Skydance: Ellison names the Paramount–Warner empire as the $110 billion deal heads for Tuesday’s close Skydance is the name of the company that will emerge when Paramount Skydance closes its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, CEO David Ellison said Friday, days before the deal is set to take effect. The roughly $110 billion combination is expected to close on Tuesday, October 6, after a federal judge this week approved a settlement with a group of state attorneys general that had been the last major obstacle. Ellison announced the corporate name in a post on X, framing the merger as an expansion of two century-old studios rather than a replacement of either one. “What once was the peak, is now just the beginning,” he wrote. “Paramount and Warner Bros. shaped over a century of culture. By combining them, we aren’t rewriting history — we’re equipping these iconic studios with a more powerful engine. Together, we are Skydance: a creative-first home for bold, quality storytelling.” Why Skydance Ellison said the name was chosen so a new corporate identity would not overshadow the studio brands audiences already know. Paramount and Warner Bros. will remain distinct labels under the Skydance umbrella, alongside other consumer brands in the combined portfolio, including CBS, HBO, CNN, Paramount+, HBO Max, DC, and Nickelodeon. “We never wanted a new corporate identity to diminish, alter or overshadow either one,” he wrote. “Instead, we wanted a name that would give the combined company an identity of its own while allowing Paramount and Warner Bros. — and all our extraordinary brands — to remain in the spotlight.” Skydance is the production company Ellison founded in 2006. It became the vehicle for his acquisition of Paramount last year, which produced the Paramount Skydance name. The post-close company will trade under the ticker SKYD and move to the New York Stock Exchange, according to an SEC filing. Ellison said the combined company would pursue larger goals “with passion, imagination and a willingness to take smart risks,” while giving both studios more scale to produce and distribute stories worldwide. “I couldn’t be more excited about what we’re going to build together,” he wrote. Path to close Paramount prevailed in a bidding contest for Warner Bros. Discovery after Netflix declined to match a revised all-cash offer. Warner shareholders approved the deal in April. The Justice Department and regulators in dozens of other jurisdictions cleared it; a July lawsuit by California and 11 other states, joined by the Writers Guild of America, delayed closing. That case was resolved in a September 21 settlement. Reported concessions included a board to protect editorial independence at CNN and CBS News, a commitment to release 30 theatrical films a year, an additional $1.5 billion in film production spending over five years, and a larger share of those films made in the United States. No structural divestitures were required. Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved the settlement on September 30, clearing the way for the October 6 close. Ynon Kreiz, the outgoing Mattel CEO, has been named co-CEO of the combined company, with day-to-day operations expected to sit with him while Ellison focuses on strategy. Early reporting on the post-close structure also points to both Paramount+ and HBO Max remaining as separate streaming brands, at least initially, and to television studio operations being consolidated under one executive. The deal pairs Paramount franchises such as Mission: Impossible, Top Gun, Yellowstone, and Nickelodeon with Warner and HBO properties including Harry Potter, the DC Universe, and Game of Thrones, and puts CNN and CBS News under the same corporate roof.

