Latest news with #SpaceshipEarth
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
3 Dates for Disney Investors to Circle in June After the Stock's 24% Jump in May
GEO-82 gives Epcot foodies a new upscale lounge with a view. Pixar's "Elio" hopes to build on the momentum of two strong theatrical releases in May. Marvel's "Ironheart" on Disney+ gives a key character from "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" her own show on the streaming platform. 10 stocks we like better than Walt Disney › Shares of Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS) had a May to remember. The stock soared 24% last month, fueled initially by a blowout quarterly report and unexpected news about a new international theme park in the works. The media giant has now fully recovered from the downticks that it experienced during the market correction earlier this year. Where does Disney go from here? There isn't another quarterly report coming out until August, but it doesn't mean that Disney will be standing still. There is new content coming to entertain folks at the local multiplex as well as fans streaming from home. Let's take a closer look at some dates that Disney investors will be watching in June. Disney rolled out new shows and experiences at Disney World and Disneyland in May. The original resort in California will have some more debuts in July as it picks up the tempo on its milestone of turning 70 this summer. June will be quieter than the bookend months, but it doesn't mean that something new isn't on the way. Disney World is opening GEO-82 at its Epcot theme park on Wednesday. The new lounge located in the rear of the iconic Spaceship Earth attraction will serve up a wide range of handcrafted beverages along with a thin but artisan menu of food offerings. It also offers a great view of the park's World Showcase, a feature that will come in handy as a way to serve up a premium viewing experience for the nightly festivities. A new posh watering hole may not move the needle, but GEO-82 is a hot attraction before it even officially opens. The first 60 days of reservation availability have been quickly gobbled up. It's not just Disney stock entering the month of June with momentum. Its movie studio is also on a roll. Disney's live-action reboot of Lilo & Stitch has been the top draw at theaters in back-to-back weekends. It is now the country's second-highest-grossing theatrical release this year, behind A Minecraft Movie. Marvel's Thunderbolts also debuted earlier in May. The two films are among three Disney releases currently in the top five biggest moneymakers in 2025. Disney has another potential winner coming out this month. Elio is the latest computer-animated release from Disney's Pixar hit factory. Expectations are low despite Pixar's pedigree. Industry watchers are modeling $35 million to $45 million in domestic ticket sales during its non-holiday opening weekend. This is less than last year's Inside Out 2 or Moana 2 rang up in box office receipts in a single day, but those were sequels to established properties. Mufasa: The Lion King opened with just $35 million domestically for its premiere weekend late last year. It wound up topping $254 million by the time it was done with its multiplex run, collecting another $468 million in admissions outside of the U.S. market. If Elio is able to score strong initial reviews, the film could have a long tail at theaters. Disney+ has now been profitable for the past year. Can it use the platform's scalability to build on its bottom line? A new series hits the premium streaming service in three weeks. Marvel's Ironheart is spinning off a character from the successful Black Panther movie franchise, giving Dominique Thorne a chance to reprise her role as Riri Williams in the new show. Riri is the genius inventor who created her own high-tech armor in the film. In the new series, Riri will have to contend with no longer having Wakandan technology on her side. As successful as Disney+ has been with a vault of iconic talent for younger viewers -- including the recent win to become the exclusive streaming home for Cocomelon -- it also needs magnetic content for teens and adults. The media giant has already leaned on its Marvel arm to feed hit shows to the platform including Loki and WandaVision. If Ironheart is the next hit on Disney+, it will help with retention on the service. Profitability in the cutthroat streaming space is something that even Disney can't take for granted. Before you buy stock in Walt Disney, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Walt Disney wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $651,049!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $828,224!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 979% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 171% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 2, 2025 Rick Munarriz has positions in Walt Disney. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Walt Disney. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. 3 Dates for Disney Investors to Circle in June After the Stock's 24% Jump in May was originally published by The Motley Fool
Boston Globe
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Disney without the crowds? Teens thinking their parents are (kinda) cool? Yes, there is such a place.
