Category: BREAKING NEWS

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Switzerland’s First Robotaxi Now Takes Passengers

The Furttal valley, a string of commuter towns northwest of Zurich, got a new kind of taxi this week. It is called Iamo — short for “intelligent automated mobility” — and it is Switzerland’s first robotaxi service open to the public.

The service has been carrying paying passengers since September 28, and the news of its launch made the rounds on October 2. Three electric self-driving cars now serve roughly 100 designated stops across four municipalities: Boppelsen, Dänikon, Hüttikon, and Otelfingen. Riders book through the Iamo app. Each car seats up to three passengers and runs daily from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Four hours a day isn’t much. But for a country that regulates autonomous vehicles with a Swiss watchmaker’s caution, it’s a milestone worth marking.

The price is the real story

The fare structure is what caught my attention. Iamo charges a CHF 4.70 base fare plus CHF 0.38 per kilometer. That puts a 10-kilometer ride at roughly CHF 8.50. A conventional taxi covering the same distance around Zurich? Closer to CHF 44.

Read that again. The robotaxi costs about a fifth of a regular cab.

That’s not just a pilot project flex. That’s the economic argument for autonomy, stated plainly in Swiss francs. The economics of a vehicle that never sleeps, never tips, and never sits empty in a queue are fundamentally different. Switzerland is one of the most expensive places on Earth to catch a taxi, so it’s also one of the places where autonomy’s price advantage shows up fastest.

For travelers, the math is simple. If you’re staying anywhere in the Furttal valley — and that’s mostly residents, not tourists, for now — your airport-adjacent hop just got cheap. For cities, the math is bigger: predictable, low-cost autonomous shuttles could reshape what “served by transit” means in lower-density areas where running a bus every 20 minutes never penciled out.

Who’s behind it

Iamo is a joint effort by Swiss Transit Lab, the cantons of Zurich and Aargau, and Swiss Federal Railways (SBB). That last name matters. When the national railway co-runs your pilot, the goal isn’t a tech demo — it’s figuring out how driverless cars fit into a transit network that already runs on time to the minute.

The underlying technology comes from WeRide, which holds Switzerland’s first driverless robotaxi permit, issued in November 2025. WeRide has been quietly collecting European firsts; as we recently covered, American partnerships like Uber’s $1.25B Rivian deal get the headlines, but the Chinese autonomy firms are the ones actually deploying on European roads right now.

For now, a safety driver still sits behind the wheel of each Iamo car — standard practice for a public pilot in a country that doesn’t rush things. The roadmap goes further. Organizers plan remotely supervised automated minibuses next, pending approval from the Federal Roads Office (Astra). Minibuses, not sedans: that’s a transit-first mindset, and it’s telling.

The European robotaxi race is on

Zoom out and a pattern emerges. Momenta is plotting thousands of robotaxis for Dubai and Europe. EHang is expanding its pilotless air taxis into Vietnam. Now Switzerland has a public service and Spain is mapping Madrid for its own launch. Europe spent years as autonomy’s cautious latecomer. That era is ending.

Why does Switzerland matter specifically? Because Swiss regulators are famously deliberate. A public robotaxi clearing Swiss approval signals to every other European regulator that this is manageable technology, not science fiction. One small valley’s pilot could do more for European autonomy policy than a hundred closed-course demos.

Why a valley, not a city

The choice of the Furttal valley is smarter than it looks. This isn’t downtown Zurich — it’s commuter belt: villages where the train station is a bus ride away and the bus runs on a schedule written for someone else’s convenience. That’s exactly the gap autonomous shuttles fill best. Not replacing transit, but feeding it.

With SBB as a partner, the logic clicks into place. A hundred designated stops across four municipalities is dense coverage for a valley this size. The robotaxi becomes the first-and-last-mile layer for the national rail network — the thing that makes living car-free in Boppelsen actually workable. Swiss transit culture is built on connections that line up to the minute. If Iamo can slot into that choreography, it stops being a pilot and starts being infrastructure.

The 1-to-5-p.m. window is the giveaway that this is still early. Commuters need 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. Expanding the hours is the real test — and probably the next announcement.

What to watch next

Three cars, four hours a day, ~100 stops. Those are pilot numbers, and Iamo’s team will need to grow all three before anyone calls this a service. The interesting milestones: whether Astra approves the remotely supervised minibuses, whether operating hours expand past the afternoon window, and whether the CHF 8.50 ride stays CHF 8.50 once the novelty wears off.

If it does, Zurich’s taxi drivers might want to start reading the fine print. The robots are already cheaper. They’re about to be everywhere.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Fun Things to Do in NYC This Weekend, Oct. 3–4: Food Festivals, Live Music and Rooftop Parties

New York doesn’t do quiet weekends. If you’re still figuring out Saturday and Sunday, here’s a lineup worth stealing: coffee and cider festivals, a pow wow in Prospect Park, a street festival taking over Atlantic Avenue, and a couple of rooftop parties to close out the night.

