Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr will face Senate questioning Wednesday for the first time since he pressured broadcasters to take ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air, a stance that drew bipartisan criticism and raised concerns about government interference in the media.Carr will appear before the Senate Commerce committee for an oversight hearing that will also include the FCC’s two other commissioners, Olivia Trusty and Anna M. Gomez. It will be the first Senate Commerce oversight hearing with all FCC commissioners since 2020, though there are two vacancies on the five-member panel.Since being tapped by President Donald Trump last November to lead the nation’s top broadcast regulator, Carr has closely aligned with the administration’s aggressive posture toward media outlets it views as hostile. He has launched FCC investigations into ABC, CBS and NBC News, in addition to some local stations.Trump in his second term has sued The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and, most recently, the BBC. And at Trump’s urging, Congress this summer approved eliminating $1.1 billion allocated to public broadcasting.Earlier this year, Carr came under fire from lawmakers in both parties after he denounced Kimmel’s comments about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. He called Kimmel’s remarks “truly sick” and warned broadcasters, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Hours later, ABC announced Kimmel had been suspended indefinitely.Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, who scheduled the hearing last month, was among the Republicans who criticized Carr’s remarks at the time.“I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying we’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying,” Cruz said on his podcast, calling Carr’s comments “dangerous as hell.”The hearing comes as Carr faces additional scrutiny from Democrats over media consolidation. Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen, a member of the committee, joined other Democrats this week in urging Carr to closely examine Nexstar Media Group’s proposed acquisition of rival broadcaster Tegna.In a letter sent Tuesday, the lawmakers warned the deal would further concentrate media power in the U.S. local television market.“Regulatory approval of the conglomerate would likely raise prices for consumers, accelerate job losses, and weaken the independence and news coverage of local TV stations,” they wrote.The transaction would require the FCC to loosen rules limiting how many stations a single company may own. Carr has said he is open to changing those ownership limits. Nexstar was one of two ABC affiliate owners that said they would preempt Kimmel’s show with local programming following his comments about Kirk.Kimmel’s suspension came after his monologue included a reference to Kirk’s shooting and compared Trump’s grief to “how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish.” The show returned to air less than a week after the indefinite suspension was announced.
Joey Cappelletti and Matt Sedensky, Associated Press
It’s been a tumultuous year for U.S. stock markets. Investors have had their nerves rattled twice this year by government-related eventsPresident Trumps Liberation Day tariffs in the spring, followed by the longest U.S. government shutdown in history this fall.
Thats on top of an economy already hit hard by inflation and declining consumer confidence.
Yet despite this, there have still been several high-profile and successful initial public offerings throughout the yearespecially in the AI and fintech spaces.
And now, an IPO this week is set to dwarf all others that have come before it this year. Heres what you need to know about Medline Inc.s initial public offering.
What is Medline?
Medline Inc. is a maker of medical supplies. The company is based in Northfield, Illinois, and was originally founded in 1966 by brothers Jim and John Mills.
According to the companys S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Medline makes approximately 335,000 different medical and surgical productseverything from wheelchairs to masks to scalpels.
It manufactures this extraordinary portfolio of products at 33 global facilities and has customers in more than 100 countries. As of the end of 2024, Medline employed more than 43,000 workers worldwide.
For the nine months that ended on September 27, Medline reported $20.6 billion in net sales so far this year. Its net income for the nine-month period was $977 million. For the same period a year earlier, Medline reported $18.7 billion in net sales and net income of $911 million.
Medline has a history of public offerings and private equity
Despite its IPO this week, this isnt the first time Medline has publicly listed its stock. As Reuters reported, Medline originally went public in 1972. But just five years later, in 1977, the Mills brothers took the company private again.
The company grew massively over the next several decades, ultimately attracting the attention of private equity.
As noted by the Financial Times, a group of private equity investors, including Blackstone, Carlyle, and Hellman & Friedmans, acquired a majority stake in the medical supply maker in 2021 for a staggering $34 billion.
At the time, it was the largest leveraged buyout since the 2008 financial crisis.
And despite Medlines IPO this week, this isnt the first time in 2025 that Medline was expected to go public. The company had been considering an IPO earlier in 2025, but then Trumps Liberation Day tariffs hit.
Medline was one of the companies that stood to be hit hardest by tariffs, as the majority of its products are made in Asian nations that faced some of the steepest tariffs.
Despite this earlier delay, Medline will once again become a publicly traded company after 48 years.
When is Medlines IPO?
Medline priced its shares on Tuesday. It expects to list its shares today: Wednesday, December 17, 2025.
What is Medlines stock ticker?
Medlines shares will trade under the stock ticker MDLN.
What exchange will Medlines shares trade on?
Medline shares will trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market.
What is the IPO share price of MDLN?
The initial public offering price for MDLN stock is $29 per share. Thats at the higher end of the IPO share price range of $26 to $30 per share that was expected.
How many MDLN shares are available in its IPO?
Medlines press release states that 216,034,482 shares of its Class A common stock were available in its IPO.
How much will Medline raise in its IPO?
Medline raised $6.26 billion in its IPO. According to Reuters, this makes Medilines IPO 2025s biggest first-time share sale globally.
How much is Medline worth?
At its $29 IPO price, Medline is now valued at around $39 billion.
Medline surpasses other IPO giants this year
Medlines $6.26 billion IPO haul makes it the biggest IPO of 2025. As noted by the FT, the offering comes in above the $5.3 billion that Chinese battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology Co raised in May.
Medlines $6.26 billion debut also dwarfs the largest U.S. IPO of the year, which was liquefied natural gas producer Venture Global (NYSE: VG). Venture Global raised $1.75 billion in that offering.
