The Brief

If you've ever wanted to conjure up a scenario between yourself, Han Solo and the crew from Zootopia, you're in luck.

The Walt Disney Company has reached a licensing agreement with OpenAI that brings Disney characters and images to Sora, the artificial intelligence company's short-form-video generator. According to a joint statement released by the two companies, the three-year licensing agreement will allow people to create and share videos using "more than 200" animated characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars.

Notably, the statement adds "the agreement does not include any talent likeness or voices."

As a part of this agreement, Disney will invest $1 billion into OpenAI and become a "major customer" of the company.

Fairplay, the nonprofit advocacy group dedicated to reducing children's screen time, issued a statement saying the Disney OpenAI agreement "betrays kids."

"OpenAI claims children are prohibited from using Sora, yet here they are luring young kids to their platform using some of their favorite characters. Shame on the 'House of Mouse' for aiding and abetting OpenAI's efforts to addict young children to its unsafe platform and products," the statement reads.

Disney and OpenAI say in their statement that the two companies share a commitment to protecting the rights of creators while "maintaining robust controls to prevent the generation of illegal or harmful content."

Sora users will be able to take advantage of the agreement starting in 2026.
Copyright 2025 NPR

If state lawmakers decide to continue funding California State University’s efforts to improve graduation rates, they should tighten oversight of how those dollars are spent, California’s nonpartisan fiscal and policy adviser said Wednesday.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) reported that while CSU’s Graduation Initiative 2025 had mixed success at the end of its 10-year run, a lack of detailed financial reports clouds lawmakers’ ability to assess which interventions were most cost-effective. As CSU works to implement new and more wide-ranging criteria for student progress, the analyst’s office calls for lawmakers to more closely track future spending across the 22-campus system.

LAO recommends state lawmakers “continue to monitor whether existing programs are meeting their objectives cost‑effectively and make adjustments accordingly. While a new CSU graduation initiative likely would provide some state benefits (such as enhanced economic mobility), those benefits could be less sizable or less significant than the potential public benefits of other state programs.”

Funding for the graduation initiative grew from roughly $50 million in 2016-17 to more than $400 million annually by 2024-25, an LAO analysis found, backed by state and tuition revenue. Systemwide, Cal State had more success in increasing two-year graduation rates for transfer students and four-year rates for freshmen, but saw slower progress on six-year freshmen and four-year transfer rates. Achievement varied widely among campuses.

LAO’s interviews with campus administrators suggested the graduation effort had several positive effects beyond raising completion rates, including better Cal State data systems and heightened public scrutiny that held campuses accountable for students’ success.

But LAO found that CSU campuses struggled to balance multiple graduation objectives. Cal State also has not provided enough data to the state about how much campuses spent on specific activities like tutoring, academic advising and mentoring, LAO noted. Data on students’ use of those services also wasn’t available for Graduation Initiative 2025, though recent CSU survey results suggest use of counseling and career services is relatively low.

CSU is now launching a new and broader framework for measuring student achievement, which includes not only graduation rates, but metrics like placement into jobs or graduate school and post-graduation earnings.

If lawmakers opt to back those goals, LAO recommends they explicitly link funding to a single objective and set a formula for how the money is divided among CSU campuses. LAO also calls for campuses to release consistent annual tables breaking down spending and student utilization rates.

In the spring of last year, then-President Joe Biden tried to convince skeptical voters that the struggling economy was healthy. Then-candidate Donald Trump seized on the moment and vowed to lower prices for American consumers, beating his eventual Democratic rival Kamala Harris in part with a winning economic message.

Now it's President Trump who's trying to persuade the public that the state of the economy is sound, after prices rose 3% in the 12 months ending in September and with consumers spending less on big-ticket items.

Betsey Stevenson, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, says making that argument could be a tall order in the face of rising costs for a number of goods and services.

"My personal takeaway from the experience we had [in 2024] was that you can't tell people that prices aren't up when they're up," she said.

While the prices of some items such as gasoline have fallen on Trump's watch, the overall cost of living has continued to climb. For example, grocery costs are up 2.7% for the year ending in September and electricity costs have jumped more than 5%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"Trump's claims about inflation are false," Stevenson said, "and you can go to the grocery store and see it yourself."

But, in a wide-ranging speech to supporters on Tuesday, Trump both defended his administration's track record on the economy and said that talk of affordability was overblown. Trump told the crowd in Mount Pocono, Pa., that he believed the term "affordability" was a "hoax" perpetrated by Democrats. Trump's recent assertions dismissing inflation are not backed by official government economic data.

Consumers are feeling high prices firsthand

While it's true that inflation hit a 9% high during the summer of 2022 under the Biden administration, that was during the pandemic and it dropped significantly after that. Inflation dipped to an annual rate of 3% in January during Biden's final month in office, the same rate it was in September under Trump.

Now many voters are questioning how well Trump is tackling the stubbornly high costs of everyday items. Some 57% of voters said in a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released this week that Trump was "losing the battle against inflation," while 68% of respondents to a AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from October said the economy was poor or very poor.

