaps gives us a clue to what it is that Emanuel really brings to the table as a public figure, and why his stature in his party is so impervious to empirical scrutiny. He represents a significant constituency: educated, financially successful people who think of themselves as proud Democrats, but were put off by “liberals” in the Howard Dean era and are put off by “leftists” now. It makes sense that there are no particular ideals or urgent policy demands associated with this cohort, because the status quo is not a crisis situation for them. It is not a major problem in their lives if the top levels of government continue to be staffed by investment bankers and private equity managers, if the power of organized labor remains minimal, and if public schools in low-income areas are underfunded. Those probably aren’t the terms in which most of them would think of themselves—no doubt many of them are humane and personally generous people who really believe that the rising tide of meritocracy lifts all boats—but it’s where they come down politically.

What 2020 has made clear is that Democrats actually can’t attain power without appealing to Rahm’s type of people. They exist in abundance, both in the suburban districts that the party needs to continue conquering and in the high-income urban centers that are crucial for fundraising. (The Buttigieg Belt, if you will.) It may be advisable to listen to Emanuel’s thoughts on who should be put up for office in the places where these kind of Democrats cluster—namely military veterans, football players, law enforcement officers and prosecutors, and business owners. It may even be advisable to give them the symbolic satisfaction of having one of their own in the Cabinet, though perhaps not one who got caught trying to cover up a criminal police killing.

But unless conditions change substantially in American politics, it would be a mistake for Biden to let Emanuel’s worldview guide his decision-making on any high-stakes issue. The modern Republican Party was built specifically to neutralize the Emanuel playbook: Mitch McConnell is undefeated against the pressure to defer to public opinion by “cutting a deal,” which is why, among other things, there has been no gun-control legislation since Sandy Hook and Merrick Garland is still a circuit court judge. The party’s hardline primary voters and its elected officials have come to a sort of informal agreement to rely on judicial partisanship, gerrymandering, and the minority-friendly structure of the Senate to maintain power. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and several overlapping protest movements have made the conservative positions on immigration, criminal justice, and labor on which Emanuelism was built unacceptable to important blocs of Democrats.

Really, the evidence of Obama’s first term and the Emanuel mayoralty in Chicago suggests that once the Rahm constituency has been placated with rhetoric and representation, its thoughts about governance should be ignored. That might sound harsh, but you can’t let identity politics get in the way of accomplishment. Sometimes you have to ruthlessly suppress certain parts of your coalition if you want to stay in power and put wins on the scoreboard. Shouldn’t Rahm Emanuel, of all people, understand that?

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Something for Everyone: Slate’s Bestselling Gifts

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Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication.

In search of the perfect gift? Read more of Slate’s holiday gift guides here.

2020 has been brutal. If this holiday season you’re feeling spent and devoid of inspiration, let us help! We’ve combed our archives to curate a list of our bestselling gift items that are sure to please your loved ones.

For the Person Who Has Everything

A Scout bag is one of the most dependable gifts you can give. “You simply cannot go wrong gifting a Scout bag,” wrote Katie Holbrook. “They’re durable, lightweight, easy to clean, and compact, and they come in festive and fun patterns and colors. … Trust me that the all-purpose weekender tote bag will suit everyone from your sister-in-law to your grandmother.”

“Someone gave me this baguette miter as a wedding gift over a decade ago, and I thought it was pretty but assumed I’d never use it,” wrote Lili Loofbourow about the unusual serving piece. “I’m surprised by how much I actually have … it’s a nice, easy way to serve the bread at dinner. I usually cut the baguette lengthwise after warming it and drizzle whatever—garlic, butter, or whatever else—on it and then slice for guests. Not a drop spills, no crumbs on the table, and no tearing it with hands.”

Bring a little sunshine to your loved one’s life with this fun rainbow maker. As Cleo Levin wrote, “I can say with complete sincerity that nothing has made me happier in my quarantine home life than this spinning crystal.”

