For most leaders these last five years have been ones of great volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Political dynamics, economic shifts, massive layoffs, strategy pivots, technology disruptions, and more are shaping how we lead and what we can accomplish together. Leading through uncertainty is no longer a mere possibility, it’s core to the job description.
Times of uncertainty call for fast executive decision-making with limited information, good enough risk assessment, and repeated pivots. I know this because I led a global philanthropy network while the world shut down in 2020. During those initial months, I relied less on staff input to determine our direction, despite deeply valuing a culture of co-ownership. My choices as an executive during this period had to be fast and decisive to keep us afloat, but also had significant ramifications.
While I was able to effectively pivot to help our organization survive the crisis, I noticed that the staff who previously had driven programs now lacked ownership and motivation to move things forward. They deferred to me when I needed them to own their expertise. They didnt have audacious goals that matched our big North Star. They didnt bring ideas to brainstorms on how we could further innovate.
At the time this frustrated me; I was exhausted and burnt out from managing the crisis without much support and I desperately needed my board and staff team to step up.
What Ive learned since is just how common this is. After a period that requires a more top-down approach to decision-making, organizations and leaders rarely snap back to a high agency and collaborative cultureeven if thats what they value. Why? Because teams have become conditioned to defer to others to make decisions, and we exist in a culture where this is the norm.
What leaders need to do is find a way to reinvigorate that distributed leadership as quickly as possible after the initial crisis management. How we lead during these moments can set us up to become more nimble, adaptable, and creative. Given the continued volatility we are all experiencing, leaders who can embrace uncertainty as the time to share and shift power will find themselves better supported and prepared to navigate ongoing turbulence.
Here are three strategies I have observed and learned to use with boards, staff teams, and leaders as soon as possible after or during periods of uncertainty to help organizations move through the crisis while deepening a culture of shared agency.
1. Disrupt any top-down culture creep
If your crisis management plan or campaign requires a tight-knit group of leaders to make decisions, look for ways to redistribute that power as quickly as possible.
This might mean delegating some of the lower risk decision-making opportunities to team members and fully getting out of their way. You could also try taking yourself out of the picture temporarily to help disrupt the well-grooved habits that people might have in relying on your input. Leaders who step away for a week or two off while putting in place an interim leadership structure often come back to find that their teams have rebuilt more trust and agency.
One executive I worked with faced a strategic crisis at the same time as their pre-planned time off. While some leaders might have cancelled their vacation, I encouraged the leader to take that leave. They put in place an interim leadership team, created a point of contact for the Board to rely on if things escalated further, and quickly distributed power and authority. Now, the interim leadership team continues to be an important brain trust, supporting a more distributed approach to decision-making. The new relationships and capacity built during that crisis moment have helped the organization adapt as circumstances continue to change.
Its important to remember that top-down leadership is the culture were swimming in, and it is the obvious choice. Distributed leadership requires active planning, focus, practice, and a counter-cultural approach. When done well, strategic leadership redundancy allows for organizations and leaders to be more nimble and resilient.
2. Re-orient to story and purpose
Crisis often narrows our point of view to daily or weekly operations. Leaders, however, need to quickly get back to being the chief visionary officer. Teams rely on leaders to provide this perspective, inspire them to connect to each other, and work towards a shared purpose.
Over the years, Ive talked to numerous teams during times of crisis and transition. One thing that I hear is that leaders have to default to being doers during this time, despite the fact that their genius lies in being storytellers, visionaries, strategic dot connectors, and community builders. When I talk with the people around these leaders, a common thread is that people want to feel inspired and connected to the vision that brought them to the work in the first place.
Look for opportunities to remind people of your shared values or help connect them to the bigger picture of where they are going. When you tell the story of what you are building together, you refocus and reenergize people to bring their best selves in working toward your shared North Star.
As leaders, its not always easy to prioritize this kind of vision and value-setting work. It might seem more frivolous than the clear tasks and list of items you can easily check off. But over my 20+ years in social change and public sector roles, Ive seen that executives who lead with this kind of visionary approach first are the ones who are able to build teams of people enthusiastic about navigating uncharted waters.
3. Engage openly in learning and reflection
Uncertainty necessarily moves many leaders into a control-oriented mindset. However, navigating uncertainty and sharing power over a long period of time requires curiosity and a beginners mindset.
Reject your knee-jerk reaction to have all the answers. Instead, model holding uncertainty and curiosity to the people around you. Admit where you have learning edges and acknowledge the questions youre holding.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff, neuroscientist and author of Tiny Experiments, shares this wisdom: Leaders need to optimize for curiosity by creating an environment where its safe to experiment and learn in public. When teams see their leaders openly sharing their learning process, including the missteps and uncertainties, it creates psychological safety, which encourages everyone to embrace their own curiosity. This is how you can create a virtuous cycle of continuous reinvention.
