What's on Your Mind?

Netflix has announced that it intends to buy legendary Hollywood studio Warner Bros. in a deal valued at approximately $82.7 billion. The deal, which must be approved by regulators, will further consolidate the entertainment industry and give Netflix ownership of some of the most iconic films and television franchises ever, not to mention HBO. Here’s what you need to know: What’s happened? Today, Netflix and Warner Bros announced a deal in which Netflix will 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 $72.0 billion)…

The U.S. Treasury Department imposed a $7.1 million fine on a New York-based property management firm Thursday, accusing it of violating sanctions by managing luxury real estate properties for oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said Gracetown Inc. had received 24 payments between April 2018 and May 2020 totaling $31,250 on behalf of a company owned by Deripaska. OFAC says it gave Gracetown notice that dealings with Deripaska were prohibited, but the firm proceeded anyway. Justice Department filings from 2022 connect Gracetown Inc. with U.K. businessman Graham Bonham-Carter, w…

If you’ve ever dreamed of sitting behind the wheel of a giant hot dog, then you’re in luck. Oscar Mayer’s Wienermobile is in need of Gen Z drivers known as “Hotdoggers,” as the company opens its applications. The iconic vehicle is about to roll into its 90th year. The job is truly unique and, if you’re a hot dog enthusiast with a keen sense of adventure, could be an absolute thrill, especially if you’re looking to avoid a nine-to-five desk job and love to travel. The Hotdogger Program has been around since 1988 and according to Oscar Mayer is likely to be a fit for recent college graduates who are hoping to make a “positive impact” on the communities the Wienerdog cr…

Planner vs. Engineer is a well-known professional rivalry in the infrastructure world. The arguments are sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile, sometimes about important issues, sometimes insignificant. I’m in a peculiar spot because of my career as a “plangineer.” My parents helped me buy a civil engineering degree, but several years into my career, I bought the certified planning certificate. I know the two camps very well. The roundabout question Roundabouts are one of the many Planner vs. Engineer debates, and it happens to be a very important issue where emotions cloud good judgment. As much as I criticize the engineering profession, they are generally correc…

Charli XCX is making a trip to the Sundance Film Festival in January. The pop singer-songwriter appears in three films premiering at the 2026 festival, including a mockumentary that she produced and stars in. Programmers on Wednesday unveiled a lineup of 90 feature films set for the festival’s last hurrah in Park City, Utah. The slate includes documentaries on basketball great Brittney Griner, Nelson Mandela, Salman Rushdie, Courtney Love, and Billie Jean King. There are starry features with the likes of Natalie Portman, Jenna Ortega, Seth Rogen, Channing Tatum, Danielle Brooks, Olivia Colman, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Alexander Skarsgård, and Ethan Hawke. Olivia Wilde di…

Large language models are quietly reshaping the way people write research papers—and scientists are catching colleagues using AI to do their work. View the full article

On December 11, 2015, OpenAI arrived on the scene with a bang. Announced on the penultimate day of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, an academic confab held in Montreal’s Palais des Congrès by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others, the organization had been in the planning for months (an infamous July 2015 meeting at the Rosewood Sand Hill Hotel brought on board many of OpenAI’s key early staffers). But when it went public with an announcement and blog post, the community reacted with surprise. “This is just absolutely wonderful news, and I really feel like we are watching history in the making,” wrote Sebastien Bubeck, then a researcher at Microsof…

Faking tends to get a bad rap. We celebrate authenticity, praise, and honesty, and preach radical transparency—as if the workplace would magically improve if everyone walked around expressing their unfiltered “true selves.” But, imagine for a moment what unedited human authenticity would actually look like in a corporate setting: colleagues announcing every irritation, managers confessing every insecurity, leaders sharing every impulsive thought or half-baked opinion. Actually, that doesn’t look overly different from many workplaces! And yet, most of us are well aware of the dangers of pure self-expression, even if the realization comes mostly from analyzing other…

