Rediscover your love for drawing with this cheap online bundle

TL;DR: The 2021 Complete Character Art Academy Drawing Bundle is on sale for £21.64 as of July 1, saving you 97% on list price.

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If you're looking for a way to jump back into drawing as a hobby, this 2021 Complete Character Art Academy Drawing Bundle is a great place to start. This training will help you get back into your flow state of putting pen to paper and teach you a few new tricks along the way.

From character drawing to colouring and painting, these seven courses and over 400 lessons can help you sharpen your art skills and take your creativity to the next level. You'll start by learning how to draw popular characters, then develop your own style and unique characters you can bring to life on the page. Whether you want to draw concept art for films, comics, or even learn how to draw popular Disney-style characters, this course is for you.

Then, you'll move on to the complete color theory and painting course, where you'll learn professional-level character coloring, even if you're an absolute beginner. Round out your training by learning how to design landscapes and create unique worlds for your characters to live in.

Each course in the bundle is taught by Scott Harris, who boasts an impressive instructor rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars. Harris is an illustrator, painter, and art instructor who has helped over 270,000 students grow their art skills and turn their passions into lucrative careers.

This seven-course bundle is valued at £1,010, but for a limited time, you can get lifetime access to these classes for just £21.64.

Credit: Online Courses

Save 97% on the 2021 Complete Character Art Academy Drawing Bundle

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Learn a new language over Zoom with this discounted subscription

TL;DR: A one-month subscription to Lingoda Live Language Courses is on sale for £86.58 as of July 1, saving you 27% on list price.

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If you didn't master any new skills during the pandemic, don't sweat it. The good news is you can learn something new at literally any time, as long as you have the desire to do so.

With the Lingoda online language school, you can take French or Spanish language courses at your own pace with instructors and courses that are geared toward your levels. Lingoda makes classes available 24/7, so you can access them whenever you have the time.

Group classes are typically 60 minutes long, are only taught by native-speaking teachers with at least two years of teaching experience, and are all done live. Some classes are in a larger group format, whereas smaller groups typically have just three to five students in them, so you can ask questions easily in real time and get the focus and attention you need.

From there, you can book classes based on topic and time slots that suit your schedule. All you need is a Zoom account and a stable internet connection to get started.

Normally, a one-month subscription to Lingoda retails for £119, but for a limited time, you can take 27% off and get one month for just £86.58.

Credit: Lingoda

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TikTok deleted over 7 million accounts supposedly belonging to minors

TikTok may be known for its young, viral dance craze-loving user base...but you still have to at least pretend to be 13 years or older to use it.

On Wednesday, TikTok, the viral video app that blew up in popularity during the pandemic, released its first transparency report of 2021. The report covers the first 3 months of the year.

While TikTok has released these reports before, which detail how the company deals with various forms of policy-breaking content, there was a "first" this time around.

"For the first time, we're publishing the number of suspected underage accounts removed as we work to keep the full TikTok experience a place for people 13 and over," TikTok says in the report.

And the number of accounts removed here is certainly eye-opening.

Of the 11,149,514 (yes, that's more than 11 million) accounts removed for breaking the service's community guidelines or terms of service, a whopping 7,263,952 of them were "suspected underage accounts."

And "suspected" should be stressed. There's no way to know exactly how many users under the age of 13 were actually using the service...or still are. These are accounts where users willingly entered their birthdate, identifying themselves as 12 years old or younger when signing up for the service.

That number may be high but, according to TikTok, it makes up less than 1 percent of all registered users. The company also highlighted how users under the age of 12 can sign up for a special curated version of the platform oriented to their age group — a service called TikTok for Younger Users.

While users 13 and over are allowed on the TikTok platform, the company did roll out special settings for those under the age of 18 earlier this year. The default account setting for users between 13 and 15 is set to private, and there are restrictions on who can download their videos and engage with their content. There are similar settings restrictions for users between the ages of 16 and 17 as well.

TikTok users who think they've found a perfect workaround by lying about their age may not be in the clear either. While TikTok hasn't addressed this yet, other social media platforms have before. For example, a few years ago Twitter suspended many users who were legally allowed on the platform at the time, but had put a false birth date when they were underage and set up their account.

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You're using your air fryer all wrong

The name "air fryer," frankly, is a misnomer. A brilliant marketing tactic, but a misnomer, nonetheless. An air fryer doesn't fry. Not really.

You’ve heard of air fryers. Hell, how could you not know about them at this point? If you’re on TikTok you’d need an air fryer to make nearly every other recipe produced in the last year.

But when you hear air fryer, you might, naturally, think of, well...deep fried foods. Onion rings, mozz sticks, wings, and the like. That's the power of marketing. And if there's anything Americans love, it's taking something decadent and wonderful, then watering it down so it can be consumed in large quantities. As Michael in TV's The Good Place once said of frozen yogurt vs. ice cream: "There's something so human about taking something great and ruining it a little so you can have more of it."

That is the ostensible promise of an air fryer: OK, so it won’t be fried, but it’ll be close and good. Throw some frozen chicken tenders in this sucker and bam, you’ve got a slightly healthier version of the real deal.

But if that’s how you’re using your air fryer, frankly you’re using it all wrong.

The air fryer is the perfect tool for roasting vegetables. It is particularly sent from heaven for weeknight meals. Frankly, I hardly even use my traditional oven for roasting veggies anymore — and most dinners I make involve roasted vegetables.

An air fryer is, in all intents and purposes, a convection oven. It circulates hot air in and around your food to cook it fast at high temperatures. That is, well, exactly how you’d roast vegetables in a perfect world.

Brussels sprouts, carrots, onion, sweet potatoes, broccoli, freaking whatever, here’s my method for air frying veggies:

• Cut the veggie into your desired size and shape

• Douse the hell out of the air fryer basket with cooking spray

• Dump the food in the basket

• Spray the hell out of the food (you could use oil here, too, if you desire)

• Season the veggies however you like (just make sure you include salt)

• Blast the air fryer at its top heat

• Shake the basket around to mix the veggies after about ten minutes

• The vegetables are done when they're crispy on the edges but tender inside. You should see a little char. This usually takes around 20-ish minutes.

