The San Mateo action-based camera maker GoPro will let nearly a quarter of its workforce around the world go by the second quarter of 2026, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange commission.

The company, which first launched its camera line in the early 2000s, plans to cut some 145 jobs globally, representing 23% of the company’s ending first quarter head count of 631 employees, per the filing.

The San Mateo-based action camera company GoPro is slashing jobs. Getty Images

The cuts are expected to be completed by the end of the year, the filing read.

The move comes after GoPro’s Board of Directors approved a restructuring plan on April 7 to “reduce operating costs and drive stronger operating leverage.”

“Restructuring Plan is expected to cost the tech company between $11.5 million and $15 million. The costs include one time benefits payouts to those “affected employees, including but not limited to severance payments and healthcare benefits,” the filing noted.

The cuts are expected to effect some 145 jobs globally. Bloomberg via Getty Images

An article in November 2025, noted that GoPro sales had declined by nearly 37% year over year.

Despite the drop, CEO Nicolas Woodman put a positive spin on the way things stood at the time.

“Q3 marked a meaningful step forward in our strategy to diversify, grow, and restore profitability to GoPro’s business,” Woodman said. “We successfully launched three new TAM-expanding hardware products — our MAX2 360 camera, LIT HERO camera and Fluid Pro AI gimbal — alongside several new software offerings. We expect to return to revenue growth and profitability beginning Q4 2025 and in 2026.”

The cuts are expected to slash nearly a quarter of the company’s workforce. Getty Images/iStockphoto

Several people commented on a Reddit Post about the job cuts.

“Another round of layoffs (not to be confused with the previous layoffs, this is new). This is a brutal time to be laid off, I hope they land on their feet,” one person wrote. “This is 100% on Nick Woodman. He should have been laid off years ago.”

Another added, “Might be a good move for them, everyone laying off, thousands of employees, they just following the trend. For investors it sounds appealing.”

“Salaries cut off, new cameras + new processor at NBA Show -> Their stock will probably jump a lot on the next few weeks. So with this changes + new revenue if the launch is a success, might  actually save them as a company.”

A November 2025 report said sales were down year over year. Vladimir Razgulyaev – stock.adobe.com

On Tuesday, it was announced that some 700 workers at another Bay Area tech company, Oracle, would be out of work by June statewide. 

The statewide tally along with another nearly 500 firings in Seattle, is part of the software maker’s recently announced bloodbath that is reportedly in the thousands of jobs.

Last month, a 6 a.m. email message was sent out to workers notifying fired employees that they were out. 

The message from one of the world’s largest software companies, chaired by billionaire Larry Ellison, informed “thousands” of workers across the globe that March 31 would be their last day.

Two people familiar with the matter confirmed to CNBC that the layoffs involved thousands of jobs.

It’s the latest Bay Area tech company to gut its workforce globally. Getty Images

Oracle told The California Post that it would decline comment when asked about how many jobs were being cut.

As of May 2025, the software company employed around 162,0000 full-time employees, according to its annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The California Post reached out to GoPro for further comment.

The post Bay Area-based tech company announces shocking layoff of nearly a quarter of its workforce appeared first on Our Story Insight.

For nearly seven decades, Mattel has sold Barbie as a true original: a revolutionary and empowering alternative to the baby dolls before her. In her new book, “Barbieland: The Unauthorized History” (Atria/One Signal Publishers), Tarpley Hitt provides a surprising counternarrative.

Barbie, per Hitt’s lens, was not a groundbreaking novelty. Rather, she is a cheap “knockoff” elevated by strategic marketing, exploitation, bullying, backstabbing and espionage.

A new book is full of shocking allegations related to Barbie and Mattel.

“Mattel had spent years obscuring Barbie’s backstory,” the author writes. (A Mattel spokesperson told The Post that the company is “aware of the book.”)

The prevailing Barbie myth has long been that, in 1959, a businesswoman named Ruth Handler (who founded toy company Mattel with her husband, Elliot) introduced an 11.5-inch plastic doll to the market — and changed girlhood, the toy industry and pop culture forever. 