Saturday is already underway, and plenty is still on the schedule.

Saturday, October 3rd

The day kicks off early with the NYC Coffee Festival in Brooklyn at 9AM — coffee people, this is your morning. At 10AM, the Lenape Nations Pow Wow brings drums, dancing, and tradition to Prospect Park.

By noon you’ve got options: the Latin Food Fest uptown and Cider Feast at Industry City. Tacos or cider — or honestly, why not both if you plan it right.

Afternoon looks good too: NYC Day of Flow at Brooklyn Bridge Park at 2PM, the Creole Food Fest at Pier 3 at 3PM, and the Village Trip Concert in the Meatpacking District at 4PM.

Then the evening splits between two solid picks: the Perreito Rooftop Party at Elsewhere at 6PM, and Tootsie’s Video Vault at Littlefield at 7:30PM.

Sunday, October 4th

Sunday opens with the second day of the Lenape Nations Pow Wow in Prospect Park at 10AM — a genuine cultural experience and a great way to start the day.

At noon, two classics: the Harvest Festival on Randall’s Island and the Atlantic Antic on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, the massive street festival that draws crowds every year.

Afternoon keeps it going with Greenpoint StoopFest at 1PM in Greenpoint, then a pair of 3PM picks: Mister Sunday at Nowadays and Hot Honey Sundays at McCarren Park. At 4PM, Disco Tehran takes over Elsewhere.

Close out the weekend with laughs: Comedy + Music at Littlefield at 8PM Sunday night. A perfect landing spot before Monday does its thing.

For more ideas, check out our picks for last weekend’s festival-heavy lineup, the best happy hours in the city for a pre-game drink, and Oktoberfest events still running through the month.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: White Sox Sweep Astros for First Playoff Win Since 2005

The young core arrives

Rookie San Antonacci drove in two runs in Game 1. Colson Montgomery homered in his postseason debut — because of course he did. And Chase Meidroth's homer sealed Game 2 and the series. Five of Chicago's starters were rookies, and across both teams, eight rookies took part — a postseason record.

Think about that. The biggest stage, the brightest lights, the franchise's first real October moment in two decades, and the heroes were players who hadn't been born the last time the White Sox won a playoff series. (The 2005 championship team's youngest fans are now in their twenties.) There is something deeply satisfying about a rebuild that pays off all at once, in front of everyone.

The Astros, for their part, are no pushovers — a seasoned October program that has been in this position many times. Sweeping them, in two games, with rookies carrying the load, turns this from a nice story into a statement. The White Sox didn't sneak through. They announced themselves.

A wild-card round for the ages

The White Sox were the best story of the wild-card round, but they weren't the only one. The Yankees swept the Red Sox with an 18-2 run differential, a record for the current format. The Padres swept the Cubs. The Braves took down the Phillies in three, winning Game 3 6-2 on October 2.

Now the division series begin, all on October 3: White Sox vs. Guardians, Yankees vs. Rays, Padres vs. Brewers. Three ALDS/NLDS matchups, all starting the same day, with the White Sox-Guardians series carrying the freshest storyline in the bracket. Chicago's kids get no rest — but then, rest is for veterans. Rookies don't know they're supposed to be tired.

Records are falling everywhere this fall

It's worth pausing on what kind of sports autumn this is becoming. Arike Ogunbowale just dropped 45 points to smash the WNBA playoff scoring record, proving the record books are being rewritten across leagues. The White Sox join that trend: a 21-year postseason drought snapped by the youngest roster in the field.

And here's a thought for Chicago fans making October plans: between the baseball and the season's celebrations, the city — and New York too, with Oktoberfest season in full swing — is in full fall-sports-and-festivals mode. This is the good part of the year. Savor it.

What makes this one special

Baseball droughts are a special kind of suffering. They pass from parent to child like heirlooms. The 2005 White Sox championship is old enough now that an entire generation of fans has grown up on stories about it without ever seeing a sequel. That is what made this sweep land so hard: it wasn't just two wins. It was permission to believe again.

The rookie factor amplifies everything. When a veteran team wins, it's validation. When rookies win, it's a beginning. San Antonacci, Montgomery, Meidroth — these are names Chicago will be chanting for a decade if this core holds together. The front office bet on youth, and in the first October test, youth delivered.

There's also the matter of how they won. Two games, both decisive, against a franchise that knows October better than almost anyone. The 6-3 and 7-3 finals weren't flukes or squeakers. The White Sox outplayed the Astros in every phase across two nights, and the scores flattered nobody.

The practical takeaway for fans

If you're a White Sox fan, the only advice is: don't take any of this for granted, and don't let anyone tell you to "wait until" something. Twenty-one-year droughts end exactly like this — suddenly, all at once, with kids leading the charge. Enjoy the ALDS against the Guardians starting today. October baseball is the best television there is, and your team is in it.