Schools are for learning. The adults in the room are supposed to say so. A principal in Pennsylvania just did the job. Students left class for an anti-ICE walkout. Daniel Weber met them outside. Back to class, or suspended. “You left school without permission. Your rights do not supersede the school.” That’s not harsh. That’s leadership. Schools are for learning. Not midday rallies. Not political theater on the taxpayers’ clock. Parents didn’t send their kids to join a protest. They sent them to get an education. More adults in the room. More backbone. Less chaos. ••••••••••••••••••• The school day is not a stage. It is a trust. In February, at Wilson High School in Spring Township, Pennsylvania, roughly sixty students left class without permission to stage an anti-ICE walkout after a planned event had already been canceled. Principal Daniel Weber walked outside and met them where they stood. His terms were plain: go back to class and the matter ends, or stay out and face suspension. “You left school without permission,” he told them. “Your rights do not supersede the school.” That is not cruelty. That is the job. Parents send their children to school to learn—math, history, language, the habits of showing up and finishing what you start. They do not send them to be marched into political theater on taxpayer time, under the school’s roof, while the rest of the building is supposed to be teaching. A walkout during instructional hours is not a seminar. It is an unexcused absence with a slogan attached. Weber treated it as such. Courage in an administrator rarely looks like a speech. It looks like standing in front of a crowd that wants the rules bent, naming the rule, and refusing to blink. Students have opinions. They can hold them after the bell, on their own time, off school grounds if the district has not authorized the event. What they do not have is a right to empty classrooms, pull staff into crowd control, and turn the school day into a rally because the cause feels urgent. Order is what makes a public school function. Without it, the quiet majority who came to learn loses the hour. The district later made the distinction clear: consequences attached to leaving the building without permission and failing to follow staff directions, not to the viewpoint itself. That is the adult line. Speech is protected. Disruption of the school day is not a free pass. America does not stay free by letting every institution become a campaign office. It stays free when the people charged with a narrow duty—teaching the next generation—actually do it. Rules that apply only when the protest is unpopular are not rules. Rules that hold when the cameras are out and the flags are up are the ones that keep a school a school. More of this is needed. More principals who will walk outside, state the choice, and mean it. More school boards that back the instructional day instead of managing the optics. More parents who expect the building to be a classroom first. Backbone is not a mood. It is the decision, repeated, that the bell still means something. Schools are for learning. The adults in the room are supposed to say so. Daniel Weber did.

💪 #USAFA just took back the Guinness World Record title for the most people performing pushups simultaneously, surpassing the record set by the @NavalAcademy in 2025. In just one minute, 3,703 Academy personnel completed the challenge together.   🏈 Next up: Sink Navy.

Zoom in on this image. The violin, the bow, the envelope, the rusty hinges, the nail it all hangs from: none of it is real, and it was painted 140 years ago... This is The Old Violin by William Harnett, made in 1886. Harnett started out as an engraver of silverware, cutting tiny patterns into forks and spoons, and that patience never left him. He painted every object at its actual size, filled the canvas edge to edge, and left almost no trace of a brushstroke, so there’s nothing to remind you that you’re looking at a picture. When this painting was shown in Cincinnati in 1886, people couldn't stop reaching for it: they tried to touch the violin, or pinch the corner of the envelope, just to find out whether it was really there. In the end, the exhibition had to post a policeman next to the painting to stop visitors from trying to take the violin and bow off the wall. A local publisher fell in love with it, bought it on the spot, and turned it into a print made from seventeen separate colors. Copies spread across America, and the painting that fooled a city became one of the most famous images in the country. Today it hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. I started my newsletter because the past is full of masterpieces like this one, and so few people ever stop to give them the attention they deserve. Every week I try to. If that is something you'd like to be part of, you can join through the link in my bio! And if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible. Thanks for reading.

Wishing doesn’t win. Courage does. Character does. Standing when it’s easier to fold does. America doesn’t need more people hoping someone else fixes it. It needs a backbone.

The Arcane Texas Fact of the Day: Today marks the 191st anniversary of the famous "Come and Take It" battle. Everybody knows the broad outlines, of course, but briefly: The battle was fought over a cannon. The small cannon was on loan from Mexican officials, and Lt. Francisco de Castaneda and 100 dragoons came from San Antonio to retrieve it. Because of tensions between Texians and the Centralist government, Castaneda was ordered to to avoid conflict. But when he crossed the Guadalupe River near Gonzales to retrieve the cannon, the Texians challenged Castaneda to "Come and Take It," and a brief skirmish took place. The Mexicans returned to San Antonio empty handed. The cannon's subsequent fate is unknown. Okay, so that's the overview, but ol' Traces loves the arcane, obscure facts, like this: during a pause in the fighting, a parley was held between Castaneda and John Henry Moore, the Texian commander. Castaneda told Moore that he personally opposed Santa Anna's Centralist policies and considered himself a Federalist. Moore replied that the Texans were fighting not merely for the cannon but in defense of the Mexican Constitution of 1824. In other words, at the opening battle of the Texas Revolution, the commanders on opposite sides were in total agreement about the politics that had produced the confrontation. Castaneda simply had orders to retrieve the gun. Watercolor painting below by Bruce Marshall.