Now imagine that Disney experience wrapped up in three hours, a brief window to take in as many rides as most people do all day. This land exists — it's called Advertisement On select nights in Florida, from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., Disney holds a special event at one park when only people with a special wristband can board rides at Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, or Hollywood Studios. You can officially enter at 7 p.m., but the perks begin later. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up I did this recently with my two teenage kids in Florida. between $155 and $185, a tad more than a normal day ticket (prices vary by park and date). But the nighttime alternative is good bang for your buck. Consider our experience with Disney's hot, newish Advertisement Around 8:30 p.m., when the park was still open for regular ticket holders, my kids and I saw the mass of humanity lined up and said no, thank you. When we came back at 11 p.m., we zipped through in minutes. The ride is way cooler at night, by the way. The parks and attractions, including EPCOT's Spaceship Earth, look cool in the dark. Jason Margolis Another night, we hit EPCOT and the indoor roller coaster Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, which opened in 2022. On a normal day, you can either wait up to a whopping two hours or pay about $20 for a Lighting Lane Single Pass, which reserves you a spot. (More on that process in a bit.) During After Hours, we practically walked on, then hopped back in the queue for a second go. Side note for roller coaster enthusiasts: My kids and I agreed that Guardians is hands down the coolest ride we've ever done. The train zips through the dark as a different disco or '80s pop song propels you along, a nice touch to make each time a bit different. I won't spoil the big surprise, but the ride has an unexpected twist, which blew our minds. The special bracelets that got us on the Disney After Hours rides. Jason Margolis Overall, the longest we waited at night was about 20 minutes for the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster in Hollywood Studios, still much quicker than during the day. Here's another small bonus of Disney After Hours: carts hand out unlimited popcorn, sodas and water, and ice cream bars, all for no charge. For a teenager, or anyone for that matter, is there anything better than free food? Advertisement Now, Disney After Hours is not for everyone. Most people there were young adults without kids, with some families sprinkled in the mix. Parents with young children, this event is not for you. Or people who like to soak in the entire Disney vibe, I'd stick to the daytime. After dark, there are no shows, no parades, and very few places to eat or shop. Character sightings are sparse — we only spotted Pluto. Disney After Hours events give guests three hours – after hours – to explore one of the Walt Disney World Theme Parks. Throughout Magic Kingdom, guests can enjoy more than 20 attractions and experiences including the new TRON Lightcycle / Run. Steven Diaz/Steven Diaz, Photographer Also, it's a rather late night. In one of my less-than-stellar parenting moves, when my 13-year-old daughter was just plain tuckered out and it wasn't even close to midnight, I gave her a 20-ounce Coke and some popcorn so my 16-year-old son and I could keep the good times rolling. (But hey, it was free!) And she POWERED through the rest of the night. I also think my kids may have thought I was bordering on cool for just a brief moment as I obliterated all the rules. (My wife was stuck back in Boston preserving her vacation time, so all good there.) Further, my kids loved the perfect teenage schedule: sleep in as late as possible, hit the pool for a few hours, then slowly make our way to the parks by 7 p.m. There was plenty to fill our days as well — Disney has lots to do outside the parks, from riding canoes or horses, taking a boat tour of the themed hotels, strolling 'Disney's Boardwalk' and playing games of chance, or just shooting some free billiards at a hotel. My daughter and I also took a cake-decorating class at the Disney Springs shopping area one day while killing a few hours. Advertisement Now, going back to that Lightning Lane, an After Hours ticket isn't entirely necessary to cut down on wait times if you're well prepared. Disney has its ride reservation system down to a science, and you can put in for up to five attractions in advance: three on a multi-pass and two additional single passes for bigger attractions. When we went to the parks during the daytime, I had my morning laid out a week in advance, including passes for TRON and Guardians. And when Disney says Lightning Lane, they mean it — we never waited more than 5-10 minutes for a ride. But reserving those rides tacks on another $60 or so per person; pretty quickly that late-night ticket starts looking like a sweet deal. Also, the Lightning Lane can only be used for a specific ride once, unless you're willing to purchase an unlimited 'premier pass,' which can run north of $400 per person at Magic Kingdom, a bridge too far for me. With the regular Lightning Lane, once you check in for a ride, you can immediately select a new one on Disney's app. It's a fun