• Eat

Follow this method and you will be rewarded with crisp, salty, beautiful, slightly charred vegetables every time. A process that would take 45 minutes and gluttonous amounts of oil in the oven takes the air fryer half the time and no oil, should you desire to cut it.

OK, so now a confession. I am an idiot: I could not, for the life of me, find photos of my lovely air-fried vegetables. And that is because — like I said — it is a perfect weeknight food, when you’re just rushing to get something finished post-work. I don't stop to take photos when I just want to relax and eat.

You’ve just got to trust me. It's almost impossible to mess up. And here, gaze upon beautiful veggies air-fried by others.

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Now of course you can use the air fryer for other things. It does do a damn fine job of cooking frozen foods. It makes a good chicken wing — though as a wing expert I contend deep frying remains tastier. You can use it for anything you'd bake or roast. I've air fried salmon, chicken, and whatever else I've needed to cook easily and quickly with little mess.

But I'd argue veggies are the only food I'd rather cook in the air fryer than any other method. If an air fryer was a one-function tool — if it only roasted vegetables — I'd still want it. You could use a convection oven to net similar results, but, typically speaking, a good convection oven is going to cost you more money, cook fewer vegetables, and be tougher to clean. My Instant Pot brand air fryer costs just $99 and has a large, nonstick basket that takes a couple of minutes to wash, at most.

So just hear me out, if you don't love you air fryer, maybe ditch the frozen foods — or don't, whatever — but definitely mix in some roasted veggies. You won't regret it.

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Google deploys new AI tool to COVID-19 vaccine searches

Google's answer to combatting COVID vaccine misinformation has been to display resources from health authorities like the CDC in information boxes on search result pages.

But the coronavirus — and COVID-related scams and fake news— have blown through international borders and language barriers.

How is Google supposed to serve up that same quality of information when people are using search terms in foreign languages that the algorithm might not recognize?

Enter: MUM. No, not someone's British mother. It's Google's new AI tool, called Multitask Unified Model, that the company says will help the search engine answer complicated queries by (among other things) pulling information from sources in "75+" languages.

First announced at the company's I/O developer conference in May, Google shared Tuesday that it has put MUM into action for its first job: Surfacing information about the coronavirus vaccine.

MUM has some information to share. Credit: Google

Google says its analysis shows that there are more than 800 variations of names for the coronavirus vaccine — like "Coronavaccin Pfizer" and "CoVaccine" — in different languages. Identifying the names, and assigning information boxes to them, is a process it says would have normally taken "weeks." However, MUM was able to do it in "seconds." Google validated that MUM's analysis of search terms was accurate, and the technology is being used for searches now.

"This first application of MUM helped us get critical information to users around the world in a timely manner," Google's blog post on the topic reads.

Google displays information from the CDC or the World Health Organization in its boxes. Google says it will also display information from "local health authorities, depending on where you're searching from."

Disseminating vaccine information is a fairly small-scale example of some potentially big changes under the Google Search hood. MUM needs fewer data inputs to generate answers, so Google Search will theoretically be able to adapt to new trends and information more quickly.

On the user end, MUM will be able to take context from pages in multiple languages to suggest more relevant search results in the user’s language. Google gives the example of someone visiting Mt. Fuji. It might use information from Japanese websites to provide a traveler better results in English.

That's not all MUM can do. Google explains it will eventually let people ask Google Search increasingly complicated questions. It can also process questions in multimedia formats; for example, it could answer a question, posed by voice, about the contents of an image. You can read a more detailed explanation of how MUM works here. And don't be surprised if you see more from MUM, soon.

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Volvo concept car previews its all-electric future

Where Volvo's going, it's all electric.

The Swedish car company showed off its electric concept car at a live tech event streamed from Gothenburg, Sweden on Wednesday. The Recharge concept will be the design foundation for future Volvo EVs.

Volvo has already pledged to only produce electric vehicles by 2030. Until then, Volvo has five plug-in hybrid versions and there's already the Volvo XC40 and forthcoming C40 Recharge, which look like electrified versions of Volvo's combustion-engine SUVs.

But now electric Volvos will have a completely new look to distinguish them from past traditional gas models.

As seen in the concept photos, the new look even has a roofline LiDAR sensor from Luminar for autonomous driving features. The sensor box on the roof emits light rays to measure distance so the car can "see" what's around it, like cars, pedestrians, or cyclists.

Glass roof complete with LiDAR. Credit: volvo

The main feature of the Recharge concept is a flat floor, under which will sit the electric battery. The first EV to be manufactured from the concept design will be an SUV with more space inside, a new glass roof, and a "shield" instead of a grille on the front.

Backside bliss. Credit: volvo

Come on in.

Credit: Volvo

An inside look at the concept.

Credit: volvo

SEE ALSO: 10 car companies coming for Tesla's EV crown

The seats have been repositioned because of the bigger inside space and flat floor, with a 15-inch touchscreen as the focal point of the interior. As part of Wednesday's tech event, Volvo also announced its own operating system called VolvoCars.OS to control the screen. There's even a plan to collect real-time data from actual driving to improve its AI-based automatic driving system. These features should make Volvos feel more like a Tesla.

According to Volvo, the Recharge concept car is intended to have a "Scandinavian living room feeling."

That's the electric future.

Stan Schroeder contributed to this report.

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Let's talk about that mid-credits scene in 'Loki' episode 4

When Loki died at the end of Thor, it seemed like a plausible end to his character. It was not. His second sacrifice in Thor: The Dark World was a more obvious fake-out. The third time, when Thanos choked him out in Avengers: Infinity War, seemed to stick, but it only took until Avengers: Endgame to reveal the variant Loki loophole that led to the god of mischief starring in his own TV show. This is all to say that when Loki the TV series killed Loki for the fourth time by pruning his variant from the sacred timeline, you'd have to have some serious pattern recognition deficiencies if you thought he was really gone.

Episode 4 of Loki took a page from Thor's book and brought Loki back in a mid credit scene, but this one did a lot more than reveal that the Loki variant was still alive — it changed the game for what the Time Variance Authority is actually up to when they prune variants and might have opened the door to an entirely new corner of the multiverse.