This doll boasted big breasts, long legs and a killer wardrobe. She wasn’t a baby like the playthings that came before her; she was a fashion model with clothes that mimicked the latest couture collections. Ruth called her Barbie after her own daughter, Barbara. 

In reality, Barbie was not the first adult doll. There were others, Hitt notes. And one, the German dolly Bild Lilli, had a much bigger influence on Barbie’s creation than Ruth would ever admit. 

Lilli started life as a ribald comic strip in the German tabloid Bild — a blonde bimbo whose adventures in gold-digging often ended in wardrobe malfunctions. She became a doll in 1955, sold in tobacco stands and toy stores throughout Europe. In 1958, she starred in her own live-action movie — 65 years before actress/producer Margot Robbie and director Greta Gerwig brought “Barbie” to the silver screen.

The book claims that the leggy doll isn’t the revolutionary original she’s been sold as. Mirrorpix via Getty Images

Decades after her Barbie’s debut, Ruth admitted she saw Lilli in Switzerland in 1956, but insisted she had the idea for a grown-up doll years before.

When Mattel engineer Jack Ryan — a former missile designer and “sexual libertine” who would later patent Barbie’s hips — went to check out some factories for Japan, Ruth allegedly stuck a Lilli doll into his briefcase. “See if you can get this copied,” she told him, according to the book.

By the time the German company got its American Lilli patent approved in 1960, Mattel had already sold “nearly $1.5 million worth” of Barbie, Hitt writes.

Barbie bares a striking resemblance to the German Bild Lilli doll. SSPL via Getty Images

Eventually, Mattel bought the worldwide rights to the Lilli doll — and buried her. “Investigations into Lilli had a habit of disappearing from the public record,” Hitt claims.

It wasn’t just Barbie’s origin story that Mattel tried to control. When the company commissioned an “Art of Barbie” coffee table book in 1994, it nixed photographer Nancy Burson’s contribution: an “aged” Barbie with crow’s feet. When Sharon Stone pitched a “Barbie” movie to Mattel in the 1990s, the actress said she was given “a lecture and an escort to the door,” according to Hitt.

“For Mattel to tolerate a reproduction of Barbie it had to be, as [one publisher] put it, ‘as identical to the doll as possible’” she writes. “… Perfect, not only in its aesthetic faithfulness to the doll itself, but existentially: Barbie could not be flawed.” 

Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler admitted that she had seen Lilli in Switzerland a few years before she launched Barbie, but insisted she had the idea for a grown-up doll years before. Getty Images

As the 1990s wore on, Mattel ramped up its petty lawsuits.

When the company sued the Europop band Aqua for its 1997 song “Barbie Girl,” the exacerbated judge — who ruled in favor of the song — advised the toy company “to chill.”

“Barbieland’s” last third details Mattel’s decade-long battle against Bratz, MGA’s popular line of teen fashion dolls that debuted in 2001 — claiming that a Barbie designer had come up with the idea at Mattel. MGA then alleged that Mattel had spied on employees and maintained a “long-running corporate espionage operation” to steal trade secrets. One of these spies took the stand, recalling using fake names and business cards to sneak into competitors’ showrooms and reporting his findings back to Mattel. The jury, on appeal, found that Mattel had actually stolen from MGA, and Mattel was ordered to pay its rival $85 million in damages. (A later court struck down the award on “a procedural issue,” per Hitt, and in the end Mattel only had to cover MGA’s legal fees.)

Mattel took issue with the 1997 song “Barbie Girl” by the Europop band Aqua. Aqua

It’s astonishing that Mattel allowed Gerwig to make a movie that somewhat skewers the doll’s image. In the 2023 “Barbie” film, the titular doll, played by the lissome Robbie, goes into an existential spiral after she spots cellulite on her leg.

But, according Hitt, by 2018, Mattel was in bad shape, and it needed to shed its uptight image and make money. Its new CEO claimed he wanted to turn Mattel into an IP-driven company. “He understood that the screen was the medium on which Barbie’s future would be made,” she writes.

