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Youve seen the PBS logo in the news a lot lately. The current logothree facial silhouettes in white and bluehas remained largely unchanged since Tom Geismar, the cofounder of the canonical corporate design firm Chermayeff & Geismar, designed it in 1984. And its message has remained steadfast, too: PBS’s programming is a civic service for everyone, as an extension of the right to a public education in the United States. The logo has a name: the Everyman, first coined by the iconic corporate designer Herb Lubalin, who designed the original PBS mark in 1971 to unify the look of its 200 local stations. The obvious illusion comes out of the name, Lubalin said. Public means people. The PBS logo, 2019present. [Image: PBS] Republicans have long accused the broadcaster of liberal bias and have for decades attempted to curtail its funding, although this position runs counter to public opinion66% of Americans agree that they support federal funding for public radio, and 7 in 10 think its a valuable service, according to a recent Harris national poll. Finally, last month Republicans succeeded. Congress rescinded $1.1 billion in previously approved federal funding for public broadcasting as part of a $9 billion rescissions package suggested by President Trump, largely along party lines. This eliminates all federal funding for NPR and PBS, which had been approved through 2027 with bipartisan support by congress. The Senate Appropriations Committee then declined to restore some of the funding for the next budget year, which supporters of PBS previously considered to be a possible path forward for the broadcaster. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting will now shut down, it announced last week. A 1971 version of the mark. [Image: PBS] More than 70% of CPB’s annual federal appropriation goes directly to more than 1,500 local public media stations, according to a web page of its financials. This loss in funding could force local stations, especially in rural areas, to shut down, according to the CPB. Local member stations are independent and locally owned and operated, according to NPR. As a public-private partnership, local PBS stations get about 15% of their revenue from federal funding. Following this news, I got in touch with Geismar to see what he made of this turn of events. In this as-told-to, Geismar reflects on his 1984 design, and what it means in the context of PBSs recent loss in funding and the new challenges it faces today. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting did not reply to a request for comment by time of publication. There is an ironic tie-in between the government decision to cut off all funding to public television and public radio, and what prompted the redesign of the PBS logo back in the early 1980s. That was also a difficult time, financially, for the Public Broadcasting Service, and especially the stations in more remote regions of the country. Much of the public equated PBS with the major television networks CBS, NBC and ABC, and presumed that, like those major institutions, PBS was the parent of and significant funder for all the local public television stations throughout the country. But, in fact, the reality is somewhat the opposite. Although PBS local affiliates received a portion of funding from the federal government, it is the individual stations that have the responsibility to do public fund raising, and PBS, in a sense, works for them. A sketch of the redesigned PBS “Everyman” [Image: courtesy Tom Geismar] Because of this confusion, the PBS leadership felt that their existing logo (a famous design by by Herb Lubalin) needed to be more than just the classic 3-initials mark, something more evocative of a public-benefit system serving all people. Thus the everyone mark was born. [Image: PBS] To preserve some continuity, we took the P from the prior PBS mark, which had been rendered as a human face n profile, flipped it around to be clearly just a human profile, and gave it a facelift and a gentle lobotomy. We then repeated the profile in both positive and negative form, to suggest a multitude, a public, and combined this mark with the initials PBS in a bold type style to form the new, more appropriate PBS visual identity. Though in subsequent decades the profiles have been subtly modified, this everyone concept has been the core of the PBS visual identity ever since. [Image: courtesy Tom Geismar] And now, once again, with federal government funding stopped, it is the stations in the less populous regions who will suffer the most.