To begin with, that glowing stick thingy that allegedly prunes variants from all timelines is clearly not doing that. Instead of disappearing Loki (and Mobius, one must assume) from all time, the mid-credit scene showed our Loki variant waking up in a never-before-seen dimension that requires a more careful second look to make sense. In addition to showing four more Loki variants (we'll get to those in a minute), fans pointed out on Twitter that the background of this strange land appears to show a destroyed Avengers Tower.

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Avengers Tower was never destroyed in the sacred timeline, but it may have been destroyed if Loki's 2012 invasion of New York had succeeded. If this place is where variant Lokis go when they're pruned, it may be that this place is a combination of pruned timelines as well — the timelines where Loki actually won.

In the brief moments Episode 4 lets us glimpse this potentially pruned Loki-land, perhaps the Lokiverse, four new characters show up to greet our variant Loki. There's a tall Black Loki with a Mjolnir-looking hammer of his own, an older Loki wearing the comic book character's original costume, a kid Loki, and a small alligator wearing Loki's horns. Let's break those new characters down.

Boastful Loki

The credits for episode 4 name this guy Boastful Loki and reveal that he is played by Game of Thrones and Pirates of the Caribbean actor DeObia Oparei. Boastful Loki has no precedent in the comics, but his hammer is pretty cool and may indicate that he's a "worthy" Loki variant with a hammer of his own.

Classic Loki

Richard E. Grant himself plays Classic Loki, an obvious throwback to Loki's original costume complete with underwear over his tights and enormous curved horns. This isn't the first time the MCU has played with their characters' classic costumes — remember when Wanda dressed up in the original Scarlet Witch getup for Halloween in WandaVision?

Kid Loki

Would everyone please update their Young Avengers in the Disney+ MCU tallies accordingly? Kid Loki is in the house. This little whippersnapper is a fan favorite version of Loki from the comic books, where Loki was reborn into the body of a child. He still had Loki's tricky personality but was determined not to become the villain his older self was, which led to him idolizing Thor and becoming a Young Avenger for a while. If this kid sticks around, he's going to be a huge deal.

Reptile Loki

It's an alligator, not a crocodile. If you care about that sort of thing.

We don't know exactly where the mid-credit scene from episode 4 of Loki takes place, or what the part the other variant Lokis will play in the show's final two episodes, but if the pattern from WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier holds up, a mid-credit scene marks the point where Disney+ Marvel shows start getting real about what's going on. Whatever that is, it's sure to be a mischievous good time.

Loki is streaming on Disney+.

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Twitter's giving away NFTs for free (it's hard to put a price on worthless)

Twitter's making it rain NFTs.

On Wednesday, the social media giant announced its intention to give away 140 non-fungible tokens hosted on the Rarible marketplace. Unlike Reddit, which just last week listed its own NFTs for sale, Twitter decided not to charge for these digital trading cards — perhaps in an unspoken acknowledgment that the longterm NFT value proposition is, at best, unclear.

With the help of Rarible, Twitter minted 20 NFTs (i.e., created ERC-721 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain describing corresponding pieces of art) for each of the seven different pieces of digital art, sporting titles like "Furry Twitter," "Vitamin T," and "Reply Guy."

Notably, those lucky enough to be gifted one of these things — the prerequisite for which (from all outside appearances) involves simply tweeting at Twitter or tweeting about the giveaway and the company DMing you directions on how to claim the NFT — don't actually own the art or any rights to it. That's because NFTs often don't actually contain any art. Instead, they typically point to or describe something that exists in the world somewhere else.

That appears to be the case here, too.

In its NFT terms of service (which is listed on the InterPlanetary File System), Twitter lays out exactly what it's giving away.

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"The Artwork and Brand are neither stored nor embedded in the NFT, but are accessible through the NFT," explains the TOS. "Although the NFT itself is owned by the recipient of the NFT, the Artwork and Brand associated with the NFT is licensed and not transferred or sold to such recipient."

When asked about this, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed as much. The spokesperson also added that the NFT recipient doesn't own the rights to the artwork itself, or any Twitter IP.

This latter point isn't surprising, and is similar to buying a print of a famous piece of art. You can hang the poster in your dorm room, but you can't reproduce it and sell copies. Except with Twitter's NFTs, you don't even own the poster (to continue the analogy), but rather a digital token describing the contents of the poster and where it's being kept.

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Importantly, while Twitter is not selling this batch of 140 NFTs, that doesn't mean it won't sell NFTs in the future. When asked about any plans to do so at a later point in time, the spokesperson replied only that the company had nothing to share.

Bloomberg reports that a Twitter spokesperson told the publication it had no NFT plans other than this campaign.

The motivation behind this NFT drop, according to the Twitter spokesperson, was simply to highlight the existing discussion of NFTs on the platform and make it easier for Twitter users to get in on the NFT fun.

The spokesperson did confirm, though, that the recipients (aka new owners) can sell the NFTs on the Rarible marketplace if they choose to do so. Which makes sense, as the Twitter NFT TOS is written in such a way as to cover "a subsequent transfer or purchase."

Tweet may have been deleted

It's worth noting that some NFTs are structured in such a way, dubbed the "royalty system," so that every future sale kicks back a percentage of that sale, in perpetuity, to the NFT's creator.

We asked Twitter if this current batch of NFTs is set up in a similar way, and the spokesperson replied that recipients can sell them or keep them, and Twitter won't take a cut.

As of the time of this writing, Twitter has given away at least a few of the NFTs, and one such example is still listed as "Not for sale." The new owner of the "Furry Twitter" NFT may just be holding onto it for a while before he re-lists it for sale, however.

Still not for sale. Credit: screenshot / rarible

With this initial batch of 140, it appears that Twitter is testing the water to see what, if anything, Twitter-minted NFTs are worth.

SEE ALSO: So you spent millions on an NFT. Here's what you actually bought.

The great thing about being in a possible bubble is that the rest of us won't have to wait long to find out — one way, or another.

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How to change Alexa’s voice

Fun fact: Alexa can speak in a variety of languages and accents that you have access to on your Alexa app.

