The good: Excellent screen, gorgeous lightweight design, great keyboard, fast performance
The bad: Awkward webcam placement, Battery life is solid but not impressive
Who it’s for: Those who value portability, a comfortable keyboard, and a sharp screen above all else

If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. That’s the motto Dell seems to be living by with its newest incarnation of the XPS 13. And I’m glad it did.

Dell’s refreshed XPS 13, announced in January and starting at $999, is a modest but appreciated update that brings enhancements in all the right places. The Infinity Display that Dell introduced on the original model is now even slimmer this time around (23% smaller compared to the previous generation), allowing Dell to squeeze a 13.3-inch screen into a frame that would usually fit an 11-inch laptop. The laptop itself is also thinner and lighter than its predecessor, making it 24% smaller overall. It runs on Intel’s eighth generation processors.

The most immediately noticeable change is in the XPS 13’s look and feel. While the overall design remains the same, the company tweaked just enough to make the 2018 version feel fresh while retaining what I liked about the older models. This year’s iteration comes in a new rose gold color option with a stunning white woven glass fiber interior. (Seriously, just looking at this thing made me want to touch it.) I usually shy away from buying anything colored white, whether it’s a pair of pants or a laptop, because I know the slightest amount of dirt or dust is going to show immediately. I never had that issue on the XPS 13. In fact, I thought it was less prone to stains than the burgundy Alcantara keyboard deck on Microsoft’s Surface Laptop, which smudges easily. My only hangup about the XPS 13’s design is the webcam’s location underneath the screen, which makes it hard to find an angle that’s not awkward or unflattering when video chatting.

Read more: 5 Things About the Samsung Galaxy S9 I Like Better Than the iPhone X

The 3840 x 2160 resolution 4K UHD display on my XPS 13 review unit was predictably gorgeous, as should be the case on a laptop that prides itself on its screen. Colors seemed to pop off the display, the detail was rich, and text looked crisp. The viewing angles are wide enough to comfortably watch videos with multiple people huddled around the laptop. That being said, the Microsoft Surface Laptop’s 2256 x 1504 PixelSense screen and the 12-inch Apple MacBook’s 2304 x 1440 Retina display were about equally impressive, with the XPS outshining them in very few circumstances. The downside is that touch functionality isn’t included by default in the XPS 13 base model, as it is on Microsoft’s Surface Laptop.

A laptop’s good looks and excellent screen don’t matter much if you can’t stand typing on it. Luckily, the XPS 13 has one of the best keyboards I’ve used on a mainstream laptop. There’s no stiffness to it, and the key travel is deep enough to provide a comfortable level of feedback as you type. I preferred it over the Surface Laptop’s (also very good) keyboard, which felt slightly mushy compared to the XPS 13’s. Anyone who has ever used a poor touchpad that’s slow and sluggish will appreciate the XPS 13’s smoothness, although I did find myself noodling around in the settings to dial down the sensitivity.

If you’re looking for a solid general purpose laptop, the Dell XPS 13 should offer more than enough power for daily tasks. Whether I was encoding video or browsing the web, the eighth generation Intel Core i7-powered XPS 13 never grew uncomfortably warm. That’s probably because Dell put considerable amount of effort into the XPS 13’s cooling system, doubling the number of heat pipes and fans. The company also covered some areas of the pipes with Gore thermal insulation to dissipate heat and keep the processor cool when it’s working hard.

That said, I did notice some heat coming from the hinge that connects the display to the keyboard deck while I was using the touchscreen, but it never got close to becoming alarmingly warm. When I stress-tested the XPS 13 by launching 12 tabs in the Edge browser, opening three tabs in Chrome, and running a full hardware system scan with a few other apps operating in the background, the fans grew a bit loud and Chrome lagged slightly. Still, performance seemed unaffected otherwise. Don’t buy the XPS 13 if you’re primarily interested in PC gaming, as it couldn’t run The Witcher 3 at a playable frame rate. But it can run casual games and even other less demanding major titles like BioShock Infinite just fine. Besides, the XPS 13 isn’t meant to be a gaming rig — Dell has its Alienware line for that.

As is usually the case with most of today’s premium laptops, the Dell XPS 13 can last for the duration of the workday. I was able to get roughly seven hours out of it when I used the XPS as my primary work computer, which was satisfactory but nothing special. It’s worth noting that my configuration has a power-hungry 4K display, so other models will likely last noticeably longer.