Curiosity is also power-sharing in practice. This shifts leadership from being about I share answers and direct people around me to complete tasks to I identify questions from my perspective and enable people to come together to experiment, learn, and find solutions together. From here organizations get better results and can navigate uncertainty with more relationship and trust.
Together these three practices help break down any unhelpful power dynamics, create trust, and reinvigorate teams to co-own and co-create. Better yet, leaders who implement these practices before a crisis will find themselves well-equipped to navigate uncertainty with creativity, clarity, and courage.
Good leaders can use their power; great leaders know when to give that power back.
If your sofa was made between 1970 and 2014, its foam is likely loaded with flame retardantschemicals that can escape into dust and end up in the air you breathe.
A new study led by the California Department of Public Health shows the payoff of swapping it out: people who replaced their old, chemical-filled sofas or chairs with new, flame-retardant-free models saw levels of one common chemical, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), drop by half in just over a year.
The chemicals became ubiquitous in upholstered furniture thanks to older regulations in California. The state’s large market meant that flame retardants were used in furniture nationwide.
The tobacco industry originally lobbied for the rules in the 1960s, when smoking was a common cause of fires and the industry didnt want to make self-extinguishing cigarettes. But flame retardants didn’t prevent fires effectively. Instead, they were linked to cancer risk, hormone disruption, and reduced IQ levels in children.
By the early 2000s, manufacturers began phasing out one type of flame retardant, and by 2014, California finally revised its flammability rules so that companies could sell furniture without flame retardants.
In the early 2000s, there was a lot of accumulating evidence of the health effects associated with these chemicals, particularly for neurological development for children,” says Robin Dodson, a research scientist at the Silent Spring Institute and one of the authors of the study. “So the industry kind of saw the writing on the wall and opted for a phase out of BDE flame retardants in upholstered furniture.”
Initially, manufacturers switched to organophosphate flame retardants (OPFRs). But after California updated its rules, some phased out flame retardants completely, so it became possible to buy furniture without them.
In a previous study, the researchers found a significant reduction in PBDE chemicals in dust after furniture was replaced in a house. The new study is the first to look at what happens biologically. The chemicals dont go away immediatelyPBDEs have half lives in the body ranging from 1.8 to 6.5 years. But when large furniture like a sofa is replaced, they quickly drop. (There was less change in OPFRs, which have a shorter half-life in the body and which are still present in other products, from cars to electronics.)
The scientists also studied a companion group of people who didnt replace furniture. They also saw a drop in PBDEs in their blood and urine, thanks to the fact that more products are being made without the chemicals. But levels dropped two to four times more slowly than in those who got new furniture.
That doesnt mean you need to immediately buy a new couch if your budget is tight. (There’s also currently no safe, environmentally friendly way to dispose of old flame-retardant-filled furniture.) Our number-one tip right now today for flame retardants is to actually keep dust levels low inside of your house, says Dodson. That means, for example, vacuuming with a HEPA filter that can capture dust. Washing hands before making food or eating also makes a significant difference, especially for children.
But when you do get new furniture, Dodson says, look for items that are specifically made without the chemicals. We’ve been generally telling people, don’t run and throw out your couch, she says. But when choosing new furniture, choose without flame retardants.
From return-to-office mandates, anxiety about AI taking (or reshaping) jobs, and a highly competitive atmosphere for recent graduates and other job seekers, 2025 has been a year of change. Its also been a big year of change for women in the workplace, with a record number exiting the workforce. And, according to a new report, women are now also less inclined to seek promotions.
LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Co. just released their 2025 Women in the Workplace report based on a survey of 124 organizations employing around 3 million people. The survey research found that while companies overwhelmingly say that diversity (67%) and inclusion (84%) are top priorities, just over half (54%) of companies say the same about women’s career advancement. For women of color, only 46% of companies value advancement. And while employers broadly say they value diversity, equity, and inclusion, one in six have reduced DEI budgets.
The survey also revealed another worrisome trend. Across categories, women say they want to be promoted at lower rates than men. Only 69% of entry-level women want a promotion compared with 80% of entry-level men. Likewise, 84% of senior-level women want to be promoted, while 92% of senior-level men do. And overall, 80% of women overall say they want to be promoted to the next level, compared to 86% of men.
Interestingly, it doesn’t start out that way. Young women are extremely ambitious. In fact, women under 30 are more interested in being promoted than young men, but after 40, only 52% of entry-level women want to advance, while 71% of men still do.