Margot Robbie portrayed the doll in the 2023 movie “Barbie,” directed by Greta Gerwig. ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

The movie, in its own cheeky way, ultimately upholds the Barbie mythology: the idea that this doll changed the way that girls saw themselves, not as future moms but future designers, adventurers, businesswomen, even presidents. 

Barbie “had become not just a child’s accessory but a symbol, as synonymous with American consumerism as the Golden Arches and French fries,” Hitt writes. “She was ‘forever,’ like diamonds or microplastics.”

The post Barbie’s shocking secrets revealed in new book appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Members of Congress “were displeased, shocked, engaged and ready to consider legislative and oversight action,” Lindsay Owens, executive director of consumer advocacy group Groundwork Collaborative told The Post on Thursday, after meeting with 15 lawmakers.

The report finding Instacart charged hundreds of customers widely different prices at  big chains including Target, Kroger, Safeway, Albertsons and Costco came as Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) introduced legislation to ban such practices.

Instacart is a delivery company that handles mostly grocery deliveries. Bloomberg via Getty Images

“Greedy corporations are compiling Americans’ personal data and using AI to find their ‘pain point’ – the maximum they’re willing to pay. That’s not fair pricing, that’s predatory pricing. My bill puts an end to it,” Gallego said in a statement.

Sen Ruben Gallego (D. Ariz.) introduced The One Fair Price Act. Getty Images

The lawmaker flagged January research from the Federal Trade Commission showing that retailers “frequently use customers’ personal information – everything from their location to the type of device they are searching on – to set tailored prices for goods and services,” according to his office.

In the House of Representatives, lawmakers are exploring ways to curb dynamic pricing, which sometimes employs AI tools to track customer data.

“They wanted to know what types of legislation they could pursue to protect consumers from this practice,” said Owens, who met with all Dems.

Instacart is on the hotseat after a report was released showing that grocery shoppers are being charged differently in the same stores. JHVEPhoto – stock.adobe.com

The pols were part of the “Congressional Dad’s Caucus” of Dems focusing on working families.

Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D.-Calif.) said after meeting with Owens, he’s “weighing next steps to bring costs down and rein in this type of pricing.”

“If Instacart’s AI pricing is quietly, unfairly and/or deceptively making some people pay more for the same groceries, that’s a big problem,” he said in a statement to The Post.

Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) said he’ll take steps to crack down on “dynamic pricing.” CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Any action on dynamic pricing would need GOP buy-in in the Republican-controlled House and Senate.

The high cost of living has caught the attention of pols across the political spectrum in recent months.

The Groundwork Collaboration report found that Instacart charged Target customers at a North Canton, Ohio store $2.99 for Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter one day in September – while other Instacart users that day paid as much as $3.59 for the same jar picked up from the same location. 

Target distanced itself from Instacart’s pricing strategy, stating that it is “not affiliated with Instacart.” Christopher Sadowski

Target said in response to the findings that it is not “affiliated with Instacart and is not responsible for prices on the Instacart Platform.” 

Instacart was likely trying to determine how much money it could make off of Target shoppers, Owens said.

“At a place like Target which is not known for being on the low-end, Instacart was probably like ‘this is an interesting place for us to explore a higher mark-up,” she explained.

Instacart did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The company previously told The Post that its price “tests,” which “have now ended,” are never based on personal characteristics of shoppers and do not change in real time.

The post Exclusive | Lawmakers mull action on ‘dynamic’ AI-powered pricing in wake of ‘shocking’ Instacart report appeared first on Our Story Insight.

February 7, 2025, 1:52pm

This week marks the anniversary of the first issue of Reader’s Digest—for the unacquainted, there’s a great overview of the history of the magazine in this week’s Literary History newsletter. I got curious and decided to reread this first issue, available on the Internet Archive.

The format of the magazine feels immediately recognizable—the summarizing and bullet-pointing of longer ideas and articles seems to be a technique media is constantly reinventing. The articles themselves are an extremely mixed bag. Some have aged horribly, in terms of both content and expression—there’s a use of the verb “pump” in one piece that I still haven’t quite made sense of. But perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of these pieces feel like they could run today with a few words replaced. On the lighter side, a lot of our obsessions and hang-ups stay the same, but there’s also a darker thread of continuity connecting this vision of 1922 to today. Below, I have digested the digest for the modern reader:

“Remarkable Remarks”

The first piece is a collection of witticisms, and the first one—which is the very first line in the whole magazine!—is a weird crack about women’s weight. Not off to a great start.