Read more: Review: Google’s Tiny New Camera Uses AI to Become Your Personal Photographer

If you’re a current Mac owner and you’re used to answering and sending text messages on your laptop, I have good news and bad news. First, the good news: Dell now has its own program that lets you connect your phone to your PC to do just that. If you’re an Android user, you’ll also be able to access apps on your phone and notifications on the PC through Dell Mobile Connect. The bad news: It’s not as seamless as Apple’s iMessage integration between iPhones and Macs. To text your iPhone contacts from the Dell XPS 13, you need to have your phone unlocked with Dell’s companion app running. That’s because the XPS 13 wirelessly communicates with your iPhone via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct, whereas Apple’s iMessage service works across desktop and mobile platforms through the cloud. Once you sign into your Mac with the iCloud password you use on your iPhone, you don’t have to think about anything else.

The new Dell XPS 13 is a great option for users who want a simple general purpose laptop that’s thin and light and has an excellent screen. If portability is your top concern and you don’t want to shell out $1,299 for the entry level 12-inch MacBook, which runs on older processors but has more memory and storage than the base $999 XPS 13, Dell’s new laptop is certainly worth considering.

It’s rare for a laptop to stand out in the way that the XPS does for being just that — a no frills but superb laptop. Whereas other device makers hope to differentiate their products by claiming to offer the thinnest notebook in the world or by trying to make them operate more like phones or tablets, Dell’s XPS is a no-nonsense workhorse. It’s not the perfect laptop for everyone: Some will want more power and graphics performance, some will want more flexibility, some will need more battery life. But one thing is for sure: Dell will have to pry this machine out of my hands to get it back.

4 out of 5 stars

(NEW YORK) — U.S. stocks plunged and Treasuries climbed after Donald Trump promised to impose substantial tariffs on foreign metals, drawing a rebuke from a manufacturing industry group.

The S&P 500 Index sank to session lows and fell below its 100-day moving average, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 500 points after the U.S. president added to earlier confusion on the fate of proposed tariffs by announcing the levies in a meeting with industry executives. The Institute for Supply Management called the proposal a “big mistake.” The Federal Reserve earlier praised the benefits of trade, while the European Union has said it could respond in kind to any new tariffs.

“Trump made the announcement about tariffs and it dropped,” said Donald Selkin, New York-based chief market strategist at Newbridge Securities Corp. “It would raise the price of autos, look at the auto stocks. It would raise the price for items that use steel and aluminum.”

The market reaction was uneven. While industrial companies in the benchmark equity index tumbled, U.S. Steel Corp. advanced 7 percent and steel-products company Nucor Corp. gained 3.1 percent. Automakers led decliners as Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. added to losses already sparked by weak sales numbers. The Russell 2000 Index posted the smallest loss among major indexes as the bulk of its members derive most of their sales in the U.S.

“You could see earlier in the day when investors thought the president was going to have a listening session regarding tariffs the market went positive,” Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial Inc., said by phone. “All of those stocks that have steel or metal, they slid up. Then of course when he announced tariffs you saw the market pull back.”

The news sparked a bout of volatility, with the Cboe’s VIX measure climbing past 23 from less than 20 earlier. The Canadian dollar retreated 0.4 percent versus the greenback, which pared earlier gains to trade little-changed versus the yen. Mexico’s peso fell.

Investors also digested Senate testimony by Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, who called for gradual interest rate hikes and said he doesn’t see evidence of the economy overheating. Traders were on edge during Powell’s second day of Congressional testimony after his comments on Tuesday about the strength of the U.S. economy opened the door to speculation that the Fed plans to quicken the pace of monetary tightening, a move investors worry could derail growth.

“In many ways, the Fed is going to be considering things against a backdrop of an economy that’s expanding above trend with excess demand and no spare capacity, and against a backdrop of pretty strong fiscal stimulus,” said David Page, senior economist at AXA Investment Managers. “The Fed is actually going to be wondering whether or not four rate hikes are going to be enough this year.”

Elsewhere, the Stoxx 600 Index fell as some companies missed their earnings estimates and manufacturing data showed that growth may have peaked. The U.K. pound was flat after the European Union published a draft Brexit treaty, squaring off with Prime Minister Theresa May. The Australian dollar dropped after business investment unexpectedly fell in the final three months of last year.

Rep. Ilhan Omar faced calls from Republicans to resign from the House Foreign Affairs committee this week, following comments she made over U.S. politicians’ motivations for supporting Israel. After apologizing for evoking anti-Semitic stereotypes, the freshman Democrat indicated on Wednesday she has no intention of keeping a low profile on the committee.

At a committee hearing on the crisis in Venezuela, where authoritarian president Nicolás Maduro has refused to step down amid a sprawling economic and humanitarian crisis, Omar entered into a heated exchange with Elliott Abrams. President Donald Trump appointed Abrams in January as special envoy for Venezuela. Omar spoke frankly about the diplomat’s controversial record in Latin America. Here’s the history behind her claims:

Who is Elliott Abrams and what happened when he testified at the Venezuela hearing?

