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Nearly 60 years after the publication of E.L. Konigsburg’s book about two kids running toward the city and away from their suburb-living parents, there are increasing signs of the complete opposite occurring: Parents are taking their kids out of the New York City school system, and out of New York City entirely, and heading for the burbs, thanks to the increased cost of raising a child here. Families with young children are leaving New York City at more than twice the rate of households without them, and the public school system is shrinking as a result.

A decade ago, the city had over 1 million public school students, but this year it has 885,000, City Comptroller Mark Levine said in a social media post on X—and he expects another 150,000 fewer over the next decade. The drop has left 219 schools with fewer than 200 students each, he said, some too small to field a sports team. “This is not sustainable,” he wrote in the post, and the city will have to consolidate schools with sharply declining enrollment, Gothamist reported.

Levine said in a statement to Fortune that cost is part of the story. “Raising a family in New York City is increasingly difficult as the cost of living rises, and declining student enrollment is one troubling sign of that challenge,” he said. “Affordability is a major factor, but not the only one, and we need to better understand every driver of this trend to respond with viable, data-driven solutions.”

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/07/new-york-city-public-school-enrollment-drops-affordability/?utm_source=reddit/

Singapore celebrated its 61st birthday with two films. One, Bersama Majulah, depicts the Southeast Asian country under siege by zombies; the other, Trace Project, tells an inspiring tale of a young man who grows up to become Singapore’s first astronaut on Mars.

The twist? Neither film starred a human actor. Everything in both films—apart from their scripts—had been fully generated by AI.

Generative AI in filmmaking is the first real proof of how the new technology can disrupt an established industry. It started with short-form content: According to Chinese state media, over 95% of the more than 120,000 Chinese microdramas released in the first quarter of 2026 were AI-generated, compared with nearly zero just a year ago.

The technology is now encroaching on more established media: Last September, Hong Kong broadcaster TVB released a 10-episode short drama titled You, and Only You, the first of its kind in Hong Kong to feature AI-generated characters. (The network is now using its virtual actors in ad campaigns.)

“AI is like oxygen—it’s everywhere,” says Danming Xie, senior vice president and chief AI scientist of Chinese video-streaming platform iQiyi. “It’s increasingly impossible not to use AI in video production. The conversation’s shifting more toward how deeply creators use it.”

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/07/ai-entertainment-china-technology/?utm_source=reddit/

Christina Zhu, the head of Walmart’s China business, remembers when Chinese shoppers did not have much choice.

As a child, she watched her parents wake up at 4:30 a.m. on Sundays to go to the wet market. “They had to haggle, and high-quality produce wasn’t always guaranteed,” Zhu, born in 1973, recalled at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau in September.

Today, Chinese shoppers are “probably the group with the most choices [in the world],” and they have become “the most demanding customers,” she said.

Meeting those rising expectations has become the defining challenge for retailers in China, and Walmart has managed it better than most. It entered China in 1996 with a Supercenter and a Sam’s Club in Shenzhen. Three decades later, the U.S. retailer is thriving in the world’s second-largest economy even as other foreign brands struggle.

Walmart has defied the downturn by meeting the dual needs of the discerning Chinese consumer: extreme convenience, in the form of lightning-fast delivery, and an in-person shopping experience so novel that stores have become a holiday destination for shoppers throughout the region.

The big-box membership warehouses are Walmart’s primary growth engine in China. Sam’s Clubs contribute about 70% of Walmart revenue in China, estimates Fitch Ratings senior director Cathy Chao, and the business has expanded from 15 clubs in 2016 to 67 in May.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/05/walmart-china-sams-club-growth-christina-zhu-consumer-slump-fast-delivery/?utm_source=reddit/

“China plus one” has been a winning strategy for Southeast Asia. The proposition was simple: Draw in global manufacturers pivoting away from China owing to rising costs and geopolitical tensions, and win stronger growth, higher wages, and more jobs for local economies. 

Yet despite winning billions of dollars of investment in new factories, the region is reaping fewer benefits than its leaders may have hoped. 