If you're not a White Sox fan, there's still a reason to watch. Baseball is at its best when young talent explodes onto the national stage in real time, and this roster is doing exactly that. The Guardians will be a real test — the division series is where Cinderella stories go to be verified. Either way, it's appointment viewing.

What comes next

The Guardians await, and the ALDS is a different animal than the wild-card round — longer series, deeper rotations, less room for a hot two games to carry you. But the White Sox have already done the hardest thing: they proved the moment isn't too big for them. Twice.

Twenty-one years of waiting ended in two games. The kids did it. And somewhere in Chicago tonight, a father is telling his kid about the sweep the way his father told him about 2005 — only this time, the story isn't history. It's the present.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Sam Raimi’s Every House is Haunted Gets a New Studio

A Horror Project Finds Its Home

Some movies spend years wandering the development wilderness before finding the right studio. Every House is Haunted has been one of those projects — until this week. Deadline reported that 20th Century Studios has acquired the supernatural thriller from Netflix, ending roughly five years in development limbo at the streamer. Netflix picked up the original script back in 2021, and the film has been waiting for its moment ever since.

Now it has one. And the talent lining up behind it suggests this could be worth the wait.

The Raimi Factor

Producing is Sam Raimi, via Raimi Productions alongside Zainab Azizi. Raimi's name on a horror project still carries genuine weight — the man practically invented the modern horror playbook, and his instincts for supernatural material are unmatched. This move comes on the heels of his team's 20th Century Studios hit Send Help, so the studio-producer relationship is already proven.

Joining the producing ranks: Roy Lee, the veteran horror producer behind Weapons, and Andrew Childs (The Long Walk) for Vertigo Entertainment. Ian Rogers, the author of the source material, executive produces alongside Starlight Media. That's a production bench with serious genre credibility on every chair.

The Source Material Is a Gem

The film is based on Ian Rogers' acclaimed short story "The House on Ashley Avenue," from his Every House is Haunted collection. The premise, per Deadline: an insurance investigator tries to debunk claims that a couple's death was caused by a haunted house — until a psychic and the mysterious occurrences he witnesses with his own eyes challenge his skepticism.

That's a beautiful setup. The skeptic-protagonist is horror's most reliable engine, because the audience gets to be converted along with the character. An insurance investigator — a professional debunker, a man whose entire job is finding the mundane explanation — forced to confront the unexplainable is the kind of premise that writes its own tension. And grounding it in a single house, the Ashley Avenue house, gives it the contained, escalating dread that the best haunted-house films share.

New Directors, New Energy

Directing are Adam Schindler and Brian Netto, the duo behind Netflix's 2024 hit Don't Move — a film that topped the streamer's movie charts for two weeks. They replace previously attached director Corin Hardy and will revise the screenplay (the original script was by Jason Pagan and Andrew Deutschman).

This is a smart handoff. Schindler and Netto proved with Don't Move that they can build sustained, suffocating tension from a simple premise. A haunted-house thriller is exactly the kind of assignment that plays to their strengths: atmosphere, escalation, and the kind of scares that come from what you don't see.

Why the Studio Move Matters

Netflix's loss is theaters' gain

The project languished at Netflix for five years. At 20th Century Studios, it's a theatrical horror film — and theatrical horror is having a moment. Genre fans turn out for well-made supernatural thrillers on the big screen, and the studio clearly sees this as a theatrical play. That ambition alone changes the project's trajectory.

The horror ecosystem is thriving

October is proving it right now. Clayface arrives as DC's horror-tinged offering, and the seasonal appetite for scares extends well beyond Halloween — haunted-house attractions like Bayville Scream Park, returning with five haunted houses, show how deep the cultural hunger for a good fright runs. A well-crafted haunted-house movie with Raimi producing slots directly into that appetite.

Every House is Haunted has franchise bones

The title isn't just a film title — it's a short-story collection, a whole universe of haunted houses. If the first film lands, the material is sitting right there. Studios think in universes now, and Rogers' collection is a ready-made one.

What's Still to Come

Let's be honest about where things stand: no cast has been announced, no release date is set, and the project is in active development with a new studio — not yet in production. Industry talk will now turn to casting, and with Raimi's name attached, expect the announcement to draw real names. The film is officially on the move, and in this business, that's the hardest part.

Five years in limbo would have killed a lesser project. Every House is Haunted survived — and it survived by landing with better backers, sharper directors, and one of horror's defining producers. The release date is still TBA, but the haunting has officially begun. Keep the lights on.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Prime Intellect Launches AI Inference for Open Models

Who Controls the Pipes Wins

Announced October 3, 2026 — the freshest launch in this week's AI news cycle — Prime Intellect publicly launched Prime Inference, a serving platform for frontier open-source models. It is the serving layer of the company's open training stack, sitting alongside post-training tools like prime-rl, verifiers, and sandboxes.