Abrams, a longstanding neoconservative diplomat, served in the State Department during the Reagan Administration and played a key role in U.S. interventions in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala in the 1980s. He later joined the New York-based think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, as a senior fellow. His appointment to oversee the U.S.’s response to the situation in Venezuela, where Trump has refused to rule out “a military option,” led many to raise concerns over his past dealings in the region, including his entanglement in the notorious Iran-Contra scandal. Omar confronted him with those concerns at the hearing.

“Mr. Abrams, in 1991 you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress regarding the Iran-Contra affair, for which you were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush,” she said. “I fail to understand why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony you give today to be truthful.”

Omar then brought up El Salvador’s 1981 El Mozote massacre, one of the darkest chapters in U.S. intervention in Latin America, accusing Abrams of having dismissed the massacre and pressing him to reconcile it with his previous characterization of U.S. policy in El Salvador as “a fabulous achievement.”

Abrams pushed back, refusing to answer what he deemed a “personal attack” and labeling Omar’s line of enquiry “a ridiculous question.”

Omar’s questioning riled many in the foreign policy establishment, who defended Abrams as a human rights advocate and devoted public servant. But others, particularly on the left, praised the congresswoman for a rare honest discussion of the more sinister effects of U.S. foreign policy.

What was the Iran-Contra scandal and how was Abrams involved?

Like most 20th century U.S. interventions in Latin America, the Iran-Contra affair began with Washington’s desire to prevent the spread of communism. In 1979, a left-wing movement, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, overthrew a right-wing dictatorship in Nicaragua, and began governing the country according to Marxist principles, including nationalizing private assets and unionizing workers. When Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, he feared that Nicaragua’s government could encourage more leftist movements in Central America and potentially lead to a network of Communist states in Washington’s backyard.

The Reagan Administration — in which Abrams served first as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs and then Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor — wanted to destabilize the Nicaraguan government. So the U.S. began funding right-wing rebel militias in the country, known as Contras. The Contras waged a decade of violent struggle against the government and committed widespread human rights abuses against civilians, according to human rights groups.

Congressional support for backing the rebels waned as media reports of the conflict in Nicaragua circulated, with liberal members of Congress calling it immoral and others fearing it could spark a dangerous confrontation with the Soviets. From 1982 to 1984, Congress passed a series of amendments limiting the CIA and the Department of Defense from helping the Contras to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. By 1984, all aid of any kind from the U.S. to the Contras was banned.

Reagan’s Administration, though, was undeterred. While the President reassured Congress and the public that he had stopped attempting to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, his Administration looked for covert ways to continue. The National Security Council sold arms to Iran to use in their war against Iraq — in contravention of a trade embargo on Iran — and then used $48 million of that money to fund the Contras. (Reagan maintained he himself did not know about the arms sales, a claim White House aide Oliver North denied—saying the President “knew of and approved a great deal of what went on with both the Iranian initiative and private efforts on behalf of the contras and he received regular, detailed briefings on both.”)

The Administration’s dealings became public in 1986, when Abrams was Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, and Congress began to investigate. Abrams pleaded guilty in 1991 to two misdemeanor charges for withholding information from two Congressional committees about the arms sales. The next year, President George H.W. Bush pardoned him.

What was the El Mozote massacre?

The next episode of U.S. history in Latin America that Omar brought up was the 1981 El Mozote massacre in El Salvador. She said Abrams had “dismissed ‘as communist propaganda [an episode in which] more than 800 civilians, including children as young as 2 years old, were brutally murdered by U.S.-trained troops.”

The El Mozote massacre was the worst massacre of civilians in modern Latin American history and came as the Reagan Administration attempted to bolster El Salvador’s right-wing government against leftist guerillas, called the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or the FMLN.

Soon after he came to office in 1981, Reagan boosted military aid to the Salvadoran government and sent in U.S. forces to train Salvadoran troops to repress the rebellion. In December of that year, as those troops attempted to flush out the FMLN, they led a full scale aerial and ground assault on the eastern village of El Mozote, which they suspected of harboring guerillas. Over the course of four days, they murdered at least 900 residents of the village, including hundreds of children.

The following year, testifying before Congress as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, Abrams said the reports about El Mozote were “not credible.” Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Reagan and Bush Administration officials defended Washington’s involvement in El Salvador, saying human rights were a priority in the campaign.

In March 1993, a U.N.-backed truth commission report concluded that, of 22,000 reports of human rights abuses (including extrajudicial killings, disappearances and torture) committed during the 12-year civil war, 85% were perpetrated by the U.S.-backed state forces. Responding to the report’s publication in 1993, Abrams said that “the Administration’s record in El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement,” and attacks on it were “a post-Cold War effort to rewrite history.”