In fact, there’s a lot of dated, casual misogyny here, but also some lines that feel especially current:

J. OGDEN ARMOUR—The hard thing is to overcome riches and be human.

This opening piece captures the entire experience of reading this first issue: the most shockingly dated sentence coming a paragraph away from something that is startlingly contemporary.

“How to Keep Young Mentally”

Alexander Graham Bell’s tips on staying spry. This sort of aspirational lifestyle stuff never goes out of style, but his entire pitch is to stay curious and humble: timely and timeless.

“Prison Facts”

American prisons have always been incredibly horrifying.

“The Story of the Premature Peace Report”

In journalism parlance, this might be called a tick-tock, taking us through the chronology of how one American journalist got a jump on news of the armistice that ended WWI. The technology that undergirds this whole story I found to be especially fascinating; media and journalism has always been aided and limited by the speed of tech, and this is a very striking example.

“Untying the Apron Strings”

This one has a section talking about how boys (and just boys) need to be allowed to climb so that later in life they can handle sitting in a balcony seat at a theatre. That section then ends with the boggling line, “A billion-dollar baby, when a full grown boy, stepped out in the street alone for the first time, and was instantly struck and killed by a car.” Okay, good to know.

“What Do You Know?”

I’ve been reading Erik Baker’s excellent new Make Your Own Job, and it’s perhaps priming me to see strains of American business logics everywhere in this issue—there seem to be a lot!

Already, less than 20 pages in, we’ve met a few titans of industry and fussed over if the boys are being raised right enough to become good workers. This survey of Thomas Edison’s executive hiring practices starts with the fact that he only wants employees with good memories, a step in the drive to automatize the worker, consistent from Fordism to the replace-‘em-all-with-AI logic of today.

And of course the nut of this piece is none other than the tired, pervasive “kids these days” gripe: “In the good old days when a student had to be right practically all the time or take a caning and occupy a position of general disgrace, the school and college produced far better results.” The businessmen always feel that their employees are too coddled.

“Whatever is New for Women is Wrong”

This survey of outraged responses to women gaining more rights, autonomy, and opportunities is a little too stripped of conclusion or opinion, which leaves the door open to a bad faith reading. The summary doesn’t make a firm enough point, though it does imply that the hysteria about women being “out of place” isn’t to be taken especially seriously: “But today, as in 1700, the home and marriage and the child and female delicacy are still in imminent danger, and, as in every decade, ‘are endangered as never before.’”

But the issue with these summaries, that this piece is especially guilty of, is that they’re maybe cutting too close to the bone—I wonder if Edna Kenton, the suffragist who wrote the original piece, put a finer point on her critique in the original.

“The Difficulty of Being Unsuspected”

The “I don’t want to be perceived” meme has some deep roots.

“’Rich as Croesus’”

Ogling at the wealth of a sixth century king isn’t so fun when the dollar amounts are way smaller than the sums of money hoarded by our current oligarchs. This piece refers to Croesus—a guy so rich that they made up a phrase about it—as only a “millionaire”! The idea of a billionaire wasn’t even conceivable!

I don’t want to end up on a list so I’ll just say: this sort of thing makes a guy really start thinkin’.

“Watch Your Dog and Be Wise!”

At the risk of alienating readers, I have to admit that I’m not a dog person. So much to say, this article makes clear that people have always weirdly anthropomorphized dogs.

“Henry Ford, Dreamer and Worker”

More business guy worship, this time listening reverently at the knee of a man who at the moment this issue came out, was publishing reams of antisemitic conspiracy that was being translated and republished in Germany—it caught the eye of some folks over there, to say the least. Bigoted businessmen who self-fund platforms for their hate speech are always popular in America, unfortunately.