In late October, dozens of federal law enforcement officers flooded Canal street, a busy thoroughfare in Manhattan, arresting street vendors. Some officers donned full military uniforms; some wore plain clothes, baseball caps, and neck gaiters pulled over their faces. All were equipped with tactical vests of various styles and with a medley of identifying patchesHSI, Customs and Border Patrol, Federal Agent, or, simply, Police.
They wore markers of power and authority, but with little consistency across them. As news of the raid unfolded, the NYPD released a statement on X saying it had no involvement with the operation. So who, exactly, were all the people with Police emblazoned on their chests?
Every decade has its era-defining garments. Think spaghetti strap dresses in the 1990s, low-rise jeans in the 2000s, and athleisure in the 2010s. This year, one garment felt suddenly ubiquitous: the tactical vest. And its not just law enforcement wearing this gear; theres a growing consumer market for body armor and garments that resemble them. Theyve gone from technical gear designed for professionals to normalized accessories. Moreover, these objects have seeped into fitness in the form of weighted vests that are made by the same companies who produce tactical gear. Their form factor has become a chilling symbol of a political climate defined by fear.
How the plate carrier mainstreamed
These vests, also known as plate carriers, are military equipment designed to protect the people who wear them from bullets and other ballistics. Theyre garments with removable ceramic, steel, and composite plates, and are outfitted with nylon loops and Velcro that enables wearers to attach gear and accessories, a system known as MOLLE, an acronym for modular lightweight load-carrying equipment.
Counter protesters at the June 2025 No King demonstration in Houston, TX. June 14, 2025 [Photo: Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle/Getty Images]
What began as specialized garments created for active combat has been steadily infiltrating our cities for decades. The vests became more prevalent after the expansion of the 1033 program, which authorized the free transfer of surplus military equipment to local law enforcement for the War on Drugs in the 1980s and 1990s and counterterrorism post-9/11.
One interesting part of the business of these garments is that until the War on Terror, tactical clothing wasnt something military actively stocked in the same way as guns and ammunition, explains Charles W. McFarlane, a military fashion historian and author of the Substack Combat Threads.
A law enforcement agent’s vest in Chicago, IL. October 4, 2025. [Photo: Octavio Jones/AFP/Getty Images]
While body armor had been used since WWII, it took decades to create something that was protective but didnt interfere with movement. Patrol troops in Vietnam, for example, didnt regularly wear it because it was heavy, cumbersome, and trapped heat; however, troops in defense positions and on unarmored convoys did.
After Kevlar was invented, in 1965, protective vests became lighter and easier to wear as designers integrated the material into gear. In the 1980s, the U.S. army began issuing kevlar vests to some troops in the Middle East, Panama, and Grenada. Then in the 1990s, Army Rangers in Somalia wore vests with a combination of Kevlar and a hard plate.
In 1999, the military began issuing what most closely resembles the tactical vests of today, with removable plate inserts and the MOLLE system on the outside. But it wasnt until 2003 that all soldiers received one suit of body armor as a matter of policy. McFarlane notes that the CIA paramilitary officers who led Operation Jawbreaker, the agencys highly secretive first mission to Afghanistan in 2001, bought their gear at REI. They look like they’re dads on a fishing trip, McFarlane says.
As a new market for this gear opened, private companies began to develop specialty products that they sold to the military and the public, too. Brands like Crye Precision, 5.11 Tactical, and Safariland provide gear to the government and consumers. According to Research and Markets, the military PPE marketa categor that includes body armor, tactical vests, and combat helmets among other productsis expected to see an annual growth rate of 8.2%, rising from $19.4 billion in 2024 to $29 billion in 2029.
[Screenshots: FC]
This stuff has just become so much more available, and if you wanted to buy a plate carrier that is standard issue for the military or one that is used by Special Forces, you can go to the same companies and buy it, with some exceptions, McFarlane says.
There are few sales restrictions on tactical gear. At the federal level, its illegal for people with felony convictions to buy plate carriers or body armor, but sellers say enforcement is lax. Some states have stricter rules, like New York, which passed a law in 2022 barring sales to anyone who isnt in law enforcement or the military.
A protestor in Portland, OR. October 04, 2025. [Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images]
McFarlane links the growing consumer market for this gear to gun culture. Men who are in their thirties, who grew up watching the global war and terror on TV and also probably played a lot of video games like Battlefield or Call of Duty, and it’s like, Oh, I can own a version of that gun in real life. I got the gun. I kind of want the gear now too, and I think it builds out from there. It’s like collecting action figures.
A man works out in a plate carrier. [Photo: serejkakovalev/Adobe Stock]
Incidentally, 5.11 Tactical, which makes plate carriers and weighted fitness vests, partnered with EA Games on Battlefield 6 to design more realistic combat uniforms and bring an unparalleled level of authenticity to players, said Kyle Peterson, Senior Director of Brand for Battlefield in a news release; co-branded merchandise is also part of the deal.
An ununiform uniform
Tactical vests are evasive objects. Because immigration enforcement agents often wear civilian clothing, the tactical vest becomes a stand-in for a governmental authority. Remove the vest and youve got a pretty ordinary looking guy, which presents a problem since militias and vigilante groups have adopted the same attire. Theres not much visual difference between a January 6th rioter, far right protesters, ICE agents, or a Call of Duty fanatic. Sometimes, the visual uncertainty has had dangerous consequences. The FBI recently issued a warning about people impersonating ICE in order to commit violent crimes.
Federal agents and law enforcement stand outside of 26 Federal Plaza, New York City. October 21, 2025. [Photo: Adam Gray/Getty Images]
Naureen Shah, the Director of Government Affairs, Equality Division at the American Civil Liberties Union, says that the menacing attire that makes it difficult to identify agents erodes public trust and opens the door to civil rights abuses. The Trump Administration wants us not to know who [the agent] is because it wants to intimidate the public, Shah says. We don’t know if it’s ICE or the FBI or the ATF or the DEA or the National Guard. You really dont know whos behind that vest. I think that’s calculated chaos designed to instill fear, not just in immigrant communities, but in all of us.