You can change Alexa’s voice settings just for kicks, sure. But the voice settings also come in handy if you have a family member or friend who speaks another language and needs to be able to use the Alexa system. Whether for practicality or just for fun, here’s how to change Alexa’s voice settings:

1. Open the Alexa app.

2. Tap “More” (the three lines icon).

3. Select “Settings.”

4. Select your “Device Settings.”

5. You’ll see all of your Alexa devices on the next screen. Select the device you want to change.

6. Select “Language.”

7. You can then select the language and/or accent you want Alexa to speak in. Pick your preference, and tap “OK.”

The new setting may take a few minutes to implement, but Alexa will then speak in the language/accent you selected. Amazon Help is also there for all of your Alexa needs.

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What universal healthcare should look like

What universal healthcare should look like

The struggle to cover every American may continue for decades — and we need to think differently about cheap health tech and prevention first.

by Chris Taylor

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NOTE FOR 2021 READERS: This is the 17th in a series of award-winning open letters to the next century, now just one generation away. Kids born this year in the U.S., and nearly 50 other countries, are expected to live to 2100 and beyond. These letters examine what the world could look like then — and how we can make the best scenario happen. 

Dear 22nd Century,

If you still have such a thing as a doctor’s office, it might look something like the one I walked into in San Francisco the other week — one with no paperwork, no tablets, no visible computers at all. Instead, at a five-year-old startup called Forward Health, a doctor asked questions for nearly two hours in front of a giant touchscreen with a model of my body. We covered the interconnection of everything, from allergies to diet to workouts to that ultimate stress reducer, mindfulness. Summaries of my answers appeared on screen, not yet written by AI, but by trained medical scribes listening in remotely. At first that seemed slightly creepy, but I soon saw the point: For the first time in my medical life, a physician didn’t have to spend half his time playing stenographer in a secret file. We were both on the same virtual page.

Most of my vital signs for the last decade were already on the screen when we began, since I’d granted access to my Apple Health app. My genome would follow after I downloaded the raw data from 23andMe. Analysis of a blood draw appeared in just 12 minutes; its 75 biomarkers revealed internal organs in robust good health (only my fasting glucose was a little elevated; something to keep an eye on, given a family history of diabetes). The next visit would do a deep dive on genetics; the one after that would test me for the top five most deadly cancers. In-between, there would be some gentle nudging and nagging via the Forward app, as my doctor saw new at-home readings from my Bluetooth scales or blood pressure monitor.

So yes, maybe this is a 22nd century healthcare experience. Or maybe it just looks that way because healthcare in 2021 is so far behind where it should be. Most of us are carrying around smartphones that know more about us than our doctors do, and most of our doctors don’t even think to sync up with the phone data, or to get this deep into the weeds of preventative medicine. “People walk into our exam room and go “oh my god, I’ve seen the future,” says Adrian Aoun, the founder and CEO of Forward Health. “I’m like, ‘you know, they have touchscreens in McDonald's. It’s just that you didn’t see the past.’”

In fact, our antiquated healthcare system is such an embarrassment that I’m almost reluctant to discuss it — except for the fact that you may well be struggling with the same legacy problems, even eight decades hence. After all, it’s been nearly eight decades since a U.S. president first tried to pass a universal healthcare law, only to run into a buzzsaw of special interests. 

All those incremental legislative victories since, all that trench warfare against the same “socialized medicine” boogeymen, and what have we achieved? There were more than 29 million Americans without health insurance in 2019, compared to 28 million in 2018. The COVID-19 pandemic likely threw a million more people off the insurance rolls in 2020. Medical bills are the number one reason Americans declare bankruptcy; skyrocketing premiums and deductibles, plus money-hungry for-profit hospitals, mean even the insured aren’t protected from it. And as much as I adore having been born into a universal healthcare system that will bankrupt no one, the UK’s beloved National Health Service (NHS), its recent underfunding and record wait times aren’t much to boast about either.

But slowly, quietly, on both sides of the Atlantic, a technological revolution in preventative care is underway — one that may slash healthcare spending and usher in a truly universal, actually 22nd century-style wellness regime for everyone. As I wrote this letter, word came from the NHS of a breakthrough blood test that can detect relatively early signs of tumors in up to 50 cancers; I also found a UK company using the NHS’ massive data sets to catch cancer development at an even earlier stage. The gene-editing technology CRISPR just casually shot down one rare disease, a foreshadowing of future victories, one perhaps against Alzheimer’s. A coming wave of mRNA vaccines, buoyed by their success against COVID-19, could treat everything from malaria to various cancers (an mRNA skin cancer vaccine entered phase 2 clinical trials as I wrote this). 

And at a more prosaic level, many of the advances we’ve discussed — more red meat replacements and indoor vegetable farms for everyone — cannot help but cut the body count from top killers like diabetes and heart disease.

Looked at through one lens, Forward Health seems like it could be part of the problem: It’s a for-profit Silicon Valley startup with frothy amounts of funding ($225 million in its latest round, including a de rigeur celebrity investment, from The Weeknd). The 12-minute blood tests, as much as they seem to work, remind us of recent blood test-tech huckster Elizabeth Holmes. Forward’s primary care services cost $149 a month, on top of any other insurance you might have, and are currently only available to the usual suspects, the well-heeled citizens of LA, New York, Chicago, SF, and Washington, D.C. 

Those of us who worry about a two-tier 22nd century healthcare system, with a sparkling, polished, cancer-vaccinated, gene-edited elite on the one hand and a vast brink-of-bankruptcy underclass on the other, will find much to fear here.

On the other hand, maybe it’s exactly the sort of company we need to help cure America’s addiction to spending on sickness treatment (expected to reach $5.4 trillion, or 20 percent of U.S. GDP, in 2024). Maybe Forward and its ilk can disrupt this $11 trillion industry by being the smartphones of healthcare — getting the masses hooked on treating their health like a video game where the object is to have as few troubling biomarkers as possible. 

The $149 a month cost may be expensive now (though it is the same as Medicare Part B, the government insurance we fantasize about making available to everyone, which, in addition to general medical services like diagnostics and ambulances, covers only one major preventative visit per year and one screening for the country’s biggest killer, cardiovascular disease, every five years). That’s the company’s business plan, to keep expanding and driving down the cost and adding more services, like its new purpose-built skin cancer scanner, until the cost plummets well below monthly premiums.

“I want to keep going until Forward is as close to zero fucking dollars as possible,” says Aoun. “That’s not a joke. Not a euphemism. Literally, I would like to charge $0. And we want to keep adding value until we’ve built out the entire healthcare system.”