Responding to Omar’s questions on Wednesday, Abrams cited the survival of democracy in El Salvador, which held its latest presidential elections in early February, as proof of Washington’s successful intervention, reiterating his claim that it’s “a fabulous achievement.”

How does the U.S.’ past involvement in Latin America relate to the current situation in Venezuela?

The Trump Administration, along with most Western democracies, has refused to recognize Maduro’s second term in office and on Jan. 23 officially recognized Juan Guaidó, an opposition leader who heads up Venezuela’s parliament, as interim president. Since then, speculation has mounted around a possible U.S. military intervention in the country to help Guaidó take power (Venezuela’s military continues to back Maduro as president.) Both Trump and Guaidó have refused to rule out that option.

There are key differences between the crisis in Venezuela today and the ideological battles in El Salvador, Nicaragua and elsewhere in the region in the 1980s. But Washington’s interest in ousting Venezuela’s socialist government has revived historical tensions. Maduro has blamed the U.S. for his country’s troubles on U.S. sanctions and warns his supporters about the historical threat of “Yankee imperialism.”

Some argue that the appointment of Abrams — who, according to reporting by The Guardian gave his tacit approval of a coup attempt against Maduro’s predecessor while working in George W. Bush’s administration in 2002 – to a key advisory role, has strained an already tense foreign policy situation. Others, such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, think his expertise in the region makes him “a true asset” in the U.S.’ response to Venezuela. In any case, Wednesday’s confrontation between Omar and Abrams shows that Washington’s past in Latin America weighs heavily on the present.

Amazon is giving refunds to customers who have purchased potentially counterfeit solar eclipse glasses, which could lead to eye damage in people who wear them while looking directly at the sun.

The e-commerce giant said in a statement it has reached out to some shoppers who bought eclipse glasses on the company’s website that “may not comply with industry standards.”

Amazon did not say how many potentially fake glasses were bought or how many customers were affected. The company said it asked people selling solar eclipse glasses on its website to provide documentation that verifies the glasses were certified and real, “out of an abundance of caution.” Amazon then removed the listings from sellers who did not respond and notified people who bought the glasses from them last week.

The upcoming total solar eclipse will cross the country from coast to coast and be visible from only America for the first time in U.S. history. Here’s what to know about where to buy solar eclipse glasses and how to protect your eyes during the rare event:

What do authentic solar eclipse glasses look like?

Ahead of the total solar eclipse on Aug. 21, ophthalmologists and astronomers alike have been warning people to view the celestial spectacle only through proper solar filters that protect against the sun’s rays. Authentic glasses have lenses that meet the ISO 12312-2 standard, the international standard for safely viewing the sun. They’ll usually look like cardboard 3D glasses, with much darker lenses than ordinary sunglasses, because they block 99.99% of the sun’s rays. The eclipse glasses will also have labels that say they meets the ISO requirement, according to the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Customers will see ISO 12312-2 scrawled somewhere on the sides.

Where can you buy real solar eclipse glasses?

The AAS, the American Academy of Ophthalmology and NASA recommend skygazers buy eclipse glasses from only reputable vendors. The three groups recommend using the AAS list of places where authentic eclipse glasses can be purchased.

How can you spot fake eclipse glasses?

It’s not enough today to just look for the ISO certification, as many vendors have started printing glasses with ISO certifications — even if the glasses do not meet industry standards, experts warned, so your best bet is to only buy from the vendors above.

If eclipse glasses were purchased from an unauthorized dealer online, experts suggest conducting an at-home test. When you look through the lenses, the AAS said, you should not be able to see anything except for the sun or anything else significantly bright, like a halogen light bulb or a bright-white LED flashlight. All such sources of light should look dim through real eclipse glasses. The glasses also should not have any tears or scratches on them.

You need to wear the glasses during the partial solar eclipse, when the sun is partly blocked by the moon, but can take them off for the brief totality phase, in which the sun’s light is entirely blocked for up to 2 minutes and 40 seconds.

Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc.’s bid to become a nationwide broadcast powerhouse collapsed as Tribune Media Co. withdrew from a planned merger that drew the ire of federal regulators who questioned Sinclair’s honesty.

Tribune announced its withdrawal from the $3.9 billion transaction in a emailed statement Thursday. Tribune said it has filed a lawsuit in the Delaware Chancery Court against Sinclair seeking compensation for losses incurred as a result of “Sinclair’s material breaches” of the merger agreement.

The Federal Communications Commission on July 18 sent the deal to a hearing by the agency’s administrative law judge, citing possible misrepresentations or lack of candor in some proposed station divestitures. Hearings can take months, and the prospect of enduring one killed previous deals.