The pitch is straightforward: two modes of serving. Serverless endpoints for variable demand, reserved capacity for sustained workloads. Both run on Prime's own GPUs across multiple datacenters — NVIDIA Blackwell hardware today, with Vera Rubin listed as coming soon.

But the launch metrics are what make this announcement land. Before going public, Prime Intellect says it processed nearly a trillion tokens per day internally — across RL rollouts, synthetic data generation, evaluations, and coding agents — with a near-zero tool-call error rate and 100% uptime since launch. Its GLM-5.3 endpoint is reported among the fastest on OpenRouter. This is not a pitch deck; it's a load-tested system being opened to the public.

The New Moat Isn't the Model

The 2026 AI story is quietly shifting. For years the industry fixated on who builds the best model. But there's a growing realization that the real leverage sits one layer down: who controls the pipes between models and users.

Prime Intellect's thesis is that teams should be able to train, evaluate, and serve their own models on their own stack — "own their intelligence" rather than depend on frontier providers. The technical details show what that takes in practice: an OpenAI-compatible API (point any OpenAI SDK at https://api.pinference.ai/api/v1), automatic failover across datacenters, cache-aware routing that uses host DRAM as a secondary KV tier for large prompts, and targets around 100 tokens per second. Wisevoter's launch coverage notes the platform serves GLM-5.3 on GB200 NVL72 hardware with OpenAI-compatible SDKs.

That last part matters. Inference optimization — cache-aware routing, dedicated Blackwell capacity — is where AI economics are being won right now, not just in model benchmarks. Every percentage point of serving efficiency is a percentage point of margin, and at trillion-token scale, those points are worth real money.

The Closed Loop

The deeper idea here is the closed loop. Prime Intellect isn't just selling inference; it's building an integrated compute, training, inference, and sandbox stack where production traces feed back into training. Serve the model, watch how it's used, fold the data back into the next training run. That's the flywheel that compounds — and it's the same pattern driving the industry's rush to squeeze more compute from existing power and the massive data center buildouts feeding the open-model ecosystem.

There's also a community angle that shouldn't be overlooked. Prime Intellect is backed by Founders Fund, Radical, NVIDIA, Intel, and AI researchers including Andrej Karpathy and John Schulman. In the open-source AI world, credibility is currency, and those names spend. The open-model community has been waiting for production-grade serving infrastructure that isn't controlled by the frontier labs — Prime Inference is a serious answer to that wait.

Why Tool-Call Reliability Is the Real Spec

Buried in the launch metrics is the number that matters most for where AI is heading: a near-zero tool-call error rate. That spec isn't about chatbots. It's about agents.

Coding agents, RL rollouts, synthetic data generation — the workloads Prime Intellect ran before launch — all depend on models that can call tools reliably, thousands of times in a row, without a malformed call breaking the chain. One failed tool call in a hundred might be fine for a demo. At a trillion tokens a day, it's a catastrophe. The fact that Prime load-tested on exactly these workloads suggests the platform was built for the agentic era from day one, not retrofitted for it.

The target of around 100 tokens per second is the other number worth pausing on. For interactive use, that puts it in the territory where an open model served on Prime's stack feels roughly as responsive as a closed API. And because the API is OpenAI-compatible, switching costs are low: point an existing SDK at a new URL and you're running. That's how you win developers — not with a migration guide, but with a one-line config change.

What to Watch

The open question is scale economics. Running dedicated Blackwell capacity across multiple datacenters is expensive, and the inference market is brutally competitive. Prime's advantage is vertical integration: the same stack that serves models also trains them, which means optimizations can flow in both directions. If the closed loop works — production traces genuinely improving the next model generation — that integration becomes a moat that pure serving providers can't easily copy.

For teams building on open models, though, the practical takeaway is simpler. A fast, reliable, OpenAI-compatible serving layer for frontier open models lowers the cost of independence. You don't have to choose between the convenience of a closed API and the freedom of an open model anymore. The pipes are getting built, and they're getting cheaper.

The Takeaway

The 2026 AI battle is moving from models to infrastructure — and inference is the new front line. Prime Intellect's near-trillion-token launch track record gives Prime Inference instant credibility, and its closed-loop stack points at where the industry's economics are heading. Own the pipes, and the models follow.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Broadway Flea Market Raises $1.49M for Charity

40 years of turning fandom into funding

This is not a new story. It is a very old one that keeps getting better. Since 1987, the Broadway Flea Market has raised more than $21 million. And the organization it benefits, Broadway Cares, has granted more than $300 million since 1988 to support people living with HIV/AIDS and other critical illnesses.