Voters' souring attitudes on the Trump administration's handling of the economy come less than a year before the U.S. midterm elections, in which Republicans will aim to maintain their majorities in both houses of Congress. But in a warning sign for the GOP, November's odd-year races saw Democrats who campaigned on affordability win major contests in New York City, Virginia and New Jersey.

Political consultant and pollster Frank Luntz says Trump risks appearing out of touch if he continues to claim that affordability is a "hoax" when Americans feel like they're paying more — and actually do pay more.

"When you talk about affordability, it is all perception," Luntz told NPR's Morning Edition. "The greatest danger is if you tell people happy days are here again, and it's 1929," he added, referencing the beginning of the Great Depression.

Luntz added that Trump blaming Biden for the failures of the economy may have worked during the campaign season and even for some time after.

"That said, it's now a year since the election, and the public does expect this administration to take charge. At a certain point, they will not accept the blame game," he said.

Trump's tariffs are contributing to inflation

But getting inflation to slow down or prices to drop will be easier said than done for the Trump administration, which has embraced economic policies such as tariffs that force prices upward, according to Stevenson. Trump and other administration officials have argued that tariffs are necessary to correct past global trade policies that have been unfair to the U.S. and to bring back domestic manufacturing.

Although tariffs are raising about $30 billion per month in revenue for U.S. coffers, the new import taxes levied by the Trump administration have increased prices on a number of items, from food to clothing to furniture.

"What I find surprising is that he's out there telling people: 'This isn't happening. This is a con job. There's no affordability problem,'" Stevenson said. "At the same time, he's pursuing policies that are purposefully restricting supply, which every person who has taken even an introductory economics course knows will push up prices."

Still, the administration has taken several steps recently to ease the negative effects of tariffs on U.S. consumers and producers. Last month, Trump scrapped the tariffs on certain products that aren't widely produced in the U.S., such as bananas and coffee. And on Monday the administration announced that it was making $12 billion in one-time payments to U.S. farmers to offset their rising business costs.
Copyright 2025 NPR

Rosalía's LUX is NPR Music's No. 1 album of 2025

At the moment this fall when NPR Music's staff began discussing our picks for the best albums of 2025, the mere existence of the record we'd eventually name our No. 1 — in a landslide, it must be said — was not known to anyone on our team. But as soon as we heard Rosalía's magnificent, head-spinning LUX in early November, one spot on our list was instantly confirmed.

For most of the year, consensus felt hard to come by. We all found plenty of music to love, but we weren't always drawn toward the same signals. LUX was different. Of the dozen critics and hosts who submitted lists (you can, and should, check out each of their lists, starting with their highest recommendations here), more than half included it in their top 10. Four of us said it was the best thing we heard all year. Below, each of them makes the argument for why it deserves that crown.

LUX is high art

It's hard to describe Rosalía's artiest and most audacious left turn without rattling off statistics and credentials. "She sings in more than a dozen languages!" "She's working with the London Symphony Orchestra, and also Björk, and did you know that Caroline Shaw helped with arrangements?!" A work rich in footnotes, LUX spills over with lore about female saints, enhanced by efforts to translate, unpack and otherwise reckon with it.

LUX is a work of high art, sure. But it's also frequently, boldly, at times breathtakingly beautiful — a work of craft and care, empathy and deep emotion. "Reliquia" mutates from an orchestral piece into an electro-pop reverie, with a tear-jerking piano interlude along the way, and its vocal remains pristine enough to induce gasps. That's just one song among 18. — Stephen Thompson

LUX transcends genre

Taking the full measure of what Rosalía pulls off on LUX is like trying to solve a single-line logic puzzle: Connect opera to maximalist pop to flamenco to electronica to Baroque orchestral music to rap (and much more) without lifting your pen or crossing any lines. It feels impossible. But Rosalía shows how with a profoundly stirring, unified feast for the ears. It's less reggaeton or bachata and more like reggaeton and bachata and Sigur Rós performing Les Misérables, with Feist and Maria Callas trading lead vocals.

But LUX isn't just sonic gymnastics. Deeply considered and exhaustively researched, it's a monument to both the incomprehensible mess and breathtaking wonder of being human, shifting seamlessly between fragile beauty and childlike magic to raw, lustful desire. It's as graphic and startling as it is rapturous and divine. And yeah, it's performed in 13 different languages, as Rosalía delivers a vast exegesis on everything from religion and sex to mortality and violence.

Arriving near the end of a brutally divisive year of attacks on identity and "otherness," LUX feels — and sounds — like the best possible reply, a necessary and potent reminder of the humanity that binds us and the miracle of being here at all. — Robin Hilton

LUX belongs in a lineage with one of the most beloved jazz albums of all time

After listening to LUX for the first time, I spent days trying to understand why it felt both new and familiar. Then it hit me: The more I listened and read Rosalía's deeply personal lyrics, the more it reminded me of jazz saxophonist John Coltrane's seminal spiritual statement, A Love Supreme.

Hear me out.

Rosalía prepared herself for this moment by dividing her album into four parts, exploring feminine mysticism, transformation, transcendence and intimacy, subjects that curiously echo A Love Supreme's album track listings of "Acknowledgement," "Resolution," "Pursuance" and "Psalm."