In the tournament of pop culture—an arena increasingly obsessed with charts, data, and stat lines—Taylor Swift has, by most measures, already emerged the victor. In her nearly two decades in the public eye, she has become a billionaire by engineering one of the most dependable fan bases on the planet: a legion willing to buy every vinyl variant for her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, and generate such collective frenzy at her 149-date Eras Tour that it registered as seismic activity. Swift has become something like an institution, around whom various rituals and practices have formed, whether the exchanging of friendship bracelets or sharing easter eggs wi…

If you’ve ever been to a museum or on a school field trip, you may have had a tour guide walk you through a historical exhibit of 19th-century households or of ancient Mesopotamian agricultural tools. Now, a current TikTok trend suggests that one day in the future, those exhibits will be the modern workstation—standing desks, Zoom meeting headsets, and all. The viral series titled “Historical tour of a corporate worker’s desk,” by marketing professional and content creator Heike Young, imagines what that will look like. “Now in those times, it would have been really common for a corporate worker to sit at a desk, much like this one, and be on calls all day,” she …

A few weeks ago, I led a leadership workshop for a group of executive women leaders in Birmingham, Alabama. Before I begin leadership workshops, I ask the participants what they want out of our time together. This year, one answer has emerged consistently on top: connection. This isn’t surprising. As executives rise to higher levels of leadership, they often report increased feelings of loneliness. One Harvard Business Review survey found that 55% of CEOs acknowledge experiencing moderate but significant bouts of loneliness, while 25% report frequent feelings of loneliness. As your expertise becomes more specialized, it can be harder to find other leaders who understand …

Just when you think you’ve wrapped your mind around computers that can put your dog in front of the Eiffel Tower or chatbots that act like your best friend (or lover), the AI behemoths surprise you with a fully AI-powered TikTok or the ability to virtually bring back your dead relatives. I’ve worked in the AI space for 15 years. I served as an early beta tester for OpenAI in 2020, when I predicted that a little model called GPT-3 had world-changing potential. It was later released as something called “ChatGPT”–perhaps you’ve heard of it? I’ve also called several big AI trends correctly, including the rise of video generators and the “AI Wars” between Google a…

Google‘s corporate parent on Monday announced an agreement to buy data center energy specialist Intersect for $4.75 billion as part of its effort to secure the vast amounts of electricity needed to power artificial intelligence technology. Alphabet, which depends on Google’s search engine and other online services for most of its revenue, is buying out Intersect in its entirety after purchasing a stake in the San Francisco-based startup a year ago. Intersect had previously raised $2.1 billion from Google and other early investors. After the acquisition is completed during the first half of next year, Alphabet intends to allow Intersect to operate independently whi…

As AI data centers spring up across the country, their energy demand and resulting greenhouse gas emissions are raising concerns. With servers and energy-intensive cooling systems constantly running, these buildings can use anywhere from a few megawatts of power for a small data center to more than 100 megawatts for a hyperscale data center. To put that in perspective, the average large natural gas power plant built in the U.S. generates less than 1,000 megawatts. When the power for these data centers comes from fossil fuels, they can become major sources of climate-warming emissions in the atmosphere—unless the power plants capture their greenhouse gases first and th…

For many of us, December rushes by in a blur of holiday merrymaking and gift-giving, end-of-year invoicing and accounting, and hasty planning for the year ahead. In the rush, the thoughtful year-end reflection we might have hoped for often doesn’t happen. That’s a missed opportunity. Reflection doesn’t have to be complicated, though. Here’s a simple end-of-year exercise to help you process the year, stay aligned with your goals, and move forward with intention. Year in Review First, remind yourself what actually happened this year. It’s easy to fall prey to recency bias, focusing on the last few weeks and forgetting earlier events. We also tend to fixate on whe…