Those numbers are almost too big to feel. So think about what they buy: meals, medication, housing, emergency assistance — the practical scaffolding that keeps vulnerable people afloat. Every signed poster and vintage Playbill sold at those 63 market tables converts directly into that kind of help. Eighteen Broadway and Off-Broadway productions showed up this year — Hadestown, The Outsiders, Oh, Mary!, Wicked, and more — turning the event into a reunion of the people who make New York's stages run.

The indoor pivot deserves its own applause. Moving a street-scale event into a ballroom on short notice is the kind of logistical nightmare that usually ends in disappointment. Instead, it became part of the story: the theatre world, famous for the show-must-go-on ethos, simply put on the show. Inside the Hammerstein, warm and dry, the storm outside almost felt like a dare the event accepted.

A city that knows how to gather

New York has always understood the power of showing up. This week alone, the city is gearing up for Oktoberfest celebrations across the five boroughs, and holiday planners are already mapping out the best Christmas events the city will host this season. Add a record-breaking charity flea market to that list, and you get a picture of a city that treats gathering as a civic duty.

And the arts scene keeps delivering. Records are falling everywhere this fall — Arike Ogunbowale just smashed the WNBA playoff scoring record with 45 points. Broadway's fundraising record fits right into that pattern: a cultural community at the top of its game, using its moment to lift others.

What the money actually does

Broadway Cares has been at this since 1988, and its model is worth understanding. The money goes to the Actors Fund's social services and to hundreds of AIDS and family service organizations across all 50 states. It's one of the most efficient entertainment-industry charities in the country — a rare case where the people performing also do the organizing, the fundraising, and the giving.

The "Lost Boys" table record is a small story that tells the big one. A single table — one show's cast and fans — pulled in over $104,000. That is not a wealthy donor writing a check from a penthouse. That is a community pooling what it has, one signed item at a time, until the pile becomes life-changing.

This matters especially because HIV/AIDS fundraising doesn't get the attention it once did. The crisis has receded from the headlines, but the need hasn't receded from people's lives. Events like the Flea Market keep the pipeline of support flowing — quietly, joyfully, year after year, for four decades now.

The practical takeaway

You don't need a $30,000 London theatre adventure to be part of this. Broadway Cares runs fundraising events all year — the Flea Market in the fall, the Easter Bonnet Competition in the spring, and the iconic red buckets at theatre exits year-round. Every dollar lands where it's needed.

If you missed this year's Flea Market, mark the calendar for next fall's 41st. And if you were one of the thousands who squeezed into the Hammerstein Ballroom as the nor'easter raged outside — congratulations. You were part of the best year yet.

A tradition that keeps earning its keep

Forty years in, the Broadway Flea Market could have become a nostalgic routine. Instead, it keeps breaking its own records. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because the theatre community treats generosity as part of the job description — and because New Yorkers, faced with a storm and a charity, will always choose the charity.

$1,487,927. Indoors. In a storm. On a Sunday in September. The show went on, and then some.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: 24 Jump Street Lands Dec 2027: Tatum and Hill Return

The Third Jump Street Movie Finally Has a Date

Thirteen years. That's how long it's been since 22 Jump Street hit theaters in 2014, and comedy fans have been waiting for a follow-up with the kind of patience usually reserved for concert presales. This week, Sony Pictures ended the suspense: the third Jump Street film is officially titled 24 Jump Street, and it lands in theaters December 10, 2027.

Skipping 23 entirely is, of course, a franchise running joke. When Neal H. Moritz announced the project in June 2026, the script's title page reportedly read: "It took so long we had to skip one." That's the Jump Street sense of humor in a nutshell — the franchise has always been in on its own joke, and the title is already doing comedy work before a single scene has been shot.

The Gang Is Back Together

The Sony slate announcement settled weeks of talks reporting: Channing Tatum (Jenko), Jonah Hill (Schmidt), and Ice Cube (Captain Dickson) are all confirmed to return. For a comedy built entirely on chemistry, that's the whole ballgame. Tatum and Hill's buddy-cop energy carried two movies; Ice Cube's perpetually furious Captain Dickson stole every scene he touched.

Directing is Rodney Rothman, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who co-wrote 22 Jump Street. Rothman wrote the screenplay with Hill and Meghan Malloy, and having a co-writer from the last film behind the camera suggests the tone will be protected. Original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller return as producers alongside Moritz, Tatum, and Hill — the architects staying close to the building they designed.

Why This One Feels Like an Event

Comedy sequels have a bad reputation for good reason. Third installments especially tend to arrive tired. But a few things about 24 Jump Street suggest this could be the exception.

Tatum's endorsement carries weight

Back in a 2024 interview, Tatum called the third-movie script "the best script I've ever read for a third movie." Actors say nice things about their projects; they rarely say that. For a star who's been protective of this franchise — he and Hill produce it themselves — that quote is a genuine signal.