“This uncertainty and delay would be detrimental to our company and our shareholders,” Tribune Chief Executive Officer Peter Kern said in the statement.

The FCC order asked whether Sinclair was in fact the hidden buyer in a proposal to sell Chicago’s WGN-TV to a Maryland automobile executive with no prior broadcast experience, and ties to Sinclair management. The agency also questioned links between the Maryland-based broadcaster and a buyer proposed for stations in Dallas and Houston.

The FCC asked the judge to decide whether “Sinclair engaged in misrepresentation and/or lack of candor in its applications” and asked whether Sinclair had “attempted to skirt the commission’s broadcast ownership rules.”

Sinclair proposed the deal in May 2017, testing federal ownership limits with the plan to purchase 42 stations, including outlets in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The transaction would have left Sinclair with more than 200 stations. It’s already the largest U.S. broadcaster by number of stations, with 192.

There are two schools of thought about pink. One is that it is the color of bubble gum and Barbie. Cindy Eckert’s view is that it is the color of business. It is a dominant presence at the offices of her Raleigh, N.C., venture-capital firm, the Pink Ceiling, a fund that advertises its main goal as “to make women really f-cking rich.” It’s an even more dominant presence on Eckert, who defies people to observe the taboo on assessing anyone–especially a woman–by their clothes. She wears some hue of pink every working day, accessorized with hot pink nails, lipstick and shoes. Even her hair seems to have a fuchsia sheen. In the pharmaceutical circles in which Eckert operates, among the white coats and the navy suits, that shade of pink invites judgment. And underestimation. She is fine with that.

Through the firm’s “Pinkubator,” Eckert, 45, is helping bring to market such innovations as a flushable pregnancy test, a decal that can detect a rape drug from a drop of a drink, shelf-stable human milk products for babies and a device that helps train pelvic-floor muscles.

These are not just products for women; they’re products that give women more autonomy and, in particular, more agency over their bodies and sexual choices. And their development is being funded by Eckert’s controversial attempt to answer one of the biggest mysteries of the human body: What is the source of female desire?

In August 2015, when she was Cindy Whitehead, Eckert got the drug Addyi, a (pink) pill engineered to rev up the sex drive of premenopausal women, approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Within a week, the pharmaceutical giant Valeant bought the drug’s owner, Sprout Pharmaceuticals, a company Eckert had started with her then husband Robert Whitehead. It paid $1 billion. Eckert, now divorced, is using her share of this windfall to try to bottle lightning again, to develop and market products that others overlook because they’re by or for women.

At least, that’s her story.

There’s another story that her critics, most of whom are women, like to tell, in which Eckert’s brand of hyperfeminized pink power is razzle-dazzle and hucksterism. They believe that flibanserin, the generic name for Addyi, which had been turned down twice by the FDA, should never have been approved. One of her critics goes so far as to compare Eckert to Elizabeth Holmes, the now disgraced head of blood-testing company Theranos.

The drug approaches sex by altering the most relevant organ. Unlike Viagra, which has physiological effects on men’s genitals, Addyi works on the brain; it was originally researched to treat depression. Flibanserin increases production of dopamine (the neurotransmitter that governs motivation and anticipation) and regulates serotonin (which governs self-consciousness and mood). Eckert points to brain scans that suggest these are the systems that are malfunctioning in women who have hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD), the otherwise unexplained loss of libido that Addyi is marketed to treat.

But the science of desire–women’s or men’s–is very much up for debate. Not everyone agrees that HSDD is a disease. “These are theoretical speculations that have been grabbed onto by a desperate sexologist and desperate pharmaceutical-industry people who want to find more certainty in a very murky area,” says Leonore Tiefer, a therapist, researcher and educator who opposed the approval of flibanserin. “There’s no measure of this dopamine-serotonin model speculation.”

Indeed, if the biological mechanisms behind women’s desire are poorly understood, the role of neurobiology is even less so. According to Rosemary Basson, director of the University of British Columbia’s Sexual Medicine Program, many people actually feel desire only after they have started making love. There is no benchmark amount of sex drive against which women can measure theirs. “[The pharmaceutical] industry wants that easy desire typical of early relationships that seems to be innate … to be the ‘normal’ state and to find a drug that will replicate that,” Basson told TIME in an email. In June, an article in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, the most respected journal in the field, surmised that “research has not conclusively demonstrated that biology is among the primary mechanisms involved in inhibiting sexual desire in women.” If the problems aren’t biological, then medication is unlikely to work.