If preventative care becomes a big enough deal that it eases pressure off the hospital system, then the massive subsidies we’re already spending on healthcare may be able to cover more costs. Insurance premiums, Medicare included, may plummet if they only have to cover the truly unavoidable, like accidents and rare diseases. More preventive care means fewer people on long-term drug regimens. Shorn of big payouts, Big Pharma may be forced to actually innovate again, focusing on smarter drugs and next-generation brain-stimulation tech. Maybe they can figure out how to prevent the antibiotic resistance apocalypse along the way.

It won’t be all sunshine and roses, of course, because this is healthcare we’re talking about: a field where 100 percent of all users die eventually, even if they make it to age 150 first. The employer-based insurance system will probably get worse before it vanishes altogether. Our employers aren’t always motivated to prevent long-term health problems if you’re only going to be with them for a few years on average — well, beyond the WW memberships and fitness trackers they offer in return for discounts on insurance costs — but they are motivated to peek into your genome to see if they should bother keeping you around. As laws loosen on sharing medical data, there will be some life-saving outcomes for patients; there will also be disastrous unintended consequences. The threat of genetic discrimination, like racial discrimination, looms large in many walks of life.

But if any iniquity can make a majority of the U.S. Congress finally, properly bring the health industry and its rapacious cost curve to heel, genetic discrimination will be it. By the time you arrive, 80 years in our future, Americans may finally have what we could have had for the past 80 years: Genuinely universal healthcare, prevention-focused and treated as a human right, for as close to zero fucking dollars out of pocket as possible.

A tale of two systems

FREE FOR ALL

Labour health minister Aneurin "Nye" Bevan, creator of the NHS, greets a patient in a newly nationalized hospital in 1948.

Edward G Malindine / Getty Images

In the early 21st century, honed by so much Obamacare-era combat on the issue, our attitudes to healthcare have hardened into tribal loyalties. “Medicare for all” is the rallying cry of the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren left, who rarely stop to think about the fact that Medicare itself is too damn complicated and expensive, with giant coverage holes. (But hey, at least it won’t bankrupt you.) Most opponents on the right don’t defend the current system so much as spread fear with emotive, well-worn, battle-tested slogans like “government-run healthcare” and “socialized medicine.” So long as I live, I will never forget the cognitive dissonance of a protest sign from 2010: “Get your damn government hands off my Medicare.”

My attitude is no less tribal. I was born and grew up in the UK, which means that like most Brits I worship at the altar of the almighty NHS, which was born from the cataclysm of World War II. As bombs fell on our cities, a government of national unity — Conservatives, Labour, and Liberals — caught the mood of the nation, which was that all this death and destruction had to be for something. We had to build a better world after the war, one in which ordinary people weren’t so miserably sick of treatable diseases all the time.

“A revolutionary moment in world history is a time for revolutions, not for patching,” said the government’s Beveridge Report in 1942, recommending “comprehensive health and rehabilitation services for prevention and cure of disease” regardless of wealth. The report was a sensation. Some Conservatives tried to dampen the public’s enthusiasm in the 1945 election. Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself tried socialist fearmongering; he said the Labour Party would require some kind of “gestapo” to set up a state-run health service. A war-weary electorate wasn’t buying it, and the hero of the nation lost to Labour in a landslide.

Labour health minister Aneurin Bevan established the NHS in 1948, essentially nationalizing all hospitals over Conservative objections. "No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means," Bevan famously said, and it was (and still is) hard to disagree. Ever since then, the NHS has been as popular, and politically untouchable, as Social Security in the U.S. Politicians of all stripes have competed to boast (and often lie) about how much greater they will make it, and how their opponents will destroy it. A tribute to the NHS, full of dancing nurses and whirling hospital beds, was the centerpiece of the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony. The Brexit referendum of 2016 would not have succeeded without the Leave campaign’s infamous claim that it would spend European Union membership dues on the NHS.

When I moved to the U.S. in the 1990s, the loss of the NHS was the one thing I felt most deeply. I was shocked by the amount of repetitive paperwork involved in the American system, and outraged by the cost of everything, even then. Linking healthcare and any amount of cash seemed sacrilegious, and I remember my muted rage when my first doctor’s office casually requested its $10 insurance copay. Having to wait more than a day to see a GP was as alien as the free use of pharmaceutical “samples” was sinister. I would watch Americans decry the supposed long wait times and creaking infrastructure of the UK’s “socialized medicine” and thought: Oh brother, if only you knew.

Still, as hard as it is for me to admit, the NHS is nowhere near the top of the world in many measures. In the latest ranking of global healthcare systems in the medical journal The Lancet, based on their abilities to treat and prevent a range of diseases, the UK comes in at number 23. The U.S., despite spending the most of any nation, comes in at 29. That’s all I’ve been quibbling about, a meager six places? Most of the rest of Europe, Canada, and Australia are finding better outcomes with their single-payer healthcare systems. Scandinavian countries at the very top of the list have the benefit of great wealth (hello, Norwegian oil revenues!) and widespread acceptance of high taxes. They also boast preventative care-friendly populations that just like to eat healthier and exercise more.

That said, the NHS’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout showed the advantages of this utterly centralized system over its slower single-payer brethren in the rest of Europe. All that street-level love for the NHS provides it with a large number of volunteers for various trials, which created the conditions for that 50-cancer-detecting blood test. Centralized record-keeping allows high-tech startups to come in and mine years of data for clues about which conditions (like a high blood platelet count, or elevated levels of calcium) may lead a patient to develop certain kinds of cancer in the long run.

“We’re focused on a cheap and easy blood test,” says Giles Tully, CEO of a UK machine-learning company called Pinpoint Data Science that is working with the NHS to detect cancer as early as possible, and prioritize urgent cases. By the 22nd century, he says, the blood test should be able to tell you “when your cancer is just flipping into stage 1” — that is, when cancerous cells have gathered into a tumor about a millimeter thick. You’ll have a “micropore” device at home, one that can poke your skin to gather blood without actually making you bleed; stick it into your smartphone and your doctor will be able to start honing in on the location of the tiny tumor. A computer-guided, highly-focused radiation treatment called a Gamma Knife could then zap the rebel cells with minimal damage to the body, and none of the side effects of expensive chemo drugs.