The Rothman factor

Rothman co-wrote 22 Jump Street, which means he was in the room where the franchise found its voice. A sequel directed by someone who helped build the tone is always safer than a hired gun. His Oscar pedigree (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) doesn't hurt either.

Thirteen years of anticipation is an asset

The long gap means something specific here. 22 Jump Street's end credits famously teased absurd possible undercover assignments — medical school, culinary school, space — and fans have spent over a decade imagining what comes next. The franchise's core joke has always been about sequels themselves. A third film arriving after thirteen real-world years of sequel-baiting has more material to play with than any writer could invent. No plot details are confirmed yet, and frankly, the speculation is half the fun.

The Comedy Landscape in 2027

Here's the honest industry context: big-screen studio comedies have had a rough decade. Audiences love comedy; they just stopped going to theaters for it. But the pendulum may be swinging. Franchise comedies with genuine star power and real craft behind them — the kind of event that feels bigger than a streaming night — have a lane again.

December 10, 2027 positions 24 Jump Street as a holiday-season crowd-pleaser, the kind of movie you take a group to between Christmas shopping trips. Counter-programming against the season's heavier fare has worked before, and a broad, silly, quotable comedy is exactly the antidote to prestige-season solemnity.

What We're Not Getting (and That's Fine)

For the record: the once-discussed Men in Black crossover, the famous "MIB 23" project, is dead. It's franchise history, not part of this film, and everyone involved seems happy about that. This is a pure Jump Street movie — Jenko and Schmidt, Captain Dickson, Lord and Miller's fingerprints, and a script its own star calls the best third-movie script he's ever read.

Some franchises should have stopped. This one just made us wait thirteen years and skipped a number. That confidence is earned. 24 Jump Street arrives December 10, 2027. Schmidt and Jenko are going back undercover, and we wouldn't miss it.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: AI Startup DualEntry Raises $90M to Modernize ERP Systems

Nobody Demos ERP at Conferences. VCs Just Bet $90 Million on It.

On October 2, 2026, a startup most people had never heard of came out of stealth and closed a $90 million Series A. DualEntry, an AI-native ERP company headquartered in New York, raised at a $415 million post-money valuation. The round was co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures, with GV (Google Ventures), Contrary, and Vesey Ventures participating. Total funding now exceeds $100 million raised in roughly 15 to 18 months since founding.

ERP — enterprise resource planning — is the least glamorous corner of enterprise software. It's the general ledger, accounts payable, bank reconciliations. Nobody puts it on a keynote stage. But finance back-offices are where AI automation converts most directly into dollars, and DualEntry's pitch is aimed squarely at the industry's most painful ritual: the legacy ERP migration.

The 24-Hour Migration

Here's the number that makes CFOs sit up: DualEntry's "NextDay Migration" engine claims to map and transfer historical financial data — line items, subledgers, attachments — from legacy systems like NetSuite, Sage Intacct, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, QuickBooks, or Xero in under 24 hours. Traditional ERP migrations typically take 6 to 12 months and cost millions in consulting fees.

Anyone who has lived through an ERP migration knows why this matters. These projects are infamous: years of consultants, broken integrations, finance teams living in spreadsheets for quarters at a time. The switching cost is so high that companies stay on systems they hate. A migration measured in hours instead of months isn't an incremental improvement — it's a different market. It turns the vendor relationship from hostage situation into subscription.

The product itself is built AI-native from the ground up: general ledger, AR/AP, live bank connections, FP&A, and audit controls, with 13,000+ third-party integrations, SOC 2 Type II certification, and a range designed to scale from $5 million-revenue startups to NYSE-listed companies. Co-founder and CEO Santiago Nestares launched the company about a year ago.

That SOC 2 certification deserves a sentence. Finance software is where enterprise buyers are most conservative — nobody lets an uncertified vendor near the general ledger. The 13,000 integrations matter for the same reason: an ERP that can't talk to a company's existing tools is a non-starter regardless of how good its AI is. DualEntry is pitching disruption, but it's doing it with the compliance checkboxes that get you through procurement. That's a savvy combination.

The Finance Team of One

The customer story DualEntry leads with is genuinely striking. Slash, a fintech with over $100 million in ARR, runs on DualEntry with a finance team of one person. One.

The company reports that its AI automates up to 90% of repetitive tasks — bank reconciliations, intercompany transfers, anomaly detection, fraud prevention — and says it has processed over $100 billion in journal entries through AI automation, serving thousands of global users.

A note of healthy skepticism, which the coverage also flags: the $100 billion in journal entries and the 90% automation figures are company-reported. DualEntry is early — it launched about a year ago. But the investor list suggests the diligence was real. Lightspeed and Khosla don't co-lead $90 million rounds on vibes, and a fintech doing nine figures of revenue running on a one-person finance team is a customer story that's hard to fake.