Eckert brushes off her learned naysayers. She has never shied from conflict. In fact, in 2017 she sued Valeant, from which she had been fired, for mishandling the drug’s launch. To settle the suit, in November 2017, the company simply gave back to Eckert the drug for which it had paid $1 billion two years before. For free. It threw in a $25 million loan to help her with the relaunch. Why? Partly to get rid of a dead weight. Addyi made less than $10 million last year. By comparison, Viagra has never had less than $1 billion in annual sales.

Having walked away with a huge payoff, Eckert is now back in the fray. Her plans are ambitious. She wants to use the Internet to circumvent the awkward interaction that a woman has with a doctor when the topic is sex and the need is for more of it. Instead, visitors to Addyi’s website who give the right answers to a few queries–Would you like to increase your sexual desire? Why do you want to increase your sexual desire?–are directed to the Care XD website, where they are connected with a doctor. After a telemedicine conversation (a consultation over the phone or video chat), that doctor can prescribe Addyi to be delivered to the customer’s door. Sprout is also lowering the price, from $800 per month to $400, or $99 if users don’t have insurance. On Nov. 1, the pastel-shaded, millennial-friendly online mail-order pharmacy Hims launched Hers, a website for women’s intimate needs, and is promoting Addyi heavily. “Given that men have 26 medications to address their sex drive,” says Hers brand lead Hilary Coles, echoing Eckert’s signature spiel closely, “we felt almost an obligation to give women an option.”

This downsizing of the role of the doctor in prescribing flibanserin does not sit well with many in the field of sexual medicine. Given that the drug has the potential for serious side effects, including passing out (it comes with a black-box warning, the strictest of the FDA’s caution labels, which advises users to abstain from “things that require clear thinking” for six hours), the dangers of taking it could outweigh potential benefits. Unlike Viagra, Addyi has to be taken every night, and its users should not drink alcohol. And nobody has revised the drug’s tepid reviews: it didn’t work for all women, and those for whom it worked reported having only one more “sexually satisfying event” every month.

But the Sprout CEO is undaunted. Visits to the website are up since the relaunch. There are now 20,000 certified Addyi prescribers in the U.S. The drug is about to launch in Canada, and Eckert is working on Europe. Sprout has submitted new alcohol-interaction studies to the FDA. “People have said to me, Why are you such a crusader in this? Nobody’s going to lose their life,” she says. “And my answer to them is, they may well lose their life as they know it.”

One big change since the drug’s first launch is the nature of the discussion about women’s sexual agency. The #MeToo movement lifted a prohibition on talking about intimate experiences, especially acknowledging negative ones. That may play in Addyi’s favor. Eckert uses the language of the movement in her pitch. “We will pick up the much needed and long overdue conversation” about sexual-desire disorders in women, she says, and get past “the shameful silence of feeling it’s taboo societally to talk about what [women] are dealing with.” Expecting women to have sex when they don’t feel desire, she says, sounds like “the Harvey Weinstein defense.”

Her critics counter that Addyi treats a standard female condition–almost a third of women ages 18 to 59 report a problem with decreased sexual desire–as if it were a disease and makes women feel dysfunctional just for being women. Others say low desire is much more likely to be caused by underlying psychological issues–including poor body esteem, relationship difficulties and a lack of sexual agency–and should not be pathologized. They make their own #MeToo case: that women have the right to say no to sex without being thought of as abnormal or in need of fixing.

Eckert argues that the drug is prescribed only to women for whom the absence of desire is a burden. “The hallmark characteristic [of HSDD] is distress,” she says. “I saw women who’d lost their sense of self–they had in many cases lost marriages over this, because when things deteriorate in the bedroom they break down over the breakfast table too. And I struggle to understand objection to women having choice. If she doesn’t want it, she doesn’t take it. It’s her call.”

None of this dissuades her detractors from their belief that Eckert is no champion of women. Before founding Sprout, she and Whitehead marketed a long-acting testosterone implant known as Testopel. Their techniques drew a warning from the FDA, which said that in a pitch to doctors they had overstated the drug’s benefits, understated its risks and promoted unauthorized uses. The material was quickly amended, Eckert says, and had been sent to only 150 M.D.s. (She and Whitehead are both still investors in Sprout. Eckert is engaged to another entrepreneur, Justin Miller, whose current product is premade cookie mixes for dogs.)

But it’s not as if sex therapists don’t have a financial stake here either, if their clients can be cured by medication. One user, Michelle Wilson, 47, of Florida, who has been on Addyi for 20 months, says she never even considered trying therapy, because her lack of desire arrived with menopause and felt to her like a physical issue. “You have to have a need or urge or want,” she says. “A sex therapist is not going to help you in having that desire on your own.” A tapering-off of libido after menopause is generally considered to be normal, not a case of HSDD. Nevertheless, since starting on Addyi, which she takes every other day, Wilson’s sexual frequency has increased from once a month, she says, to at least once a week.

