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On paper, “The Queen’s Gambit” might not sound like a compelling drama: Based on a novel by Walter Tevis, the Netflix series tells the story of Beth Harmon as she rises through the world of competitive chess, eventually taking on the world champion from the Soviet Union.
But on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, your hosts are unanimous in their love for the series. We talk a bit about some of the flaws (a setup-heavy first episode, the unsatisfying treatment of Beth’s friend Jolene), but for the most part, we’re happy to spend our time praising the show.
Some of that has to do with the period setting — “The Queen’s Gambit” traces Beth’s life through the 1950s and ’60s, with some delightfully retro sets and costumes, along with a clear-eyed approach towards the condescension and sexism that Beth faces in her early matches.
At the same time, it’s Beth (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) who pulls you through all eight episodes as they depict her complex relationship with her foster mother, her struggles with substance abuse and her friendships with other chess players. While Beth has a handful traits you’ll recognize from other difficult geniuses portrayed on-screen, she’s ultimately too complex to boil down to a single idea or logline.
And while you don’t need to know much about chess to enjoy “The Queen’s Gambit,” the show’s focus on character and personality allows it to depict competitive chess in a way that is, in fact, thrilling.
You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also follow us on Twitter or send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)
f you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
4:28 “The Queen’s Gambit” review
34:11 “The Queen’s Gambit” spoiler discussion
When large parts of the world were shutting down in March, we really didn’t know how we would move massive numbers of employees used to working in the office to work from home.
In early March, I wrote a piece on how to prepare for such an eventuality, speaking to several experts who had a background in the software and other tooling that would be involved. But the shift involved so much more than the mechanics of working at home. We were making this transition during a pandemic that was forcing us to deal with a much broader set of issues in our lives.
Yet here we are seven months later, and surely we must have learned some lessons along the way about working from home effectively, but what do these lessons look like and how can we make the most of this working approach for however long this pandemic lasts?
I spoke to Karen Mangia, vice president of customer and market insights at Salesforce and author of the book, Working from Home, Making the New Normal Work for You, to get her perspective on what working from home looks like as we enter our eighth month and what we’ve learned along the way.
As employees moved home in March, managers had to wonder how productive employees would be without being in the office. While many companies had flexible approaches to work, this usually involved some small percentage of employees working from home, not the entire workforce, and that presented challenges to management used to judging employee performance based for the most part on being in the building during the work day.
One of the things that we looked at in March was putting the correct tools in place to enable communication even when we weren’t together. Mangia says that those tools can help close what she calls the trust gap.
“Leaders want to know that their employees are working on what’s expected and delivering outcomes. Employees want to make sure their managers know how hard they’re working and that they’re getting things done. And the technology and tools I think help us solve for that trust gap in the middle,” she explained.
She believes the biggest thing that individuals can do at the moment is to simply reassess and look for small ways to improve your work life because we are probably not going to be returning to the office anytime soon. “I think what we’re discovering is the things that we can put in place to improve the quality of our own experiences as employees, as learners and as leaders can be very simple adjustments. This does not have to be a five year, five phase, $5 million roadmap kind of a situation. Simple adjustments matter,” she said, adding that could be measures as basic as purchasing a comfortable chair because the one you’ve been using at the dining room table is hurting your back.
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Enlarge / Alex Trebek, seen here hosting a themed Jeopardy tournament in January 2020—and while the tournament's name was about high-performing contestants from the series' past, today, we are going to say that it's specifically about Trebek himself. (credit: Getty Images)
The staff of long-running TV game show Jeopardy confirmed on Sunday that its beloved host Alex Trebek has passed away. He was 80 years old.
While the announcement did not go into details, other than confirming he passed on Sunday in the presence of family and friends, Trebek had previously been transparent with fans about his stage-four pancreatic cancer diagnosis, using YouTube to tell fans directly about the news in March 2019. At the time, he said he chose to speak to fans via YouTube "to prevent you from reading or hearing some overblown or inaccurate reports."