According to the report, the statistic seems tied to how much support men and women are receiving, which is far from equal. Only 31% of entry-level women have had a sponsor compared to 45% of men, which the report says can nearly double promotion rates. Likewise, “when entry- and senior-level women and men have sponsors and receive similar levels of support from managers and more senior colleagues, they are equally enthusiastic about getting promoted to the next level,” the report explains.
But there’s another undeniable obstacle that women seem to disproportionately face, which is likely to impact their desire to be promoted: families. Almost 25% of both entry and senior level women who are not interested in promotions say it’s due to their personal obligations which would make more responsibility at work too challenging. However just 15% of men said the same.
Unfortunately, for women, findings follow a bounty of previous research that women still do more housework and child-rearing than men. Per the McKinsey report, “In 2024, women with partners were more than three times as likely as men with partners to be responsible for all or most housework.” Therefore, it’s not all that surprising that women who are disproportionately weighed down at home may not be as hungry for even more obligations on the job, too.
The U.S. workforce is facing a pivotal challenge: A widening skills gap that threatens economic growth and innovation. While demographic trendslike declining birth rates and a shrinking pipeline of young workersare real, the more actionable issue is the growing mismatch between the skills employers need and those available in the labor market.
According to Pearsons recent Lost in Transition research, nearly 90% of U.S. employers report difficulty finding candidates with the right skills, and more than half of workers feel unprepared for the demands of the future workplace.
This problem is decades in the making, and its consequences will be global. Without action, this gap threatens economic stability, public health systems, and critical infrastructure. Projections indicate the U.S. could face skills shortages in 171 occupations by 2032.
But instead of focusing on the inevitability of demographic change, we should zero in on the skills gapa challenge we can address through education, collaboration, and the smart use of technology. The skills gap is not just a statistic; its a call to action for educators, employers, and policymakers to rethink how we prepare people for work.
AI AS A CATALYST FOR WORKFORCE READINESS
Artificial intelligence, when thoughtfully designed and applied, is already helping to close the skills gap. When used as a tool for guided learning rather than a shortcut, AI can help bridge the skills gap and equip the workforce to succeed where human touch is required.
AI-powered learning tools in educational environments are already accelerating pathways into critical professions by enabling learners to demonstrate measurable improvements in critical thinking and adaptability, as well as build durable skills that employers need most and are essential for thriving in a rapidly changing economy.
Employers, too, are leveraging AI to upskill their current workforce, using adaptive platforms to identify and close skills gaps faster than traditional training methods allow. This approach is not about replacing people with technology, but about empowering workers to learn, adapt, and grow alongside digital tools.
THE NEW COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE: LEARNING HOW TO LEARN
The ability to learn how to learn is now a core competency for career success. As the shelf life of technical skills shortens, the most valuable workers will be those who can continuously acquire new knowledge and adapt to new roles. AI can support this by personalizing learning experiences, promoting metacognition, and helping people build the confidence to navigate transitions throughout their careers.
Were already seeing data showing that AI can promote the real learning and adaptability skills that are needed in the workforce. High school and college students are improving their academic performance and demonstrating critical thinking skill through the use of science-backed AI tools that align with Blooms Taxonomy of Learning framework. AI in education is doing more than raising test scores; it’s teaching students how to learn, adapt, and thrive in an economy where continuous upskilling is the norm.
Closing the skills gap will require collaboration across education, business, and government. We need to align AI literacy standards, invest in educator training, and ensure responsible use of technology that prioritizes data privacy, bias mitigation, transparency, and measurable learning outcomes.
By focusing on the skills gapand leveraging the best of AI and learning sciencewe can build a workforce that is not only prepared for the future but empowered to shape it.
Tom ap Simon is the President of Pearson Higher Education and Virtual Learning
Each business has its unique challenges, but one commonality today is that AI is poised to disrupt almost every business everywhere. Organizations arent the only ones rapidly shifting to adopt AIattackers are too, and theyre doing it faster. The implications of this AI arms race are alarming for legitimate businesses around the world.
Security teams must rapidly evolve their cyber strategy to meet these new threats, moving away from a reactive posture that detects and then responds after an incident happens. To outpace attackers, organizations will need to be preemptive insteaddeterring, neutralizing, and preventing threats before they happen.
HOW AI IS CHANGING THE GAME
Anthropic recently revealed that a threat actor group was able to use AI (Claude) to perform 80-90% of an espionage campaign, with only sporadic human intervention, to attack 30 enterprises around the globe. The AI made thousands of requests per second, something even a team of highly skilled human attackers couldnt do. Anthropic concluded that less experienced and resourced groups can now potentially perform large-scale attacks of this nature with the help of AI.
