MADISON (Wis.) (AP). David Crowley’s razor-thin win in the Wisconsin primary over a democratic socialist sets up a Wisconsin Governor’s Race against a Republican Congressman who has voted 100% with President Donald Trump. This could be an ideal matchup for moderate Democrats as Trump’s approval rating sags in this swing state.
Crowley defeated Francesca Hong with a dramatic victory in the Tuesday primary. This shocked pundits, pollsters and others who regarded Hong as the favorite. Tom Tiffany, Crowley’s opponent, will now have to pivot and face a Democrat who is known for his ability to work across the aisle, as Milwaukee’s county executive, and the largest source of Democratic votes in the state.
Crowley immediately focuses on Tiffany’s connections to Trump
Crowley, after a Wednesday unity event that included Hong and other participants, pledged to form a wide coalition — which would include Hong’s progressive supporters — in order to defeat Tiffany. He focused on Republican support for Make America Great Again.
This is not establishment versus progress. Crowley stated that this is not an insider-versus-outsider battle. This is Democrats beating a MAGA extremeist, Congressman Tom Tiffany. That’s where we need to focus our attention going forward.
Former Republican Governor said that Tiffany will have an easier time pivoting away from Trump’s unpopular policies and his close ties to him because he is running for governor, not Congress. Scott Walker, a Trump supporter.
Walker said to The Associated Press that Walker must be “on point” and on message at all times. He should also say: “That’s NOT what’s on your ballot.” What’s on ballots is who will be the governor for the next four-years.
Dale Schultz is a former Republican State Senate Majority leader who has opposed Trump. He said that Crowley made the road “way more difficult for Tiffany”.
Schultz stated that the new campaign will force people to focus on the things they care about, such as affordability, war in Iran or the cost of health insurance.
Tiffany is a representative of Wisconsin’s conservative, rural north woods. Trump was the winner of Wisconsin in both 2024 and 2016 but lost it in 2020. The three elections all came down to less than one percentage point. Crowley’s victory on Tuesday, which was about a half-point narrower than the previous one, cemented Wisconsin’s reputation as a state that has close elections.
Democrats are looking for a triple in Wisconsin
The Democrats were thrilled to shift their focus away from the chaotic primaries and onto the general elections against Tiffany. They’ve always seen Tiffany as a vulnerable opponent. The Democrats hope to take advantage of Trump’s poor approval rating to retain the Governor’s Office and flip both Chambers of the Legislature in order to gain full control over Wisconsin’s state government, for the first since 2010.
Tiffany’s general election campaign began with a similar message to Crowley, highlighting the ties between his Republican opponent and Trump.
Tiffany stated in a Wednesday statement that “there’s no difference at all between the Democratic candidates.” His record in Milwaukee County is exactly what Wisconsin will get: mismanagement of the government, running up the bills, and raising your taxes to cover it.
Rusty Schultz, Republican strategist, predicted that it would be difficult for Crowley’s campaign to reach out to the youth who made up nearly 40% of the primary vote and supported Hong.
He said that it would be a big task to make sure the films are released in November.
Crowley won the surprise race after dropping out
Crowley (40) often mentions on his campaign trail how he was raised in poverty on Milwaukee’s North Side in Wisconsin, where his parents suffered from drug addiction and mental illness. His family has also been evicted several times.
Crowley was elected to the State Assembly at age 30 in 2016. He served for just under three years, before being appointed as Milwaukee County Executive. In 2023, Crowley worked closely with the Republican-controlled Legislature to pass a bipartisan deal that sent more state aid to Milwaukee and local communities.
Crowley began his campaign for governor in January. He dropped out on the 8th of July, saying that he did not see any way to win. On July 18, he rejoined the race, less than one month before Tuesday’s primaries. The Democratic Governor backed him. Crowley, along with Tony Evers, another moderate, who traveled the state in his final week of campaigning, made the case for Crowley as the best candidate to face Tiffany.
Walker: “It’s obvious that Hong, with his gaffes after gaffes, was not ready for prime time.” But Crowley also didn’t receive any serious scrutiny.”
Crowley joined Hong, U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin and U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan for a meal at an event to promote unity outside Madison, before heading out on a tour of the state. Evers was not able to attend because he had another engagement. Evers is not running for a third term in office as governor.