The ancient Greeks did not separate education from the formation of character as neatly as we do. To learn how to speak well was not simply to acquire a useful skill. It was to become a certain kind of person. This is one reason virtue appears so frequently in ancient discussions of education. Knowledge mattered, but what a student did with knowledge mattered more. A brilliant man who lacked judgment or self-command was not necessarily well educated. In some respects, his intelligence only made him more dangerous.

Good morning from Virginia. 🇺🇸 On the third of October, 1863, in a white-columned house on Pennsylvania Avenue, Abraham Lincoln put his name to a proclamation setting apart the last Thursday in November as a day of national thanksgiving. The paper had been drawn up by William Seward. The plea behind it had come, year after year, from Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor in Philadelphia who believed a republic ought to keep one common day of gratitude. Lincoln made it so. The war was not over. It was not even near over. Gettysburg lay three months back, the dead only lately under the ground, the smell of the field still spoken of by men who had been there. Vicksburg had fallen in July, and with it the Mississippi. Yet Lee’s army remained, the hospitals were full, and the lists of the missing kept arriving at kitchen tables from Maine to the Ohio. Into that darkness the proclamation spoke with an almost startling plainness. The harvest had been gathered. The shops still turned. The mines still gave up their ore. The Army and the Navy had not failed. For these things, Lincoln asked the country to give thanks to Almighty God, and in the same hour to remember, with penitence, the sorrow that the nation had brought upon itself. He did not call for celebration. He called for remembrance of the widow and the orphan, the wounded soldier and the mourner, and he asked that the day be kept by all Americans, wherever they lived. On November 26 they kept it as well as they could. In camp the men ate hard bread and what meat the commissary allowed, and some of them bowed their heads because the President had asked them to. At home a chair stood empty and the prayer was said anyway. Washington had proclaimed a thanksgiving in the first year of the government. Governors and ministers had done the same each autumn for as long as anyone could remember. What Lincoln did, in the deepest crisis the country had yet known, was to make the day national, fixed, and shared. Out of a war that had divided every state and nearly every family, he drew one quiet Thursday and set it aside. That is where the holiday we keep began. Not in ease, but in the middle of the storm, when a weary President judged that a people who could still stop and give thanks might yet have strength enough to endure. America 250 🇺🇸

Rev War Tales Gloucester Garrison Garroted 3 October 1781, Gloucester Point, Virginia. While the Franco-American army tightened its siege of Yorktown, a British foraging party and covering force operating from the Gloucester Point defenses encountered advancing Allied troops on the north side of the York River. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Dundas commanded the British garrison at Gloucester, while Banastre Tarleton led the cavalry and light troops in the field. Opposite them, French General the Marquis de Choisy, recently reinforced, advanced with French hussars (including Lauzun’s Legion), infantry, and Virginia militia under commanders such as John Mercer—altogether roughly 800 to more than 1,000 men. In the ensuing action, Tarleton’s troopers were driven back after sharp fighting, and the British withdrew into their entrenchments. The skirmish secured Choisy’s cordon across the Gloucester peninsula and prevented further British foraging, further isolating Cornwallis’s army. #RevWar #History #AmRev #RevWarTales

Good Saturday morning, welcome to October 3rd... On this date in 1945, a 10-year-old boy by the name of Elvis Aaron Presley entered a talent contest at a fair in Tupelo, Mississippi. Young Elvis sang "Old Shep", a 1930's song about a boy and his dog. Elvis came in fifth place. His prize was $5 worth of ride tickets at the fair. That's him, second from the right, wearing glasses.

In 1797, George Washington left the presidency without ever living in the White House. Construction had started in 1792, but the building was not ready for a president until 1800. John Adams moved in on November 1, 1800, becoming the first president to live there, even though the building was still unfinished. Washington remains the only president who never lived in the White House during his presidency.