system to navigate, but the ride choices become slim pickings as the day goes on. You also quickly become even more tethered to your phone than usual. During the After Hours event, you just go where you want, when you want. After arriving at a park around 7 p.m., we'd hop on a few of the smaller rides with short lines, grab a nice sit-down meal in the park, then wait impatiently for the clock to strike 10 p.m. From that moment on, we were all focus. Advertisement The author's son and daughter headed toward the last ride of their late-night adventure. Jason Margolis Our last night, as the hour approached 1 a.m, we decided to make our last ride When we got off the ride, we realized it was only 12:57 a.m., and we still had three minutes of fun to go. (Also, my daughter needed to burn off the caffeine somehow.) So we ran through the exit, did a U-turn into the entrance, and were back on our rat-shaped vehicle for one more spin with a solid minute to spare. Jason Margolis can be reached at
Los Angeles Times
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Everyone knew Pee-wee Herman. But few knew the man behind the man-child
The first time we see Paul Reubens in the documentary 'Pee-wee as Himself,' he is not playing Pee-wee Herman, the antic man-child he portrayed in comedy routines, movies, a children's TV show and most of his public life. It's Reubens as we rarely saw him, out of character, having his hair and makeup fixed while he gently cracks jokes to the camera — claiming he was born in a house on the edge of the Mississippi River while his father worked on a steamboat. Then his mask slips just a bit further. We hear him jostling gently with the documentary's director, Matt Wolf, over the film which Reubens yearns to control, but which friends and colleagues have told him he can't properly oversee because he is its subject. 'You don't have perspective, really, on yourself,' Reubens says to Wolf. 'I will argue that — and you and I are going to be arguing that for a long, long time. Until this documentary is finished. You mark my words.' 'Pee-wee as Himself,' which HBO is showing in two parts on May 23 and will stream on Max, is Wolf's story of how Reubens channeled his passions for vintage toys, television, alternative art and comedy into the goofy, giggling Pee-wee Herman, who became a foundational figure of the 1980s pop-culture landscape and the focus of a 1991 media scandal. The documentary also supplies a vivid portrait of the real Reubens, who worked fastidiously to prevent audiences from seeing him as his authentic self. It explores his childhood, sexuality and uncompromising need to be in charge of any project involving him or his characters — right up to his death in 2023 at the age of 70, before the documentary was finished. What 'Pee-wee as Himself' ultimately reveals is a creator and performer so diligently compartmentalized that he could split himself in two, living widely disparate lives as the public, voluble Pee-wee Herman and the private, retreating Paul Reubens, and still have whole sides of himself that almost no one saw. 'We're all entitled to our inner lives,' Wolf said in an interview. 'Artists, particularly, are many different people inside. Paul was no exception, except the way he went about that was more extreme than perhaps you or I.' Wolf, whose previous nonfiction films include 'Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell,' about the avant-garde musician, and 'Spaceship Earth,' about the artificial ecosystem Biosphere 2, is 43 years old. Though he considers himself a Pee-wee fan, he grew up with more attachment to a beloved talking Pee-wee Herman doll than to movies like 'Pee-wee's Big Adventure' or the Saturday morning show 'Pee-wee's Playhouse.' Over a long period of outreach and with help through mutual friends, Wolf got Reubens to begrudgingly agree to a series of interviews — but, the director said, 'with a lot of hesitation, and on the condition that we would have a 30-day trial period to see if we could work together.' Though Wolf gradually gained Reubens' trust, there was conflict as well — often around the subject's desire to take control of the film. As Wolf recounted, 'The first conversation, immediately, Paul said, 'I want to direct a documentary about myself, but everybody's telling me I can't. I don't understand why.' And I said, 'Well, I'm here to talk to you about me directing a documentary.'' (Wolf said they eventually agreed that Reubens would have 'meaningful consultation' on the film.) That compulsive need for authority is a quality that Reubens' friends and family members observed in him, going all the way back to his childhood. 'It was important to him that he control the narrative about him,' said Abby Rubenfeld, his sister. 'He knew what he wanted and he made it happen.' Growing up, Rubenfeld said that her brother was clearly poised to become an entertainer, whether he was putting on shows for the neighborhood on a basement stage their father built, or cajoling the family to travel from their home in upstate Oneonta, N.Y., to a taping of the 'Howdy Doody' show in Manhattan. 'He was so excited you would think he was the guest on Oprah,' Rubenfeld said. When Reubens joined the Groundlings comedy troupe in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, his colleagues there also noted his ambitions, even in a field where everyone was striving to stand out. 