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There were plenty of times over the past year when Manchester United could have fired Erik ten Hag, said Will Unwin in The Guardian. The Dutchman's position had been under "constant scrutiny" since Jim Ratcliffe purchased a 25% stake in the club.

And, prior to United's shock FA Cup final win over Manchester City in May, there'd been a growing consensus that his time was up: he'd just guided his team to an eighth-placed finish in the Premier League, their lowest ever, and United's top brass were known to be talking to other coaches. Yet in the event, they extended his contract, hoping that he might turn things around. This week, however, their patience finally ran out: after a dismal 2-1 defeat at West Ham that left United 14th in the league, and "fearful of another season outside the Champions League", United sacked ten Hag and installed Ruud van Nistelrooy as interim boss.

Better late than never, said James Ducker in The Daily Telegraph. United have been going backwards under ten Hag since winning the Carabao Cup in his first season – despite his "increasingly desperate" attempts to point to the two trophies he won during his tenure as evidence of progress. Just look at their league form: in the 20 months since that first cup win, they've played 61 games and lost 22 of them, conceding as many goals as they scored. A series of "supposed inferiors" – Brighton, Bournemouth, Crystal Palace, Fulham – won at Old Trafford, but ten Hag also tended to fail the toughest tests, said Richard Jolly in The Independent. United managed only one away win in 15 against the "big eight" under him; and in Europe, their record stands at one win in their past 11 games. All this, despite United having spent £600m on players since ten Hag took charge, including £82m on Antony – "pound-for-pound the worst signing in United's history" – and £60m on the injury-plagued Mason Mount.

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It's hard not to blame Ratcliffe for this debacle, said Martin Samuel in The Times: a man known for his "hard-nosed business instincts", he shied away from sacking ten Hag in the summer when it was clear to all that the Dutchman should go. Ten Hag's successor will inherit "a campaign in crisis", with the club in danger of missing out on a Champions League place for a second season in a row.

Ten Hag was the fifth permanent manager to try to "right the ship at Old Trafford" since Alex Ferguson retired in 2013, said Carl Anka on The Athletic. None have overseen a serious title challenge, and the overwhelming sense is that, in the post-Ferguson era, United have lost sight of the things that made them "the biggest and most successful club in England". Whoever takes over from ten Hag will have to find them again – and fast.

Amazon-owned AV company Zoox will start rolling out dozens of its purpose-built autonomous vehicle in San Francisco and in Las Vegas in the coming weeks, co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson announced on the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 stage.

Levinson said that Zoox will start offering rides — starting with employees — in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco, and on the Las Vegas Strip. Levinson told TechCrunch on the sidelines that Zoox is starting with SoMa even though it’s more difficult in part because the company has a operations in the area.

“We have achieved that internal safety readiness” required to launch the service, he said on stage.

The announcement comes a decade after Zoox was founded and four years since it was acquired by Amazon and unveiled its purpose-built robotaxi. In that time, the nascent autonomous vehicle industry has gone through the full hype cycle that led to multi-billion-dollar valuations and later a wave of shutdowns and consolidation.

“We still exist,” Levinson said, in a nod to the tumult the industry has gone through in recent years.

Levinson said Zoox is going to take a “measured approach” to rolling out its robotaxi service, and noted that his company has been working closely with local and federal safety regulators.

“I can say that in the next few weeks, we’re actually going to have a couple dozen Zoox robotaxis across our Foster City, San Francisco and Las Vegas, geofences that will expand several fold over the next year,” he said. “And then, you know, 2026 is when we’re going to really start cranking out production vehicles at very large scale.”

He also said Zoox will launch an “explorer” program of early riders who will be able to use the robotaxis for free before opening the service up to paying customers. (Rival Waymo operated a similar invite-only early rider program before opening its service to the paying public.) These early riders, or explorers, will gain access to the Zoox vehicles early next year starting with Las Vegas, Levinson said.

The Zoox AVs will operate throughout the “most busy 16 hours” of the day, Levinson said, noting that it’s “so boring at four in the morning, we don’t think we would learn very much.”

In San Francisco, Levinson said Zoox hopes to steadily expand beyond the SoMa neighborhood, and eventually, into surrounding cities like Foster City, where the company is already operating the vehicles.

In Las Vegas, Levinson said Zoox is working with “many” of the resort-hotels up and down the strip to pick up and drop off passengers at the entrances. “We’re not ready to share which hotels those are, but we’re not going to just be driving up and down the strip,” he said.

Zoox will continue to scale, geographically and by its fleet size. Zoox uses suppliers for its vehicle components and then assembles the robotaxis in house at facilities in Fremont and Hayward, California, Levinson said.

“We actually do it ourselves, which is really cool,” he said. “We have the facilities to produce tens of thousands of our own robotaxis, which is really cool, but we do get a lot of the components from suppliers all over the world, and then we kind of put them together. So it’s not quite as involved of a manufacturing process as a regular car, but it’s still very sophisticated.”