That means the barrier to entry for cybercrime has dropped dramatically. Individuals who previously lacked the technical skills to code can now leverage AI tools to create and execute complex attacks. This will inevitability lead to a surge in the number of sophisticated attacks unleashed on business and governments worldwide.
Most enterprises and cybersecurity vendors are responding to this change by taking legacy, reactive security approaches and trying to add AI on top of them. The idea is that you should fight AI-powered attackers with AI-powered defenses. However, this is akin to taking a tank and adding AI to it to battle a fleet of drones. Yes, the AI-enabled tank will get better, but it is fundamentally too slow and too expensive to meet the new threat and win.
As AI makes large-scale attacks accessible to anyone, its not just the volume of threats that will explode, its their uniqueness. Attackers are no longer limited to reusing the same malware, they can now target specific infrastructure vulnerabilities with single-use attacks.
MASS PERSONALIZATION: A NEW FRONTIER FOR ATTACKERS
Before AI, attackers built and then reused malicious software (i.e. malware) to attack as many enterprises as possible, but AI changes that entirely. It enables mass personalization: the ability to generate custom, one-off attacks for each target, at scale.
As more and more attackers use these types of specialized, single-use malware to target their victims, businesses relying on legacy approaches will experience an exponential increase in breaches. They will face a never-ending battle to contain breaches before they can cause millions or even billions of dollars in damage.
The traditional security model, and thus your business, relies on identifying patient zerospotting the first instance of a new threat, then blocking it everywhere else. However, when every attack is unique, there is no patient zero. In a world where even unskilled attackers can use AI to perform thousands of tasks a second, novel threats can be created and evolve faster than legacy, reactive security systems’ ability to observe and respond.
This is not a future problem; this is a problem today. Last year, Infoblox classified over 25 million new domains as malicious. Ninety-five percent of them, or about 24 million, were unique to one enterprise, meaning the domains were made to specifically attack a singular organization. Last year, attackers personalized 24 million attacks for enterprises all over the world, each able to initially evade most legacy, reactive security tools. If your executive team and boardroom are not already discussing this, they need to start now.
THE FUTURE OF YOUR CYBERSECURITY IS PREEMPTIVE
AI has changed the nature of attacks, so now, it must change the nature of our defenses. To combat these threats, its no longer enough to be reactive. Instead, the cybersecurity industry and enterprises must urgently undergo huge changes to become more preemptive in their approaches to security.
Gartner analysts are saying the same, predicting that preemptive cybersecurity will make up 50% of IT security spending by 2030, up from almost 5% in 2024. The firm specifically cites AI-enabled attacks as the force behind this change.
Its time for a mindset shift. Leaders must see the security fight with a higher-level view. Instead of just focusing on using AI to speed up how fast they can detect and respond to individual fires, they must focus more of their energy and investment on using new approaches to stop the fires from ever starting. By developing strategies to preempt threats, teams can beat attackers to the punch, stopping threats before they can wreak havoc on their businesses.
Scott Harrell is CEO of Infoblox.
CIOs are grappling with how to leverage AI, but most are asking the wrong question. Its not about an AI strategy. Its about a business strategy powered by AI.
At Samsara, when we focused AI on clear business problems, we cut support chat volume by 59% with virtual agents, our IT help assistant auto-resolved 27% of tickets during the pilot, and engineers accepted about 40% of suggested code from AI code-assist, freeing teams to ship faster and tackle harder work.
My takeaway is that if you treat AI as a separate initiative, youll chase tools. If you treat it as leverage on a business KPI, youll create impact.
The VC Mindset: Investing in AI
My philosophy on AI investment mirrors how a Venture Capital firm manages its portfolio. While every investment should strive for success, organizations must adopt a portfolio mindset: expecting only 10% of AI pilots to yield a high return. This crucial insight is what drives a VC firm, and what should drive your AI funnel.
This means maintaining an active, well-fed funnel of AI investments. Working diligently to narrow this funnel through rapid pilots and experimentation allows businesses to move fast and fail quickly on small, contained experiments to find the few truly transformative applications.
This approach is crucial given the sheer volume of AI solutions available. The typical vendor evaluation process might involve vetting three or four key solutions. In the AI space, that number can balloon into the thousands. Applying a VC mindset allows us to efficiently triage and prioritize, focusing our resources where the potential business impact is highest.
Scaling AI Through Change Management
Investment is only half the battle. The most sophisticated AI tool is worthless if employees don’t use it effectively. Success demands a robust AI change management program that builds new organizational muscles.
1. Driving Adoption: A Top-Down and Bottom-Up Engine
True organizational change requires synchronized effort from the C-suite to the front lines. This is the top-down and bottom-up mandate for AI adoption.