ICE has a long history of impersonating local police officers, a practice known as ruses, in order to gain accessto spaces and information without furnishing a warrant. This includes wearing tactical gear that says Police and covering up badges that say ICE.
New York City, June, 2025. [Photo: Selcuk Acar/Anadolu/Getty Images]
Meanwhile, attorney generals in New York and Minnesota recently wrote a letter to congress urging them to pass a law that requires ICE agents to wear agency-identifying insignia and prohibits identity-concealing masks. In 2020, the ACLU filed a lawsuit in Southern California to stop this deceptive practice; in August a settlement was reached that requires ICE field officers in Los Angeles to have visible ICE identifiers whenever they use the phrase Police on their uniforms.
If you’re going to be policing the public, then you wear a uniform for that sense of accountability to the public, Shah says.
Federal Agents in Broadview, Illinois. September, 2025. [Photo: Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu/Getty Images]
The morale of the story
The use of military gear, like the tactical vest, in law enforcement represents its own type of psychologyone that projects power instead of the safety and competence that a police officers uniform was designed to do. This distinction is apparent in the ways ICE agents decorate their vests.
The same Velcro that brings functionality tactical vests also makes it easier to add flair, or what would be considered a morale patch. As McFarlane explains, the military has been using morale patches since WWI, but they had to be stitched on before the velcro, courtesy of the MOLLE system on tactical vests, became common.
Patches with a Superman logo, the Punisher, and slogan from Deadpool have been spotted on tactical vests. The Punisher logo, in particular, has become a co-opted symbol by far right groups. The superhero theme is telling. The way its presented in these stories is that they operate outside of the law, but to a higher purpose, McFarlane says.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has been tracking the DHS’ use of hate symbols, which has included white nationalist and anti-immigrant imagery and language within recruitment ads. ICE is currently on a hiring spreeit plans to hire 10,000 agents by 2026and it makes sense that the cohort who responded to those messages would wear those symbols as literal badges of honor.
“Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, several top DHS leaders and immigration advisers were drawn directly from hate groups making up the organizedanti-immigrant movement. Agents sporting patches with hard-right emblems follow this disturbing trend,” says Travis McAdam, the manager of research and analysis in the Intelligence Project at SPLC.
McAdam notes that the organization has seen an increase in ICE and other federal agents attaching patches to their tactical gear with iconography favored by hard-right movements.
One example is the Punisher symbol thats long been a favorite of Three Percent militias, which feature it widely in their logos and merchandise, he says. While its used outside this antigovernment context, agents adopting it is consistent with the Department of Homeland Securitys use of hard-right imagery and language to both recruit employees and celebrate the arrest of Black and Brown people. (Incidentally, DHS made Dean Cain, an actor who played Superman an honorary ICE officer this year.)
McFarlane is not impressed with the comic book nods. I think it shows a lack of discipline, he says. That’s the kind of stuff that doesn’t really fly in the U.S. military. You’re not going to see someone with a Superman patchor at least they’re going to have the sense to take it off when there’s a camera or superior around.
These tactical vests, as well as the words, phrases, and iconography that appear on them, reveal a shocking dissonance between the people wearing them and the situations they are in: sledgehammering through the car windowing of an asylum seeker, arresting a pregnant citizen, and slamming a senior to the ground. Who really needs protection in these situations?
One Columbia psychologist has developed a theory called enclothed cognition, which argues that what we wear affects the way we think and behave. Military-coded garments evoke a combat-ready sensibility and the fact that menacing vests are ubiquitous is frightening.
Were not supposed to have federal officials who are designed to terrify people, Shah says. Thats not supposed to happen in a functioning democracy.
There is a strange gravitational pull in the AI ecosystem right now. Every founder wants to raise a monster round. A $50 million seed. A $200 million Series A. The kind of fundraise that makes headlines, melts your inbox, and gets your parents to finally understand you have a real job.
Ive raised both kinds of rounds. A $12 million one that looked incredible in TechCrunch. And recently, an intentionally small but oversubscribed pre-seed for my new company, Empromptu.ai, where investors fought for allocation like we were handing out Taylor Swift tickets. Having lived on both sides, here is the truth no one in AI land wants to say out loud: A mega round might be the fastest way to screw up your company.
The perfection problem
When I raised $12 million at my last startup, CodeSee.io, I thought I was winning. Fewer than 30 Black women have ever raised that much venture capital. I thought big money meant big validation. And yes, years later, it was validating. CodeSee.io was Cursor before Cursor was cool. But what people forget is that everything had to be perfect. Perfect product, perfect engineering, perfect marketing, perfect sales, perfect timing. You are signing up for perfection with capital that large. And the second you fall short, the clock starts ticking on the next round, your runway, and your teams morale.
Here is what no one tells you until you are already living inside the pressure cooker.
A mega round is a contract with the future, not a celebration of the present. You are promising you will grow like a weed even while the world is chaos. In AI especially, half the market is noise and the other half is vaporware. You are still finding product-market-something, but your fundraising number tells the world you are already at product-market-fit. Now your job is not to build truth. It is to build momentum.
Markets change, timing changes, and your optimism doesnt pay your investors back. Big rounds push you toward optics instead of output. You start building for the board instead of the customer. The louder the round, the more deafening the expectations that follow. Before chasing a headline-sized round, you need to ask yourself hard questions:
Based on your actual GTM enginenot the one you hope to havehow much return can you realistically deliver?
Do you have the sales pipeline, category dynamics, and team structure to grow 10 times or even 20 times the capital you want to raise?
If an external shock hitsan economic downturn, an AI bubble burst, or a sudden shift in whatever latest metrics investors care aboutdoes your business have the frameworks and adaptability to survive it and still justify your valuation?
