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Opting for zeppelins is a distinction with a difference, too. Blimps technically rely on a non-rigid "envelope" to hold their lighter-than-air gas, with the pressure of the gas ultimately supporting the skin of the envelope. The zeppelins, in contrast, feature a semi-rigid setup with aluminum and carbon-fiber trusses. This helps the resulting airship maintain a more aerodynamic shape and provides the foundation for building larger craft with longer ranges, increased cargo-carrying capacities, and nicer bathrooms than some apartments.

Goodyear picked the right partner for its project as well, since ZLT Zeppelin traces its roots back to Count Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin, the German inventor from whom the airships got their name. Moreover, Goodyear and the Zeppelin company have a prior history of working together. The two formed the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation in 1923 and remained partners until the end of 1940. The corporation even built a pair of fully rigid airships, the U.S.S. Akron and U.S.S. Macon, for the U.S. Navy in the early 1930s. Unfortunately, both would experience (unrelated) catastrophic accidents and crash into the sea.

How big is the Goodyear Blimp?

We've previously described the surreal experience of riding on the Goodyear Blimp over the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, so let's now look at some facts and figures. First off, though, keep in mind that the word "zeppelin" has sort of become Kleenexed over the years: Both words represent brand names that have gone on to have a second life as generic terms. In this case, then, it's accurate to say Goodyear partnered with the ZLT Zeppelin company to develop its new zeppelin-type airships

There are now four, to be exact, including three based in the U.S. — Wingfoot One, Two, and Three — and one in Germany that seems to simply be called the Europe Blimp. Each is 246 feet long, making them more than 50 feet longer than their predecessors. The added length unlocks the space for a larger gondola that launched with room for 12 passengers –- doubling the passenger capacity of past Goodyear Blimps. Yet, despite these increased dimensions, engineers managed to reduce the gondola's weight by 800 pounds by building it from carbon-fiber composite.

Now, the new airship's overall curb weight did climb, from 12,840 pounds to 19,789 pounds. But with a helium-filled weight of just 150 pounds, and a trio of 5.9-liter flat-four Lycoming engines kicking out 200 horsepower each, Wingfoot Two took to the air in 2019 with Car and Driver projecting an estimated 0-to-60 time of 90 seconds and a top speed of 80 mph — which makes it some 20 mph faster than the previous-gen Spirit of Goodyear.

How did the Goodyear Blimp become a sports icon?

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Charles Goodyear was a pioneering American chemist who, in 1839, came up with the first practical way of hardening rubber for industrial use — a process he called "vulcanization" when he patented it in 1844. The same process is behind those tiny rubber hairs on new tires. To be clear, though, Goodyear would die in 1860, and that was about four decades before the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company debuted in 1898. However, his innovations were what inspired the company's founders, Frank and Charley Seiberling, to use the Goodyear name.

The Goodyear Company would go on to open an Aeronautics Department in 1910 with a goal of expanding its business into the fledgling U.S. aviation industry. The focus was originally on rubberized fabrics and coatings, and it must have made sense for Goodyear to start constructing its own balloons in 1912. Much of its early work was for the U.S. Navy, but the company began using its craft for lighter-than-air advertising by 1925.

Those marketing efforts would really take off in 1955. That was after someone at NBC, which had the rights to broadcast college football's Rose Bowl game that year, contacted Goodyear for a flyover. Equipped with a camera and microwave transmitter, Goodyear's Enterprise V broadcast the Rose Bowl Parade on January 1, marking the first time that nationally televised programming was shown live on TV. It would be the start of an ongoing relationship with major sporting events that carries on to this day.  %!s()

Rivian delivered a bunch of those features last week with Update 2026.24.40. This R2-only update brought with it a slew of features and requested modifications. It was first noticed on July 11 and released to the public last Wednesday, July 15.

How To Update?

