Bradley Goldman has filled out a size large T-shirt his whole adult life. As a bodybuilder, he knew that a steady stream of lean, bland proteins, heavy weights and steroids would make his muscles pop.

But over the past six months, Goldman, a fitness and nutrition consultant in Los Angeles, has watched his jacked physique soften and shrink. “I cracked a couple of weeks ago, and I had to buy a shirt a whole size smaller,” he says. He tried it on for his wife Brittany, and it hung loose on his frame. “I just kind of shook my head,” he says. He knew she saw the changes too.

Goldman, now 30, began taking steroids at 18. He’d heard they could interfere with fertility–steroids can shut down the body’s natural production of testosterone–but like many young men, he was more concerned with not having babies than with having them. Now he and his wife are trying to get pregnant, and though he gave up steroids two years ago, it seems the damage is done.

When he got a semen analysis last March, his sperm count came back a flat zero. “It was earth-shattering,” he says.

He started taking fertility drugs to help his testicles recover. But three months later, he still had no sperm. He’d been injecting himself with testosterone because his body could no longer produce it naturally, but his doctor recommended he stop in order to make the fertility drugs more effective. Now his sperm count is slowly climbing, but his sex drive has withered, along with his energy and 30 pounds of muscle. He has fat in places he never had before, including his breast tissue. He’s become depressed.

On his social-media accounts, Goldman has scaled back on shirtless photos and posts more long-sleeved shots instead. But beyond confiding in his wife, he hasn’t publicly shared what’s really going on. “I have 10-plus thousand people that follow me on Instagram,” he says, “who don’t know who the f-ck I am.”

Infertility is almost always thought of as a woman’s issue, and it’s true that women bear the greater burden of it. They are the ones who ultimately either get pregnant or don’t, and regardless of which partner has the fertility problem, the woman’s body is usually the site of treatment. In vitro fertilization (IVF), for instance, often requires just a sperm sample from men but a great deal more from their female partners: injections of synthetic hormones, blood tests, ultrasounds.

And yet up to 50% of cases in which couples can’t have babies are due in some way to men. More men are talking about it now, but it remains stigmatized, especially in the U.S. Men are largely absent from public conversation around infertility, and even those who have looked for support hesitate to identify as someone struggling with male infertility.

“I feel like I’m your stereotypical masculine-looking man,” Goldman says. “I’m tattooed. I have muscles. I work out. And I’m infertile. How many other guys out there that have this machismo, this mind-set about them, are in my shoes as well?”

Some men, like Goldman, know why they’re infertile. One of the most common causes is a varicocele; veins in the scrotum sometimes grow too big and tangle, which can make the testicle heat up and impair sperm function. This can often be fixed with surgery. Certain medications, including steroids and hair-loss drugs, are also known to affect fertility in men, as are obesity and other medical issues. Recent research suggests that age is another contributor–sperm quality, not just egg quality, decreases with time.

But many cases of male infertility are idiopathic, meaning their cause is a mystery to doctors. Genetics or other health factors might be at play, or it might be something environmental. Diet, alcohol, air pollution, stress, pesticides, compounds in plastics, even wearing briefs instead of boxers: research has implicated all of these in the potential degradation of fertility, and scientists are trying to figure out what’s most important. The matter appears to be getting more urgent. A 2017 analysis of studies, published in the journal Human Reproduction Update, found that among men living in Western countries, sperm count has declined more than 50% in less than 40 years.

In the three years that Dr. James Kashanian has been practicing urology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, he’s noticed a shift in how men approach the issue. Couples used to assume the problem was with the woman, jumping to IVF and intrauterine insemination (IUI)–in which sperm is inserted directly into the uterus–before exploring issues with the man. “Now, physicians, patients and couples are more aware of this male factor, and they’re looking to get answers sooner,” he says.

After men leave the doctor’s office, though, they often experience raw feelings: guilt, for being the reason their partner can’t get pregnant with their biological child and for what she’ll have to go through to do so; shame, for not being able to perform the basic feat of reproduction; loneliness, because they feel like they’re the only ones in this situation.

“There’s been this idea historically that men aren’t bothered about being infertile or about reproduction or children, which isn’t true,” says Esmée Hanna, a male-infertility researcher at De Montfort University in England. In a 2017 survey, Hanna and a team of researchers asked 41 men how infertility affected their lives; 93% said it had a negative impact on their well-being and self-esteem. The same themes kept coming up: men felt depressed, lonely, anxious about a future without children–even suicidal. Yet nearly 40% of them had not sought support.

