Homeschooled at Disney

While school for many children means crammed classrooms and soggy sandwiches, for some, it’s doing workbooks at Cinderella Castle and grabbing fresh churros during snack break. These are the Disney home-schoolers — parents who’ve swapped school buses for monorails and treat the parks as a classroom. Orlando is a popular destination for “Disney schooling.” Hundreds of families visit Disney World parks several times a week, or even every day, as part of their curriculum. Holly Leary, a former middle school English teacher, runs an Etsy shop selling Disney-inspired workbooks. For Leary and her 10-year-old daughter, Pirates of the Caribbean is an intro lesson in economics (“Do you think piracy hurt or helped the economy?” is a prompt in Leary’s workbook.) For families using Disney as their educational playground, costs accumulate. Many are annual members and budget around $3,000 to $5,000 a year for park passes, food, and merchandise.

(Adapted from “Meet The Moms Who Home School At Disney World,” by Meg Tanaka, published on July 10, 2025, by the Wall Street Journal)

Regulating trading

New York-based trading giant Jane Street has been in the eye of a storm over the past few weeks after India’s market regulator banned it from the securities market. The regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has accused Jane Street of indulging in a “sinister scheme”, alleging that its “manipulation” of India’s stock market has led to small investors trading at “unfavourable and misleading prices”. Sebi claims the suspicious trading activity by Jane Street happened on India’s Bank Nifty index, which tracks the performance of 12 large Indian banks. The regulator alleges that Jane Street operated in both the cash and derivatives markets through different entities. So one entity bought large quantities of bank shares, pushing up the price of Bank Nifty when the market opened in the morning. Simultaneously, it’s claimed, the second entity would bet on the decline in Bank Nifty’s value in the derivatives market.

(Adapted from “Why Jane Street, A US Trading Giant, Is In Trouble In India,” by Devina Gupta, published on July 17, by BBC)

Returning to office

America’s return to the office is unfolding unevenly for men and women. Five years ago, Covid-19 ushered in an era of widespread remote work. Since then, many workers have headed back to their cubicles — but surveys show more men have returned than women. The gap reflects both women’s preferences, but also the balance they are often striking between work and family demands, according to economists. More women than ever are working outside the home, but they are also likely to bear the biggest share of responsibilities for child care and chores. Among employed men, 29pc said they spent time working from home in 2024, down from 34pc the prior year, according to a new Labour Department survey. For women, that figure stayed largely flat at 36pc. While the flexibility can be a big help for working parents, it also means women risk losing out on career advancement by working from home, according to researchers.

(Adapted from In America’s Return To The Office, Women Are Falling Behind,” by Te-Ping Chen, published on July 13, by the Wall Street Journal)

AI vs web

This week, Hollywood released details of a new film about Sam Altman and the rise of OpenAI, whose launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 has brought high drama to the tech world. One of the most important effects of artificial intelligence (AI) so far is surely on how information is spread online. Instead of typing their questions into search engines, people increasingly pose them to chatbots. Google, which a year ago started adding AI-generated summaries to its results, promises that users can “let Google do the Googling for you”. Artificial intelligence is transforming the way that people navigate the web. The result is that content producers, from news providers and online forums to reference sites, are seeing alarming drops in their traffic. These sites are urgently trying to find new ways to make AI companies pay them for information.

(Adapted from “To Survive The AI Age, The Web Needs A New Business Model,” published on July 17, 2025, by The Economist)

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, July 21st, 2025