Category:
E-Commerce
The U.S. government is in full retreat from its efforts to make vehicles more fuel-efficient, which it has been waging, along with state governments, since the 1970s. The latest move came on July 29, 2025, when the Environmental Protection Agency said it planned to rescind its landmark 2009 decision, known as the endangerment finding, that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. If that stands up in court and is not overruled by Congress, it would undo a key part of the long-standing effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles. As a scholar of how vehicle emissions contribute to climate change, I know that the science behind the endangerment finding hasnt changed. If anything, the evidence has grown that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet and threatening peoples health and safety. Heat waves, flooding, sea-level rise and wildfires have only worsened in the decade and a half since the EPAs ruling. Regulations over the years have cut emissions from power generation, leaving transportation as the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. The scientific community agrees that vehicle emissions are harmful and should be regulated. The public also agrees, and has indicated strong preferences for cars that pollute less, including both more efficient gas-burning vehicles and electric-powered ones. Consumers have also been drawn to electric vehicles thanks to other benefits such as performance, operation cost and innovative technologies. That is why I believe the EPAs move will not stop the public and commercial transition to electric vehicles, but it will make that shift harder, slower and more expensive for everyone. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. [Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images] Putting carmakers in a bind The most recent EPA rule about vehicle emissions was finalized in 2024. It set emissions limits that can realistically only be met by a large-scale shift to electric vehicles. Over the past decade and a half, automakers have been building up their capability to produce electric vehicles to meet these fleet requirements, and a combination of regulations such as Californias zero-emission-vehicle requirements have worked together to ensure customers can get their hands on EVs. The zero-emission-vehicle rules require automakers to produce EVs for the California market, which in turn make it easier for the companies to meet their efficiency and emissions targets from the federal government. These collectively pressure automakers to provide a steady supply of electric vehicles to consumers. The new EPA move would undo the 2024 EPA vehicle-emissions rule and other federal regulations that also limit emissions from vehicles, such as the heavy-duty vehicle emissions rule. The possibility of a regulatory reversal puts automakers into a state of uncertainty. Legal challenges to the EPAs shift are all but guaranteed, and the court process could take years. For companies making decade-long investment decisions, regulatory stability matters more than short-term politics. Disrupting that stability undermines business planning, erodes investor confidence and sends conflicting signals to consumers and suppliers alike. Car manufacturers in the U.S. have invested large sums of money to produce electric vehicles. [Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images] A slower roll The Trump administration has taken other steps to make electric vehicles less attractive to carmakers and consumers. The White House has already suspended key provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that provided tax credits for purchasing EVs and halted a US$5 billion investment in a nationwide network of charging stations. And Congress has retracted the federal waiver that allowed California to set its own, stricter emissions limits. In combination, these policies make it hard to buy and drive electric vehicles: Fewer, or no, financial incentives for consumers make the purchases more expensive, and fewer charging stations make travel planning more challenging. Overturning the EPAs 2009 endangerment finding would remove the legal basis for regulating climate pollution from vehicles altogether. But U.S. consumer interest in electric vehicles has been growing, and automakers have already made massive investments to produce electric vehicles and their associated components in the U.S. such as Hyundais EV factory in Georgia and Volkswagens Battery Engineering Lab in Tennessee. Global markets, especially in Europe and China, are also moving decisively toward electrifying large proportions of the vehicles on the road. This move is helped in no small part due to aggressive regulation by their respective governments. The results speak for themselves: Sales of EVs in both the European Union and China have been growing rapidly. But the pace of change matters. A slower rollout of clean vehicles means more cumulative emissions, more climate damage and more harm to public health. The EPAs proposal seeks to slow the shift to electric vehicles, removing incentives and raising costs even though the market has shown that cleaner vehicles are viable, the public has shown interest, and the science has never been clearer. But even such a major policy change cant stop the momentum of those trends. Alan Jenn is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, at the University of California, Davis. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Trump and the tech industry are continuing their dance of give and take. This time, its Apple doing the appeasing. On Wednesday, August 6, CEO Tim Cook announced that Apple would invest $100 billion toward U.S. manufacturing. The money comes alongside another $500 billion that the iPhone maker pledged in February, all of which is meant to be spent in the next four years. At the time, Apple claimed that it would fund a 250,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Houston, Texas, slated to open in 2026. It also devoted some of the funds to hiring 20,000 new U.S.-based employees, primarily in fields such as AI, machine learning, R&D, silicon engineering, and software development. ‘We took that challenge very seriously’ On Wednesday, Cook alluded to Trumps push for more than that original investment. President Trump shared some kind words about that work, but he also asked us to think about what more we could commit to doing, Cook stated. Mr. President, we took that challenge very seriously. The Oval Office photo-op included an ostentatious moment in which Cook presented Trump with a glass plaque featuring Apples logo, sitting atop a 24-karat-gold base. The gift is, of course, made in America. Apples investors appear pleased with the additional pledge. Shares of the companys stock rose more than 5% throughout Wednesday, closing at $213.25. Shares continued to spike during after-hours and into premarket trading on Thursday, reaching over $220. However, the tech companys stock still hasnt fully recovered from the significant tumble it took following Trumps tariff announcements. It hit a low of $169.21 on April 8, less than a week after Trumps Liberation Day and a trade war with China, where about 80% of iPhones are made, the New York Times estimates. That represented a drop of around 35% from its record-high price of about $260 in December.
Category:
E-Commerce
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