By the time Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme in 1964, he had already experienced what he called a spiritual awakening that helped him kick addictions to alcohol and heroin, while exploring the sonic and musical limits of his saxophone. A Love Supreme is his moment of coming face to face with God. On LUX, after almost an hour's worth of intense and very musical meditations on things like feminine mysticism, light versus dark as well as spirituality and sacredness, Rosalía also comes face to face with God. But she asks God to meet her halfway: "God descends and I ascend / We meet in the middle."

Both of these albums are artfully crafted statements by artists with uncommon powers of musical communication who share with us spiritual journeys so personal that at times they feel like invasions of privacy. LUX meets the musical legacy of A Love Supreme in the middle and picks up where that classic left off. — Felix Contreras

LUX is still, at its heart, a spectacular flamenco record

Flamenco feels like the sonic representation of the moment when Eve took a bite of the apple. Cast in an ancient fire so alive it's impossible to put out or pin down, its deceptiveness is its defiance. As experimental, big and seemingly novel as Rosalía's LUX is, it sounds like one thing: her spirit. Which — as she's chameleoned across the world — stays firmly rooted in flamenco's eternal flame.

She approached this record as she does all others: global eyes, an open heart and a Spanish soul. Flamenco is pastoral music, once used for basic communication and connection. Those original sounds — sweet lyrical lullabies and softly stroked strings — gave into temptation and fell in love with pain, fear, sadness, giving way to guttural cries and desperate strums.

On LUX, there's something beyond technical ingenuity or global experience to the way the music — and its maker — morphs from track to track. What ties an entire world of sounds and languages together is an artist who enters a sonic moment and complicates it, tears it down, ruining beautiful things with a deep human-ness. Flamenco is etched in concrete yet almost always vibrating, changing; striking palms cutting up some of the most shape-shifting, dynamic vocals on Earth. Ten notes within one, a hundred emotions in two breaths. Despite apparent sonic distance, LUX may be Rosalía's most flamenco album yet. — Anamaria Sayre

Read about more of NPR Music's favorite albums of 2025 and our list of the 125 best songs of 2025.

Graphic illustration by David Mascha for NPR.
Copyright 2025 NPR

Subsidies for the Affordable Care Act appear set to expire for millions of Americans at the end of the year after competing health care related bills failed to advance in the Senate on Thursday.

The outcome was widely expected after Democrats and Republicans chose to release separate partisan proposals. Both parties are under pressure to address health care costs before the expiration of federal subsidies meant to lower the cost of premiums on ACA plans. Those subsidies expire at the end of 2025 and are expected to cause prices to skyrocket.

Both bills needed 60 votes to advance, but neither succeeded.

The Republican-backed plan failed by a vote of 51 to 48. The measure, authored by Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, would have provided up to $1,500 a year in payments for health savings accounts for Americans earning less than 700% of the federal poverty level.

However the bill would not have extended the ACA tax credits and the money could not be used to pay for health care premiums. Deductibles for those plans average around $7,000, according to data from the health policy organization KFF.

Democrats rejected the bill arguing it did nothing to address health care premiums, and opposed restrictions in the bill on abortion and gender affirming care.

"The Republican plan is a when you get sick, you go broke plan plain and simple," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, said ahead of the vote.

In a trade-off to reopen the government following the longest shutdown in U.S. history, Senate Republicans promised Democrats a vote on a bill of their choosing to extend the subsidies. Democrats proposed a three-year extension of existing federal subsidies, but that measure failed 51 to 48. Four Republicans joined with Democrats: Susan Collins of Maine, Missouri's Josh Hawley, and Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska.

Republicans have argued that extending the subsidies would allow what they describe as Obamacare "waste, fraud and abuse" to continue, while lining the pockets of insurance companies.

"There is nothing in their [Democrats] bill that stops billions of dollars in fraudulent spending," Cassidy said on the Senate floor Wednesday.

The failed votes on Thursday left the future of the ACA subsidies even further in doubt. GOP leaders in the House are signaling a potential vote in coming days on legislation to address health care costs, but the party has yet to coalesce behind a plan.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said that starting next week, the House would begin voting "on bills that will focus on lowering premiums for 100% of Americans."

"Let's see where Democrats stand when its not just giving money to insurance companies and propping up failed Obamacare plans," Scalise said.

The fight over the subsidies has once again exposed a split inside the GOP over how to control rising healthcare costs — a debate that has snarled the party since the ACA first passed in 2010.

While some Republicans say they are prepared to watch the subsidies lapse, others have joined with Democrats to press for an extension. In the House, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., has partnered with Jared Golden, D-Maine, on a plan to extend the credits for two years while imposing new eligibility requirements. A separate plan from Rep. Jen Kiggans, R-Va., and Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., would extend the subsidies for one year. The bill has more than a dozen Republican cosponsors.

Both proposals were filed through a rare legislative tactic known as a discharge petition — a workaround that lets members force a vote without the approval of leadership or committees if they can first secure 218 signatures in support.

For his part, President Trump has largely remained hands off. He has been sharply critical of the ACA subsidies, and while he has not endorsed a specific proposal he has voiced support for sending money directly to Americans to pay for care.