Given testimonials like that, Eckert and her investors believe that Addyi failed the first time not because it didn’t work but because it was mishandled by Valeant, which became mired in a price-gouging scandal that led to the exit of the CEO within months of its acquisition of Addyi. The corporate turmoil might have been a distraction that undercut the product’s launch. “Valeant went through an extraordinary circumstance,” says Eckert. “We don’t have a picture yet of how Addyi will perform.”

In so many ways, Eckert is exactly the type of hero women need to change the way the culture talks about female sexuality: she’s industrious, iconoclastic and stubborn. Her unwillingness to back down in the face of authority can be an asset. Her older brothers, Doug and Brian, tell the story of the year in Fiji she had to go to the principal’s office instead of home-ec classes every day, because on the first day of school, when it was her turn to stand and talk about her father’s job (he was the ambassador), she instead announced that the exercise was pointless. According to her brothers, this was to protect the girl next to her who didn’t want to tell everyone her dad drove a taxi.

She knew something about the exercise her teacher didn’t–that it was not a fun way for everyone to discuss their family. She understands the power of pink in a way others don’t–that a bold color can be a camouflage. So it would be nice to think she had also stumbled onto the key to the puzzle of female desire–that it can be unlocked with a prescription.

But it could also be that Eckert, as her critics say, is using women’s libido and sexual agency the way she uses color, to capture attention and sell. Either way, Eckert has picked a very difficult battle to win. “In the medical system, if I’m asked about sex I’m asked three questions,” she says. “Are you sexually active? Do you want birth control? And do you want to be tested for STDs?”

She wants there to be one more: Are you satisfied? The answer to that question may not be found in a pill.

This appears in the November 19, 2018 issue of TIME.

Google is celebrating the life and work of Amanda Crowe, an Eastern Band Cherokee Indian woodcarver and educator, to mark Native American Heritage Month.

Friday’s Google Doodle features an animated Crowe juxtaposed alongside real images of her carved work, with a score composed by her nephew William “Bill” H. Crowe Jr. playing throughout.

Crowe was born in 1928 and raised within the Qualla boundary in North Carolina, a territory owned by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. She began carving at the age of four, and her prodigious talent quickly became apparent. Her uncle, himself a well-known woodcarver, took the young Crowe under his wing, helping her to hone her skills with a knife.

“Every spare minute was spent in carving or studying anything available concerning art,” Crowe was quoted as saying, reflecting on her well-spent youth.

Her hard work paid off, and in 1946 Crowe was awarded a scholarship to study at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she learned to work with plaster, stone and metal.

But it was wood that she enjoyed working with most. “The grain challenges me to create objects in three dimensions,” she said. “A mistake or flaw in the wood will improve your design. To me, a knot can be the best part.”

After earning her Master of fine Art degree, Crowe moved to Mexico to study with renowned Spanish sculptor José de Creeft before returning to her home in Qualla Boundary to teach art classes at Cherokee High School, where she spent forty years inspiring the next generation of American Indian artists.

Crowe’s work has been showcased in the High Museum in Atlanta and the Mint Museum in Charlotte in addition to private collections all over the world.

“I carve because I love to do it,” she said.

Crowe died in 2004.

Uber rival Lyft appears to be testing monthly subscriptions for the ride-hailing service.

Some Lyft users are posting on Twitter about receiving subscription offers from Lyft, with pricing varying from $249 for an “all-access plan,” $199 a month for 30 rides, $300 for the same number of rides or $399 for 60 rides, according to The Verge.

The offer would include individual rides up to $15 dollars, and seems to target users spending $450 or more a month on Lyft. The offers did not say how rides over $15 would be charged.

https://twitter.com/search?q=lyft%20subscription%20&src=typd

Uber tested out a similar subscription service in 2016, The Verge noted, but the feature was never widely released.

TIME reached out to Lyft for comment, but did not receive an immediate response.

As email inboxes around the world are flooded with updated privacy policy notifications, the European Union’s new privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), takes effect on May 25.

The first significant regulatory policy enhancement to E.U. data protection regulations in more than 20 years, the GDPR requires companies to ask consumers whether they can collect their data, answer promptly if asked what it’ll be used for and disclose significant data breaches within 72 hours. Failure to fully comply could result in fines of up to €20 million (more than $23 million) or 4% of the company’s worldwide annual revenue of the prior financial year. In other words, breaking the law could come with some serious consequences.

The seriousness of the penalties reflects a European approach to privacy that can be traced back, in large part, to German history — and to specific experiences with personal data being used for the most heinous purposes.