Raising the stakes
Most founders dont run these numbers honestly. We romanticize optimism. But fundraising is not about what you believe your company could be worthits about whether you have the machinery to make that valuation real in the harshest version of the future. A mega round multiplies every assumption you make. Every risk. Every blind spot.
And ego makes it even harder. Getting told your company is worth $50 million at the idea stage is intoxicating. Its human nature to want to believe the flattering version of your story. But the best founders know how to put their ego on the shelf long enough to look at their business objectively. Investors dont care how good the number feels; they care whether you can return their fund.
Most importantly: AI is changing too fast for giant commitments. Todays hype cycle is tomorrows graveyard. You do not want to be the founder forced to keep shipping an outdated strategy because that is what you raised money for. Momentum is a blessing only if you are pointed in the right direction. If you are not, it becomes an anchor.
With Empromptu, we kept the round intentionally small and tight, at least for now. We chose discipline over dopamine. And here is the secret: Small money gives you big freedom. You can pivot. Experiment. Say no. Build weird things. Build the right things. Build your company instead of your investors portfolio theory.
Raising less does not mean thinking smaller. It means thinking smarter. You do not need a mega round. You need real progress, real customers, and real clarity.
And if you still want the $100 million round, at least go in with your eyes open. Sometimes the most powerful thing a founder can do is grow at the speed of understanding instead of the speed of capital.
As autonomous AI agents increasingly browse, compare prices, and complete purchases on behalf of consumers, one challenge is becoming unavoidable for merchants: trust.
On Wednesday, Akamai Technologies announced a strategic collaboration with Visa aimed at addressing that problem. The partnership integrates Visas Trusted Agent Protocol with Akamais behavioral intelligence, allowing merchants to authenticate AI agents, link them to real consumers, and block malicious bot traffic before it ever reaches sensitive systems.
The move comes as agent-driven traffic floods the internet. According to Akamais 2025 Digital Fraud and Abuse Report, AI-powered bot traffic surged more than 300% over the past year, with the commerce industry alone seeing more than 25 billion AI bot requests in a two-month period.
We all continue to be excited about the proliferation of agentic AI use cases, said Patrick Sullivan, CTO of security strategy at Akamai. Were seeing billions upon billions of requests coming from agentic AI use cases.
When AI becomes the intermediary
For decades, digital commerce has been built around a simple assumption: A human is on the other end of the transaction. Agentic commerce breaks that model.
Instead of navigating a merchants site directly, consumers increasingly rely on software to search, compare, and sometimes buy on their behalf. For instance, whereas previously buying a new suitcase might involve exploring a dozen retailer’s sites, soon you might have AI do the legwork for you. That shift introduces a new intermediaryone that can be helpful, harmful, or fraudulent.
Theres a new entity thats now sitting in between the merchant and the consumer, said Rubail Birwadker, Visas global head of growth. Things could go wrong.
From a consumer standpoint, that raises questions about refunds, disputes, and chargebacks. Whose fault is it if you asked for a black bag and received a dark blue one by mistake? From a merchant perspective, it creates uncertainty around intent, legitimacy, and risk.
If youre a merchant, and youre thinking about your website, there are a lot of changes coming your way, Sullivan said. You built your website originally in the era where there was going to be a human on the other end.
Now, discovery may happen through an AI-powered chat interface. Browsing may be conducted by an autonomous agent. Even the browser itself may be software acting on behalf of a user.
We need to make sure that its still on behalf of the right human and its not a fraudster taking advantage of some new evolution in technology, Sullivan said.
Proving both the agent and the human
At the center of the VisaAkamai partnership is a dual-identity problem: verifying not just who the human is, but who the agent acting for them is.
Its important for us to always know who the human is, Sullivan said. But then, as we see these agentic use cases emerge, its important for us to get signal from Visa of who that agent is in that interaction.
Visas Trusted Agent Protocol provides authentication signals indicating whether an agent is authorized and whether it intends to browse or pay. Akamai reads and reinforces those signals using behavioral intelligence, often before traffic reaches a merchants core systems.
Youre going to see traffic before it ever reaches a merchant system, Sullivan said. That allows us to build a trusted user profile so we can understand that Jim is actually Jim.
Because Akamai sees end users repeatedly across the internetshopping, banking, reading newsit can establish consistency and spot anomalies early in the transaction flow.
That allows us to very, very early in the transaction reduce attempts at fraud and impersonation, Sullivan said.
Scale changes the threat model
The surge in AI-driven traffic has raised concerns about whether volume itself becomes a security risk. Sullivan argues scale cuts both ways.
Weve seen AI bot traffic surge 300 plus percent this year, he said. But while the numbers are in the billions, thats still sort of a rounding error for the overall traffic that we see.
Still, Sullivan expects automation to accelerate abuse over time.
Anything that can be automated, its just so much more profitable for attackers, he said. If you can automate your attack, you can pull off more attacks.
Thats why both companies emphasize operating at global scale. Visa processes transactions across nearly 200 markets, while Akamai manages traffic and bots at internet-wide levels.
These are two companies that operate at massive scale, Sullivan said. Its companies like ours that we think will stand up to the pace of these automated processes.
Why merchants matter most
While consumers may benefit immediately from smoother discovery and purchasing, Birwadker said the heaviest lift lies with merchants adapting their infrastructure.
A large amount of change really lies on the acceptance side, on the merchant side, Birwadker said. Their infrastructure needs to keep up with all the changes that are happening.
Merchants will need to decide what information agents can access, how pricing and inventory are exposed, and how loyalty and personalization work when an AI, not a browser, is driving the interaction.
This is just keeping up with changes to consumer behavior, Sullivan said. Theyre having an AI agent do something on their behalf.
A compatibility play for the future
Neither Visa nor Akamai claims to know exactly what agentic commerce will look like three years from now. But both frame Trusted Agent Protocol as a compatibility layerone that allows commerce infrastructure to evolve without losing control.