Why AI-Native Beats AI-Bolted-On

There's a broader pattern worth naming. The first wave of enterprise AI was about bolting copilots onto legacy systems — an AI assistant inside your old ERP. DualEntry represents the second wave: systems rebuilt from the ground up with AI as the architecture, not the add-on. It's the same shift playing out across enterprise software, from open-source AI models entering professional domains to new approaches in AI-designed biology.

The deeper thesis: AI-native systems don't just automate tasks, they change org math. A $100 million ARR fintech running on a finance team of one is a preview of what every CFO is now being asked to imagine. The headcount model of corporate finance — teams of analysts doing reconciliation by hand — is exactly the kind of work that disappears when the system itself does the reconciling. Whether that's exciting or unnerving depends on where you sit, but the direction is unmistakable.

For the broader startup market, DualEntry's round is another datapoint in the enterprise AI funding surge: top-tier firms writing large checks for vertical AI companies with real customer traction, not just model demos. The $415 million valuation on roughly a year of operating history is rich — but in this market, it's the price of admission to the AI-native enterprise stack.

The Takeaway

ERP migrations have been the enterprise world's most dreaded ritual for decades. DualEntry's bet is that AI can compress 6–12 months of consultant misery into 24 hours — and a $100M fintech running on a finance team of one suggests the pitch isn't just theory. The least glamorous corner of enterprise AI may be its most lucrative.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Turkey’s EV Boom: 1 in 5 New Cars Now Electric

How it happened

Three drivers did the heavy lifting. First, a 2023 tax relief cut the registration tax on electric vehicles, shrinking the price gap between EVs and combustion cars at exactly the moment buyers were ready to consider the switch. Policy matters, and this was policy done right: a targeted, well-timed incentive that changed real purchasing decisions.

Second came the launch of Togg, Turkey's first domestic EV maker. The company didn't just enter the market — it leads it. Togg sold 13,240 vehicles in the first four months of 2026, taking 24.3 percent of the country's EV sales. And in August 2026, the Togg T10X did something historic: with 2,939 sales, it topped Turkey's entire car market — not just the EV segment, but everything. A homegrown electric car outselling every imported model on the lot. That had never happened before.

Third, cheaper Chinese EV imports arrived and intensified competition, which pushed prices down and gave buyers more choices. More options, lower prices, stronger incentives — the flywheel spun up fast.

The numbers back it up. BEV sales in Turkey nearly doubled in 2025 to 191,960 units, good for a 17.7 percent market share, according to ODMD data. That pace has carried into 2026, with Togg holding the lead.

Why this is a bigger deal than it looks

Turkey's story is a template, and the rest of the world should be paying attention. The recipe is not mysterious: cut the taxes that penalize EVs, support a domestic champion without closing the market to competition, and let falling battery prices do the rest. Other mid-size economies are watching this experiment with great interest.

There's an industrial dimension too. Togg is not just selling cars; it is building an ecosystem — factories, suppliers, charging networks, engineering jobs. When a country builds its own EV industry rather than importing one, the benefits stay local: manufacturing employment, technical expertise, export potential. The T10X topping the August market wasn't just a sales milestone. It was proof that the strategy worked.

And the environmental math follows automatically. Every percentage point of EV share displaces gasoline burned in Istanbul traffic — and anyone who has sat in Istanbul traffic knows what a difference that makes. Cleaner air in a megacity of 16 million people is not a small prize.

The global backdrop is electric

Turkey is riding a wave, not swimming alone. Clean energy keeps racking up wins: Ford and DTE just brought a 100 MW solar park online in Michigan, feeding clean power into the grid. Aviation is electrifying too — Heart Aerospace flew the world's largest electric plane this week. Even buildings are getting in on it, with wallpaper that generates power from room humidity making its debut.

Put together, the pattern is unmistakable. The electrification of everything — cars, planes, buildings, grids — is no longer a forecast. It is the news.

What this means for the industry

For automakers, Turkey is a case study in how quickly a market can flip. Legacy brands that assumed they had years to plan their EV transitions are discovering that consumer adoption, once it starts, can move faster than corporate strategy. The companies winning in Turkey are the ones that showed up with compelling electric products at fair prices. That lesson applies everywhere.

For policymakers elsewhere, the message is simpler: incentives work, and they work fastest when paired with domestic industry. Turkey didn't just subsidize imports. It built a national car company, opened the market, and let competition sharpen everybody.

For drivers, the takeaway is the most practical of all. When one in five new cars is electric, the charging network stops being speculative and becomes a business. Range anxiety fades when the cars — and the chargers — are everywhere. Turkey's buyers aren't early adopters anymore. They're just buyers.

The road ahead

A 20-fold jump in three years doesn't guarantee a straight line to 100 percent. The early majority is always harder to win than the early adopters, and Turkey will need to keep expanding charging infrastructure, especially beyond the big cities. But momentum this strong has a way of solving its own problems — investment follows demand, and demand is now undeniable.