Infertility is private for a lot of women too. But women have options for finding a community that can relate to what they’re going through, including support groups, online discussion boards and Facebook groups. Even though 12% of U.S. men ages 25 to 44 are infertile, there are few groups–in person or online–devoted to male infertility. One of the most popular men-only Facebook groups, Mens Fertility Support, doubled in size in 2017. Still, it has fewer than 1,000 members.

Andy Hansen, a 33-year-old X-ray technologist who lives outside St. Louis, is among them. In 2015, he learned he had a low sperm count due to a varicocele. His numbers went up after surgery, but after five years of trying, five rounds of IUI and IVF and two miscarriages, he and his wife remain childless. “The ‘blame’ has shifted back and forth,” he says. “We both know what it’s like to be on that end of it.”

They attended an event at their clinic hoping to meet couples in their situation, but as Hansen recalls, there were few men, if any. He tried an infertility Facebook group with over 20,000 members. “There just weren’t any guys, maybe one or two,” he says.

Finally, he found Mens Fertility Support, through which he and other men can advise one another and commiserate. “Keeping it in is just exhausting,” Hansen says. He’s noticed, however, that most members of the group are based in the U.K. In the U.S., “a guy tends to feel like he has to be the rock,” Hansen says.

“So much of masculinity in America is about being as strong, independent and capable as other men,” says Liberty Barnes, a medical sociologist and author of the 2014 book Conceiving Masculinity: Male Infertility, Medicine, and Identity. “If you can’t get your wife pregnant, you can’t help but compare yourself to other men and feel inferior.”

But ideas about masculinity can be surprisingly flexible in the face of infertility, Barnes says. For her book, she interviewed 24 American couples, once after the man was diagnosed with infertility, then again almost two years later. “You could see they were doing a lot of work trying to process their experience and redefine what masculinity meant to them,” Barnes says. The men emphasized their role as a good husband or their preparation to be a good father. For many, being a man meant going through every type of fertility procedure–no matter how painful–“basically to prove to their wife that I’m strong, I’m brave, I’m willing to do anything it takes.”

Goldman avoided joining the Facebook group for a month after his wife told him about it. “I was not about to share with a bunch of random dudes what I’m going through,” he says. Finally, though, he relented. When he read a post from a man whose struggles with infertility led him to consider suicide, Goldman broke down in tears. “That’s what so many men go through, and just keep their mouth shut,” he says.

Phyllis Zelkowitz, director of research in psychiatry at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, thinks online groups hold a lot of promise because they normalize an isolating experience. It’s hard for men to talk about these issues, she says, “because they’re out of tune with their peer group–most of the people that they know are having babies, and they’re not.” She and a team are now testing an app they developed, called Infotility, that offers men steps to take to improve their fertility as well as a message board.

Goldman posted once to the private Facebook group; beyond that, he isn’t open about his infertility on social media. But lately he’s been toying with the idea of making a YouTube series about his experience. “It doesn’t make you soft to talk about it,” he says. “It doesn’t make you less of a man.” If he can let even one other man know he’s not alone, “then putting my story out there and being vulnerable is totally worth it.”

This appears in the January 14, 2019 issue of TIME.

(Bloomberg) — Amazon.com Inc. is reconsidering its plan to build a corporate campus in New York after facing a wave of opposition, according to a report.

The company, which announced last year that it had chosen a site in Long Island City to house 25,000 employees, has not leased or purchased office space for the project yet, making it easy to withdraw the commitment, according to The Washington Post.

Amazon executives have had internal discussions recently to reassess the situation in New York and explore alternatives, the Post reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The shares initially dipped on the report but then quickly gained back some of the loss. Amazon was down 2.3 percent at $1,576.98 just before noon in New York.

Change your passwords often? Of course not — you’re too busy logging in safely and securely, after all. But for the well-intentioned majority of us too busy procrastinating to update their insecure passwords, there’s help from Google in the form of a new Chrome web browser extension called Google Password Checkup.