Our goal is just to make sure that our ecosystem remains compatible with the agentic world, Birwadker said. Its more about compatibility than about almost anything else.
As AI agents move from novelty to necessity, that trust layer may determine whether merchants embrace agentic commerceor shut it out altogether.
The idea of the Queen Bee has been buzzing around corporate life for decades. Youve heard the story: A woman finally breaks into senior leadership, only to turn around and block other women from rising behind her. She is territorial, icy, maybe even hostile. She has clawed her way to the top, the logic goes, and she intends to stay there alone.
It is a vivid image, and that is precisely why it has survived. It gives managers a neat explanation for gender inequity: maybe women just dont support each other. Maybe the problem isnt the system; maybe its . . . women. But that explanation falls apart the moment you look closely.
A zero-sum world
The term Queen Bee was coined by Graham Staines and his colleagues in a 1973 article in Psychology Today. The researchers observed a small number of senior women who appeared to distance themselves from other women in heavily male-dominated environments. Even in the original study, the behavior wasnt framed as spite. It was framed as adaptation. These women were navigating environments where there was room for exactly one of them to succeed. In a zero-sum world, survival strategies look a lot like coldness.
In the 50 years since, the corporate world managed to turn a situational observation into a personality diagnosis. Yet the newest research makes one thing clear: the Queen Bee stereotype says very little about women, and a great deal about the cultures they are operating in. One of the striking pieces of recent evidence comes from a 2024 study published in the Journal of Business Ethics. It examined what happens when women leaders distance themselves from other women. The surprising finding wasnt that distancing happens; it was who pays the price when it does. Female subordinates showed lower feelings of belonging, lower leadership ambition, and higher intentions to leave. Male subordinates, by contrast, were unaffected. In other words, when the culture pressures a woman leader to blend in with the dominant group, the cost is absorbed by the women below her.
The researchers are clear: the distancing originates not from rivalry, but from discrimination. Women who experience bias early in their careers often learn that aligning with the dominant (often male) culture is the safest path forward. That alignment can look like toughness, or hyper-competence, or refusing to mentor junior women because theyve been taught that visibility is dangerous. It is armor, not malice.
When identity becomes a liability
A broader 2024 literature review goes further, arguing that the term Queen Bee has become so misapplied that it obscures more than it reveals. The recommended term is self-group distancing, which describes how members of any underrepresented group may behave when identity becomes a liability. The behavior is well documented among racial minorities, first-generation professionals, LGBTQ+ employeesanyone who feels they have something to lose by being too closely associated with their own group. It is not a woman problem. It is a scarcity problem.
And the scarcity is real. When leaders tell me about a Queen Bee, I often ask a single question: How many women are in the room where decisions are made? The answer is almost always the same: one, or maybe two. In those environments, it is hardly surprising that some women feel pressure to prove they are different from the stereotype of women as emotional, inexperienced, or not leadership material. Distancing becomes a way to signal, I am not like them. It is not pretty, but it is predictable.
What is rarely acknowledged is how differently these dynamics play out when women are no longer tokens. Studies of global organizations show that when women hold multiple senior roles, sponsorship of women increases, not decreases. In firms with women CEOs, the next generation of senior women is larger. Leadership pipelines are healthier. And the Queen Bee patterns that managers fear become almost nonexistent. Put simply: when women stop being the only one, the motivation to distance evaporates.
‘Too soft’
To understand how this works on the ground, consider the experience of a leader. Early in her career, she worked under a woman who had a reputation for being harsh. Colleagues whispered that she was a classic Queen Bee. My client recalls thinking the same, until she learned that this leader had repeatedly been told she was too soft and not decisive enough, feedback her male peers never received. She had built a leadership style around eliminating any sign that could be read as feminine. Her high standards werent meant to sabotage other women; they were meant to make sure no one questioned their competence. This is the part managers often misinterpret. Behaviors that look like ice can actually be fear. Behaviors that look like competitiveness can be self-protection. When conflict between women appears, people leap to the Queen Bee label. The story we tell changes the behavior we see.
For managers who want a healthier culture, the task is not to root out Queen Bees. It is to remove the conditions that create them. That starts with representation. When there are enough women in senior roles, solidarity becomes easier than distance. But it also requires clearer evaluation systems, because vague criteria give stereotypes room to breathe. It requires rewarding sponsorship and collaboration, not just individual performance, because people invest in what gets recognized. And it requires noticing the small signals in daily life: who gets interrupted, who gets invited to meetings, whose mistakes are scrutinized.
If you believe a senior woman is acting like a Queen Bee, the first question to ask is: What in this culture made distancing feel necessary? When leaders approach it this way, they stop treating womens behavior as a problem to fix and begin treating the culture as a system to redesign. The Queen Bee myth persists because it is simple. But workplaces are not simple, and people certainly are not. The truth is far less dramatic and far more useful: When the hive is hostile, bees protect themselves. When the hive is healthy, they support each other. That means the Queen Bee is not your warning sign about women. She is your warning sign about the workplace.
The USS Enterprise was an impossible dream rendered in fiber glass. Designed for Star Trek, it looked like a creation straight out of creator Gene Roddenberry’s imagination: Twin nacellesthose long, gleaming engine pods held by elegant pylonsextended from a central saucer holding the engines that allowed Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. Bones, and the rest of the crew to travel across the cosmos.
Inside those nacelles, the show’s creators imagined, lay the secret that made those trips possible: a warp drive that could crease spacetime itself, folding the universe in front of the ship while unfurling it behind, allowing faster-than-light travel not through speed but through geometry. For decades, physicists dismissed it as beautiful nonsensea prop master’s fever dream.
But now the math has caught up to the dream.
Harold “Sonny” Whitea mechanical engineer and applied physicist who worked on warp drive concepts at NASA’s Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratoryhas published a peer-reviewed paper in the prestigious Classical and Quantum Gravity that proposes a new design for a warp drive that happens to look a lot like the Enterprise.