“The NHS has got this beautiful vision to it, and that’s holding the whole damn thing together,” Tully says. “It isn’t trying to make loads of money or run the country, it’s trying to stop people from dying. You need a universal system like that into which innovators can plug their cool new stuff.”

For now, though great strides are being made in preventative care, the NHS is still spending the bulk of its funding on the wrong side of the equation. British politicians’ obsession with competing to build more hospitals — Prime Minister Boris Johnson won the 2019 election promising 40 new hospitals, another fib in itself — just means they’re better at treating sickness than preventing it. Nobody wins elections promising to curb the nation’s addictions to alcohol, crisps, chocolate, and all manner of fried fast food. “Declines in mortality have not been matched by similar declines in morbidity, resulting in people living longer with diseases,” chides another Lancet report looking at the NHS. “Health policies must address the causes of ill health.”

That chiding goes double for the U.S., of course. But it does mean that if and when my adopted homeland chooses to create its own NHS — a Department of Universal Healthcare, perhaps — it can create a truly futuristic system. One based on constant preventative health monitoring that molds itself around the American obsession with self-improvement. And if it helps with motivation, Americans can imagine crowing about it the moment they leapfrog those arrogant Brits in the global health rankings.

The healthcare civil war

The U.S. should have had a huge head start in preventative healthcare, given that the entire field can be summarized by one of the most famous phrases ever written by a Founding Father. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: Ben Franklin was actually talking about fire prevention, but that in itself is a great metaphor for healthcare. Just don’t create the conditions for so many fires in your body. But while Americans have long accepted that government-funded fire departments are necessary for the public good, the same can not be said for government-funded healthcare.

When I first contemplated this letter, I thought it inevitable that universal healthcare would arrive in the U.S. sooner rather than later. How much longer can this country rationalize being the only developed nation in the world without any kind of national healthcare guarantee? Sure, it can take a disaster on the scale of World War II to enact that level of social change, as it did in the UK and much of Europe. “Inequality never dies peacefully,” says historian Walter Schiedel in his sobering study of what it took to win welfare programs around the world, The Great Leveler.

Pandemics are one of the levelers Schiedel studied, and for a while it looked like COVID-19 would count as a great enough shock to the system. Surely we wouldn’t have to go further down the road of likely 21st century health crises, many of them caused by a changing climate and humans encroaching on animal territory, before we figured out that this patchwork of private insurance, for-profit hospitals and overlapping agencies wasn’t fit for purpose? Just as 9/11 gave us one security agency to rule them all, perhaps COVID would reveal the crying need for a Department of Universal Healthcare — so obviously necessary that its very acronym is DUH.

A refresher on the last 80 years of American history, and its healthcare battle Groundhog Days, soon disabused me of that notion. Even in 1945, in the wake of World War II, President Harry Truman failed to get his universal healthcare bill through a friendly Congress controlled by Democrats. The American Medical Association slammed it as — you guessed it — “socialized medicine.” 

The AMA compromised, if you can call it that, by backing a system of private insurance instead, which is what remains in place to this day. Twenty years later, during the liberal highwater mark of the Great Society, the best Lyndon Johnson could do was to institute Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly and needy. Which is great, but a far cry from Truman’s universal coverage. And even LBJ still had to face the charge, shrieked by Cold Warriors like Ronald Reagan, that Medicare would lead to Soviet-style dictatorship.

Almost the exact same story played out at another 20-year interval, from the 1990s to the 2010s: an ambitious proposal followed by a compromise that could actually get through a Democratic Congress. First came the 1994 universal healthcare bill derided as Hillarycare, which was the reason for the first American political rally I ever attended: The Portland stop on Hillary Clinton’s 1994 “Reform Riders” bus tour. The First Lady, who had agreed to start wearing a bulletproof vest after death threats, was inaudible over a crowd filled with Rush Limbaugh listeners.

I still vividly remember the guy in the Uncle Sam costume on stilts screaming “the government’s too big,” the woman standing beside me with the “Hillary makes me sick” sign, and the reporter who came up afterwards and said, “hi, I’m with the New York Times. Why does she make you sick?” At the time, in my naive youth, it seemed like a blip in the road to inevitable progressive victory. Now I see how much of the reactionary future was embedded in that moment.

Almost two decades after the death of Hillarycare came Obamacare, slowly and painfully compromising its way through a Democratic Congress that actually had enough senators to overcome the inevitable Republican filibuster. In a sane media landscape, the Affordable Care Act would have been widely identified as a moderate GOP proposal that originated from the conservative Heritage Foundation and was first instituted by the Republican governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney.

But this was the age of the Tea Party, itself misidentified as a grassroots organization rather than the Koch-brother-funded entity that historians now see it as. Fearing a Hillarycare-style debacle, President Obama preemptively abandoned the one part of the ACA that would have made the most difference, the public option: Health insurance from the government that would compete with regular insurers on the ACA marketplaces. (Even now, according to a 2020 RAND study, a public option would lower premiums by as much as 27 percent, while cutting government healthcare spending overall).

PARTY FOUL

In 2009, Tea Partiers claimed that modest improvements in the numbers of uninsured Americans would lead to "death panels."

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Eleven tumultuous years later, Obamacare has been watered down by a GOP Congress and president that did all they could to kill the law. A single vote from the late Sen. John McCain famously saved it from repeal. But only now in June 2021, finally, is it seen as safe after the Supreme Court declined by a 7-2 vote to give GOP states standing to challenge it.

The public option remains enormously popular, more so than Medicare For All; in multiple recent polls, as many as 70 percent of the U.S. population support the idea. As does President Biden. But with the Democrats holding the slimmest majority in the Senate, and two of their senators refusing to undo the increasingly troublesome filibuster rule that has all but brought legislation to a halt over the last 14 years, new public option legislation seems dead in the water. 

And that’s not even reckoning with the steadfast opposition of the American Hospital Association. We can’t even get single-payer healthcare passed at the state level thanks to such special interests, as the latest healthcare news from the murky world of New York politics just proved.

Perhaps there will still be incremental healthcare gains in this Congress. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has just backed a Bernie Sanders plan to add dental, vision and hearing coverage to Medicare, which may be included in an upcoming infrastructure bill. To which my immediate response was: Oh for crying out loud, dental, vision, and hearing aren’t already covered? Tell me again why Medicare For All should count as true universal healthcare? Biden and congressional Democrats are also pushing another popular and heartbreakingly unlikely improvement, lowering the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 60.

