protests

There was a call to boycott Disney last fall. The owner of the ABC network had taken Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air over comments Kimmel made about responses to Charlie Kirk's murder, sending free speech proponents into a frenzy . Those free speech proponents include me, who, as a reporter, has clear stakes in protecting that right. Although I was on board with halting support for a company I felt had acted wrongfully, truly boycotting Disney proved harder than I expected. Disney's ubiquity Canceling Disney+ was simple but threw a hefty wrench into my evening routine. I tend to end many weekdays laughing at comforting sitcom reruns and adult animation. I usually associate Disney with princesses, kids' movies, and, more recently, comic heroes. But Disney also owns Hulu, which exclusively streamed many of my favorite shows for unwinding at the time, like American Dad , Futurama , Living Single , Fresh Off the Boat, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Read full article Comments

Two artists from a Bay Area studio unveiled What Iceberg? , a table-sized installation placed at the public entrance to an OpenAI developer event in San Francisco on Tuesday. According to a description of the piece, the 5-foot-tall sculpture "shows OpenAI's leaders and investors escaping a sinking ship with unimaginable wealth, while everyone else is left to face the cost of AI.” One of the co-creators of the piece, a man in his “late 30s” who gave his name as “Kevin,” said that he and members of the Berkeley-based Odd Friend Studio spent the last five days working to build What Iceberg? out of papier mâché, cardboard, paint—and a repurposed table. Read full article Comments

The future is looking increasingly bleak for Germany’s automotive industry. Since the turn of the century, car makers have been among the crown jewels of the German economy, punching above their weight in terms of investment and innovation. But those companies are now facing multiple problems at once, from declining demand at home and stronger competition from abroad to the cost of punitive and arbitrary new tariffs, on top of preexisting structural challenges like an aging workforce and a slow recovery from COVID. Total automotive sales in Europe have fallen from a peak of almost 18 million in 2019 to around 13 million in 2025, and some share of that smaller market is increasingly going to new entrants from China, which has its own spare automotive production capacity problem to worry about. And while the US market has always been the most profitable for German car exports, that was before the imposition of new import tariffs, which currently stand at 25 percent but could be subject to change at any time. Factory closures now seem not just possible but likely, something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Earlier this summer, news emerged that Volkswagen Group is considering closing four of its German factories to prepare for the future. Things have not gotten much better for VW Group in the months since that news broke. Read full article Comments