Oct 2, 1803. Samuel Adams dies in Boston at 81. Probably the most important founder a lot of people only know from a beer label. Quick myth bust first: he wasn't a brewer. His father ran a malt house, and Sam worked in the family business for a while. He was bad at it. He was bad at most business, honestly. He blew through a big chunk of his inheritance, and as a Boston tax collector he fell so far behind on collections that he ended up owing the town money himself. What he was good at was politics. Maybe better than anyone in America. Through the 1760s and 1770s Adams organized Boston against Parliament. He worked the town meetings, wrote constantly for the newspapers under a pile of fake names, helped build the Committees of Correspondence that let the colonies coordinate with each other, and was right in the middle of the protests that ended with tea in the harbor in 1773. The British knew exactly who he was. When Gen. Thomas Gage offered a pardon to anyone in Massachusetts who would lay down their arms in June 1775, he left out exactly two men: Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Those were the two the redcoats marching to Lexington were hoping to catch. When Massachusetts sent him to the Continental Congress in 1774, he was so broke that friends chipped in to buy him a new suit, wig, and shoes so he wouldn't embarrass the colony in Philadelphia. He signed the Declaration of Independence, served in Congress through the war, and later became governor of Massachusetts. He died without much money, the way he'd lived. His second cousin John Adams, a president, outlived him by 23 years. But it was Sam who had been pushing for independence back when John was still a young lawyer defending British soldiers in court.

Major John Andre Hanged Thirty-one-year-old British Major John Andre is hanged as a spy by U.S. military forces in Tappan, New York, on this day in 1780. Andre, an accomplice of Benedict Arnold, had been captured by Patriots John Paulding, David Williams and Isaac Van Wart on September 23 after they found incriminating papers in his boot. The papers revealed that Andre was returning from a secret meeting with U.S. General Benedict Arnold, commander of West Point, who had offered to surrender the strategic Hudson River fort to the British for a bribe of £20,000. Upon hearing of Andre's capture, Arnold fled to the British warship Vulture and subsequently joined the British in their fight against the Patriots. After being sentenced to death by U.S. authorities on September 29, Andre was allowed to write a letter to his commander, General Henry Clinton. Andre also wrote a letter to General George Washington in which he asked, not that his life be spared, but that he be executed by firing squad. Death by firing squad was considered a more "gentlemanly" death than hanging.

Explore the extraordinary document that has driven our nation for more than 250 years at the National Archives Museum! Fly with us through "Free and Independent: A Celebration of the Declaration", on display through July 5, 2027. #NationalArchives #VisitWashingtonDC #America250

Rev War Tales Boston Occupied 1–2 October 1768, Boston, Massachusetts. In late September, a British squadron arrived in Boston Harbor, bringing the 14th and 29th Regiments from Halifax. On 1 October, the troops disembarked and marched into the town under the guns of the Royal Navy; additional forces from Ireland followed in the weeks ahead. Sent to support customs officials and suppress resistance to the Townshend duties—taxes on glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea imposed in 1767—the soldiers immediately heightened tensions with the local population. Quartering disputes, competition for jobs, and daily friction between civilians and redcoats poisoned relations. The military occupation of Boston continued, with interruptions and reinforcements, for almost eight years, leaving a legacy of resentment that helped fuel the coming Revolution. #RevWar #History #AmRev #RevWarTales

Rev War Tales Foundering Off Newfoundland 1 October 1777, Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The Continental Navy ship Reprisal, commanded by Captain Lambert Wickes, founders in a storm, with the loss of nearly the entire crew. On or about 1 October 1777, the Continental brig Reprisal, under the command of Captain Lambert Wickes, was lost off the Banks of Newfoundland. The vessel had sailed from France on 14 September after a highly successful cruise against British shipping in European waters, during which Wickes’s squadron captured or destroyed nearly twenty prizes. Bound for home, Reprisal encountered a severe storm on the Grand Banks and foundered. Of all those aboard, only the ship’s cook survived. Wickes, one of the Continental Navy’s most capable early captains and the officer who had carried Benjamin Franklin to France the previous year, perished with his ship. The loss deprived the young American navy of both a proven commander and a valuable warship. #RevWar #History #AmRev #RevWarTales