'His level of commitment was something I hadn't quite seen,' said Tracy Newman, a founding member of the Groundlings who worked with Reubens in this era. 'He was always thinking, looking for an opening, looking for his thing.' When Reubens first hit upon the childlike, toy-obsessed Pee-wee character at the Groundlings, Newman said, 'He knew he had something he could draw on so easily, because he was a 10-year-old boy at heart.' At the peak of Pee-wee's fame in the 1980s, Reubens was appearing publicly as his character and stopped granting interviews as himself, which seemed like the ideal way to safeguard his privacy and still enjoy the civilian pleasures of anonymity. 'Brad Pitt probably has to stay sequestered in a tower in a castle somewhere — it becomes no fun at all,' said Cassandra Peterson, the actor better known as the macabre movie hostess Elvira. 'I feel like I got to have a normal life, and Paul got to have a normal life too, and pick and choose when he wanted to be fawned over.' When they socialized together without their Pee-wee and Elvira costumes, Peterson said they were each like 'a drag queen who was out of drag.' But behind the scenes, Reubens was wrestling with his decision to hide his identity as a gay man after having been more openly out during his pre-fame years. Amid the scrutiny that came with his success, 'he thought he was in the closet,' said Rubenfeld, now a lawyer who focuses on LGBT rights. 'I think most people thought he was gay anyway, but he chose not to make that public. Nobody should have that kind of pain about who they are and have it affect them that much.' Even during the making of 'Pee-wee as Himself,' this proved difficult for Reubens to acknowledge. At one point, Wolf recalled, 'He came into my little room and was like, 'I don't know how to do this.' And I said, 'You just say, 'I'm gay.'' Once filmmaking resumed, Wolf recalled, 'I said, 'Paul, are you gay?' He made a bunch of jokes, and then he started to just speak from an authentic place.' The carefully constructed boundary between Paul Reubens and Pee-wee Herman was all but annihilated when Reubens was arrested for indecent exposure in 1991 at an adult movie theater in Sarasota, Fla., where his parents lived. At the time, 'Playhouse' was in reruns. The media circus that followed now seems wildly excessive. As Wolf explained, 'I always said to him, 'You didn't do anything wrong. In historical retrospect, this was an injustice that was a symptom of the media's emerging appetite for takedowns, and you were a casualty of that.'' But Reubens felt like a pariah and the documentary shows him struggling in near-solitude for months after the incident. He and Wolf never got to have a detailed discussion about this aftermath or how Reubens went on to put his life and career back together. The actor and the filmmaker had had a falling out during the making of 'Pee-wee as Himself,' again over editorial control, then reconciled. Reubens said he would give a final interview and, Wolf said, 'he trusted me and that he wasn't sure he'd be able to be as involved as he hoped.' Coming out of that conversation, Wolf felt he had the confidence he needed to continue the project. A week later, Reubens died of cancer, having kept his diagnosis a secret from nearly everyone except his closest confidants. Rubenfeld, who was among the few who knew Reubens was sick, said there were still times before he died that her brother would try to conceal the severity of his illness. 'Paul is an actor, and when I talked to him, you couldn't really tell if he was in a bad mood, unless he wanted you to. And you couldn't tell if he didn't feel well, unless he wanted you to,' she said. Wolf said he learned of Reubens' death on 'the day that everybody found out that Paul died,' through the news media coverage and the many sad, celebratory tributes that followed. For all the involvement that Reubens had wanted on the documentary, Wolf was left to finish it without him, using the interviews he had already conducted with Reubens and a haunting narration that Reubens had recorded for him in the final days of his life. Wolf knows that, without his intending it, 'Pee-wee as Himself' will be viewed as a grand summation of someone who never quite knew what to make of himself. 'As much as Paul had done work on himself through the various kinds of traumas and controversies he faced in the media, I don't think he necessarily could see himself in all of his complexity,' Wolf said. 'I think a lot of what I was asking Paul to do was to integrate different parts of himself, and that was very uncomfortable.' Wolf added, 'Paul started to recognize that I had a take on his story, and that he was OK with that take.' While his perspective on Reubens may endure or fade, what will stand over time, Wolf said, is Reubens' legacy as an artist and innovator who brought his offbeat sensibility to the widest possible audience, and who paid a price for doing so. 'I think there's consequences for being an experimental performance artist in a mainstream context,' Wolf said. 'Being avant-garde and being popular — those things don't always go together.'