For this first Rivian R2 update, you’ll need to launch it manually (conveniently, this update also brings with it the option to schedule overnight updates in the Rivian app so you won't have to manually update again). You'll want to be parked at home with a reliable signal and have at least 35 miles of charge. The update will take around 30-40 minutes.

Personally, the live activity widget for the update seemed to be stuck at 9% for me for most of the update. It was only after I opened the app that I saw it was actually nearly done. So don't stress if it looks like things have stalled out. Check the app first!

MORE FOR YOU

Parked Conveniences

The biggest part of this update is the addition of two highly anticipated features that current Rivian R1S and R1T owners have enjoyed for years: Pet Comfort and Gear Guard.

Pet Comfort mode will maintain a comfortable cabin temperature while you’re away from your vehicle. It also displays a message on the screen with the information that the mode is active as well as the current cabin temp. However, based on real-world tests from one R2 owner whose vehicle failed to reach the designated temperature after 20 minutes, it seems that this feature could use a bit more tweaking. If you do use it right now, keep a close eye on cabin temp via your Rivian app.

Gear Guard is another big feature for the R2. At its core, this feature enables the automatic recording of clips to the R2's internal storage when you're away from your vehicle and it detects activity around your vehicle. When activity is detected, the R2 sounds an alarm and notifies you in the app (yes, you can turn this off at your home location).

Gear Guard (and Launch Mode) also brought a slew of video features for when you're on the move, such as incident recording, which saves clips when a crash or hard brake is detected. You can also plug in an external hard drive (Rivian owners swear by the Samsung Shield T7) to fully record your drives.

Launch Mode

For those of you that want to see how close you can get to the R2's official 3.6 second 0-60 mph time, you can now engage Launch Mode. Meant to be engaged on close courses in dry conditions, you can access it from Driver Modes > Sport > Launch. The vehicle will walk you through the process (and give you a fair amount of warnings as to its usage). In Launch Mode, you'll have access to maximum off-the-line acceleration and a higher top speed. Your 0-60 mph and quarter mile times will also be recorded. Keep in mind, this is not considered a standard drive mode.

Garages

And now for the thing I was most excited about — the garage door opener! My garage is fickle and has decided to stop responding to some of its remotes lately, leaving me stuck opening and closing it via the MyQ app, which is…fine? But what I want is a button to press in my car, preferably something that is integrated into the vehicle itself without requiring additional hardware. As soon as I saw the Homelink hardware included in the R2 owner's manual, I've been looking forward to this being enabled.

Yes, it’s a minor convenience, but it’s well-integrated into the R2 experience. You pair your garage opener under Settings > Garages, set up one-touch access, and then use the right Haptic Halo wheel to open and close the garage. I have a minor issue where my garage doesn’t always want to close from the one-touch signal but works if I go into the Garages menu…but like I said, my garage door opener is fickle. You can also specify a location range for the one-touch option to appear. It's very nicely done, overall.

Quality of Life and Bug Fixes

This update also includes a fair amount of fixes and improvements to the overall software package, from improved performance for the media apps, to better responsiveness from the haptic trunk and rear window buttons. There are also quality of life improvements such as the lowering of the turn-signal volume (which didn't bother me, but was the first negative thing my wife said about the R2). The performance of the Haptic Halo wheels has also been refined…though that's a subtle enough change I haven't really noticed much of a difference.

Rivian's engineers also included a fix to an embarrassing issue where the vent controls were reversed in the climate settings…so if you haven't been able to get the vents pointed where you like them, give it another go after the update.

More Soon

Rivian is just getting started in regards to the R2 and its over-the-air software updates. Additional high-profile features that are expected this fall include the launch of the Sirius XM media app (hopefully sooner rather than later, I miss Lithium terribly) and improved Autonomy+. Autonomy+ is expected to receive point-to-point navigation as it gets closer to Level 3 self-driving sometime later this year…though it remains to be seen if Rivian can deliver on their ambitious self-driving timeline.

Should I Update?