Google Chrome already has built-in password management support, meaning you can generate, store, and update your usernames and passwords using Chrome itself — just head to your Settings page and hit the Passwords box. Google Password Checkup functions as a helpful second layer of security, telling you when your passwords have been compromised, and reminding you to change them before it’s too late. To figure out which passwords are secure, Google keeps an encrypted database of passwords known to be compromised, and compares it to your own credentials (which it also encrypts). The actual comparison is done locally, in the Password Checkup extension, so no personal information is transmitted during the checkup process. If it finds a match, the extension will suggest you change your password immediately.

You don’t have to do much to benefit from the extension, either. “Whenever you sign in to a site, Password Checkup will trigger a warning if the username and password you use is one of over 4 billion credentials that Google knows to be unsafe,” said Google in its announcement post. From there you can either create a new password full of random characters — with Google’s help — or ignore the reminder until something terrible happens to your online account.

If you think an extension will save you from the ills of bad online security habits, you’re greatly mistaken. While Google’s Password Checkup will fix your login information, it can’t protect you from data breaches in the first place. For that, you’ll need to adopt better security habits, including changing your password periodically and enabling two-factor authentication on your accounts to add yet another layer of protection.

To install Google’s Password Checkup tool, you can click here or navigate to Chrome’s Extensions page, where you’ll find it alongside thousands of other Chrome extensions.

2019 will have plenty in store for astronomy fans across the world, with a total solar eclipse, an annular solar eclipse, a total lunar eclipse and more.

The most exciting such event for U.S.-based stargazers may be the so-called “Super Blood Wolf Moon Eclipse” on Jan. 21, says Christian Veillet, an astronomer at the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory in Arizona.

“The January lunar eclipse will be special, at least for the U.S. It’s really seen by the whole of America and South America and nicely centered, so everyone will be able to see all the totality phase of it, so it’s a nice show,” he says.

Viellet says 2019 won’t have any solar or lunar events that are especially rare, like 2017’s total solar eclipse, which was the first of its kind to be visible exclusively from the United States since the country’s founding. Still, there’s plenty to see in the night sky over the next 12 months. Of course, like all celestial happenings, your ability to view these events can depend on your location on Earth as well as the local weather.

From the Super Blood Wolf Moon Eclipse in January to the total solar eclipse in July, here are five solar and lunar phenomena to watch in 2019:

January 6: Partial Solar Eclipse

On Jan. 6, stargazers in parts of East Asia and the Pacific will be able to witness a partial solar eclipse.

A solar eclipse occurs when the sun is obscured by the moon. If the sun, moon and Earth are lined up, you get a total solar eclipse. But if that alignment is off, it can result in a partial solar eclipse, and only part of the sun will appear to be blocked by the moon.

January’s partial solar eclipse will the last until April 2022, when another will be visible in parts of South America and Antarctica.

January 21: Super Blood Wolf Moon Eclipse

On Jan. 21, people in North America, South America, Greenland, Iceland and more will be able to view a lunar eclipse that some are calling the “Super Blood Wolf Moon Eclipse.”

The astronomical event, a simultaneous total lunar eclipse and a “supermoon,” will take place on the night of Jan. 20 into the morning of Jan. 21. During the event, the moon will fall completely into Earth’s shadow, and appear red-colored and slightly larger than usual for about an hour.

The Super Blood Wolf Moon Eclipse will be the last total lunar eclipse until 2021.

July 2: Total Solar Eclipse

On July 2, people in parts of Chile and Argentina will be able to witness a total solar eclipse just before sunset. Those in some other places, including Ecuador; Brazil; Uruguay and Paraguay, will only be able to witness a partial solar eclipse, according to Space.com.

A total solar eclipse occurs when the moon blocks the entire view of the sun, leaving just the corona visible to those viewing from Earth. (While the sun is 400 times bigger than the moon in diameter, the moon happens to be 400 times closer to Earth, giving it the relative size needed to block out the sun.)

July’s total solar eclipse will be relatively long, lasting almost two minutes in some places. According to NASA, the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century occurred in July 2009, lasting six minutes and 39 seconds; it was visible through most of Southeast Asia.

July’s total solar eclipse is the last such event until December 2020, when another total solar eclipse will be visible over similar parts of South America.

July 16: Partial Lunar Eclipse

On July 16, people in much of Europe and Asia, as well as parts of south and east North America, South America and Antartica, will be able to view a partial lunar eclipse.

A partial lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth moves between the sun and the moon, but the bodies are not perfectly aligned. During a partial lunar eclipse, the moon falls partially into Earth’s shadow (also called the umbra), leaving only a portion of it visible to those on Earth.