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Could a planet really develop a brain?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The idea that Earth may operate as a single, self-regulating, living organism has existed for decades, emerging in the 1970s as the Gaia hypothesis. In this excerpt from "Gaia Wakes: Earth's Emerging Consciousness in an Age of Environmental Devastation" (Columbia University Press, 2025), economic development and peacebuilding expert Topher McDougal describes how Earth might acquire a planetary brain powered by artificial intelligence (AI) in what he dubs the "Gaiacephalos hypothesis." McDougal argues that this giant, global brain could benefit humanity by boosting the complexity of life on Earth and ultimately secure a more sustainable future. What if our entire planet were to grow a consciousness? The human race finds itself aboard a vessel traversing the vastness of the Milky Way — the Spaceship Earth, as Henry George, Kenneth Boulding, Buckminster Fuller, and others since have so appositely described it. But those thinkers were using the phrase only to evoke the limitations placed on human societies in a relatively closed, steady-state system. They were merely implying that our economies can only grow so far before they come up against the very real resource constraints of our tiny planet floating in the vast emptiness of space. Certainly, the widening scope of environmental devastation humans are wreaking on this planet throws these considerations into stark relief. But what if Spaceship Earth is itself developing (and indeed has already developed much of the infrastructure to support) a single emergent consciousness? I call this idea the "Gaiacephalos hypothesis," in deference to the "Gaia hypothesis" forwarded by James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, and others, which contends that Earth's interlocking environmental systems could be thought of as a single organism. I argue that the two phenomena associated with Spaceship Earth — first the global environmental devastation we are starting to experience, and second the development of a planetary brain — are two halves of the same process. This process is part of a naturally recurring cycle that has driven the increasing complexity of life on Earth — one that will, with effort, culminate in the emergence of a global AI-powered "brain" capable of coordinating the body planetary. Could a planet really develop a brain? A mind? Would such an outcome be desirable, and could we thwart that development if not? I don't claim to predict what will happen, but rather what could happen. My contention is that Earth may, if we are lucky and diligent and clever enough, grow an emergent superconsciousness. The questions this development would beg range from the practical to the philosophical and even quasi-mystical. For instance: Is life itself a natural and inextricable part of the evolution of the universe? Are there any limits to the scale of life? Is life the process by which the universe comes to know and understand itself? To postulate the growth of a planetary brain may at first sound bizarre, even outlandish. Consequently, many readers may, in an effort to grant me the benefit of the doubt, be tempted to misread this treatise in metaphorical terms. "Perhaps the author means that the Earth has interlocking systems — climatological, ecological, biophysical — that could be thought of as a 'brain' or be likened to a mind." But no, let's eliminate any possibility of confusion: I postulate the growth of an emergent neural network — one whose totality is not designed by humans, even if its initial constituent parts are. This neural network could quite literally enable Earth to achieve unitary consciousness on a massive scale. After the advent of this development, humans would likely continue to play various supporting roles in the life of the planet, but will ultimately find themselves subordinate to and conditioned by a higher intelligence with higher purposes. What would this new mind consist of in tangible, physical terms? Well, microchips, circuits, superconductors and semiconductors, digital storage devices, fiber optic cables, eventually quantum computers — the stuff of electronic processors and communications. In other words, the planetary mind and the brain supporting it would emerge from what geoscientist Peter Haff has termed the "technosphere," the vast panoply of tools we have created to fashion for ourselves a more interconnected world. The planetary brain, if it emerges, would likely arise from AI-enhanced, human-made institutions: technologically sophisticated corporations and the governments regulating them, or what we collectively term "postindustrial economies," themselves increasingly cybernetic. But these interconnected systems and the spectacular potential for information processing they represent operate according to an inherently global logic. As such, a natural scalar synergy exists between high technology and global human institutions, including but not limited to transnational corporations, the United Nations, and transnational social movements. The more extensive the network, the richer its capacities. If they become extensive and fast enough, these systems may, eventually, function together as a brain. And just as in the human brain, where logic may at times war with "gut" instinct, or the need for fresh thinking wrestle with well-laid plans, the decisions made by Gaiacephalos would almost always be the mediated results of discussions, conflicts, and compromises amongst constituent analytical components. The emergence of a planetary mind would not be the first radical scalar upgrade in the complexity of life on Earth. Indeed we have no fewer than four precedents from which to infer the general patterns at work. All previous upgrades have built on the scalar units of their predecessors. All of them have radically increased life's capacity to harness and use energy — in other words, its capacity for entropy. These entropy-maximizing processes oscillate cyclically between episodes of expansion and centralization, growth and coordination. Successful units first begin to predate others, but eventually forge more mutualistic relationships with them as prey becomes scarce. Mutualism yields hierarchical collectives. But these collectives are unwieldy; they