Absolutely. Update 2026.24.40 brings with it features that Rivian promised when you purchased your vehicle and adds bug fixes and quality of life updates that make your R2 safer and more pleasant to drive. If you haven't already, you can launch the update from your Rivian app or the main screen of your vehicle.

If you’d like to dig into the details of this release, open your Rivian app and click Updates to get the official release notes. The R2 owner’s guide (also accessible from the Rivian app) has also been updated to include the new features and changes.

You can find out more about the R2 on the Rivan site. %!s()

As he says this, the rapper sits at a table on the banks of the Grand Union canal, outside Paddington Station in north central London. He doesn’t live here, but it’s easy to get to on the train from his home near Reading, a broadly unremarkable town outside the British capital. He takes a sip of beer. Suddenly he seems to remember that he’s speaking to a fairly well-known American music magazine. 

“I’ve always wanted to break America,” he says. “It’s the absolute dream.” 

For now, it’s impressive enough that Songer has broken in the U.K. Wokingham, the small town he grew up in (just outside Reading, which is just outside London), is not known to be overflowing with rap talent. He blew up in 2017 at age 17, when a freestyle on the British YouTube channel Bl@ckbox went viral. His name became better known on home shores when “Vino Bandit,” a collaboration with the drum-and-bass producer K Motionz, crashed the U.K. singles chart. Then his own track “Toxic Freestyle,” featuring an instrumental lifted from the Britney Spears classic, became the second-highest selling U.K. rap single of 2024. For all of the U.K. rap scene’s talent, for all its brawn and bravado, its innovation in production and depiction of the country’s troubled streets, few rappers convey the turmoil inside their own heads quite like Songer.

But despite interest from the mainstream, Songer remains resolutely independent. His choice of lyrical subject matter makes him something of an outlier too, his albums full of confessional bars about mental health and the challenges of growing up in the spotlight. “I’m not a rapper, not an MC, not a producer, not a singer, just someone who writes down stuff and puts it out to the world,” Songer says. I’ve interviewed him several times, and this is the sort of thing he says often. 

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Our most recent interview happens a week before the release of his sixth album, What If I Say No?, due on Friday. Having toured Australia, New Zealand, and much of Europe, supported grime pioneer Dizzee Rascal, played Glastonbury and made music with a broad range of scene legends, you might think the American market would be the next target on his hit list. But for now he has his mind on the impact of another English export on the United States. And don’t call it soccer. 

“Football lyrics that are shit are so annoying,” Songer raps on new album highlight “What’s the Punchline.” “If you’re on the wing like Bale or Beckham, I’m throwing coins.” Even you, American reader, know who David Beckham is, and maybe even that, in his playing days, he played on the right side of the field, or the right wing. You may even have heard of Gareth Bale. Being “on the wing” (also like doing time on a prison wing) like “insert footballer here,” is a common lyric among British rappers. Throwing coins at the pitch is something unruly football fans — in the sport’s largely bygone lawless era — would do if they were unimpressed with a player’s performance, particularly affecting wingers, as they were closest to the side of the pitch. You get it. It’s a clever bar.

“Don’t just watch the games,” Songer says, addressing anyone who’s yet to fall in love with the sport. “Watch the fan culture. Watch what it does to people. Watch the way people react to it and what it means to the people watching it. That’s how you fall in love with football. People live and breathe it. It dictates a weekend.”

It could be about to dictate his weekend. We speak on the day before England’s tragic semifinal defeat to Lionel Messi’s Argentina. “If we win against Argentina tomorrow,” he says, still naively unaware of his country’s impending immolation, “then I’m flying out there for the final.” He has a ticket already, which cost in the region of £5,000. He thinks if he’d waited until the semifinal was over, that price would have almost doubled. 