July’s partial lunar eclipse will be the last until November 2021.

December 26: Annular Solar Eclipse

The day after Christmas 2019, people in eastern Europe, much of Asia, and northern and western Africa will be able to witness a “ring of fire” caused by an annular solar eclipse.

An annular solar eclipse occurs when the moon appears to cover the center of the sun, leaving just the sun’s outer edges visible — forming a so-called “ring of fire.” Annular comes from the Latin word for ring, “annulus.”

The difference between an annular solar eclipse and a total solar eclipse? During an annular solar eclipse, the moon is further away from the Earth. That means it appears to be smaller in the sky and does not completely cover the sun, leaving just the “ring of fire,” according to NASA.

The next annular eclipse will be in June 2020.

From the vantage point of 50 years later, many of the events of the watershed year that was 1968 seem to be symbols of something broken — from the Vietnam War turning point that was the Tet Offensive, to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., to student and labor strikes in Paris to the Prague Spring.

The Democratic National Convention that August was a nominating convention for an extraordinary year, in which incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson decided not to run again and candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated as his campaign was gaining steam. It was part of the larger pattern, and remains a half-century later a symbol of a broken system.

Inside the convention hall, party leaders nominated Vice-President Hubert Humphrey for the top of the ticket, even though he hadn’t run in any primary races, which would help prompt major reforms in how the Democratic Party picks its candidates. And outside, in the streets of Chicago, a massive wave of resistance — an estimated 10,000 demonstrators — drew a harsh response from city authorities, becoming a seminal moment in the history of American protest.

By the time the convention ended, 668 protesters had been arrested, and hundreds of people had been injured. The public would get to know some of those arrested better during the roughly five-year legal battle that followed. Eight participants were charged with conspiracy and crossing state lines to incite a riot: John Froines, Lee Weiner, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale.

In the walk-up to the anniversary of the most famous police-crowd confrontations of the week, those of Aug. 28, TIME spoke to several who protested about their memories of that time, the impact of the protests on the anti-war movement — and how what happened in 1968 is still playing out today.

Why They Went and What They Wanted

Protesters flowed to Chicago in the days before the Aug. 26 start of the convention. Some young Democrats tried to work within the system, trying to get anti-war candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) nominated. Others worked the streets and the parks, believing something more revolutionary had to take place to end the War in Vietnam. And, in a commentary on the quality of candidates available, Yippies (members of the Youth International Party) “nominated” a pig for president.

Michael Kazin, then a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and now co-editor of Dissent magazine and professor of History at Georgetown University: I, and others in Students for a Democratic Society, went to Chicago to convince the kids in their teens and early 20s, who’d been campaigning for McCarthy, to give up their illusions about getting change within the system — break from Democratic Party and start their own party.

Judy Gumbo, then a Yippie, still an activist: We didn’t see the use of electoral politics. We hadn’t seen it do anything to end the war. Our job as we saw it was to do provocative acts of theater that would inspire others to repeat those acts wherever they were [based]. The [planning] roles were gendered; the boys went to try to negotiate for a permit, and the women were in the park making signs. The cornerstone of my experience was being in these male-dominated [planning] groups and getting up the nerve to make a point. That was a very empowering experience. To create a more integrated movement, they wanted to have someone come to speak from the Black Panther Party. I was the one who suggested Eldridge Cleaver. I had to say it about two or three times, but eventually they said that’s a good idea. He couldn’t come, but the Panther party leadership sent Bobby [Seale] instead.

Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party: I went because we were for human rights and against this damn war. We, the black people, shouldn’t have to be fighting this war, dying in Vietnam, if this country isn’t recognizing our civil, democratic, human rights.

Abe Peck, then-editor of alternative newspaper The Chicago Seed, now at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism: How can you organize people who would rather die than go to a meeting? You do it by spectacle. You do it by bringing a band, nominating a pig. Media coverage was our oxygen, so the claims had to get bigger and bigger to keep having coverage. I tried to warn [people]. It’s not like I was saying ‘don’t come,’ but I just wanted people to know what they were getting into, that the police were really going to try to snuff it out and you may be at risk.

Confrontations With the Police

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who had taken an infamously harsh approach to the riots that had swept the city following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. that April, prepared for the convention by supplementing his nearly 12,000 Chicago police officers with 5,000 state National Guardsmen and 6,500 federal troops.