Top-Down Commitment: This begins with the CEO and C-suite making AI a core business priority. At Samsara, two of our four company priorities are explicitly AI-relatedone focused on internal efficiency, and the other on product innovation. This executive mandate, championed by leaders like our CEO and reinforced through my partnership with our CFO, ensures AI initiatives are treated as strategic imperatives, not discretionary projects.
Bottom-Up Application: While CIO organizations are natural early adopters, the people best positioned to apply AI are those who live with the business problems dailyin supply chain, finance, sales, and operations. These colleagues have a nuanced, first-hand understanding of where AI tools can create the most value. And they can bridge this gap by empowering those teams to identify and lead implementation.
2. Scale Literacy with an AI Champions Network
To connect the top-level vision with bottom-up execution, businesses must actively cultivate AI literacy. At Samsara, weve implemented a two-pronged approach to ensuring that AI skills and uses are being scaled across our business.
AI Champions Network: Our AI Champions are a bridge to realizing our AI ambitions. We identify individuals across every function with a strong understanding of technologythe natural thought leadersand designate them as AI Champions. We give them concrete roadmaps for how to use AI in their specific function, making them evangelists who drive enablement and comfort within their teams.
General Education: We use channels like our daily Slack digest to deliver short, 5-minute to 10-minute lessons to provide general AI education and demystify the technology for all employees.
3. Frame AI as Partnership, Not Replacement
Any companys ethos on AI should be clear: AI wont replace people who embrace it. They should position these tools to their staff as partners that will better their teams and outputs, freeing them up for higher-value work.
As I alluded to above, for our R&D and BizTech teams, weve implemented AI Code Generator tools. Our teams accept, on average, over 40% of the prebuilt code suggested, accelerating development cycles and allowing them to focus on complex, innovative challenges.
On the service side, our use of AI chat agents has driven a 59% reduction in chat ticket volume in customer support, allowing staff to focus on complex issues. Similarly, our internal Generative AI-powered help assistant for the IT Help Desk resolved 27% of tickets with no human touch during the pilot, freeing up IT staff for strategic work.
The CIOs Evolving Role
In this new era, the CIO’s job is to stay intensely agile. They must mirror the companys need for external innovation with a commensurate drive for internal modernization.
The path to AI success is not paved with technology alone, but with strategic discipline and cultural transformation. The new CIO mandate is simple: Stay intensely agile. Mirror the companys need for external innovation with an equivalent drive for internal modernization. The path to AI success is not paved with technology alone, but with strategic discipline and cultural transformation. Stop chasing the latest platform and start asking: What is the core business problem we need to solve? Anchor your investments in quantifiable business value, embrace a venture-style portfolio approach to experimentation, and aggressively equip your employees to be partners of AI, not its victims. This shift from technology buyer to strategic portfolio manager is the key to enduring competitive advantage.
Across America, a new generation of farmers is reimagining what it means to work the land. They are engineers, ecologists, and entrepreneurspeople who see farming not only as a way to grow food, but as a form of innovation. In fields across the country, these farmers are harnessing soil science, biodiversity, and technology to restore what decades of extractive agriculture have depleted.
Their work represents one of the most powerful opportunities of our time: The opportunity to regenerate our planet from the ground up. Yet, the odds they face are immense. Land prices have soared, access to capital is limited, and isolation comes with choosing a career path few understand. Farmland continues to disappear, and for those eager to farm differently, access to resources and mentorship remains limited.
These farmers are proving that the next era of agriculture can be both economically viable and ecologically sound. They are experimenting with cover crops to build soil health, integrating renewable energy into operations, and rethinking distribution through community-based models. Their work underscores a truth we must all recognize: The future of farming depends on our ability to empower the people willing to reinvent it.
THE FUTURE OF REGENERATIVE FARMING
At Rodale Institute, weve seen firsthand how supporting beginning farmers can accelerate this transformation. Through training, mentorship, and research, weve helped growers adopt regenerative organic methods that improve soil biology, reduce chemical dependence, and restore carbon to the earth. But the broader movement must go further, requiring not only scientific innovation but cultural and corporate partnerships.
Thats why Rodale Institute and Davines Group have partnered to launch the second annual U.S. Good Farmer Award, a program recognizing beginning farmers and ranchers who have been in operation for 10 years or less and who embody environmentally responsible, community-focused, and forward-thinking agricultural practices.
The award honors individuals whose work demonstrates a profound respect for nature, fosters biodiversity, and strengthens their local communities. More than an accolade, the award reflects a global mindset shift where innovation is not just about new technology but about regenerating what sustains us.
In 2025, our U.S. inaugural winner, Clarenda Farmer Cee Stanley of Green Heffa Farms in North Carolina, showed us what this vision looks like in practice. Her herb and tea farm blends economic impact, education, and equity into a model of regenerative success. Shes a farmer, but also a mentor, an advocate, and a catalyst for change.