“There this misperception that it’s a protectionist response, but the roots are much deeper. We trace them back to World War II and the atrocities of the Nazis, who systematically abused private data to identify Jews and other minority groups,” says Anu Bradford, professor of law and director of the European Legal Studies Center at Columbia Law School.

As the Nazi regime rose to power, state control of businesses brought with it state control of information technology.

In 1930s Germany, census workers went door to door filling out punch cards that indicated residents’ nationalities, native language, religion and profession. The cards were counted by the early data processors known as Hollerith machines, manufactured by IBM’s German subsidiary at the time, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH (Dehomag). This history became more widely known after the publication of the 2001 book IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, which argued that those Hollerith machines not only identified Jews, but also ran the trains that transported them to concentration camps. Some historians dispute the book’s claims that IBM supported the use of its machines to carry out genocide and argue that the Nazis also used other methods, as simple as pen and paper, to round up victims just as effectively; the company hasn’t denied that its machines were used during the Holocaust, but claims “most” documents about the operations have been “lost.”

But, regardless of the company’s direct involvement, or lack thereof, it became clear how — while census data can also be used to keep a government running — the collection of citizens’ personal information could lead to direct harm for those people.

When the war ended, Germany was partitioned but state surveillance remained intact, most famously carried out by the now-defunct East German secret police force known as the Stasi.

These officials were free to screen mail, search people’s apartments, bug bedrooms and bathrooms, and torture citizens of whom they were suspicious. They kept files on everything from people’s friends to their sexual habits. In response, in 1970 West Germany approved what’s considered the country’s first modern data privacy legal protections concerning public sector data in the West German state of Hesse. This was followed by a 1977 Federal Data Protection Act designed to protect residents “against abuse in their storage, transmission, modification and deletion.”

Later, concerns about unnecessarily intrusive census questions led to a landmark 1983 Federal Constitutional Court case that declared the right of “self-determination over personal data” as a fundamental right. “That became the cornerstone of the E.U.’s views today,” says Bradford.

All German citizens became entitled to those rights after the reunification of Germany in 1990. The end of the Cold War coincided with the rise in data transfers throughout Europe in the ’90s. The process of establishing a single market also included a 1995 E.U. data protection regulation, and cautious attitudes about privacy became a European norm. Perhaps most famously, in 2014 Europe’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union, affirmed the so-called right to be forgotten and ruled that Google has to abide by user requests to take down “data that appear to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” — and since then, Google has received 655,000 requests to remove about 2.5 million links, and complied with 43.3% of those requests.

Experts say the GDPR is essentially an upgrade of that 1995 law. And, Bradford says, that upgrade can be partially attributed to wider knowledge of how data has been misused, not just today but also in the past. “The understanding [of the Nazi history] is very widespread now,” she says. “Given the historical backdrop, that made the legislation intuitively more appealing and less subject to resistance.”

So what about privacy outside Europe, where the GDPR can’t be used to protect customers?

Bradford says Europe has been good about enacting protections on privacy that tend to apply to all sectors of the economy, whereas in the U.S. laws apply to certain sectors (such as healthcare) more than others. But, especially after Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook data breach and the Equifax hack raised awareness of data privacy in the first half of this year, Americans have expressed interest in the government taking more action. Polling by Reuters/Ipsos and Harris X suggests that — while faith in the government’s ability to keep their own personal data safe is another story — a growing number of Americans may be more open to more federal regulation to protect their data.

The name Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge may not mean much to you. But chances are you owe him a huge debt. For it was he who first “discovered” caffeine. Today, Google is celebrating what would have been his 225th birthday.

Runge expressed an interest in chemistry from an early age, and began conducting experiments as a teenager. Legend has it that during one of these experiments, Runge noted how belladonna (a poisonous plant sometimes called ‘deadly nightshade’), induced a long-lasting dilation of the pupil of the eye.

A decade later, while studying under the chemist and inventor Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner at the University of Jena, Runge was asked to reproduce belladonna’s effects as part of a demonstration for Döbereiner’s friend, the writer and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Quite why Goethe then suggested Runge analyze the chemical makeup of some coffee beans he happened to have on his person is unclear. Runge dutifully studied the beans and later that year, he isolated the active ingredient we now call caffeine.

Runge earned his doctorate from the University of Berlin, and went on to teach at the University of Breslau until 1831, when he left academia to take a position at a chemical company. During this time, he invented the first coal tar dye and a related process for dyeing clothes. He was also one of the first scientists to isolate quinine (a drug used to treat malaria), and he even devised a method for extracting sugar from beet juice. On top of that, he also invented paper chromatography, a method for separating chemicals that is widely used in teaching labs.