Which would chip another 1.6 million off the rolls of 30 million uninsured Americans, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. But another analysis by consulting firm Avalere Health suggests that many of those patients would get a better deal on the ACA marketplaces than with Medicare’s dizzying range of surprisingly expensive plans.

If the opportunity for truly major healthcare legislation is running on its historical schedule, we won’t see another push until the 2030s — which itself may fail, as the 1945 and 1994 efforts did. In which case, we can expect the next Medicare/Obamacare-style incremental success (the public option, perhaps?) to pass sometime in the 2050s, then come under sustained political and legal assault in the 2060s. (Which may be when the raft of judges Donald Trump appointed to the federal bench will be in the prime of their power.) 

Another noble healthcare law failure would be due in the 2070s, before the U.S. would be on target to finally, maybe, get a Department of Universal Healthcare across the line in the 2090s, just in time for the Americans of your era to argue endlessly about its government overreach.

Even this timeline may be too optimistic, given the GOP’s current lurch towards vote-suppressing authoritarianism, QAnon irrationality, and the Democrats’ dithering in the face of these threats. Which is why I reluctantly conclude that the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley offer the best hope in the short- to mid-term of changing the healthcare landscape to our ultimate benefit.

Because if we’re all going to be walking around with smartphones and smart watches anyway, we might as well use them as the foundation of a newer, healthier digital culture.

Who’s going to save our health now?

Back at Forward Health, CEO Adrian Aoun certainly doesn’t sound like the greatest friend that universal healthcare advocates ever had. He calls the idea that healthcare is a human right “absurd.” He derides the NHS by insisting there’s “no way” I would move back to the UK if I needed cancer treatment. (Not true!) His role models for the company are not healthcare heroes, but Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, both of whom constructed business models that Wall Street consistently failed to understand, for decades, until their success was assured.

But the fact that his brother had a heart attack at an early age gave Aoun religion when it comes to preventative care. “I didn’t pay attention before then,” he says. “I was like ‘I’m young, I’m healthy, I’m good to go.’ And then he’s there in a hospital bed, this well-to-do guy in New York City, the best doctors all surrounding him, and I’m thinking ‘man, if there was just one doctor a year before telling him not to eat so goddamn much, maybe we wouldn’t be here.’”

Thanks to that revelation, so profoundly obvious in retrospect, Aoun’s ambition doesn’t just extend to remaking the entire global health industry. The food industry is an integral part of the puzzle too. “Healthcare is not woven into what we do,” he says. “When I walk into a restaurant, why is there not a menu personalized for my health? How have we not gotten to that level?” Indeed, we’re getting closer to such a thing, now that federal law mandates fast food chains add calorie counts to menus. Perhaps by your era, more precise menus tailored to your genome and your health goals will be a thing. But in the short term, the entire $11 trillion U.S. healthcare industry will have to do as a target.

To remake it, we’re all going to have to get involved. As someone who has spent the last decade increasingly obsessed with my fitness stats — first on Fitbit, then on Apple Watch — and who has used the meditation wearable Muse to launch a friendly mindfulness contest, I can confirm that the nudges involved in a regular socially-driven healthy lifestyle really do work. I suspect they’ll work even more if your primary care physician is in on the action too. Training for a 5K, say, may be worth it for the plaudits you receive online from friends; it’ll feel even better with your doctor enthusing about how many months you just added to your life. 

Aoun agrees. “Every other part of my life is continuous,” he says. “Facebook is continuous. Why is healthcare not continuous? Why am I demanding more from my social media apps than my doctor?”

“Our traditional healthcare system is disease maintenance,” says Kevin Peake, president of LA-based Next Health, another obsessively-focused preventative primary care startup. “Once what we do is normalized, taking part in your internal health will be like going to the gym.” Peake believes we’re on the cusp of two major changes during the 2020s: Insurance companies belatedly covering more than one or two preventative care visits a year, and a new focus on the anti-aging therapies we covered in a previous letter.

To that end, Next goes a few miles further than Forward; not just looking for a larger number of micronutrients in the blood (which can slow aging and degenerative diseases) and scoping out inflammation-creating food allergies. The buzzworthy-but-still-experimental services it offers include exosomes (cellular components that may help trigger antitumor immune responses), hyperbaric oxygen therapy (which may heal some serious infections and wounds), three-minute full-body cryotherapy (super low temperatures can make your cells more resilient to everything), and potentially the most transformative tech of all, stem-cell therapy. It has a price tag to match: Next Health memberships range from $199 to $299 a month.

But this isn’t just about the big, flashy, expensive, high-tech therapies. There is so much more we could be doing with our healthcare dollars in the preventative care field that we’ve barely even begun. Just walking briskly 30 minutes a day could cut Type II diabetes diagnoses by 50 percent, a 2016 study suggests; some insurers already offer discounts for customers who use fitness trackers, so perhaps the government could turn the same idea into an official subsidy. A 2017 study found that if just 18 percent more elementary school kids exercise for 25 minutes three times a week, their healthcare cost reductions add up to $21.9 billion over a lifetime. 

Building more green spaces in cities, banning soda in schools, investing in anti-smoking and nutrition programs: There are proven and surprising ways to reduce the healthcare load everywhere you look, at every level of government.

One roadblock that ambitious startups like Next and Forward could run into as they expand is a shortage of primary care doctors. The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates there could be a shortfall of up to 124,000 frontline physicians by 2034. Then again, medical colleges do have a vested interest in making such a claim. Another analysis from Harvard Business Review suggests that the estimated 190,000 primary care physicians we’ll have in 2025 should be enough to cover more than twice the U.S. population.

But there’s no getting around the fact that physicians are drowning in paperwork, which takes roughly a third of a primary care doctor’s time. Forward-style remote scribing, and increasing use of AI in medical analysis, could solve that. Another is that doctors are unevenly distributed, preferring to cluster in big cities rather than go out into the rural communities that so desperately need them. To be sure, if the COVID-19 pandemic is good for anything, it has at least normalized remote video visits. But we’re going to have to work out more strategies for getting people seen for the problems that a video visit and other remote data, like that of a smartphone, can’t detect.