Peck: We’re sitting in our [newspaper] office and heard the windows crack. There were bullets in the window. A police car cruised by. We called the police, and they asked, Who do you think did that? Well, we think you did it.

Seale: In my speech in Lincoln Park, I said you’ve got a right to defend yourselves. If they come at you with a billy club, you gotta reach up and grab the billy club and try to get it out of his hand so you can swing back. [The protesters] learned Police Brutality 101. It was a course, and they all passed it with As.

Gumbo: I remember walking up and down the line of National Guardsmen outside of the Hilton with [the singer] Phil Ochs. They all had their rifles pointed at us, but one of them told Phil he had been to one of his concerts. I watched Phil stand and talk to this guy for some time, and at a certain point the guard lowered his rifle and just had a one-on-one conversation with Phil. That was the kind of interaction that we had hoped to have with the police.

Lee Weiner, a sociologist, then a Chicago community organizer, who went on to work for Americares and the Anti-Defamation League: On Aug. 28, during the huge battle on Michigan Avenue with the National Guard, I separated myself from the crowd to stand on the steps of the Art Institute and watch the crowd of people. It was the only time in my life I thought a revolution might happen in the United States.

Assessing the Impact of Protest

Hubert Humphrey officially accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for President on Aug. 29, and the convention came to an end. Humphrey would be defeated in the general election by Richard Nixon.

Weiner: Did we accomplish what we wanted to accomplish? No, the war kept going. But I think it made the notion of resistance more legitimate.

Peck: I wouldn’t call it a success or a failure. It was just one part of this grinding process of convincing the government that the war was wrong. Obviously there were dreams we had that weren’t fully realized, and it’s probably a good thing some weren’t realized. It’s hard to build a counterculture.

Frank Joyce, then a People Against Racism member, former radio station news director and United Auto Workers union spokesperson: The outcome of the convention itself and the subsequent election definitely made me even more skeptical of electoral politics. I mean, we thought we were working in the system by expressing what we had been told were rights to free speech and protest. Could we have done the training even better, maybe coordinating more closely with SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] and the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference], and do more of the non-violence training that was successfully done in the South by Dr. King? With the benefit of hindsight, the answer is yes. Absolutely. We were naive. Because we grew up in predominantly white communities in the North, we didn’t have the interactions with police that black people have always had. Chicago was a wake-up call for a lot of white people.

John Froines, then a chemistry professor at the University of Oregon who had worked as a community organizer in New Haven, Conn., now professor emeritus at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health: Violence was inevitable. But the depth of the violence was far greater than we anticipated. I think the process of the war coming to the end came through a series of steps, of which Chicago was certainly the most violent.

Kazin: The famous criticism, which I think was justified, is by the late ’60s, SDS and radicals in general more identified with what they didn’t like than with what alternatives they outlined. People who were feeling like you had to increase the militancy of your demonstrations were emboldened to do that. It turned so many people, even liberals, against Humphrey and the Democrats that year. I’m not proud of the fact that we might have helped defeat Humphrey, but we might have.

The Fight That Followed

The Chicago Eight went on trial before Judge Julius Hoffman on Sept. 24, 1969, almost exactly a year after the protests. They became known as the Chicago Seven when Seale’s case was separated from the others. The remaining seven were eventually sentenced for contempt of court; five were also found guilty of crossing state lines to incite a riot.

Seale: Jerry Rubin said to be indicted here makes our protest the Academy Awards of protests. This trial was the most famous trial of all of the 1960s protest movement cases — it even overshadowed [Panther leader Huey Newton’s] trial — especially because I would not shut up in the courtroom. This judge [Julius Hoffman] denied me the right to defend myself while my lawyer was in the hospital. The other seven defendants didn’t have to be in jail the whole time, but I was in jail every day. So every time my name would be mentioned, I’d jump up and stand in my chair and cuss the judge out. I’d call him a pig and fascist. He called me a Negro. I said, I’m an African American, black American, Afro-American, but do not refer to me as a Negro. He considered that a point of contempt. They chained, shackled and gagged me for three days. Three times, three different levels of gag.

