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The newest teacher at San Diego charter school chain Altus Schools stands 6’2″, has bright blue eyes, and a bald head. It is also a robot.

Ameca, which the school touts as the “world’s most advanced AI-powered humanoid robot,” is the name of a pair of robots purchased by the school for a combined, eyebrow-raising figure of $500,000. The purchase is raising questions among parents and community members.

Altus expects the ChatGPT-enabled robots to be onsite this fall. Principal Cathryn Rambo wrote in an email to families that she was “thrilled to be the first school in the world researching the use of physical AI as a teaching partner,” according to Voice of San Diego, which reviewed the email.

Amazon has been explicit about its vision to become a leaner organization and use automation to fill in the gaps, and that ethos seems to have taken root in the company's HR department—which was reportedly a major target of the recent layoffs.

Despite citing the “transformative” nature of generative AI in its layoff announcement, the company has denied that its investment in automation was directly responsible for the job losses.

But interviews with warehouse associates and former HR employees, along with legal filings, reveal how Amazon’s growing reliance on automation appears to be removing humans from the HR process.

When Carley Fortune started writing her debut novel Every Summer After, she had one goal: to create something for herself. Frustrated by corporate pressures, the then-executive editor of Refinery29 Canada returned to the lake where she grew up. 

Everything that followed—five best-selling books published in five years, two projects in development at Netflix, a television adaptation charting in the top 10 on Amazon Prime Video, and the mania surrounding her romances set in idyllic nooks of Canada—she never anticipated. 

Every Summer After, a coming-of-age romance set in Barry’s Bay—the corner of Ontario where Fortune spent her adolescence—was published in 2022 and has sold over a million copies. The television adaptation of Fortune’s debut, dubbed Every Year After, premiered on Prime Video two weeks ago. 

Fast Company spoke to Fortune about the series, other projects, how her journalism background influenced her as an author, and the renaissance of romance book-to-screen adaptations.   

Were there moments from the book that you specifically advocated to keep in Every Year After? 

Not really, but only because our showrunner Amy Harris really knew what the moments readers wanted to see. I think with another showrunner it may have been a different conversation, but she felt a lot of pressure to get certain things right. The big one for both of us, even without having discussed it, was the “you came home” scene, when Percy and Sam see each other for the first time as adults. It’s such an emotional moment in the book and it needed to land right in the show. And it’s done so well. Somebody online took that scene from the book and matched it up to how it plays out on the show, and it is beat for beat. So, so perfect. 

Speaking of your showrunner Amy Harris, I know you and she have talked about seeing this as a multiseason show. Where do you want to see Every Year After go next? 

I’m so excited by the way the series ended. The finale really sets us up for One Golden Summer, and Alice, who is Charlie’s love interest from that book. I’m very hopeful we’ll get a second season so we can begin to weave that story into everything else that’s happening in Barry’s Bay. 

I also want to see what’s happening with Chantal, Delilah, and Jordie. Amy put it really beautifully. With Percy and Sam in season one, it’s a “will they, won’t they?” In season two it would be a “how will they?” which I think is so smart.

There’s so much pressure when adaptations happen. You were an executive producer on Every Year After. How did you manage all of those different expectations? 

I think what I was most focused on was making sure the adaptation preserved the spirit and tone of the book—so it felt like the book—while also growing it, because this is a show we’re really hoping has multiple seasons. We wanted Percy and Sam’s story at the heart of it, but also to build out the world. I wanted to make sure that even with the changes, it still felt like the world of Every Summer After. 

With casting, it just so happened that the people we loved looked like the characters, but that wasn’t the priority. You’re really trying to find an embodiment of the characters—the feeling that the actors give you. Fans want to see what they read in the book, and it just so happened to work out that way. But that’s not my number one thing. It was more: Does this character feel like Percy? Do they feel like Sam? Is there chemistry? We were just really lucky to have a cast that delivered on what readers were picturing. 

The six-minute prologue to The Odyssey is a physical experience, especially when seen from director Christopher Nolan’s preferred spot. That’s the middle row of AMC’s IMAX theater at Universal CityWalk in Hollywood, where Nolan has been reviewing footage in early April as he finishes postproduction. With the 58-by-79-foot screen fully enveloping a viewer’s peripheral vision, waves crash and arrows thud with spine-rattling force.

The Odyssey, which Universal Pictures is releasing in theaters July 17, is the first feature film in which every scene is entirely shot with IMAX cameras—from Matt Damon’s Odysseus huddling inside the iconic Trojan horse to the iron-helmeted Greeks ambushing their foes. Nolan captured many of the moments using a new camera named “the Keighley,” which was designed to handle eye-widening spectacle and intimate dialogue with equal vividness. “We were able to get a lot of extremely intense, emotional scenes with this imaging capability, [which] we’ve never been able to do before,” says Nolan.

The quietest and most versatile camera IMAX has ever created, the Keighley (named after IMAX “chief quality guru” Patricia Keighley and her husband, David, IMAX’s longtime chief quality officer, who died last year) is designed to send Hollywood a message: This format isn’t just for stunts and docs anymore. IMAX is betting that the Keighley will unlock the appeal, and profits, of large-format film for a new generation of directors. It also may sweeten the deal for a potential suitor: IMAX is reportedly exploring a sale.

Nolan has dreamt of filming an entire Hollywood movie in IMAX since he was 16. At a Six Flags amusement park north of Evanston, Illinois (the suburb where his mother grew up and the London-born Nolan spent his summers), he saw To Fly, an IMAX doc about aviation.

During a particularly spectacular shot filmed from the point of view of a banking airplane, Nolan recalls that his friend “nudged me to look at the audience—and see everyone’s head tilted to one side,” he says, grinning at the memory in his Los Angeles production office.

Since 2008’s The Dark Knight, when he became the first director to use IMAX film cameras in a narrative feature, Nolan has pushed the technology further with every subsequent project—aerial dogfights in Dunkirk, handheld brawls in Tenet, portrait-style close-ups in Oppenheimer. But those scenes always stood apart. IMAX’s cameras—which hadn’t been redesigned in decades—were too cumbersome and loud to handle an entire film, especially the dialogue scenes.

Read the exclusive on Fast Company.

The Odyssey, which Universal Pictures is releasing in theaters July 17, is the first feature film in which every scene is entirely shot with IMAX cameras—from Matt Damon’s Odysseus huddling inside the iconic Trojan horse to the iron-helmeted Greeks ambushing their foes. Nolan captured many of the moments using a new camera named “the Keighley,” which was designed to handle eye-widening spectacle and intimate dialogue with equal vividness.

“We were able to get a lot of extremely intense, emotional scenes with this imaging capability, [which] we’ve never been able to do before,” says director Christopher Nolan.

The quietest and most versatile camera IMAX has ever created, the Keighley (named after IMAX “chief quality guru” Patricia Keighley and her husband, David, IMAX’s longtime chief quality officer, who died last year) is designed to send Hollywood a message: This format isn’t just for stunts and docs anymore. IMAX is betting that the Keighley will unlock the appeal, and profits, of large-format film for a new generation of directors. It also may sweeten the deal for a potential suitor: IMAX is reportedly exploring a sale.

IMAX takes home 11% of the box-office haul from movies released or remastered in the IMAX format. (That amounted to $142 million in 2025, or more than a third of IMAX’s total revenue for that year; the other $268 million came mainly from sales, rentals, and maintenance on IMAX projection systems.) But IMAX sees movies filmed, not just screened, with its technology as an increasingly important part of its business model.

Read the exclusive on Fast Company.