What stood out to me in this article though are Ford’s assertions that electricity is the future and we should keep coal in the ground, and his big idea to reform government:

Supreme court judges should be paid as much as the President. Make them so independent that you can get the best men, and then get them to give the best in them.

This, in a way, is exactly what happened and it delivered a government that I think Ford would quite like.

“Love—Luxury or Necessity?”

A nice antidote to the previous piece, making the case for love. I’m sure this was only intended as a description of romantic love in the narrowest, most normative sense, but it has some lessons that we might today read as calls to solidarity:

– “Love is not so much a matter of luck as a matter of learning.”

– “The reason why love is regarded as a luxury and not as a necessity is that people apply to it the criterion of expense.”

– “The false idea that strength of character and force of will are based on sterility of the affections and aridity of the emotions still stubbornly prevails.”

“Time Telling—Past, Present and Future”

It really is wild to think about much we take for granted that we will always know what time it is, and how rare that is in history.

“The Philippines Inside, Out”

After a brief interlude, we’re back to the bad stuff.

Starting with a wildly defensive sentence about American imperialism—“For twenty-two years the United States has been peacefully administering the Islands more liberally than any other foreign power has ever administered its colonial possessions.”—this article trails off into an infantilizing argument for why the Philippines is not ready for independence. It even includes an imagined fight between the colonizers and colonized, casting Filipinos as shouting, petulant children and America as “the slightly exasperated parent.” Nasty, racist stuff. It reminds me of the stomach-churning, paternalistic ways people talk today about Palestinians.

“What Kind of a Husband are You?”

I was hoping this was going to be a quiz, and I could finally find out how I rate, but no such luck. This one is dated and reductive, but nicely calls out the hypocrisy of male expectations.

“The Future of Poison Gas”

The smoke has barely cleared from WWI at this point, and already we’re back to the war-mongering. This survey of gas weapon technology from the Chief of Chemical Warfare Service claims that making “warfare more universal and more scientific makes for permanent peace by making war intolerable.” Shocking from America’s head of military poison gases.

“Useful Points in Judging People”

A salesman’s guide to sorting everyone you meet. Check it out if you want to find out which business temperament you are: mental, social, aesthetic, or physical. I think I’m a social sun, physical moon, and aesthetic rising.

“Progress In Science”

1922’s latest scientific breakthroughs include new, long-distance phone cables, aerial photographs helping to sell real estate, manipulated oranges that retain their color longer, and the invention of the lie detector.

A thought experiment: if you could go back in time and undo one of these inventions, which one would you erase from the timeline to do the most good?

“The Firefly’s Light”

If there’s one article I’d recommend from this first issue, it’s probably this one. Fireflies rock.

“Wanted—Motives for Motherhood”

This genre of adolescent essay, that sentimentally and breathlessly defends what we now would label as conservative family values, has always been around. This piece also makes clear that the trumpeting of marriage and a large family as proper, normal, and essential to “the very existence of the Nation” has always come across as hollow and thinly reasoned.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson

An article about an Arctic explorer includes the boggling prediction that reindeer meat will likely replace beef.

Over 100 years later, we’re probably running out of time to ever taste reindeer meat.

“Today”

Op-ed writers never change. These snapshots from a syndicated 1922 column include the conclusions that “people don’t know what’s good for them,” “technology is crazy,” and “we’re all going to live forever.”

“Can We Have a Beautiful Human Race?”

If you read this headline and thought “uh oh,” you’re right.

“Advice From a President’s Physician”

The sort of good, logical health advice that also seems too time-consuming and expensive to be reasonable for the average person.

“Research and Everyday Life”

Onward and upward with food science! Towards the end, there’s some speculation about where research might go next, which includes a question that I still have: “What is the ideal container?”

Have we answered this one yet?

“A Peasant on a Painted Train”

An anecdotal view into a Russia just emerging from the post-revolutionary Civil War. The writer travels by train with then head of Soviet Russia, Mikhail Kalinin, and sees hunger everywhere, as well as devotion to the new government.

