Good day to you, and welcome to another installment of The Monitor, WIRED’s culture news roundup. We had a busy weekend with WIRED25, but there was a lot of news happening outside of San Francisco as well. Let’s get you all caught up.Disney+ Could Have More Than 100 Million Subscribers by 2025Of all the fronts…

Apple wants to go to the moon. Its rocket: Apple TV+. Its pilots: Maril Davis, Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert, and Ronald Moore, creative forces behind fan favorites like Fargo, Battlestar Galactica, and Outlander.In the team’s most recent creation, For All Mankind, Moore and company introduce audiences to a new history of the space program—one where…

Balderton Capital, one of the so-called “big four” early-stage VC firms in London (the others being Accel, Atomico and Index), has raised a new $400 million fund to continue backing…

In a scant six weeks, there will be a new Star Wars film, The Rise of Skywalker. Yet folks are still talking about the last installment, 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, specifically asking writer and director Rian Johnson about fan backlash to the diverse cast of characters he put on screen. Maybe his latest…

While across much of Asia, November 11th is either “singles day” (a $38 billion Alibaba extravaganza this year) or Pepero Day (named because 11/11 looks like a bunch of chocolate…

Microsoft’s recent victory in landing a $10 billion Pentagon cloud-computing contract called JEDI could make life more complicated for one of the software giant’s partners: the independent artificial-intelligence research lab OpenAI.OpenAI was created in 2015 by Silicon Valley luminaries including Elon Musk to look to the far horizon, and save the world. The newborn nonprofit…

As Xiaomi widens its smartphone lead over Samsung in India, a new competitor is increasingly posing a challenge. Realme, a one-and-half-year-old smartphone vendor that spun out of Oppo, commanded 14.3%…

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s comments during an interview with Axios — and his subsequent apology — have done more than hand the company’s critics more ammunition in the renewed #boycottUber…

An expensive experiment in global distribution has been abandoned by Adidas, which has announced that will close its robotic “Speedfactories” in Atlanta and Ansbach, Germany, within 6 months. The company…

Going direct to consumer works well for complex product categories Ashwin Ramasamy Contributor Ashwin Ramasamy is the cofounder of PipeCandy, which provides algorithm-generated insights and predictions about ecommerce and D2C…