White told the science and tech publication The Debrief that the resemblance to the twin nacelles of [Star Treks] USS Enterprise is not merely aesthetic, but reflects a potential convergence between physical requirements and engineering design, where science-fiction architectures hint at practical pathways for real warp-capable configurations.” In other words: When White and his research colleagues came up with a design that could bend spacetime but also keep a crew safe inside the ship, the optimal geometry that emerged was twin engine pods arranged around a central habitable zone.
That’s the Enterprise.
Perhaps it’s because there are only so many ways physics allows you to arrange exotic energy efficiently. Star Trek‘s production designers, working on pure intuition and ’60s aesthetics, accidentally landed on a rare optimal solution. It’s as if someone sketched the ideal car design in 1920 without knowing anything about aerodynamics, and a century later, physics said: “Actually, you were right.”
The USS Enterprise in the Star Trek: The Next Generation [Image: CBS/Getty Images]
The warp drive
According to White and his colleagues, the original mathematical model for a warp drive envisioned a spacecraft encased in a continuous, donut-shaped ring of negative energy, a bizarre form of matter that works like gravity in reverse, pushing space apart rather than pulling it together.
Physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed this model in 1994 after watching Star Trek episodes and wondering if the science could actually work. This theoretical geometry could effectively move an object faster than light by deforming the space around it, but his idea came with headache-inducing problems for any engineer trying to build it.
White’s breakthrough was simpler. Instead of trying to make Alcubierre’s donut-shaped design work, he asked a different question: What if you broke the energy ring into separate tubes, like engine pods, arranged around the ship? That small geometric shiftfrom one continuous ring to multiple discrete cylinderschanges everything about how the physics plays out inside the bubbles. The math suddenly became manageable. The interior could remain flat and safe. The dangerous forces could be confined to the nacelles, away from the crew.
“The results of this study suggest a new class of warp bubble geometries,” White explains. By organizing the exotic matter into these specific pods, engineers could theoretically maintain a completely flat, calm interior for the ship while the external geometry handles the violent warping of space.
But this research doesn’t mean we are going to be kirking and spocking all the way to the Crab Nebula any time soon. Faster-than-light travel remains a theoreticalbut possibleway to travel across the cosmos that depends on many factors, like producing the fuel necessary to make it happen. If it ever happens, it will be generations away. White’s paper, however, provides a mathematical blueprint for practical design and engineering. Once built, his proposed design will result in something that looks like every nerds favorite spaceship.
A rendering of the ‘donut drive’ from Warp Field Physics by White et al. 2013. [Image: Mark Rademaker/Mike Okuda/NASA]
White’s math dictates that to keep the ship’s internal clock synchronized with the outside world and avoid ripping the pilot apart, the most efficient structure involves arranging these energy tubes around the craftexactly like the twin nacelles of the USS Enterprise.
A figure from Interior-flat cylindrical nacelle warp bubbles: derivation and comparison with Alcubierre model
by White et al., 2025 [Image: White et al./CC-BY 4.0]
“I knew it should be possible to construct warp bubbles basedon a nacelle-like topology,” White says, noting that the new geometry allows for structures that act as modular propulsion units rather than a single, unmanageable energy field.
The USS Enterprise in the Star Trek: The Original Series. [Image: CBS/Getty Images]
Humanitys hallucinations
This phenomenon of fiction functioning as a crystal ball/R&D lab for reality has pervaded civilizations progress since Jules Vernes predictions of moon trips and nuclear submarines. Take Ryan McClelland, a research engineer at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center, who found himself staring at the screen during the pandemic, watching The Expanse, a series that imagines a realistic scenario for humanity spread throughout our solar system.
“They have these huge structures in space, and it got me thinking . . . we are not gonna get there the way we are doing things now,” McClelland told me in a interview from 2023. That sci-fi binge-watch led to Evolved Structures, a project where McClelland uses generative AI to hallucinate spacecraft parts that look unnervingly organicas if they were extracted from an extraterrestrial ship secretly stored in an Area 51 hangar.
The AI, unburdened by human preconceptions of what a bracket should look like, designs twisted, bone-like metal forms that are a third lighter than human designs but just as strong. McClelland believes it is the only way that we can mass manufacture the future of space colonization.
The translation from page to pad is often even more direct. NASA engineer Les Johnson became obsessed with the idea of laser sails after reading the novel The Mote in Gods Eye written by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven in 1974, which describes a sail that uses photons as a thrust force to move a spaceship over vast distances at extremely high speeds. It made him become an engineer.
I had an opportunity to get involved in a project that was looking at different types of propulsion, and this is one that I added to the mix to consider, he told me during an interview for a story on how he and his team designed the largest solar sail ever created. Now the technology is herewe can build these things. And thats been on again, off again part of what Ive worked on for the last 20 years.
[Photo: CBS/Getty Images]
The list of fictional technologies that are now mundane reality is so long that it is actually exhausting. Sometimes they take a handful of years to become real. Other times decades pass between the dream and the device.
In 1945, Arthur C. Clarke published a technical paper proposing geostationary satellites to relay communications; 19 years later, NASAs Syncom 3 broadcast the Tokyo Olympics to the U.S., fulfilling the prophecy. Clarke was also to theorize solar sails in his 1964 story “Sunjammer.” Way earlier, in 1933, H.G. Wells imagined video calls on glass screens in The Shape of Things to Come; it took 87 years until the Zoom era made us sick of them.
A rendering of the ‘donut drive’ from Warp Field Physics by White et al. 2013. [Image: Mark Rademaker/Mike Okuda/NASA]
It’s not the first time this has happened with Star Trek. Saying that the series shaped humanity as we know it today is not an exaggeration. It introduced ideas that, many decades later, resulted in designs and technologies that have moved humanity forward.