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Like football, British rappers have a checkered past when it comes to making it big in the United States. You may have heard of MIA, or Skepta, The Streets, or even Dizzee Rascal (and you’re welcome for Slick Rick, MF DOOM, and 21 Savage), but further legends of the U.K. rap landscape like Wiley, Giggs, Ms Dynamite, D Double E, Casisdead, Skinnyman, So Solid Crew, and 67 are probably less likely to ring bells in your ears. How would Songer suggest a new listener might get into his music?

“Rather than the songs that I think commercially might do better, I’d show them one of the more honest ones,” he says. “I rely on honesty so much. Without the honesty I’m just someone that rhymes quickly.” He mentions one of his favorite lyrical subject matters. “It’s not just a case of this geezer likes to go out and get hammered. It’s why do I get hammered? How do I feel after, and the complexities that come with that.”

These are the two sides of his musical personality. Among his Spotify most played, you’ll find songs like “Vino Bandit” and “Balling,” where Songer raps over raucous beats about going out on a Friday, drinking lager, and maybe the occasional narcotic. Elsewhere in his oeuvre you’ll find stuff like “No More Candles” (2019), a laconic cloud-rap track over which he intones lines such as: “I have been blessed in life to the point where I don’t complain, but oh my days, why the fuck am I feeling so much pain?” Then there are others like the grime riddim “Mind of War,” and the U.K. drill-inflected “Better than Yours,” with a Kelis-inspired hook (“My album brings all the boys to the yard/Damn right, that’s better than yours … I could teach you, but you ain’t got bars”). 

Then again he also does like, as he says, getting hammered. “Stop giving me politics, I don’t want politics, I want Moretti at half-past three,” he raps on “Feel My Face.” Then: “Asking the barman to give me a free one, somebody told me that talk is cheap/Whole generation trying to escape on C-O-C-A-I-N-E.” 

The two sides of Songer’s modus operandi — neatly dichotomised in the title of another new track, “Vices vs Verses” — can be traced back to his beginnings, growing up in pubs around Wokingham. His grandad was the singer and frontman in a pub band called Alfie & the Alcoholics. 

“Hence my middle name,” says Songer, real name James Alfred Songer. “My middle name is Alfred because of my grandad. There was banjos, the craziest looking guitars. It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s get a Les Paul.’ It would be, ‘Let’s get a banjo with three strings missing.’” He credits his kin for his musical passion: “It’s in the family, people that love music. My dad adores music from my grandad, and I adore music from my dad. So yeah without those 12 pints and a banjo, I’m not sure what would happen.” Was he drinking 12 pints as a child? “Not at that age, no. I think I was only on about 10 or 11 at that time.” 

As well as his grandad’s Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash covers, Songer grew up listening to the Arctic Monkeys and Eminem. He once saw J. Cole supporting the early 2010s U.K. rap superstar Tinie Tempah. At school he and his friends learned to rap by cussing each other’s mums. Songer soon realized he had a gift for rhyming insults, writing lists of punchlines in his notes and rattling them off at any opportunity. Eventually his friends convinced him he was actually pretty good. As he reached adolescence, he had mates who were throwing drum-and-bass raves around Wokingham, Reading, and Bristol. Songer became their go-to MC, belting out those same punchlines to sweaty clubs full of teenagers at 160 beats per minute. 

In 2017, at age 17, he recorded his near-legendary Bl@ckbox freestyle, and the British music industry started to take notice. His debut album, Dream Workz, with an image of Songer smoking on the moon as its cover, came in 2019. Then came Lyrics for Sanity and The Sunrise Project, on which Songer reached new levels of poetic introspection. “I’m paranoid, my phone’s got my life on it/Credit card, fingerprint, it’s got facial recognition, notepage, that’s my mind on it/I wish that I didn’t, but rely on it/Knowledge is power, I think I’ll die from it,” he lamented on “Confession Tape 17.” 