It’s interesting to see such an early vision of the Soviet Union aimed at a Western audience, before WWII and the Cold War. It’s a small thing, but the Soviet political system is spelled “Cummunist” here—very strange to imagine an America where there wasn’t even yet a standardized spelling for this new economic system.

“To Bore or Not to Bore”

Something intended to be light and amusing about dealing with boring people is immediately derailed for the modern reader by the repeated use of the phrase “being pumped into.” I think it’s supposed to mean being overwhelmed in conversation by tedious conversation, but lines like “to sit still and be pumped into is never an exhilarating process,” just doesn’t land the same way to the modern ear.

“Is the State too Vulgar?”

Another essay that could easily be transposed to today: pearl-clutching at the indecency, lewdness, and vulgarity of contemporary entertainment never goes out of style, nor does the chiding of viewer who should know better—“Box-office figures point unmistakably to the public being the culprit.”

“Hart of The World”

And that scolding is quickly followed by a short excerpt worrying that people will start mimicking what they see on movie screens. The badness we might pick up from the movies include wild non-American gesticulations, fancier courtships, and “lovemaking is going to have its renaissance from now on since the movies came into our lives.”

“Printing and Its Early Vicissitudes”

This seems to be the “what effect is media having on us” section of the magazine—again, a very recognizable fixation.

This brisk survey of printing ends with laments over the “encumbered… libraries with much rubbish, much stupidity, much useless information,” “licentious novels,” and the spread via books of “the formulas for explosives and asphyxiating gases.” Some of these phrasings feel almost identical to the ways people talk about TikTok corrupting the youth.

“Northward the Course of Empire”

We’re back to Vilhjalmur Stefansson? This is the first I’m hearing of this guy, so I went searching for more information. He seemed to be a bit of a celebrity explorer, despite some pretty big screw-ups.

This article is very much of a piece with the other articles in this issue that discuss foreign places: other parts of the world are to be pitied or conquered. Stefansson’s notes on the Arctic are very transactional; he comes across as an explorer in a conquering, imperialist mode who sees everything through the lens of possession, national security, or extraction.

And again he’s fixated on reindeer meat. Did Stefansson have some kind of financial stake in reindeer ranching? Was he some kind of 1920s meat influencer?

“Advertising and Health”

New York City’s Health Commissioner makes the case that advertising has been universally good for people’s health. This reads like a more boring version of something you’d hear Don Draper boozily preach. The piece is a thorough list of the wonderful products that have been marketed to Americans, all of which have made us healthier.

It’s an amazingly credulous piece that only at the absolute last moment concedes that advertising might not always been on the level:

Time was when worthy publications permitted the advertisement of nostrums which conferred no benefit whatsoever and which even, in some cases, did positive injury. The service, however, rendered to the public health has far outweighed that past disservice.

And lo, advertising never deceived us ever again.

“Don’t Growl—Kick”

Finally, issue one ends with a piece about how complaining is a constructive force in the world. As a self-described hater, this speaks to me. And I love that this article is mostly drawing on examples from NYC—I salute all the generations of whining New Yorkers who came before me.

But the last line here only seems to have gotten sharper and more true:

Americans suffer silently, in the belief that an individual stands no chance of being heard by a corporation.

Here this is meant almost whimsically, as an incentive to be more insistent in customer service interactions, but the implied next thought here—is that belief true? And what are you going to do about it?—is hard not to read more militantly a century later.

1922 was a low point for American labor, with declining union membership, management’s aggressive suppression of collective action, and courts siding with corporations over and over. 1922 was a year after President Harding sent the army against coal miners at the Battle of Blair Mountain and months after a massive railroad strike was defeated by a federal judge. Over a century later, we’re again finding ourselves in a moment where we feel lonely and small in the face of sneering corporations and political corruption—in 1922, the revelation of Harding’s Teapot Dome corruption and his vetoing of the Bonus Act were coming soon.

The prescription of this last article, to growl and kick, is more true than ever. But I would this idea a step farther: we can growl a lot louder and kick a lot harder if we do it together.

Like this:

Like Loading…

The post The first issue of Reader’s Digest from 1922 is both shocking and relevant. ‹ appeared first on Our Story Insight.