Not just automatic doors, but mobile phones, touchscreen tablets and interfaces, voice-activated AI assistants, medical scanning devices, and virtual reality. Star Trek didn’t just predict the futureit became the blueprint engineers actually followed to design it.
Clearly, theres a pattern here of dreaming up the impossible, putting it on a screen or in a book to entertain ourselves, and then, slowly but surely, our math and our machines evolve until they catch up to the fantasy. It feels like we are not just observing the universe; we are designing it to match the stories we tell ourselves, proving that the most powerful force in physics might just be a good writer’s deadline. Some scientists think we all may be part of a cosmic simulation in some alien computer. Perhaps we are all giant AI, like in Asimovs short story “The Last Question.” Whatever the case is, the fact is that humanity seems to have a peculiar knack for reverse-engineering its own hallucinations.
At one time or another, weve all sat next to someone interesting on a plane or a train, making small talk that sometimes leads to long-winded conversations about life, the world, even personal struggles or accomplishments.
Its been said its easier to talk to a stranger . . . but could these random, chance chats lead to networking opportunities?
To be clear, vacation provides crucial time to unplug, relax, spend time with family and friends and is vital in maintaining work-life balanceso no one is saying you should treat your holiday like a business conference. (Not least any travel companions you may have.)
But the trick is, should you recognize when a conversation on a beach, boat or beyond could be moving in a direction related to your skills, experience or care . . . it might lead to surprising, beneficial results, says Ronald Placone, associate teaching professor emeritus of management communication at Carnegie Mellon Universitys Tepper School of Business.
There are always opportunities to network, he says. Sometimes they emerge when least expected. Whether its at the airport bar flying home for the holidays, or at a tropical resort as you seek warmer temps this winter . . . the thing you could find instead is someone who could help you out down the road.
Fast Company asked three business experts about how to keep in touch with interesting folks you meet on your travels.
The magic of the vacation dynamic
You never know who youre going to meet when youre in a new environment. You may cross paths with an industry leader, a fellow professional in your field, or even a recruiter while enjoying your mai tai by the pool, or while killing time in the Amtrak café car.
This random meeting could facilitate a conversation.
You may be more relaxed, less scripted, and come across as more genuine in such contexts, adds Placone.
Even when youre unplugging, casual conversations often touch on what we do professionally, says Kara Ayers, senior vice president of talent at Xplor Technologies, an Atlanta-based SaaS and payments company. She calls potential benefits to these meetings to be tremendous. After all, referrals fill many positions and often make solid hires.
Sharing your skills and success with someone in a vacation context is more casual, and not as performative as it would be in a mixer or at a formal work event. Chatting with potential contacts on vacation feels refreshing because its unbiased and pressure-free, Ayers says. And if you love what you do, encounters like these with someone like-minded in the wild may remind you of that.
For example, during a recent vacation, I had a simple discussion with another HR professional which evolved into an exchange of best practices for managing global benefits, she shares, an encounter she calls enlightening and valuable.
Nowadays, with the rise of digital nomads, greater remote work opportunities domestically and abroad and even more expats in the workforceit could very well be a real possibility that your next holiday sees you cross paths with a potential future colleague.
But dont push it, adds Placone.
Reading the room
The absolute key to vacation-networking, and why it even unfolds in the first place, is that its casual and organic.
If the stranger you strike up small talk with in the hotel lounge reveals they work in the same field as you, go with the flow without an agenda. Not everyone wants to talk about work while their OOO message is on back home, especially when so many U.S. workers report feeling guilty for going on vacation to begin with.
A big part of doing this right is being able to accurately pick up vibes. Avoid the all-time rookie mistake, of course, of trying to chat to your neighbor on public transportation once they put their headphones inthats the universal travelers signal for stop talking to me.
If an airplane seatmate pulls out their computer or tablet and either starts working or watching a show, that’s another signal, says Ruth Sherman, a communications coach, media trainer, and consultant in Greenwich, Connecticut. You might be okay with talking to strangers on your vacay, but others might not be. And of course, if the individual is with other people, make sure the conversation is inclusive for everyone to participate, Ayers adds.
If they seem uninterested, pivot the conversation back to other topics, advises Ayers. Listen and be engaged with the other individual and their interests. In this setting, the chat is “not self-promotion, she says. Be authentic and enjoy the serendipitous meeting for what it is: an unplanned encounter with a friendly stranger who shares interests, or a similar life context when it comes to career.
And if things feel right, approach the topic about staying in touch.
Lets connect
Many people want to be 100% disengaged from anything that even reminds them of work while on vacation. Its okay to acknowledge that now is not the time to have networking-type conversations. (Good form, even.) But you could always mention that youd value a future opportunity to reconnect and talk shop when youre back online.
Ask about how to best to communicate with that individual in the future, if theyre open to it, Placone says. Many people do not carry business cards these days, so Ayers recommends offering to connect on LinkedIn. This is low pressure and a great way to stay connected, she adds.
Other vacation-goers opt for the Instagram follow when they hit it off with fellow travelers. If that feels right, do that, even if you do hope for a potential professional relationship down the line.
Networking on vacation is about doing what feels right, easy and authentic.
You are not pitching someone or showing them that you are the best candidate for a hypothetical role, Ayers says. You are sharing stories and experience. Maybe thats trading war stories from earlier jobs, hot takes on buzzy industry news in the headlines, or just bonding with someone similar on a human level in a comfortable, low-stakes environment.
That authenticity builds trust and makes the interaction more memorable, Ayers says.
And in a labor market as fraught as this one, a genuine bond in a surprising setting might be the unexpected boon your career needs.
Contract roles can feel like the perfect job setup: flexible hours, work-from-home perks, and a way to break into your dream company. For some, they also serve as a temporary solution until a more permanent position comes along.