Since then, Trebek went on to continue hosting the series between rounds of treatment, posting regular updates to Jeopardy's YouTube account. The last such message came in July of this year, which confirmed that the show's regular production had been put on hold due to COVID-19 precautions. This allowed him, among other things, to write a memoir that came out shortly after that last YouTube message: The Answer is... Reflections on my Life.
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Enlarge / The splash image for Apple's (probably) final event of 2020.
At 10:00am Pacific time (1pm Eastern) on Tuesday, November 10, Apple will hold yet another live event—the third in as many months—to announce new products. This time, the company is expected to reveal the first Macs that will replace Intel processors with Apple Silicon, the company's in-house-designed ARM-based chips.
As with the prior two events, we'll be liveblogging the proceedings right here. Just return to this page before the show starts to see all the updates from Cupertino.
The previous two events announced two new Apple Watch models, a new iPad, and four new iPhones, among other things. But the tagline for this event is "one more thing," suggesting the focus will singularly be on Apple's long-rumored, recently confirmed ARM transition.
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Let's Encrypt warns phones running Android 7.1 or older won't connect to many secure websites starting in 2021 as they will no longer trust its root certificate — It took a long time, but most of the web now uses HTTPS to securely transmit information, partially thanks to a push by Google.
Enlarge (credit: Viaframe / Getty Images)
Elon Musk made a lot of promises during Tesla’s Battery Day last September. Soon, he said, the company would have a car that runs on batteries with pure silicon anodes to boost their performance and reduced cobalt in the cathodes to lower their price. Its battery pack will be integrated into the chassis so that it provides mechanical support in addition to energy, a design that Musk claimed will reduce the car’s weight by 10 percent and improve its mileage by even more. He hailed Tesla’s structural battery as a “revolution” in engineering—but for some battery researchers, Musk’s future looked a lot like the past.
“He’s essentially doing something that we did 10 years ago,” says Emile Greenhalgh, a materials scientist at Imperial College London and the engineering chair in emerging technologies at the Royal Academy. He’s one of the world’s leading experts on structural batteries, an approach to energy storage that erases the boundary between the battery and the object it powers. “What we’re doing is going beyond what Elon Musk has been talking about,” Greenhalgh says. “There are no embedded batteries. The material itself is the energy storage device.”
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While PUBG Mobile may have announced its departure from India a few weeks ago, it seems like it might just make its return sooner than expected. Sources tell TechCrunch that the game might come back to India before the end of the year. The publication's report states that the PUBG Corporation privately informed some high-profile streamers in the country that is expected to resume services before the end of 2020. Further, it was noted that the company plans to run a marketing campaign in India during Diwali. TechCrunch also noted that PUBG Corporation did not respond to a request for comment.
This news comes around the time were PUBG’s parent company Krafton Inc., announced that it would be working with Microsoft’s Azure platform. In its press release, Krafton notes, “With privacy and data security being a top priority for KRAFTON, the company will be working with Microsoft to ensure personal data protection through Azure. Azure powers some of the biggest multiplayer games, featuring state-of-the-art security and the most comprehensive set of compliance offerings of any cloud service provider. The collaboration will ensure that privacy rights are respected and relevant software will be in full compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.”
The release further noted that Krafton will be working with Microsoft to introduce a verification process. With this, the company hopes to ensure that storage of personally identifiable information of its players follows appropriate requirements in “the territories where Krafton and its subsidiaries operate gaming services.”
To recall, PUBG Mobile, along with over 100 other Chinese apps were banned by the Government of India in September citing privacy and security concerns. A few days after this news, PUBG Corp decided to cut ties with Tencent and cancel the license that allows Tencent to run PUBG Mobile in India. A few weeks back, it was announced that Tencent Games will terminate all services and access for users in India to PUBG Mobile and PUBG Mobile Lite. On top of this, the rights to publish the game in India will be returned to “the owner of the PUBG intellectual property,” namely, PUBG Corp.
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