The former first lady’s incandescent speech on Saturday night in Michigan centered women’s bodies and excoriated the man who gropes but won’t protect them.

Gone are the days of “When they go low, we go high.” That was Michelle Obama’s mantra during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 cage fight with Donald Trump. I wanted to believe it so much I had coffee mugs made with that saying on them. I don’t have them any more.

I’m trying to figure out what slogan I’d put on a coffee mug from Obama’s incendiary, incandescent Saturday night speech in Kalamazoo. I’m leaning toward “Take our lives seriously.” It was a 38-minute feminist manifesto, excoriating Trump but also the men who either support him or aren’t sure they’ll vote for our first Black female president. “A vote for him is a vote against us,” she declared. Obama laid out everything women suffer under while trying to just live our lives, from crippling double standards to menstrual cramps, the expectation of perfection, and sexual abuse. The pain and threat posed by even a “normal” pregnancy.

Oh, and menopause. I’ve attended hundreds of political speeches about women’s health over the years, but I’ve never heard menopause talked about from the stage. (We might whisper about it backstage.) But of all the stages of women’s health, menopause could be the most shrouded in mystery, even shame, and one of the most debilitating.

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“Every month, far too many of us experience excruciating cramps and days of nausea,” she said. “As we struggle through menopause, crippling hot flashes, and depression, too many women my age are unaware of what’s happening to our bodies,” she added. (Obama opened up about her own menopause experience to People magazine in November 2022.)

“I want the men in the arena to bear with me on this, because there’s more at stake than just protecting a woman’s choice to give birth,” she said. “Sadly, we as women and girls have not been socialized to talk openly about our reproductive health. We’ve been taught instead to feel shame and to hide how our bodies work.”

Young girls might not know what to expect from puberty. Women “my age,” she noted, don’t know what to expect from menopause. Now, they face the erosion of their healthcare options, she said, in the wake of Dobbs, the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling that set the stage for bans across the country.

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“Look, a woman’s body is complicated business, y’all,” Obama said, to a bit of laughter. “And in those terrifying moments when something goes wrong—which will happen at some point to the vast majority of women in this country—let me tell you, it feels like the floor falls out from under us. In those moments, all we have to rely on is our medical system, in those dark moments, all we have to rely on is our faith in a higher power and the experience of doctors to get us the care we need in a timely manner.”

Obama described the hideous new reality in so many states around the country, in which pregnant women can’t get the emergency care—which may include abortion care—that they need. “If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood, or some unforeseen infection spreads and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late,” she told the men in the room. “You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something. If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women, will become collateral damage to your rage.”

She went on.

“Please, please, do not hand our fates over to the likes of Trump, who knows nothing about us, who has shown deep contempt for us, because a vote for him is a vote against us, against ourselves, against our worth. To think that the men that we love can be either unaware or indifferent to our plight is simply heartbreaking. It is a sad statement about our value as women in this world.”

Leaving the realm of women’s health, Obama also talked angrily about the media and voters’ double standards Harris faces.

“I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn. I hope that you’ll forgive me if I’m a little angry that we are indifferent to his erratic behavior. His obvious mental decline. His history as a convicted felon. A known slumlord. A predator found liable for sexual abuse. All of this while we pick apart Kamala’s answers from interviews that he doesn’t even have the courage to do, y’all.”

“We expect her to be intelligent and articulate, to have a clear set of policies, to never show too much anger, to prove time and time again that she belongs,” Obama said. “But for Trump, we expect nothing at all, no understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals.”

Talking about barriers to women at the 1988 Democratic convention, the late Texas Governor Ann Richards famously said: “After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.” She might also have been doing it with terrible cramps if she’s menstruating, morning sickness if she’s pregnant, or hot flashes, sleeplessness, and brain fog if she’s leaving that time of life.

At all of those times in my own life I was able to reach out to girlfriends and cousins and aunts to get support. But we didn’t want to whine. I was told by a friend not to ask for time off during my (brief) period of morning sickness when I was pregnant. If we propagate these notions of women as sickly or frail, whether during menstruation, pregnancy, or menopause, “they” will hold it against us, we feared. Indeed, protective labor laws that had been passed decades earlier to recognize the special challenges women face served to limit women’s hours, wages, and mobility in the work force. They have been dismantled over the last 50 years, but in terms of not talking about these burdens, maybe we overcorrected.

To end on a happier note, after the event, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer took Kamala Harris to a nearby pub, where they drank some local beer, to the slight shock of the media. “I’m having what she’s having!” Harris told reporters. The two women sat closely, keeping their conversation low. “We just told all the family secrets—shit!” Harris said when asked.

That and the beer seemed to shock some observers. I loved it. Maybe they talked a little menopause management, too.