Her story, and those of farmers who will follow, remind us that progress doesnt always come from technology or policy. Often, it grows quietly in the soil, nurtured by people whose courage to plant seeds in uncertain times defines what regeneration really means.
WHY INVESTING IN NEW FARMERS IS ESSENTIAL
Investing in beginning farmers is essential to a more resilient and regenerative future worldwide. At first glance, it may seem unlikely that a beauty, skincare, and haircare company like the Davines Group shares our commitment and passion for supporting new farmers.
However, Davide Bollati, chairman of Davines Group, like us, sees regeneration as the next evolution of sustainability. It is not enough to minimize harm, but we must actively restore it. In a recent conversation, he shared that the protection and preservation of biodiversity are a cornerstone of our environmental strategy, alongside decarbonization, circularity, and water.
Like us, Bollati also sees an energy among young farmers who have the energy and the courage to innovate with an approach that considers the wellbeing of our planet.
Through The Good Farmer Award, in both Italy and the U.S., its about empowering the next generation of farmers to lead with empathy, intelligence, and creativity. The path forward must be multigenerational, inclusive, and rooted in community.
FINAL THOUGHTS
When Bollati and I met to prepare for the upcoming award application, he summarized our shared purpose perfectlyregeneration today is the only possible path to ensure a future for next generations, and for our planet.
It is farmers like our inaugural award winner, Clarenda Farmer Cee Stanley, who are embracing agriculture for a different quality, and a different pace of life where they can grow high-quality crops, use sustainable and regenerative practices to protect the soil, and connect others with limited access to farm-fresh products.
Jeff Tkach is CEO of Rodale Institute.
Paul Thomas Andersons One Battle After Another scored a leading nine nominations to the 83rd Golden Globe Awards on Monday, adding to the Oscar favorites momentum and handing Warner Bros. a victory amid Netflix’s acquisition deal.
In nominations announced from Beverly Hills, California, One Battle After Another landed nods for its castLeonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor, Sean Penn, and Chase Infinitiand for Andersons screenplay and direction. Its competing in the Globes category for comedy and musicals.
Close on its heels was Joachim Triers Sentimental Value, a Norwegian family drama about a filmmaking family. The Neon releases eight nominations included nods for four of its actors: Stellan Skarsgrd, Renate Reinsve, Elle Fanning, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas.
The Globe nominations, a tattered but persistent rite in Hollywood, are coming on the heels of a potentially seismic shift in entertainment. On Friday, Netflix struck a deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for $72 billion. If approved, the deal would reshape Hollywood and put one of its most storied movie studios in the hands of the streaming giant.
Warner Bros., Netflix, and the Golden Globes
Both companies are prominent in this year’s awards season. Along with One Battle After Another, Warner Bros. has Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s acclaimed vampire hit. It was nominated for seven awards by the Globes, including box office achievement, best actor for Michael B. Jordan, and Coogler for best director.
Netflix’s contenders include Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly (which landed nods for George Clooney and Adam Sandler), Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (five nominations), and the streaming smash hit, KPop Demon Hunters. Arguably the most-watched movie of the year, the three nominations for KPop Demon Hunters included one for cinematic and box office achievementan oddity for Netflix, which typically gives its films only small, limited theatrical runs but found a No. 1 box office weekend in singalong screenings for the animated film.
The two studios led all others in nominations across film and television on Monday. Netflix landed 35 nominations, boosted by its expansive film slate and television nominees like the British limited series Adolescence (five nominations). Warner Bros. had 31 nominations, including 15 from HBO Max for series such as The White Lotus, the lead TV nominee with six.
The proposed deal for Warner Bros. has stoked concern throughout the industry that Netflix might devote one of the most theatrical-focused studios to streaming. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos has pledged a theatrical commitment to many Warner releases, but the leading trade group for exhibitors has called the deal an unprecedented threat. On Sunday, President Donald Trump said the market share created by the merger could be a problem, and Paramount said Monday it was mounting a hostile bid for Warner Bros.
Neon shines on a bad day for Wicked: For Good
Yet the studio that triumphed on the movie side of the Globe nominations was Neon. The indie specialty film company has emerged as a dominant force in international releases, winning a string of Palme d’Or awards at the Cannes Film Festival. It earned 21 nominations Monday, including five of the six international film nominees.
Some of those nominations came at the expense of some high-profile studio films. Wicked: For Good was nominated for five awards, including two nods for its songs and acting nominations for Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. But it was overlooked for an award it was presumed to be in contention for: best comedy or musical.
