Uber is trial video recording during rides in an effort to improve safety features. Drivers will be able to use the front-facing camera on their phones to record video through Uber’s Driver app, it was announced Thursday.

The capability was built on top of Uber’s audio recording featurewhich allows riders and drivers to document their trip, with drivers being unable to access recordings unless they share it with Uber in a safety report.

The ride-sharing platform will test the feature with “select drivers” in New York City, Cincinnati and Louisville, as well as in Santos and João Pessoa, Brazil.

Uber is also expanding its audio recording capability to Cincinnati, Nashville, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Antonio and Tucson next month, saying it has already “seen many instances where this technology has helped us determine the best course of action after a safety incident .”

Uber announced its audio recording feature at the end of December 2021, bringing it to Louisville, Kansas City and Raleigh-Durham at the time. Audio recordings can be submitted by either drivers or riders — whoever begins recording the ride through the app — to Uber alongside safety reports. Files are encrypted and stored directly on the driver or rider’s device.

Other driver safety features announced Thursday by Uber include providing navigation routes with fewer left turns — citing National Highway Traffic Safety Administration research from 2010 that found 22% of crashes were caused by making a left turn at an intersection — and map messages

In the “expanded cinematic universe” age in which we currently reside, we take for granted just how hard it is to successfully tell a story that spans multiple generations and weaves disparate pieces into one grand narrative. Many have tried, many have floundered.

Anyone with such sprawling storytelling ambitions, however, could take a lesson from the horror anthology podcast Old Gods of Appalachia from Asheville, North Carolina’s DeepNerd Media. Launched in 2019, Old Gods is an engrossing and otherworldly saga, set in an alternate version of Appalachia, where the land is riddled with supernatural entities — so-called “haints” and whatnot — and the humans who often find themselves tangled up with them. After a friend recommended it, I powered through all available episodes in two weeks.

As of this writing, there are three seasons comprising more than 40 free episodes (with even more for Patreon subscribers). What starts out as the tale of a doomed coal town named Barlo, Kentucky, expands into a whole universe with narrative tentacles that reach back to 1756 and forward well into the 1900s. The podcast’s penchant for nonlinear storytelling zips you back and forth in time and gives you the sense there’s an infinite number of people, and creatures, to meet in every holler the show visits.

Maybe you spend three episodes with a small-town magistrate, or a young couple that make a bad deal, or a little boy whose family meets a grim fate. You might leave these characters behind for