“China plus one has been a net gain for Southeast Asia, but a conditional and uneven one,” says Meng-Chun Liu, the director of the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER), a Taiwan-based think tank. “It brought factories, exports, and jobs to the region, but not the design, core components, and process know-how that captures most of the value.”

Vietnam, the star economy of Southeast Asia, focuses primarily on final assembly before export to developed markets, rather than manufacturing intermediate components. To make matters worse, companies like Target—frustrated by an underdeveloped Southeast Asian factory ecosystem—are moving supply chains back to China.

And now Southeast Asia faces a bigger challenge: As Chinese firms increasingly view Southeast Asia as a region of consumers, not workers, a flood of cheap exports could end up undercutting the region’s manufacturing gains.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/05/southeast-asia-china-plus-one-manufacturing/?utm_source=reddit/

Red Lobster had unwittingly handed creators the perfect stage for a mukbang—the South Korean–born online genre in which hosts eat for an audience, sometimes to spectacular excess. Ambitious mukbang-ers eager to prove their gastronomic stamina descended on Red Lobster locations across the country to consume absurd quantities of shrimp. One YouTube video by Joey Kinsley, a.k.a. “Sir Yacht,” features the influencer shoveling down shrimp for 10 hours straight.

The chaos spread from dining rooms to newsrooms as Red Lobster became one of America’s most-discussed restaurants—for all the wrong reasons. While customers drawn by the deal monopolized tables to gorge on order after order of shrimp, restaurants ran out of shrimp and turned away regular customers. The chain filed for bankruptcy protection in May 2024, with $692 million in total liabilities, and revealed in court documents that it lost $11 million on Ultimate Endless Shrimp in the third quarter of 2023, and then $12.5 million in the fourth quarter. It closed roughly 130 of its 700 restaurants and cut corporate staff.

Now a creditors’ trust is suing Red Lobster’s former parent companies, claiming breach of fiduciary duty and fraud. In a lawsuit filed in May, it’s alleging that Ultimate Endless Shrimp wasn’t an epic blunder, but a conspiracy designed to force Red Lobster to buy massive amounts of shrimp—a scheme, the trust alleges, that put an Asian seafood giant’s interests ahead of Red Lobster’s, extracting millions from the American restaurant chain via overpriced shrimp purchases, and ruining its reputation in the process.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/01/red-lobster-endless-shrimp-bankruptcy-thai-union-private-equity-lawsuit/?utm_source=reddit/

The health wave has made its impact on what could have been considered its mortal enemy: fast food. In a far cry from its old era of “supersized” menus, McDonald’s is exploring a new $8.5 billion, decade-long “McDonald’s Next” overhaul—and the fast food giant is exploring smaller and more flexible portions aimed at protein-first and GLP-1 consumers. The company is considering grilled chicken sandwiches and wraps, crispy chicken and burger bowls, and egg bites as it adapts to changing eating habits.

“We’re going to evolve our menu to make sure it reflects where we think that consumer is going to be looking for in the future,” McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said in a CNBC interview this week regarding GLP-1 customers.

The company has already begun its repositioning of its menu. In April, McDonald’s introduced protein callouts—or badges that mark specific protein items—in its app and restaurant kiosks for 17 menu items. The company says it has more than 30 menu items containing at least 15 grams of protein.

McDonald’s said the potential customer base extends well beyond people taking  weight loss medication. Skye Anderson, president of McDonald’s USA, said at the company’s investor day in September that roughly 30 million Americans are using GLP-1 drugs while the company’s own research indicated that about 60 million more Americans are also actively looking for more protein in their diets.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/01/mcdonalds-8-5-billion-bet-fast-food-protein-glp-1/?utm_source=reddit/

Starting this week, all of Robinhood’s roughly 29 million customers will have access to trading agents powered by OpenAI and Anthropic. Customers will be able to choose between various OpenAI and Anthropic models, and instruct the agents to carry out trades, conduct research, and build complex investment strategies.

The rollout, which coincided with Robinhood’s annual HOOD summit, follows a move by the company in May to release a so-called MCP tool that allows technical users to hook up their own agents to its trading platform.

While AI has been creeping into every corner of finance, Robinhood is the first to release a nontechnical trading agent for a giant customer base—a step that has the potential to alter how Americans invest, and that could have ripple effects on markets more broadly.