The nominees instead were One Battle After Another, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice (a Neon release), and a pair of Richard Linklater movies in Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague.
In the drama category, Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet scored six nominations, including nods for its stars, Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. It was nominated for best film, drama, along with Frankenstein and three Neon titles: The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value and It Was Just an Accident.
Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, the acclaimed Iranian revenge drama, was nominated for a total of four awards. At different times, Panahi has often been imprisoned, put under house arrest and prohibited from leaving Iran by the Islamic Republic while making films over the past two decades. Earlier this month, while traveling outside of Iran with the film, he was sentenced to a year in prison and a new two-year travel ban.
Podcasters and A-listers mingle
As the Globes continue to transition out of their scandal-plagued past, there’s one notable change this year. For the first time, the Globes are giving a best podcast trophy. The inaugural nominees are Armchair Expert With Dax Shepard, Call Her Daddy, Good Hang With Amy Poehler, The Mel Robbins Podcast, SmartLess, and NPR’s Up First.
Many of those nominees aren’t exactly outsiders to Hollywood. But they’ll mingle with a wide array of stars that the Globes, long known for packing their red carpet with A-listers, were sure to nominate.
Those include Timothee Chalamet, nominated for his performance in Marty Supreme, Jennifer Lawrence (Die My Love), Julia Roberts (After the Hunt), Tessa Thompson (Hedda), Jeremy Allen White (Springsteen: Delivr Me From Nowhere), Emma Stone (Bugonia), Ethan Hawke (Blue Moon) and the two stars of The Smashing Machine, Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt.
After a series of controversies for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group that previously put on the ceremony, the Globes were sold in 2023 to Todd Boehly’s Eldridge Industries and Dick Clark Productions, a part of Penske Media. A new, larger voting body of more than 300 people now vote on the awards, which moved from NBC to CBS on a shorter, less expensive deal.
Nikki Glaser is returning as host to the Jan. 11 Globes, airing on CBS and streaming on Paramount+. This past January, Glaser won good reviews for her first time emceeing the ceremony. Ratings were essentially unchanged, slightly dipping to 9.3 million viewers, according to Nielsen, from 9.4 million in 2024.
Helen Mirren will receive the Cecil B. DeMille Award in a separate prime-time special airing Jan. 8. Sarah Jessica Parker will be honored with the Carol Burnett Award.
Jake Coyle, AP film writer
Joshua Aaron, the developer of the ICE agent tracking app ICEBlock, filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice and ICE for unconstitutionally pressuring Apple to remove the app from its App Store.
Apple pulled ICEBlock in early October after Justice Department officials contacted the company claiming that the app enables users to evade immigration raids and endangers ICE agents. The app, which has more than a million downloads, gives users notifications when ICE agents are nearby, and allows users to anonymously report the location of ICE agent activity, but only if they are located in the same area. Aarons lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeks reinstatement of the app, plus appropriate damages. The case could reshape how tech platforms handle government requests, particularly when those requests come without formal warrants or court orders.
The developer argues the app simply facilitates sharing of public information, similar to community apps that track traffic or weather. The lawsuit claims Attorney General Pam Bondi and other officials violated Aarons rights by forcing the apps removal without a court order.
The goal is pretty simplewere hoping to set a precedent that says not only is ICEBlock protected by the First Amendment but they cannot come after me and threaten me as they’ve been doing over the past year, Aaron tells Fast Company. If successful, the lawsuit could prevent the Justice Department or other federal agencies from depriving other lawful apps of distribution in the future.
The ICEBlock app removal may be a case of an unconstitutional government tactic known as jawboning, in which a government official uses their official capacity to pressure a private sector entity to do something. In another recent example of the practice, FCC chairman Brendan Carr used an implicit threat of regulatory entanglement to pressure ABC and its affiliates to drop Jimmy Kimmels Kimmel Live show.
Bondi may have admitted, in public, to jawboning, when she spoke on Fox Digital the night after Apples removal of ICEBlock on October 2, 2025. We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Storeand Apple did so, Bondi declared, according to the lawsuit.
With this admission, Attorney General Bondi made plain that the United States government used its regulatory power to coerce a private platform to suppress First Amendment-protected expression, the suit states. Bondi again boasted of the ICEBlock take-down during a congressional oversight hearing two days later.
But it may take more than Bondis public statements to prove that the government violated the First Amendment. The EFF, a digital rights group, recently filed suit to compel the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security to release documentation of their communications with Apple and other tech platforms that led to the app removals.
Meta removed a Facebook group with 80,000 members called ICE Sighting-Chicagoland at the request (or demand) of the government. Chicago residents had been using the apps to warn neighbors when the masked federal agents were near area schools, grocery stores, and other community locations. Google removed an ICE tracking app called Red Dot from its Google Play store, saying the app violated its policy against apps that share the location of what it describes as a vulnerable group.