His next album, SKALA, named after his family dog, featured a guest verse from grime legend D Double E, a key cosign and mentor who still texts Songer well wishes on Christmas morning. Fifth album The Price of Therapy cast Songer’s as U.K. rap’s top psychiatrist, dropping lines like: “My lyric book will know me by my scary side/I used to write to cope, now I get a flight/There’s airport security I recognise.” 

The first time I interviewed Songer, nearly five years ago, he told me “I’m into politics, but I hate politicians.” On “Front Row Seats,” another highlight from the new album, Songer pines: “Child poverty’s the highest that it’s ever fucking been/Where’s the party for that gone, what kind of world to we live in?” 

“I think it’s harder to be optimistic about the future than ever before,” he says. “I think the light at the end of the tunnel has gone out. I think the illusion that technology getting better is gonna somehow save the world is gone. The disbalance of power, the elites, the world’s first trillionaire … It’s gonna get really dystopian. My worry is, do we have enough time for the pendulum to swing back the other way? I probably sound a bit miserable, but I’m not optimistic at all.” 

DAYS AFTER OUR conversation, the World Cup was presented to the Spanish captain Rodri by President Donald Trump. Songer skipped it in the end, opting to sell his ticket after England’s semifinal defeat and watch at home like the rest of us. He is perhaps more familiar with the sight of the tangerine tyrant handing over a trophy than most, having seen his club team Chelsea handed the psychopathically designed Club World Cup by the same man last summer. “I think he’s an absolute scumbag,” Songer says. “And I think the sooner FIFA have a president that isn’t two and a half inches inside of Donald Trump, the better.” 

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He stops short of total doomsday speak, especially on the subject of football. “I only ever see the World Cup as a good thing,” he says. “It is only ever a force for good, even if people are trying to drag it the other way. The world’s on its arse really. I just think we’re in real danger of handing the keys, if we haven’t already, to people that can dictate the narrative of the world to be whatever they want.” He invokes another recent news story. “You know the two people that climbed the Empire State Building and got married? One: How amazing is that? But two: Their flag said ‘The day that the power of love overtakes the love of power, the world will find peace.’” Sounds like a Songer bar. “Yeah, exactly. They must have access to my demos or something.” 

Halfway through our conversation, a twentysomething man walks past us and stops. “Songer!” The rapper smiles and gladly poses for a photo with the fan, asks his name, and thanks him for his support. He tells me this is normal for him by now. In the same vein, he says breaking America would not mean “being top of Billboard charts,” but “expanding my audience and building a community, building a family. If I were to break America whilst maintaining the level of integrity that’s so important to me within my lyrics, then it would be the biggest possible compliment to the music. If they can relate to how I’m feeling, then we’re all in this together.” %!s()

Brottman’s book, published last year, chronicles the events following the December 2000 disappearance of Mike Williams in the Florida panhandle. No body was ever found, but five years later, Mike’s long-time friend Brian Winchester divorced his wife, Kathy, and married Mike’s wife, Denise. The truth of what happened to Mike finally came to light 12 years after that.

Tomorrow Studios, an ITV Studios partner, is producing Guilty Creatures and developed the project via first-look deals with Garner’s Alma Margo and director and executive producer Craig Gillespie’s Fortunate Jack Productions. Stuart Zicherman (American Sports Story) is the showrunner and executive produces with Sarah DeLappe, who is adapting the book; Garner; Tomorrow Studios’ Marty Adelstein, Becky Clements and Alissa Bachner; Gillespie and Annie Marter for Fortunate Jack; and Brottman.

Pullman is coming off of the Netflix movie Remarkably Bright Creatures and will next be seen as Bob Reynolds/Sentry in Avengers: Doomsday (whose trailer was released Tuesday morning). He earned an Emmy nomination in 2024 for his work on Apple’s Lessons in Chemistry; other credits include The Testament of Ann Lee, Outer Range and Top Gun: Maverick. He also stars with his dad, Bill Pullman, in Spaceballs: The New One, due for release in 2027.

Pullman is repped by CAA, Anonymous Content and ID.

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