Crowley was the first Black candidate to receive a nomination from a major political party for Wisconsin Governor. He is now vying for the position of first Black Governor in Wisconsin and only the fourth Black Governor elected to the nation’s history.
This historic moment does not escape me. Crowley stated, “But I don’t even think about it because we still have work to do.” The job isn’t done. It is still not done. “My job isn’t to be the first. If I am the first then my job is to ensure that I don’t become the last.

If The End of Oak Street was just 100 minutes of Ewan McGregor smashing dinosaurs with a sledgehammer, it would be pretty great. If you then added in Anne Hathaway blasting at them with a massive shotgun too, things get taken up a notch. And when those dinosaurs are not in a theme park, but in a familiar-looking 1980s neighborhood because of time travel, well, that’s incredibly random, but we are all in.
Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell (It Follows), The End of Oak Street is all of that and much more. It’s surprising, it’s exciting, it’s heartfelt and dramatic. It also, at times, struggles to find the right balance between its suburban setting and massive action beats. And yet, that tiny flaw and others never change the fact that it’s a well-made, entertaining dino-adventure that feels like it could’ve been released during the era in which it’s set.
Set during the summer of 1982, The End of Oak Street centers on the Platt family. There’s the mother, Denise (Hathaway), father Greg (McGregor), older daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), son Brian (Christian Convery), and a Battlestar Galactica-named dog, Starbuck. They’re a pretty typical family. Audrey doesn’t quite fit in, Brian gets into a lot of trouble, Greg is out of work, and Denise struggles to hold the whole thing together while also harboring her own secrets. They’ve all got issues. There are some complex dynamics between them, but hey, they love each other. And it’s the 1980s, so they’ve got cassette tapes, rotary telephones, terrible fashion, and all that good stuff. Basically, it feels like it’s set in a shared universe with all of the Amblin films of the 1980s, along with Stranger Things, which has the same DNA.
Mitchell spends a healthy amount of the film’s surprisingly short runtime setting up those characters and their world. This delays the dinos a bit, but also gives the movie its own unique flair. He wants us to understand this place and these people before that place travels back in time a few million years and gets dropped in the middle of a dinosaur-filled ecosystem. Which, even just writing it, sounds pretty weird, and the movie never quite explains it in a wholly satisfying way. But, somehow, everything is grounded enough that it fits and you go with it.
Once that happens, The End of Oak Street changes, but not as much as you’d expect. The dinosaurs don’t immediately come parading through the film. Mitchell leans heavily on the character development and filmmaking to keep building tension and mystery. Lots of that comes from the film’s delightful cinematography by Michael Gioulakis. As the camera follows the characters around, every inch of every frame is used to build anticipation. We’ll catch a glimpse of something moving in the background. Linger on an object that becomes important later. See something terrifying almost out of frame, but not quite. The tactic is employed throughout and gets exponentially bigger once the Platts figure out dinosaurs are running around. But early on, it’s somehow even more delightful to watch as they walk around with no clue what’s going on, and the film’s inevitability quietly lurks for the audience to see.
That almost claustrophobic feeling becomes not just one of the film’s biggest assets, but also a bit of a liability. As you’d expect, once the story starts becoming more about surviving the dinosaurs, the chaos continues to ramp up. The dinosaurs get bigger. The stakes get more intense. And it’s all captured within the confines of Mitchell’s tight-knit filmmaking. Lots of close-ups. Sparingly populated streets. As that happens, though, certain big moments arrive in an almost shocking way. The film kind of goes from zero to 100 and then back to zero in terms of action a bunch of times throughout. This obviously was done to maximize surprise and excitement. But because these scenes stand out from an otherwise relatively quiet little movie, it does make them feel a little out of place. The juxtaposition definitely has an impact, but it also works ever so slightly against the film as a whole. It’s not quite the seamless journey it wants to be.
And yet, those moments are so freaking good, you forgive some slight unevenness. This is where you get your sledgehammers, your shotguns, and some other insane surprises we’d never dare spoil. It’s just simply entertaining to see dinosaurs running around a suburban neighborhood, through houses, and more, with an action level akin to Jurassic Park. But, probably because of Jurassic Park, Mitchell does his best to focus on less familiar dinosaurs, which also results in some memorable moments.