Which would be another reason for the U.S. to adopt more of a centralized healthcare system that can manage supply and demand — or at least do better than a market-based system where the doctors can move to where the wealth is, but poorer patients can’t just move to where the doctors are.

By the time you arrive, if you’re lucky, our current healthcare system will look impossibly barbaric. Scaled-up technological solutions, multiple mRNA vaccines, a maniacal focus on preventative care, and on aging as the root cause of most suffering, plus a long-delayed DUH at the national level may improve outcomes and drive down costs to the point where you spend less on healthcare than we do. Nevertheless, I hope you continue to fight tooth and nail to reduce whatever inequality and imperfect outcomes remain lodged in the system.

Yours in good health,

2021

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How to use Portrait Mode in FaceTime with iOS 15

If you're my best friend, I'm happy to FaceTime you from my most unflattering angle. In fact, I insist on it. But if I'm meeting someone for the first time via video chat, then I'm looking for the best lighting and probably staring at my own little square more than whoever's on the other end.

With iOS 15, the iPhone's latest software update (currently available in beta), we all get one more FaceTime trick to feed our egos and look our best: Portrait Mode.

OK, yes, technically Portrait Mode only changes your background and not your actual face. But something about that smoothed-out scene behind you makes everyone look a little better. Think about how good your Portrait Mode photos look!

Whether you're going on a first date via FaceTime or making a more professional video call, turning on Portrait Mode in FaceTime is worth it and super simple.

Choose your video-chatting partner

On iOS 15, you FaceTime call someone the same ways you always have: Pull up their contact card, find their contact info via iMessage, or go straight into the FaceTime app. There is one slight change: Now when you pull up your texts with someone, the FaceTime icon will display to the right of their name, making FaceTime calls even easier.

Tap on your video feed during calls

Bigger picture of me! Amazing for my already huge ego. Credit: screenshot: apple

A small window of your video feed should appear in the lower righthand corner as it usually does on FaceTime, although the iOS 15 version seems a bit bigger than the previous version.

Oh, look. It only gets bigger. Credit: screenshot: apple

When you tap on it, it should get even bigger and display four icons in each corner: Portrait Mode, minimize, effects, and camera view.

Turn on Portrait Mode

Bada bing, bada boom. Bring on the blur. Credit: screenshot: apple

Tap on the icon in the upper left corner of your video feed, and presto! Your background should immediately blur, effectively hiding any garish details and making your gorgeous face the center of attention.

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U.S. to add 'X' gender markers to passports without requiring medical documentation

United States passports and IDs are about to get a long-overdue update.

On Wednesday, just before Pride month came to an end, the Biden administration announced plans to issue passports and IDs that feature "X" gender markers, which can be selected without providing medical documentation.

Per The 19th — a nonprofit that reports on news related to gender, politics, and policy — the American people will soon be able to choose between "M," "F," and "X" on these federal documents. The addition will give transgender, non-binary, and intersex individuals the freedom to identify as gender neutral or a gender different from the one listed on their birth certificate. And eliminating the need for transgender people to provide proof of gender transition from a medical professional will allow them to self-identify freely.

Tweet may have been deleted

Those familiar with Joe Biden's LGBTQ policies will recall that he promised to "affirm one's gender marker and expand access to accurate identification documents" during his campaign.

"Transgender and non-binary people without identification documents that accurately reflect their gender identity are often exposed to harassment and violence and denied employment, housing, critical public benefits, and even the right to vote," the president's campaign website JoeBiden.com explains.

Biden promised that as president he would push for gender-neutral IDs, and this is a noteworthy followthrough on that push for equality.

Though the exact timeframe for when people can expect to have access to "X" gender markers on documents remains unclear, per Reuters, the State Department is "evaluating the best approach to achieve this goal."

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Meet the gender-inclusive crew of dummies heading to the moon

Before any humans head back to the moon in the near future, three dummies are testing it out in NASA's Artemis 1 mission. One is a full male-bodied manikin; the other two are female-bodied torsos. The varied manikin bodies — made with materials that simulate the stuff that makes up humans, like our skin, bones, and organs — will provide scientists important, inclusive data about radiation for future Artemis astronauts in 2023 and beyond.

NASA announced the name of the full manikin Tuesday: Commander Moonikin Campos. The name was chosen through a public poll that received more than 300,000 votes. The last name of Campos was picked in honor of Arturo Campos, who helped direct the Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to Earth after an oxygen tank failed on their spacecraft.

Commander Moonikin Campos will be decked out in a full Orion Crew Survival System suit, the same that astronauts will wear in phases of future Artemis missions. Campos is also donning a couple of sensors to detect the amount of radiation that astronauts could encounter inside the Orion spacecraft.

The female-bodied torsos, aka phantoms, were named Helga and Zohar in 2020 by the German Aerospace Center and Israel Space Agency, respectively. With radiation sensors embedded throughout their bodies, they'll be testing out an AstroRad vest designed to protect astronauts' vital organs from radiation. Zohar will be wearing the vest and Helga will not, allowing scientists to determine the effectiveness of the clothing.

Using female-bodied phantoms allows scientists to measure how radiation could effect women, as women tend to have a greater sensitivity to radiation than men, NASA noted in 2020. AstroRad vests have already been worn by astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) to test their fit, comfort, and mobility.

Zohar and Helga are pictured here Credit:

NASA has historically failed women in its astronaut program, excluding them entirely in the first 19 years. Astronaut Sally Ride was the first woman selected for the agency's program, becoming the first U.S. woman to enter space in 1983. Of the 339 Americans that have been to space, just 45 have been women.

SEE ALSO: How NASA's Perseverance is making oxygen on Mars

The Artemis program has been touting that it will send the first woman and person of color to the moon in the coming years. Using female-bodied manikins in the Artemis 1 mission is key to creating inclusive designs and compiling inclusive data for scientists and astronauts going forward, and shows that NASA's promises aren't empty.

Artemis 1, expected to launch later in 2021, will be a three-week trip around the moon and back. Artemis 2, NASA's first crewed mission to the moon since the '70s, is expected to launch in 2023 and will also circle the moon before returning to Earth. The crew for Artemis 2 has not yet been determined.

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