Thanks to Jason Kottke, I came across CBC Uncover: Escaping NXIVM:

NXIVM calls itself a humanitarian community. Experts call it a cult. Uncover: Escaping NXIVM is an investigative podcast series about the group, its leader Keith Raniere and one woman’s journey to get out.

This is a great podcast and if you liked Serial, Making a Murderer, and others like it, definitely check it out. It’s available on just about every podcast platform you can think of.

Netflix comes at us with a new tale about Robert the Bruce, King of Scots. Coming November 9th to the service and select theaters, this is Outlaw King. 

As a part of his latest special, 100% Fresh, out now on Netflix, Adam Sandler drops a beat on about what most of us carry always: a phone, wallet, and keys.

Killer reporting from Daisuke Wakabayashi and Katie Benner over at The New York Times:

Mr. Rubin was one of three executives that Google protected over the past decade after they were accused of sexual misconduct. In two instances, it ousted senior executives, but softened the blow by paying them millions of dollars as they departed, even though it had no legal obligation to do so. In a third, the executive remained in a highly compensated post at the company. Each time Google stayed silent about the accusations against the men.

Shocker. However you interpret this, Rubin denied the coercion on Twitter, but not the payments.

The article goes into detail about a host of other accounts too:

In 2013, Richard DeVaul, a director at Google X, the company’s research and development arm, interviewed Star Simpson, a hardware engineer. During the job interview, she said he told her that he and his wife were “polyamorous,” a word often used to describe an open marriage. She said he invited her to Burning Man, an annual festival in the Nevada desert, the following week.

Um, creepy?

At Mr. DeVaul’s encampment, Ms. Simpson said, he asked her to remove her shirt and offered a back rub. She said she refused. When he insisted, she said she relented to a neck rub.

“I didn’t have enough spine or backbone to shut that down as a 24-year-old,” said Ms. Simpson, now 30.

A few weeks later, Google told her she did not get the job, without explaining why.

…She said the official asked her to stay quiet about what had happened, which she did — until Mr. DeVaul’s public profile began rising in articles in The New York Times and The Atlantic.

I don’t want to spoil too much of this. Just read it. It’s really good.

From Polygon:

Now we’re getting somewhere. Cameras and photographs are just one way of seeing the world, a way that in so many regards does not reflect the way that we see. But there are other ways of creating an image, and Garbut’s explanation of Red Dead Redemption 2’s philosophy of lighting, well, paints a picture, if you’ll pardon the expression.

“[We] looked to reality, we looked to the places that we were riffing from. […] However, there were certain areas like lighting where there were some direct inspirations. Owen Shepherd, our lighting director, looked to the pastoral and landscape painters like Turner, Rembrandt and American landscape painters from the 19th century such as Albert Bierstadt, Frank Johnson, and Charles Russell.”

In my opinion, that’s not where Red Dead Redemption 2’s painterly influences stop, but it’s a great place to begin.

This is a great piece by Arthur Gies and the images are stunning. I started playing RDR2 last night when it opened up at midnight EST (9pm at my home) and the visuals are simply stunning. The game is almost 100GB in size and after seeing some of the scenes capes so far in the game, it’s totally worth it. 

(featured image: Red Dead Redemption 2, courtesy of Rockstar by way of Polygon)