McGregor is fun and really funny as Greg, especially thanks to the amazing costume design by Erin Benach, while Stella and Convery both play great ’80s teens. But, as is often the case, it’s Hathaway who really shines in the film. Her character has the most going on, so it makes sense, but beyond that she exhibits an ease and gravitas that even Obi-Wan Kenobi himself struggles to match. It’s her performance and character that make the film’s very familiar-feeling (almost too much so) ending resonate in a way that leaves you smiling when the credits roll.
The End of Oak Street is just fun, plain and simple. It achieves that by giving us relatable, human characters in a recognizable setting that then gets overrun by dinosaurs in the most hilarious and random ways imaginable. Do we care that it’s so out there? No, we do not. Do we care a bit that the film has more peaks and valleys than we’d like? A little, but that never fully ruins the overall experience.
The End of Oak Street opens August 14.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

Last year’s Made by Google event for the Pixel 10 resembled a late night talk show, complete with Jimmy Fallon as host, and it aired an hour after the phones were revealed. Spec dives and executive appearances were replaced with celebrity cameos and awkward skits, to the confusion of many diehard Pixel fans. But it served its purpose in reaching a broader audience: Last year’s stream racked up 8.4 million viewers on YouTube; the launch the year before only managed 1.4 million.
This year, Google has only escalated matters. For tomorrow evening’s livestream, Fallon has been replaced by Trevor Noah, who will lead a “stacked” lineup of celebrities including basketball star Stephen Curry, podcaster Alex Cooper, and DJ Peggy Gou. What the event won’t have is many surprises. While the launch event kicks off at 6PM ET, the Google Store’s preorder countdown is set to end eight hours earlier, presumably when the phones will be revealed in full.
By the time Google’s stream starts, its most avid fans will know exactly what’s coming. Then again, for the most part, they already do. In a world where almost every spec leaks ahead of time, it makes sense that Google’s celeb-centric launch event won’t be targeted at Pixel power users.
Google’s been one of the most adaptive companies when it comes to the modern proliferation of phone leaks. Last year it took the unusual step of simply revealing the Pixel 10 design in full almost a month ahead of the launch. This year it’s only showed glimpses of the Pixel 11 series, but in the process has revealed something that should excite most power users more than the launch itself: a notification light.
The light is built into the camera island of the Pixel 11 Pro (though perhaps not the regular model), where the flash normally is, suggesting that it serves as the flash and flashlight too. It’s a small feature, but a surprisingly big part of Google’s smartphone heritage. The majority of Google’s Nexus phones included hardware notification LEDs, and Google was one of the last manufacturers to drop the feature, which saw a brief resurgence in 2017’s Pixel 2 before Google binned it off again — we thought for good. The RGB lights could be used to show the phone’s charging status, flash when notifications come in, and activate in different colors. Open-source Android skins like CyanogenMod and apps like Light Flow gave even more flexibility, letting users set specific colors and blink rates for specific apps or contacts.
Notification LEDs went out of fashion about the same time that the always-on display came in. Who needs a little light when you can have the actual notifications on the screen at all times? Some Android phones instead include the option to have the edges of the display flash a certain color when notifications come in, which can even be visible when the phone is face down, depending on the design, but dedicated lights have been few and far between.
The most prominent recent examples have all come from Nothing, which has elevated the LED into an art form. Ever since 2022’s Nothing Phone 1, it’s incorporated complex light arrays and dot-matrix displays into the back of its phones, allowing not just quick flashes but complex, customizable patterns or icons that can vary by contact or app. There’s only one other recent phone I can think of to feature a dedicated LED, though in the case of the Trump phone, it felt like proof of its dated, recycled design rather than a forward-thinking feature.
The small light shown in the camera bar of the 11 Pro is more subtle than most of Nothing’s designs, though seemingly more colorful. Google hasn’t said what the light can do, though since the pulsing, multicolored animation resembles some of the Gemini design language, it seems a smart guess that it relates to Google’s AI assistant. Leaks suggest it may light up when you talk to the chatbot or receive calls from certain contacts, though I hope Google has more in mind for it than that, with the same customizability by app and by contact that Nothing phones support. The cruelest trick of all would be to bring back the notification light and then not have it light up for notifications.
Perhaps it’s odd that on the eve of Google’s flagship phone launch I’m most excited about the apparent resurrection of a feature Google sent to the graveyard nine years ago. I presume the new Pixel phones will also be interesting in other ways, with the usual chipset bumps, camera upgrades, and design language tweaks.