Froines: We gave hundreds of speeches on college campuses, and used the speaking fees to pay for legal costs. We’d give the speeches at night and fly back that same night to make it back to court the next day. At one point in the fall of 1969, I got a package. Everyone said don’t open it, it’s probably a bomb. It was five pounds of jelly beans. My mom sent me five pounds of jelly beans. So we had all these jelly beans to get through — and across the country, there were editorials about how the Chicago Seven isn’t taking the trial seriously because they’re eating jelly beans in the courtroom! What you really don’t realize now is how massive the media interest was in the trial. Richard Avedon took our portrait. We used the photo as Christmas cards. Then people started to take us more seriously.

Weiner: The Avedon cards we sent to anybody who’d previously given us money as a thank you, a new year’s greeting and a request for money. A friend in New York who was a photographer took photos of me and my girlfriend at the time naked with Christmas lights in our long hair, and made it into a poster that said “Make a New Year’s Revolution.” We handed it out to the young people waiting out on the cold to sit in on our trial to thank them for supporting us.

What 1968 Can Teach Today’s Activists

A chaotic courtroom and judicial antagonism led to the sevens’ eventual convictions — as well as Seale’s four-year prison sentence for contempt of court — to be overturned on appeal. Many who participated in that time went on to continue long careers of activism.

Joyce: I think now almost any activist or a high school student in Parkland [Fla.] starts with a sense that there’s a broader systemic problem. I think there’s broader awareness now than there was then, of the interconnectedness of social justice problems.

Gumbo: Work on any front that you can to make America the country we know it can be.

Seale: You must continue activism, and coalitions put you in a greater position. Don’t assume anything. Get people registered to vote.

Weiner: Crowd formation is quicker and easier now — perhaps one of Trump’s gifts to America. But there are still people who usually think about politics like they think about the weather. They know it affects their lives, and they don’t think people can do anything about it. In 1968, people fought against it and thought they could and should do something about it.

While chatting with customers via Twitter Tuesday, Tesla co-founder Elon Musk let it subtly slip that the next Tesla Model will be a pickup truck. “I promise that we will make a pickup truck right after Model Y,” Musk tweeted, admitting that he has had the core design and engineering elements in his mind for nearly five years. “Am dying to build it,” he added.

The exchange between the social-savvy CEO and his throng of online fans was something of a wish-list session for Tesla owners, with Musk asking his customers how his company could do better in the future.

Responses varied from a requests for improved navigation software (to which Musk said “coming soon“) to a toggle setting for Bluetooth auto-connecting Tesla model cars to owners’ phones (“Done” replied the auto industry icon.)

The entire thread is a fascinating look inside the through process and plans of Musk, who is always pushing his products forward, be it through their design or their software updates.

However, as it applies specifically to the Tesla pickup truck, Musk’s Twitter chat was light on details. Not to be confused with the Tesla Semi, the Tesla Truck would be similar in size to a Ford F150, revealed Musk, and would have a “really gamechanging (I think) feature” that Musk would like to add. And with that tease, he turned his attention to other questions, ignoring critical details like the future Tesla pickup truck’s price.

Although exciting, Musk’s mini-reveal will not come to showrooms any time soon. Development of the Tesla truck will begin after completion of the Tesla Model Y, a crossover SUV that could radically change the fortunes of the relatively young company. And though that car’s design hasn’t been fully revealed yet, one customer already had a request for it. “Model Y with 7 seat option pls,” tweeted one follower. Musk had no response to that.

Carbondale, Illinois — a college town of 26,000 — has spent the past three years gearing up for 2 minutes and 38 seconds on Monday, when the moon will slip completely in front of the sun, enveloping the region in the darkness of a total solar eclipse. The Great American Eclipse‘s totality phase will be longer in this rural Midwestern town than nearly anywhere else in the nation.

Southern Illinois University’s Saluki Stadium, the primary viewing location in town, will pack in 15,000 locals, visitors, scientists and students to watch the rare astronomical event unfold. Still more eclipse enthusiasts will spill out onto sidewalks, congregating in the downtown square, outside of city hall, and everywhere in between.

“This is the biggest event we’ve ever done,” SIU physics professor Bob Baer said. “It’s bigger than homecoming.”

Adding to the excitement is the fact that this won’t be Carbondale’s last eclipse. Seven years from now, on April 8, 2024, a second total solar eclipse will be visible again over the area — an extremely unusual happening that has inspired Carbondale residents to dub their town the “Solar Eclipse Crossroads of America.”