Robinhood’s new offering also comes with a series of guardrails that the company says will prevent agents from behaving in an unexpected manner. Those include providing a dedicated trading account for the agent, and letting users set limits on how much the agent can trade at a time. Users can also opt for a confirmation process that requires the agents to seek final approval before executing a transaction.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/09/29/robinhood-trading-agents-hood-openai-anthropic/?utm_source=reddit/

Geico has the kind of brand recognition most marketers spend their careers chasing. Its Geico Gecko has been selling car insurance for more than 25 years, while slogans like “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance” have become embedded in American culture.

Arianna Orpello, Geico’s chief marketing officer, thinks the mascot’s recognition now approaches rarefied territory.

“Everybody loves the gecko,” Orpello tells Fortune. “It doesn’t matter if they’re 10 or 80.” She likens the character’s recognition and likability to that of Mickey Mouse, calling the advertising intellectual property an asset “most marketers would kill to have.”

Orpello’s challenge now is turning that enormous brand equity into a broader growth engine, using AI, data, and personalization to deepen customer relationships and expand what consumers associate with Geico.

Auto insurance remains the foundation and vast majority of Geico’s business. Geico now wants consumers who know it for car insurance to consider it for everything from home and renters insurance to motorcycles, boats, personal liability, and business insurance.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/article/geico-talking-gecko-advertising-icon-cmo-sell-car-insurance/?utm_source=reddit/

The Trump administration on Monday plans to release new fuel economy standards that would relax regulatory requirements for automakers to control pollution from gasoline-powered cars and light trucks.

President Donald Trump said on his Truth Social media account Saturday that the less stringent mileage requirements would “take the waste out of building cars in America” and save families “thousands on a new, beautiful and safe car,” while boosting auto production in the U.S.

Last December, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration projected that the new standards would set the industry fleetwide average for light-duty vehicles at roughly 34.5 miles per gallon in the 2031 model year, down from a projected 50.4 miles per gallon in 2031 under rules put in place by the Biden administration.

Fuel economy requirements set out how far new vehicles need to travel on a gallon of gasoline. The change would further Trump’s promise to revoke policies that encouraged or created incentives for the production of electric vehicles.

Since taking office, Trump has relaxed auto tailpipe emissions rules, repealed fines for automakers that do not meet federal mileage standards and terminated consumer credits of up to $7,500 for EV purchases.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/09/28/trump-gas-mileage-evs-cars/?utm_source=reddit/

Three oil tankers linked to Iran have been gradually making their way toward the U.S. after being seized by naval forces when President Donald Trump first imposed a blockade on the regime.

The Tifani and Majestic X are now off the coast of Brazil after they were boarded in the Indian Ocean in April, according to Bloomberg. A third ship, known as the Lenore as well as the Davina, just cleared the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa and is headed west into the Atlantic after being interdicted in the Indian Ocean in June.

All three tankers are very large crude carriers, which can each hold 2 million barrels of crude. Brent futures are currently trading at about $106 per barrel.

The U.S. initiated its naval blockade in April, targeting ships attempting to enter or leave Iranian ports. It also applied to Iran-linked vessels anywhere in the world, including the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

After a brief ceasefire lifted the blockade over the summer, Trump reimposed it weeks later as he pivoted toward economic warfare and away from bombs.

Meanwhile, the legal channel the administration is using to seize the tankers and enforce forfeiture is known as prize law and has its roots in the Middle Ages.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/09/27/us-600-million-iranian-oil-seizure-naval-blockade-prize-law/?utm_source=reddit/

Walmart is aiming to assuage customers’ fears about its new pricing technology as it rolls out digital price labels at its stores.

In a statement posted on the company’s website, Walmart Inc.’s CEO John Furner vowed that the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer isn’t using personal information like income, shopping history or a customer’s willingness to pay to set prices, and it won’t be doing so in the future either.

“We don’t set different prices based on who you are or the time of day, and we won’t,” Furner wrote Friday. “Whether you’re buying groceries or electronics on a hot afternoon or in a sudden rush for an item, it’s never a reason to charge you more.”