Yet sometimes when freelancers decide to transition to a full-time gig, their contract history can potentially come back to bite themeven when it shouldnt.
In a job interview, employers might ask: Can you work effectively on a team? Can you take direction from a manager? Will you think about your work long term?
Or they might not ask at all, but theyll still wonder.
To be clear: Freelancing or contract work is work, of course. But if full-time employment is your goal, knowing how to address these concerns does matter in a job interview.
Dont assume
First, in a job interviewno matter which side of the table youre sitting onits essential not to make assumptions.
Its important for hiring managers to be aware of assumptions they might have. Instead of assuming, ask very direct questions, says Phoebe Gavin, a career and leadership coach. Dont just assume they cant work a 9-to-5, or that theyre not willing to commit to a company long term.
If youre a job seeker, when applying for roles and in interviews, get ahead of assumptions by addressing them head-on. If the employer is looking for a collaborative team member, share examples of how youve worked effectively with others in the past.
The hiring manager may genuinely not be aware of how collaborative freelance or contract work can be. So for the person who’s being interviewed, don’t make any assumptions about what they know about your work, Gavin says.
Can you work on a team?
Freelancers often work more independently, but that doesnt mean you prefer to, or that you work entirely alone. After all, you probably send your work off to someone for review.
If you thrive in a team environmentor even miss being part of a teamsay so.
When working as a freelancer, there may have been times when your work has required working with multiple parties and collaborating with teams. Even if it was temporary for a particular project, make it really clear that that’s something you have experience with, Gavin says.
Highlight specific examples from past projects where you successfully collaborated with others, showing that you can contribute effectively on a team.
Career coach Patrice Williams Lindo recommends saying something like: I rebrand quickly into the teams operating model. That means understanding how decisions get made, who owns what, and where my work fits into the broader system. I dont operate in silos. I network intentionally across stakeholders so my work lands cleanly, on time, and without creating friction. Independence, for me, means high trust, not high isolation.
Can you take direction?
When looking for a new job, remember that youll most likely have a manager. If youre thinking, I don’t really need a manager; I can do the work without you managing me, that mindset can create challenges with the person providing direction.
Showing that you can take direction demonstrates adaptability and immediately makes you a stronger candidate.
Williams Lindo suggests saying something like: I dont need micromanagement, but I do respect structure, accountability, and feedback. My goal is to deliver in a way that strengthens leadership credibility, not competes with it.
Can you think beyond the project at hand?
Freelancers usually focus on the work in front of them and dont always have to think about long-term impact, but in a full-time role, youre expected to see the bigger picture. If thats something you do already, make sure you say that.
For example, if you like to promote your work after its published, thats something worth highlighting.
Williams Lindo suggests saying, Even when my engagement is project-based, my mindset is enterprise-level. I document decisions, build repeatable processes, and leave behind claritynot just deliverables. Im always thinking about how my work ladders up to longer-term outcomes, because recognition comes from impact, not just execution.
Contract roles can help you land a full-time position if you want one.
By addressing assumptions up front and showing that you can collaborate, take direction, and think beyond individual projects, you signal that youre ready to thrive in a full-time role.
Freelance experience is real work, and it matters. When presented strategically, it can showcase your impact and position you as a strong candidate for permanent opportunities.
Whenever I tell people Im an auctioneer, there are inevitably two follow up questions:
First: Do you talk really fast like those guys on TV? followed by a cartoonish imitation, complete with an imaginary microphone and a pseudo Southern accent.
Second: Whats the most expensive thing youve ever sold? After two decades of auctioneering, the answer is usually something in the many millions. I typically just name the last item I sold for over a million dollars.
Whether someone pictures a fast talking cattle auction or a refined British gentleman selling Picassos in black tie, auctioneers are assumed to do one thing: talk. A lot.
Which is why most people are shocked to learn that the most powerful tool I like to use on stage isnt my voice at all.
Its silence.
When Im onstage in front of 500 people, yes, fast, energetic bidding can electrify a room. But in auctioneering, as in negotiation, the person who is comfortable with silence holds the advantage. Think about the last time you negotiated anything. The one who jumps to fill every uncomfortable silence often reveals the most. The one who sits in the quiet controls the pace.
Lessons learned
After years in the boardroom and on stage, here are the top three lessons Ive learned about how silence can capture the attention of any room:
1. When a room is talking, dont talk over it. Own the moment.
If a crowd wont quiet down, talking louder rarely works. Instead, I smile and say, Ill wait until the room is quiet enough to hear me. The shift is immediate. People realize theyre missing something or they are being rude, and they stop. Once theyve realized Im willing to wait for them to stop talking before Ill start again the dynamic is shifted, and now they are paying attention.
2. Make your point, then stop talking.
Many times when I am onstage with a new crowd I will ask the audience where I should start the bidding. Instead of throwing out a number that could intimidate half the room, I will say to the audience who wants to start the bidding? When the person raises their hand Ill ask where are we starting the bidding tonight? and then I simply wait . . . 9 out of 10 times the person will come in at a higher level simply because they dont know where I plan to start and want to be sure they dont announce a low bid. Youll be amazed how often the other side rushes to fill the space, usually revealing exactly what you need to know.
3. Silence raises more money than any speech ever could.
During the paddle raise portion of a charity auction paddle raise, Im not offering a vacation home or a puppy. Im simply asking for donations. When I begin at the highest level, say, $25,000 the room gets very still. People shift in their chairs. They look at each other. They wait. But more importantly, I wait. And sometimes Ill throw in a joke to show them how at ease I am in the silence Ill wait just long enough until it starts to get really uncomfortable and then I smile and wait a little longer. Inevitably someone will raise their hand simply to break the tension. Its no concern for me; I will wait all night.
Thats the power of silence: It moves people to act.
The next time you are in an important meeting, giving a speech, or presenting on stage, remember the power of silence and use it to your advantage.