“Mother nature dropped this right in our lap,” Mayor John “Mike” Henry said. “There isn’t anything else we could possibly do to bring this many folks to Carbondale.”

The mayor’s office is closing schools on Monday to free up local parking. Churches are being converted into cooling stations. Locals are opening up their homes to outside visitors. “We’re thinking of it as [a Southern Illinois University] family weekend on steroids,” said longtime Carbondale resident Roxanne Conley, 58, who manages a screen-printing business in town and is vice president of Carbondale’s tourism bureau.

More visitors also means additional revenue for local businesses. “As most of rural America is experiencing, our economy is struggling,” says the town’s economic development director, Steven Mitchell. He predicts that an influx of 50,000 outsiders could bring in $8 million for Carbondale’s private sector.

Despite the town’s eclipse-day preparations, there are still a handful of factors that are out of anybody’s control. “Internet and wireless service will probably stall,” said Henry, “but we’ll do the best that we can with that.”

The biggest uncertainty, perhaps, is the number of people coming to observe the eclipse. Initially, NASA estimated that 50,000 to 90,000 people would descend on Carbondale this weekend.

State police now predict that upwards of 120,000 people could flock to Carbondale.

In response, city leaders have encouraged locals to treat the eclipse as though it were an impending natural disaster, which means stocking up on groceries, filling prescriptions, and loading up cars with a full tank of gas in advance.

But in reality there’s only so much the town can prepare for, said Randy Johnson, 58, who owns Carbondale’s 710 Book Store. “At some point you just have to get out of the way and let it happen.”

And no matter what, it will definitely happen. And then, in 2024, it will happen yet again.

“This is just our practice run,” Conley said. “Come back in seven years and we’ll have it figured out.”

Engineering and robotics firm Boston Dynamics released two new videos Thursday showing off what their Atlas and SpotMini robots can do.

In the first video, the humanoid Atlas robot goes for a swift jog through a yard and even leaps over a log.

In the second, the dog-like SpotMini robot climbs up and down stairs. To steer properly, the robot was originally guided by an operator, the Verge reports. But now the robot has mapped the area and uses cameras to navigate autonomously.

In February, the Massachusetts-based company unveiled a robotic dog that could open doors.

In 2017, Google parent company Alphabet sold the robotics firm to Japanese conglomerate SoftBank for an undisclosed sum.

Karl Wilhelm Krause served as Adolf Hitler’s valet — his personal orderly — for five years, starting in 1934, and was thus a close witness to a key period in the Nazi dictator’s rise to power — and the personal preferences and foibles of the man behind the Holocaust. His account of that time has been published in German, but the new book Living With Hitler brings his remembrances and two other similar narratives together in English. As historian Roger Moorhouse notes in the introduction to the new edition, Krause, who died in 2001, “was perhaps as close to his master as anyone would get: waking him in the morning, serving him breakfast, managing his wardrobe and travelling with him wherever he went.”

The following is an excerpt from Krause’s eyewitness account of that time.

Here is a question many people asked themselves: why didn’t Hitler get married? What I can state here is that Hitler certainly did not hate women. Proof of this are the many actresses who were invited during the early years to afternoon and evening performances. Often, during our travels, he would suddenly be totally enchanted, exclaiming: “My God, isn’t that a beautiful girl (a beautiful woman).” He then turned around, making me, who was behind him, move to the side so that he had an unrestricted view behind him and could follow the lady with his gaze. If, in any given place, an exceptionally beautiful girl would catch his eye, Brückner more often than not had to find out her address. After that, the lady was invited for coffee, either to Munich, Berlin or on the Obersalzberg, just so that Hitler could have a chat with her. In the earlier years, he also often joined members of the KDDK (Kameradschaft der deutschen Künstler) when they gathered after performances in the theatre and opera houses.

Rumours about Leni Riefenstahl and Frau Winifred Wagner have no substance. He certainly respected Leni Riefenstahl because she was an ambitious woman who, based on remarkable commitment, had put together the films on the Party convention days and the Olympic Games. “A woman has more sensitivity for this whole thing than a man,” said Hitler once, referring to Riefenstahl. And he revered Frau Wagner as the bearer of the Wagnerian legacy, but marriage was never a likely possibility. They certainly were close, however. I was once present during a private conversation between Frau Wagner and Hitler where he mentioned that he was thinking of dissolving the Party. His reason was that for the sake of the unity of the German people no difference should be made between Party and non-Party members, and they should all be on equal footing. Frau Wagner was very surprised to hear this and asked him to consider what his old Party comrades would say to such a decision. This is just an example of their frank relationship.

