A screen shot from Toy Story 3, or the robot-Barbie future?

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us.

Hey, did you read

• Mayor Emanuel’s pitch for raising property taxes? Gwynedd Stuart

• That Volkswagen has said 11 million of its diesel cars worldwide incorporate software the EPA says deliberately evades pollution tests? John Dunlevy

• How a Siri version of Barbie dolls has been made possible by implementing artificial intelligence? Sue Kwong

• That the Met will no longer use blackface in its performances of Otello? Brianna Wellen

• That CD sales dropped 31.5 percent in the first half of 2015? Gwynedd Stuart

• About Soho House, the work-space-slash-playground for “creatives”? Tal Rosenberg

• About why this female editor quit her dream newspaper job? Brianna Wellen

• About the film Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett collaborated on 50 or so years ago, now the subject of a “kino-essay”? Kate Schmidt

• About spending a week in the land of Jane Austen? Aimee Levitt