Good news in economics is rare enough to celebrate. A country that quadrupled its EV share in three years, built a domestic champion that outsells imports, and did it all while the market was shrinking 20 percent? That's not just good news. It's a blueprint.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Michael B. Jordan, Austin Butler Rev Miami Vice for 2028

Pastel Suits, Fast Boats, and a Cast That Means Business

The latest news out of Universal's Miami Vice revival is exactly the kind of casting headline that gets a whole industry nodding. Edi Gathegi has joined the ensemble, reported by The Hollywood Reporter this week. Sources describe his role as a small-time crook with big-time ambitions who is in over his head — the character's name is undisclosed, but the part is said to be consequential to the story.

Gathegi is having a moment. He broke out as the scene-stealing Mr. Terrific in James Gunn's Superman (2025) and reprises the DC role in 2027's Man of Tomorrow. Superhero ensemble casting is having a moment too, evidently. Before that: X-Men: First Class, the Twilight films, The Harder They Fall, and a series-regular turn on Apple TV+'s For All Mankind. A "small-time crook with big-time ambitions" sounds like exactly the kind of role an actor like Gathegi could run away with.

The Ensemble Is Ridiculous

Let's take stock, because this cast list is doing a lot of heavy lifting:

Michael B. Jordan plays Ricardo Tubbs. Austin Butler plays Sonny Crockett. Read that again. Two of the most magnetic screen presences of their generation, one as the smooth undercover cop, one as the charismatic wild card. The Crockett-and-Tubbs dynamic is the engine of Miami Vice; this pairing suggests the film knows it and cast accordingly.

Then there's Alden Ehrenreich, signed in August 2026 per Deadline. Whitney Peak and Camila Morrone. Danny Ramirez. And John Leguizamo, revealed by THR in August as the film's main villain — Leguizamo playing the big bad is the kind of casting that makes you lean forward in your seat. Rounding it out: Andrew Schulz.

This is not a cautious ensemble. It's a statement.

Kosinski Behind the Camera

Directing: Joseph Kosinski, the man behind Top Gun: Maverick and F1. Whatever else you say about Kosinski, the man photographs vehicles, speed, and men with something to prove better than anyone in the business. Top Gun: Maverick is the textbook example of a legacy revival done right — reverent to the original, thrilling on its own terms, and enormous. The script comes from Dan Gilroy, who wrote Nightcrawler, so the noir credentials are solid.

The film draws inspiration from the original pilot episode of the classic 1980s NBC series, created by Anthony Yerkovich and produced by Michael Mann. That's a smart anchor. The pilot is where the show's DNA lives — the glitz, the danger, the moral ambiguity. Set in mid-1980s Miami, all glamour and crime, the film is being made for IMAX, with production beginning in November 2026 and shooting in New York and Miami.

Why This Revival Feels Different

Reboots of 80s properties arrive with a certain sameness. This one has a few things working in its favor.

The director is the right kind of maximalist

Kosinski's films are tactile. You feel the speed. A Miami Vice movie needs boats that scream, cars that gleam, and night sequences that glow. Nobody stages that better. The IMAX presentation signals Universal wants this experienced, not just watched.

The period setting is a gift

Setting the story in the mid-1980s, rather than updating it, is the boldest and smartest choice here. Period Miami — the pastels, the neon, the specific decadence of that decade — is a character in itself. It frees the film from competing with every modern cop drama and lets it become a full sensory immersion. Audiences are clearly hungry for big-screen period spectacle; the success of epics like Nolan's The Odyssey shows that transporting viewers to another era, done lavishly, is box-office gold.

The villain matters

Leguizamo as the main villain deserves its own paragraph. He's one of those actors who can be genuinely menacing and wildly entertaining in the same scene, and a Miami Vice story lives or dies on the quality of its criminal kingpin. Pairing him against Jordan and Butler sets up a triangle with real charge.

What Industry Talk Suggests

Plot specifics beyond the undercover vice-cop premise remain under wraps, and that's fine. The confirmed ingredients tell the story: Gathegi's ambitious small-time crook, Leguizamo's villain, Jordan and Butler's detectives, a pilot-inspired undercover operation, and Kosinski shooting it all for IMAX. You can practically hear the synths already.

Production begins next month. Between now and May 19, 2028, expect set photos that will flood every feed — New York and Miami shoots of Jordan and Butler in period costume are going to be a whole genre of content. The film is produced by Dylan Clark (The Batman) via Dylan Clark Productions, alongside Kosinski.

The 1980s revival wave has produced its share of nostalgia plays. Miami Vice '85, with this cast and this director, looks like something rarer: a revival that might outshine the memory. In theaters May 19, 2028. Start the playlist now.