He was overjoyed when the BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädel) girls came out to openly celebrate him during his trips, and he went out of his way to treat them as being very special. They received gifts of money from him of two to ten Reichsmark per head with the words: “Why don’t you extend your stay for a little bit,” or “Coffee and cake are on me,” and so forth. All that was simply a reflection of his appreciation of beauty. If an especially attractive actress performed in an opera or play on stage (and provided she was also talented), he asked to be introduced to her at the end of the event. Among the film actresses he especially liked were Olga Tschechova and Brigitte Horney.

What Hitler didn’t care for was women who got involved in politics. While he conceded that women had achieved big things, he stood firm in his opinion that politics was exclusively to be left to men. This is how he explained his status of remaining unmarried: his principle was that every married partner should lead a decent family life. This was, however, not something he himself could ever offer, considering the colossal amount of work he had to cope with. He would only come home late at nights, and a wife and family would have nothing to gain from him. At most — if he were married with children in real life — they could perhaps have a chat about him. That was his reason to remain unmarried.

Sometimes he made reference to his wartime activities and said that it was a good thing he hadn’t been married at the time, as “the wave of enthusiasm [he] received mostly came from women.” He didn’t believe that, had he been married, he would have garnered so much support. “Just based on instinct alone, females are more inclined to be attracted to (single) men,” he said.

I don’t want to end this topic without making reference to the alleged diary by Eva Braun. However, let me preempt this by saying that, for me, the entire “diary” is a total lie. While there are some details that correspond to true facts, even those are embellished by wild fantasy.

I knew Eva Braun well. In fact, I knew her from the first day I went into service for Hitler. I don’t want to be judgmental in any way, as whatever I say would no doubt be biased. Eva Braun and I didn’t get on much better than, as the saying goes, cats and dogs. Once, during the winter of 1935/6, we really gave each other a what for and ever since we had nothing whatsoever to do with each other, except for both of us saying hello and goodbye if our paths crossed.

At the beginning of the war, Eva Braun came to stay in Berlin only twice or three times, and then for no longer than one or two days on each occasion. In the years 1934 –7 she and Hitler were never in Berlin together at the same time. Their relationship became closer only after the war had started. Her parents never came to Berlin, her sisters visited perhaps once or twice. She lived at the Berghof for quite some time and was good friends with Martin Bormann, the actual master of the house, who then hired her as the housekeeper so that she was officially registered at the office for employment.

Eva Braun never came to the headquarters, nor was she called upon for official receptions. At private functions, she came as Hitler’s wife, was greeted by him with a kiss of the hand, as with other women as well, and called Evchen, a diminutive of Eva. She herself always addressed Hitler by the familiar Du.

There is no doubt that Hitler considered her “his bride.” But he wasn’t the jealous type. After the conversion of the Berghof had been completed, the two bedrooms were linked to each other by a connecting door. Of course, Eva Braun’s living expenses were met by Hitler personally. May I add that it fell to Brückner to keep the books. Hitler himself never carried a wallet, but placed his money – up to some 200 Reichsmark – loose in his pocket. Private journeys were always paid for out of Hitler’s private funds.

Once, when the entire Hotel Imperial in Vienna was booked out by Party members, the manager of the hotel submitted a bill of 29,000 Reichsmark. This price seemed to be too high in Brückner’s eyes, but Hitler just told him: “Oh, go ahead and pay the bill; maybe the man has very large debts.” When Hitler expressed the wish to own the house in the Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich, he was short of funds. The subsequent release of his book Mein Kampf to countries outside Germany then enabled him to purchase the house.

…I have no reason to “whitewash” Hitler. I also believe that everything that happened under the rule of the National Socialists has burdened our people enough not to have to be saddled with untrue stories. But whatever the truth is, it has to remain just that. Towards our future generations and history we are obliged to convey an honest portrayal of who Hitler was and what happened during his time.

Adapted with permission from Living With Hitler: Accounts of Hitler’s Household Staff by Herbert Dohring, Karl Krause and Anna Plaim, available Aug. 19, 2018, published by Greenhill Books, distributed by Casemate.