But as the company pushes into entirely new ways of launching its phones to entirely new audiences, there’s a charm in it giving its oldest fans what they want when it comes to the hardware itself. Somehow I doubt it’s going to dig any further and reveal a Pixel 11 with a 3.5mm headphone jack, microSD card slot, or replaceable battery, but at least we can dream.

Mattel celebrates the musical legacy left by Whitney Houston. A collector’s doll is commemorating the impact of this late icon on the music business for over 40 years.
Houston died at 48 on February 12, 2012. She was discovered by the legendary music executive Clive Davis. Houston’s legacy includes a number of platinum albums and singles including: “The Greatest Love of All”, “Saving All My Love For You”, “All at Once”, “Didn’t We Almost Have It All”, “Where Do Broken Hearts go,” “I Want to Dance with Someone (Who Loves me),” “How Will I know” and Houston’s riveting performance of the “Star Spangled Banner” before Super Bowl XXV, 1991.
ForbesMegan moroney teams up with American Girl for new doll and accessories
Whitney Houston, the legendary daughter of gospel singer Cissy Houston, sold over 220 millions albums, singles, and videos in her long career. Whitney Houston is the only artist who has charted seven No. 1 singles.
Barbie Signature Whitney Houston Doll unveiled at 5th Legacy of Love Gala, Atlanta. This annual charity event is hosted by The Whitney E. Houston Legacy Foundation. Mattel says that Whitney Houston doll was developed in collaboration with Pat Houston who is president of the Foundation and executor for The Estate of Whitney E. Houston.
More for You
Barbie’s doll recreates Whitney Houston’s iconic look from the 1987 music video “I Wanna Dance with Somebody Who Loves Me”. Barbie doll recreates Whitney Houston’s vivid eye makeup from the 1987 music video. She is dressed in a purple tank top and colorful earrings. The doll measures 12 inches tall and comes with a mic and stand replica.
Mattel states that Pat Houston worked closely with their Barbie team during the entire creative process. She helped shape the design of the doll, including Whitney’s signature style and glamour, as well as the thoughtful touches which celebrate her most memorable performance.
ForbesMiley cyrus is giddy about the new Barbie doll as it goes on sale
When will the Whitney Houston Barbie doll be available?
Barbie Whitney Houston Dolls are now available in Target stores, online through Amazon, Walmart and Mattel Creations, and at Target.com. This doll is available for 60 dollars.
Pat Houston stated in a Mattel statement that “we celebrate today more than just the doll release, we also celebrate the legacy of an iconic figure.” The new Whitney Houston Barbie pays tribute to a woman who’s voice, grace and beauty inspired many generations. This doll will remind children and collectors that true excellence never fades, dreams are limitless, and there is no end to what you can achieve. “Thank you Mattel, for making Whitney’s dream come true.”
Nathan Baynard is also celebrating the Barbie Signature Whitney Houston Doll release. He said, in a press statement: “Whitney Houston’s music was the soundtrack for countless moments of joy and happiness around the globe. Barbie is honored to pay tribute to her legacy by adding the new addition to the Barbie Signature Series.
Baynard, noting Pat Houston, the Whitney Houston Estate’s close collaborator, noted that Whitney Houston Barbie doll celebrates her “unmistakable spirit, style and joy.” It is our hope that it will give fans an opportunity to honor the singer whose influence and voice continue to be heard around the globe.
ForbesMattel’s first ‘KPop Demon Hunters Dolls’ go on pre-sale for summer release

Michael B Jordan has sparked dating speculation.
At the weekend, they were seen together at Six Flags Magic Mountain outside Los Angeles.
A viral social media photo shows the two on a rollercoaster. The singer smiles at the actor from Sinners as they talk happily while the fans look on.
Jordan and Raye’s appearance at the theme park follows several high-profile pairs, starting with Kendall Jenner with whom he left the Met Gala After-Party in New York City in 2015.
After being seen with Kiki Layne (from If Beale St Could Talk) and Cindy Bruna (a French model), he was briefly associated.
Jordan’s first and most publicized romance was Lori Harvey. He dated her from autumn 2020 until mid-2022.
People magazine confirmed the split on June 20, 2022. A source told the publication that Michael and Lori were “both completely brokenhearted” but “still loved each other”.
How do you get to know someone you’ve just met and may or not like? The Oscar-winning actress told GQ in 2018 that dating can be difficult.
In the past, Raye has unofficially been linked with Drake and Lewis Hamilton.