The pledge from Walmart comes as concerns are mounting from some shoppers, consumer advocates and lawmakers skeptical about the rollout of digital price labels by the discounter and other stores. Digital price labels are rapidly replacing paper shelf tags at U.S. supermarkets and let stores change prices instantly from a central computer instead of having workers swap out paper labels by hand.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/09/27/walmart-ceo-ai-shopping-assistant-personal-information-prices-digital-labels/?utm_source=reddit/

Meatpacking industry groups raised concerns Friday that recent heightened immigration operations in Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma have caused employees to miss work, leading to problems at meat-related businesses that could ultimately raise prices for consumers.

The Texas Cattle Feeders Association, Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association and Kansas Livestock Association said in a statement that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations have prompted delays in the shipment of thousands of cattle, resulting in millions of dollars in lost revenue. The groups say ICE operations have disrupted operations at feedlots, dairy processors, feed and grain companies, and transportation hubs.

Scarlett Mabinger, the vice president of communications for the Kansas Livestock Association, said they have received multiple calls from their members reporting an increase in absences at their southwest Kansas businesses after these communities noticed an increase in federal immigration officers this week.

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed their presence in Kansas but said they are not conducting worksite raids.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/09/26/ice-raids-trump-meatpackers-revenue-losses-texas-kansas-oklahoma-republicans-marshall-moran/?utm_source=reddit/

Samsung customers flooded an online community with dozens of comments this week about issues they’ve experienced with certain models of their not-so-smart AI-powered smart refrigerators. 

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Samsung Electronics’ online community forums were filled with dozens of posts from “Samsung Members” claiming their refrigerators became inoperative following a firmware update from the company’s smart home platform “SmartThings.” The customers reported that following the update, refrigerators went offline, with internal lights not turning on, and cooling and freezing mechanisms not working. 

“Samsung told me to update, so I did, but it broke down,” one user wrote in a post translated from Korean to English. “The meat and everything else is about to spoil. Where can I get compensation for this, and when is the refrigerator going to be fixed? I bought this this spring, and I can’t believe it’s already broken.”

The glitch is the latest example of consumers’ complicated relationship with smart home technology, which has correlated with growing anxiety over AI products more broadly, even as AI adoption continues to increase. 

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/09/25/samsung-customers-complain-spoiled-food-after-update-bricked-ai-smart-fridges/?utm_source=reddit/

Warren Buffett’s middle child recently took over his father’s position as Berkshire Hathaway chairman. Warren had retired as CEO on Jan. 1, but retained his position as chairman until last week. Howard, who now effectively oversees the $1.1 trillion company, has a colorful career background, though. Most interestingly, he previously was a farmer. 

He started farming in Tekamah, Neb., in 1977 on property Warren had purchased for him and leased out, and worked for various food, beverage, and agricultural companies like Coca-Cola and ConAgra in the 1990s and 2000s, according to an interview with Life Stories.

Howard said he loves farming because of the challenge—and it was from the very beginning, since he rented a farm without ever having done it in his life before. 

“Farming to me was totally getting outside my comfort zone,” he said. “I had no idea how to do what I was doing, but I learned it, and today it’s a huge part of what I do in my life—and it’s a huge part of what our foundation does. I think it’s a great lesson.”

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/09/23/warren-buffett-son-howard-buffett-worked-on-a-farm-instead-of-going-to-college-now-chairman-of-1-trillion-berkshire-hathaway/?utm_source=reddit/

China said Tuesday that it is now requiring permits for exports to the United States, Mexico and Canada of two additional chemicals that can be used to make illegal drugs, expanding controls on shipments to the three countries.

The Commerce Ministry and other authorities jointly announced the new regulations ahead of this week’s meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump. The additions bring the number of chemicals under such controls to 18.

The U.S. has called China the world’s largest producer of many of the precursor chemicals used in the illicit production of fentanyl, methamphetamine and other deadly synthetic drugs. It has urged Beijing to take more aggressive action to reduce the flow of unregulated precursor chemicals.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/09/22/china-xi-trump-fentanyl-precursor-drugs/?utm_source=reddit/