Large tech companies have largely overlooked the authoritarian tendencies of the Trump administration, choosing instead to appease and coddle it, and capitulate to its demands. The tech industry is engaged in investing trillions in AI, and wants the administration to continue hobbling the governments normal regulation and oversight.
Precedent may be on Aarons side. There is a long history that shows documenting law enforcement performing their duties in public is protected First Amendment activity, Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Mario Trujillo tells Fast Company. The government acted unlawfully when it demanded Apple remove ICEBlock, while threatening others with prosecution.
Reuters reported that members of the House Homeland Security committee argued in a letter to tech companies that free speech does not protect incitement to lawless action, and called on them to explain how they vet and monitor such content.
Apple cited its App Store guidelines prohibiting content that poses “safety risks” as justification for the removal, but critics argue the vague policy allows for arbitrary enforcement influenced by government pressure. As AppleInsiders Wesley Hilliard points out, the App Store carries the Waze and Apple Maps apps, both of which allow users to post information about nearby traffic enforcement personnel.
On December 5, the entertainment world was rocked when Netflix and Warner Bros. announced a massive deal that set Netflix up to purchase the legendary Hollywood studio, creating one of the largest media entities of all time. Today, Paramount Skydancewhich has been vying for Warner Bros. for monthsappears to be saying, Not so fast.
Paramount Skydance, the David Ellison-led company fresh off of its own merger earlier this year, has been circling around a potential buyout of Warner Bros. Discovery (Warner Bros. parent company) since at least September. Last week, it appeared that Netflix was swooping in to snatch a large part of the deal. And now, Paramount Skydance has countered with a hostile takeover bid to secure Warner Bros. Discovery once and for all. Heres everything you need to know about the saga and whats at stake.
Whats the backstory?
Back in early September, initial reports emerged that Paramount Skydance was preparing a bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, one of its rivals. The following month, Warner Bros. Discovery confirmed that it was open to a potential sale in a press release, sharing that it had received unsolicited interest from multiple parties for the entire company. Paramount Skydance and Netflix were two of the top contenders identified for the deal.
In late October, Reuters reported that Ellisons initial $60 billion approach offer was rejected by Warner Bros. Discovery, though analysts still pegged Paramount Skydance as the most likely victor in the bidding wars.
Then, on December 5, Netflix and Warner Bros. came forward to announce a deal in which Netflix would purchase the legendary Hollywood studio, along with its HBO Max and HBO divisions, for a total enterprise value of approximately $82.7 billion (which Netflix says has an equity value of $72 billion).
The agreement came after Warner Bros. Discovery announced this summer that it would split the current company into two, with the newly created companies owning its Streaming & Studios assets and Global Networks divisions, respectively. Through the proposed acquisition, Netflix would be buying the Streaming & Studios company that will spin off from Warner Bros. Discovery next year. Paramount Skydance, on the other hand, had expressed interest in buying all of Warner Bros. Discoverys assets.
How did people react to the Netflix deal?
Experts say that the colossal Netflix-Warner Bros. deal would give the worlds largest streaming service access to a giant library of valuable IP, including the Harry Potter film franchise, the DC Universe, Barbie, and more.
The proposed deal sparked immediate concerns that Netflix might gain too much of a monopoly within the entertainment industry, potentially allowing the company to bump up its subscription prices. Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren called the deal an anti-monopoly nightmare in a statement. It would create one massive media giant with control of nearly half of the streaming marketgiving Americans fewer choices over what and how they watch, and putting American workers at risk, she wrote on X.
Another notable commentator was President Trump, who said on December 7 that the deal could be a problem because of the size of the combined market share.
What’s happening now?
Now, it seems that the Netflix deal could be on shaky ground.
On December 8, Paramount Skydance announced that it would go straight to Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders with an all-cash, $30-per-share offer that equates to an enterprise value of about $108.4 billion. Warner Bros. Discovery reportedly rejected the deal last week, but now its investors will get a chance to weigh in. This tactic is called a hostile takeover bid, and its intended to put pressure on a target company by recruiting its shareholders on the side of the deal.
Were really here to finish what we started, Ellison told CNBC this morning. He added: Were sitting on Wall Street, where cash is still king. We are offering shareholders $17.6 billion more cash than the deal they currently have signed up with Netflix, and we believe when they see what it is currently in our offer, thats what theyll vote for.
At this point, the deal is in limbo as shareholders react to Ellisons new offer. And, no matter which company comes out victorious, the acquisition is likely to face regulatory fights to determine whether the megamerger truly represents a media monopoly.