require the countervailing formation of centralized information-processing to coordinate their myriad functions. Collectives that succeed in developing coordination apparatuses thrive. In this way, a new, higher-order unit emerges. The first three of Earth's upgrades are studied in biology. They include the emergence of, respectively, prokaryotes, eukaryotes, and brainy multicellular organisms. The fourth of these upgrades is studied in the social sciences, and involves the emergence of centralized states as massively coordinated resource exploiters. As with the brains of multicellular organisms, Earth's brain will be energetically taxing to maintain. But it will also potentially pay great returns, allowing the planet to seek out new sources of energy, while regulating those internal functions that would dispose of the energy waste (heat). And while human-devised forms of organization would (at least initially) set the parameters for the basic structure, it would likely evolve quickly. Its abilities to make quick sense of terabytes of information, identify and anticipate possible problems, find optimal solutions to them, and take appropriate actions will far outstrip the capacities of human institutional apparatuses. At least a few questions confront us under the Gaiacephalos scenario. First, is Earth endowed with the resources necessary to afford a planetary brain? Brains are always energy-intensive organs, and the emergence of the Gaiacephalos, nascent though it may be, has already proved extremely taxing to the body planetary. Larger planets can probably more easily afford to invest in brain development than smaller ones. Do we have the necessary biological capital to support a brain, or will its development prove so costly that the planet falls back to a brainless state? Second, are there smarter policies that we can adopt that can make Gaiacephalos more likely to develop? Third, if we are successful in creating a planetary brain, what would daily life for humans look like? Will we be part of this brain? Or will we have worked ourselves out of a job? Will the planetary intelligence that emerges be inimical to human flourishing? And will our free will be totally overridden by this potential tyrant? And finally, what are the implications of the emergence of a planetary brain for our understanding of the universe and our place in it? RELATED STORIES —Climate wars are approaching — and they will redefine global conflict —Can our brains help prove the universe is conscious? —'We can't answer these questions': Neuroscientist Kenneth Kosik on whether lab-grown brains will achieve consciousness I cannot claim that what I describe will happen. Nor can I even say I believe it is statistically probable. It is for me one analytic possibility of uncertain likelihood. The argument traces a hopeful path into the future, but that hope should not bias our assessments of the path's likelihood of success. But this argument does have the potential to direct our policy actions in order to make this path more likely. In that sense, it might serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is important enough to deserve our attention, and perhaps also our best collective efforts: it may prove preferable to the foreseeable alternatives. It is something to run towards, rather than merely run away from. For those who despair of ever achieving environmental sustainability, it may plot one feasible course toward a version of that end. Excerpted from Gaia Wakes: Earth's Emergent Consciousness in an Age of Environmental Devastation by Topher McDougal (2025) with permission from Columbia University Press. Gaia Wakes: Earth's Emergent Consciousness in an Age of Environmental Devastation Hardcover — $30.00 on Amazon Gaia Wakes presents a compelling new framework for understanding the past, present, and future of our planet. Starting from a strong foundation in economics and drawing on a vast range of multidisciplinary scholarship, Topher McDougal explores the possibility of a fifth transition towards an upgraded Earth: the development of a technologically enabled planetary brain capable of coordinating ecological functions and peering far into the future and Deal
Hindustan Times
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Spaceship Earth lounge at EPCOT: Walt Disney World announces opening date and menu items
The GEO-82, adults-only lounge at EPCOT theme park, Bay Lake, Florida will begin operations for the public on June 4, Walt Disney World announced Monday. Along with the opening date, some menu items have also been revealed. The GEO-82 lounge will operate from inside Epcot's Spaceship Earth. One of the major attractions is slated to be the World Celebration Gardens, followed by a landing spot for "Luminous: The Symphony of Us", says Walt Disney World. Some of the assorted food items on the menu is reportedly funghi flatbread, cannellini hummus, truffled ahi tuna, jumbo lump crab gateau, and a chef's special selection of cheeses and meats. Some featured cocktails on the menu items revealed by Walt Disney World include brown butter old fashioned, caramelized leek martini, strawberry-black pepper sour, high brow batanga, banana brulee highball, and more. READ MORE | Spain, Portugal power outages cause frustration among people; Videos and memes flood Internet If one is interested in beer or wine, they are also readily available. Zero-proof cocktails will also feature on the menu items, according to the resort. However, one cannot access the GEO-82 lounge without a reservation. The reservation acceptance is slated for May 6. If the menu items were not enough to wow Walt Disney World enthusiasts, the resort is also offering a special, add-on "fireworks experience". This is going to be a part of the Enchanting Extras Collection, starting June 4, as per reports. The fireworks experience will be paid and will cost $179 per person, with theme park admission being a requirement. On this unique fireworks experience, The official Walt Disney World's GEO-82 section says, "Your party will be seated at a private table beside the window in GEO-82. You'll be perfectly positioned to enjoy dazzling views of Luminous The Symphony of Us, the nighttime spectacular." Along with the sorted menu items, a selection of sweets during "Luminous The Symphony of Us", is also going to be available, says the site.