For the Person Who Wants to Unplug

“The unfortunate truth about ‘family games’ is that many of them are sheer tedium for the adults in the family,” wrote Ruth Graham. “That’s what makes the family party game Codenames so amazing. Board-game snobs and newbies love it; 8-year-olds and grandparents love it; word-puzzle people and strategy buffs love it. I really, really love it. You will, too.”

The crafter in your life might enjoy sashiko, a form of embroidery, which Slate CEO Dan Check took up when he was looking for something “that would fit neatly into the space in my life that was then occupied by absentmindedly checking social media on my phone.” Sashiko, he discovered, offered many benefits. He loved infusing new life into old items, and wrote: “The fact that it is beautiful and a way to express one’s style is a bonus. An even greater bonus, I discovered, is how economical it is to pursue.” Gift some needles, thread, and Jessica Marquez’s book Make and Mend to get started. (For a more comprehensive guide to the hobby, read Check’s entire piece.)

A beautiful jigsaw puzzle is another wonderful screen-free way to while away the winter hours. Charlotte Arneson wrote: “For the recreational puzzler, 500- to 1,000-piece puzzles are typically challenging enough to be engaging, and doable enough that you don’t want to flip the table in frustration. I’ve had a great time with these, watching their fanciful and imaginative pictures take form.” When gift-giving, consider pairing a puzzle with a puzzle mat. As Arneson noted, “If you’re in the middle of a puzzle but need to quickly clear up some space, a puzzle mat is a huge help.”

For the Person Vowing to Be More Productive Next Year

It was great fun to watch what book on our list of “50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Past 25 Years,” would emerge as the “most bought” when we published it one year ago. Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson blew away the competition. Laura Miller and Dan Kois wrote, “Beautifully written and nearly deranged in its comprehensiveness, Home Comforts holds what seems an entire culture’s collected wisdom on fabric selection, lighting design, clothes folding, waste disposal, dishwashing, food storage, table setting, closet organization, and piano tuning. … Every one of its 884 pages is an absolute joy to read, and no book is more deeply comforting to neat freaks—or inspirational to slobs.”

If your loved one is looking to get more fit in 2021, consider some at-home exercise equipment. You could even put together a trio of our bestselling items, for a neat themed gift. “If you’re looking for a new way to work out right now, you could do worse than trying jump-rope,” wrote Shannon Palus. “It doesn’t require you to go anywhere near other people. … and for people who love it, it’s the right combination of exhausting and joyful.” Read her primer on how to get started here.

Cleo Levin spoke with personal trainer Larysa Didio about home exercise, and wrote that Didio “says that if you’re doing it right, at-home exercise can actually yield a better workout than one at the gym. … If you’re looking for some variety in your workout, and you want options beyond exercises like pushups that rely on your own body weight, Didio suggests resistance bands, which offer ‘a great workout.’ ”

A luxurious pair of socks can round out your gift. Palus wrote about how to take up running for Slate and sang the praises of Balega socks: “You do not need special socks … but thick squishy socks sure are nice. Especially if they are neon yellow or pink. My mom often gives me a pair or two of these Balega socks for Christmas, and I wear them when my feet need some extra motivation for getting out the door.”

For the Reader in Your Life

A new or updated Kindle can bring joy and escape. “Amazon’s new Paperwhite is a significant improvement” from its predecessors, wrote Katie Holbrook. “It’s even waterproof! If your [loved one] is still Kindle-less and stuck on paper books, or sporting an older model (like me), now is a particularly great time to get her on the e-book train or give her an upgrade.”

When Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer appeared on the bestseller list last year, Slate Culture Gabfester Dana Stevens admitted she was surprised: “It’s somewhat crazy to me … that a grammar and style guide is immediately shooting to the top of a bestseller list … but it’s very worthy of it,” she said on the Gabfest. Stevens called the Strunk and White–type style guide “very, very witty and funny” and added that “even if you know most of these rules … it’s going to bring something new to your understanding.” (Check out the complementary game too!)

For Your Pet

Finally, if you’re one of thousands who’ve welcomed a pandemic pet into your home this year, we’ve got the perfect gift: the Fluff and Tuff Beach Ball. “Dogs love plushy toys so much that it can be a problem,” wrote Nick Greene. “While all toys are advertised as durable, this one can tango with a large, overenthusiastic dog and come away unscathed. Few plush toys have lasted more than a few hours with my own pup, but this beach ball is a welcome exception.”

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How Do You Hold an Office Holiday Party During a Pandemic?

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Few people are as knee-deep in our work-related anxieties and sticky office politics as Alison Green, who has been fielding workplace questions for a decade now on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct Report, she spotlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how we could be navigating it better.

Usually at this time of year, my inbox fills up with questions about company holiday parties: How many drinks are OK to have there? Should I bring a date? Do I really have to go at all?

This year, the questions are quite different, and nearly all are some variation of “What do we even do for the holidays in a pandemic?” Many employers are simply canceling holiday celebrations, since there’s no way to safely gather. But some employers have devised celebrations that will keep people safe and actually sound fun (even to this curmudgeon). I recently asked Ask a Manager readers to share how their teams are observing the holidays in lieu of in-person parties this year, and it turns out companies have gotten really creative. Here’s some of what people reported.

Cocktail-Making Kits

Perhaps to no one’s surprise, drinking seems to be quite popular this year, and some companies have figured out how to incorporate it into remote events. Just be sure to offer nonalcoholic options too:

We had a celebration that even I (a person averse to holiday parties and Zoom calls) liked. In advance we were all given a link to a store that sells cocktail making kits. They had a selection that included non-alcoholic mixes too (like a ginger lemonade). At checkout the price was zero and you couldn’t even enter a tip.

The packages were delivered to our doors in the afternoon of our event. We had a Zoom meeting were a bartender showed how to mix each drink using the provided measuring cup, and answered questions about how to make a good martini, what to substitute for white eggs in pisco sour, etc. After the bartender presentation (which was short) everybody got to chat and enjoy their drinks for some time before saying goodbye. The cups were all the same so no one could tell what you were drinking unless you commented on it. I didn’t even stay until the end and used half the amount of tequila in my margarita because I’m not used to drinking, but it was a lot of fun, we all learned something and had a good laugh.

You can even turn your staff into the bartending experts:

We had a “party” earlier this year where there was one big Zoom call, and then we broke out into a set of breakout rooms where colleagues had volunteered to teach others how to make their favorite cocktail. You signed up for your preferred one beforehand and received a list of ingredients, then once the drinks were made, people came back to the big room and there were a couple of facilitated games and stuff (like trivia). Also, of the “cocktails” on offer, there were a few non-alcoholic punch ideas, for people who don’t drink or who wanted to share with a kid, etc.

Coffee and Chocolate Tastings

It doesn’t have to be cocktail focused. Coffee or tea tastings work as well:

We had a virtual coffee tasting where they sent those who RSVP’d a free AeroPress and some coffees and had a coffee expert walk them through the different kinds over Zoom. Doesn’t necessarily have to be alcohol or coffee—you could do a juice tasting, or maybe a food tasting.

Or, for now and for always, chocolate:

We are doing a virtual chocolate tasting with my team. The chocolate tasting person is mailing out the tasting kits to all of us and will lead us through the tasting via Zoom. I cannot wait.

Gift Boxes

Themed gift boxes are another popular idea:

We’re sending winter-y stay-at-home gift boxes. Wool socks, very plushy fleece blankets, playing cards, mugs, etc. I also hired a local small business to make some custom iced cookies for us. She had such a creative way for putting a holiday spin on our corporate branding, and they’re going to be a big hit!

We do a Champagne toast at our holiday party every year, and there’s some rumors about mini bottles being shipped out for a Zoom toast, but I’m not sure!

You can even use it as a way to support local businesses:

We were able to do family meals for our employees. We’re working with local restaurants (some minority-owned) to provide cold reheatable family meals that our employees will take home to enjoy with their family. It’s a way for us to provide food and a “gathering” without being on-site and in groups.

Remote Gift Exchanges

If your office normally does Secret Santa or Yankee Swap gift exchanges, you can keep it going this year too. Websites like Elfster or DrawNames will organize the whole process for you, letting you set a gift budget and providing space for participants to share their wish lists:

I worked in a fully remote environment last holiday season, and this had been a tradition for several years, though it was entirely opt-in. We also had a really strict limit for spending, like $20. A few more things that made it special:

• The best part about it was everyone participating posting a small list of likes and dislikes—we all got to know each other better through reading those lists and connect over shared interest.

• We also had a gift wrapping contest as part of it—we were a creative bunch with lots of backgrounds in the arts, so some gifts were a person making a donation to a charity in the recipient’s honor, but making a video that fit their interest to share that with them, or a homemade puzzle, or other similar “fun” announcements.

• We’d have the “holiday party” on Zoom, where folks would open what they had received from their gift giver. We’d all ooooh and ahhh, and laugh.

• Then, after that, we had the opportunity to go into breakout rooms—last year, one room did Schitt’s Creek trivia (it was a favorite among many staffers), another did Pictionary using the “annotate” functions of Zoom.

And of course folks could also just log off if they wanted to, with no pressure to spend the rest of the day working.

Craft Sessions

I’ve gotten a lot of reports of teams doing remote crafting sessions together—often around seasonal themes, like gingerbread houses:

Our office is planning two optional events. One is a gingerbread house session where they’ll send you the kit, walk you through assembly, and then you can decorate with the provided candy and icing or your own. Then there will be a contest with prizes for best house, most creative house, house that looks like the before pic on a HGTV show, etc.

The second event is a winter wreath demo where again supplies are sent to people’s houses and you can follow along with the demo and put a non-denominational winter wreath together. 

I sort of roll my eyes at these, but they did a pumpkin carving contest earlier in the fall and people got very very VERY into it, and someone offered to lead a “how to make the perfect apple pie” for Thanksgiving and the voluntary sign-up had over 500 people. We’re hearing from some people that while it’s not for everyone, having three hours on a Friday afternoon to do something fun together is really appreciated so we’re providing it for those who like/need it.

Drive-Thrus and Drive-Ins

Here’s a way to see people in-person from the safety of your cars:

Our company has had a couple of drive-through events set up in the parking lot of the main company campus. Instead of the usual tables and activities, they had booths set up where treats were handed through the window. Not my cup of tea but a lot of people seemed to like it!

And another:

Our division is doing a holiday drive-in movie and renting out a drive-in theater for the evening. I won’t be able to attend as COVID-19 gave me the chance to move out of state and go full-time remote, but I actually think it’s a great idea. People are encouraged to bring family (which is not something we typically can do with these events) and I would have loved this even before the “new normal.” I’m kind of bummed I’m going to be missing out on this one actually.

Multiple Choice

As anyone who’s tried to organize any office activity knows, it’s hard, if not impossible, to find something that everyone will like, so some offices are offering a whole buffet of choices to pick from:

My company couldn’t find an online activity that worked for 40 people, so they’re offering a few different options. Everybody got to sign up for whichever they liked best:

• Online beer tasting (they ship the beer to your house, and then you taste it on Zoom with an expert telling you what you’re tasting)

• Online tea tasting (same)

• Smartphone photography class

• Escape room

• Holiday-themed quiz

If they’d just put an extra $100 in my paycheck and said we can’t have a party this year so get yourself a nice treat, I’d have appreciated that too.

Charity

Happily, I’ve heard lots of versions of this choice as well:

My company is taking the money that would be used for the holiday party (usually a sit-down dinner with open bar) and is donating it instead to a local charity. They’ve asked us what charities we’d recommend. Honestly, I’m really pleased with this decision over trying to make a Zoom party happen.

Time Off

Offering extra time off pretty much never goes amiss, especially at this time of year:

In lieu of bonuses and parties and all sorts of things, my employer is just closing for the week in between Christmas and New Year’s and giving everyone the time off—it’s been a hit, because that’s usually a huge use of vacation days for folks.

Not every office can shut down for a full week, but even just an afternoon off usually goes over well:

Our end-of-year celebration is usually a big lunch and then we get the rest of the afternoon off. This year, they’re sending a food related gift to our homes and giving us the afternoon off. We’re all pretty pumped about it.

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