Below, Muriel Wilkins shares five key insights from her new book, Leadership Unblocked: Break Through the Beliefs That Limit Your Potential. Muriel is the founder and CEO of the leadership advisory firm Paravis Partners. She is also an executive coach to high-performing C-suite and senior executives, as well as host of the award-winning podcast Coaching Real Leaders. What’s the big idea? When leaders get stuck, their first instinct is to do more and push harder. But those actions don’t create lasting results because they’re focused on what they do and not on what they think. Sustainable leadership growth comes from examining the beliefs that drive our actions. …

Robots have long been seen as a bad bet for Silicon Valley investors — too complicated, capital-intensive, and “boring, honestly,” says venture capitalist Modar Alaoui. But the commercial boom in artificial intelligence has lit a spark under long-simmering visions to build humanoid robots that can move their mechanical bodies like humans and do things that people do. Alaoui, founder of the Humanoids Summit, gathered more than 2,000 people this week, including top robotics engineers from Disney, Google, and dozens of startups, to showcase their technology and debate what it will take to accelerate a nascent industry. Alaoui says many researchers now believe hum…

As employers have wrested back control of the job market, it has been a sharp contrast to the post-pandemic years when workers seemed to hold the power. In 2025, employees fretted about their job security and the sweeping impact of artificial intelligence on their work lives—not to mention corporate America’s continued commitment to keeping them in the office for longer. Here, we’ve compiled some of the most popular Work Life stories from this year—on the issues that consumed you most. The “996” schedule This year saw the return of hustle culture in Silicon Valley, as AI startups popularized a grueling work schedule that became popularized in China. The “996…

I am not clairvoyant and have no crystal ball. But I’ve got some predictions for 2026. I learned about predictions from a master of the craft: Byron Wien, a market strategist who rose to Wall Street prominence in the 1990s for his annual “Ten Surprises” list. Back in the day, I spent several weeks shadowing Wien as a reporter, and the lessons have long stuck with me. Wien said that the prediction game wasn’t about being right. It was about identifying trends. He knew many of his “surprises” would never come to pass, at least not in the extreme form that he shared. But they sparked dialogue and got people to confront their assumptions. And every now and then, he’…

With the start of the New Year squarely behind us, it’s once again time for the annual CES trade show to shine a spotlight on the latest tech that companies plan to offer in 2026. The multiday event, organized by the Consumer Technology Association, kicks off this week in Las Vegas, where advances across industries like robotics, healthcare, vehicles, wearables, gaming and more are set to be on display. Artificial intelligence will be anchored in nearly everything, again, as the tech industry explores offerings consumers will want to buy. AI industry heavyweight Jensen Huang will be taking the stage to showcase Nvidia’s latest productivity solutions, and AMD CEO Lisa Su…

For years, pharmaceutical companies have been racing to develop a market-ready GLP-1 weight-loss pill to join the ranks of popular injectables. Today, Novo Nordisk’s oral version of Wegovy is officially available for purchase. The Wegovy pill—which has been in clinical trials for over two years and was approved by the FDA on December 22—is the first and only oral GLP-1 for weight loss in adults available in the U.S. According to a press release from Novo Nordisk, the pill hit the market on January 5 at more than 70,000 U.S. pharmacies and several popular telehealth providers. Per a KFF health tracking poll released in November, one in eight Americans were already…

For retirement savers and retirees, the new year brings more than the usual inflation adjustments to retirement contributions. The retirement legislation known as Secure 2.0 will also continue to phase in, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will have impacts too. Here’s a roundup of three key changes and some moves to consider. Roth-only catch-up contributions for high-income 401(k) investors Thanks to a provision in the Secure 2.0 retirement legislation, high-income earners (with $150,000 or more in FICA income in the prior year) who are over 50 and investing in 401(k) or other company retirement plans must make catch-up contributions to their plans’ Roth option,…

Investors are feeling less hot about the makers of cooling systems for data centers after the CEO of Nvidia Corp. stoked concerns that demand for their products could dry up. Shares of Modine Manufacturing Co. led declines in this sector, tumbling as much as 21% Tuesday before recovering some of those losses to close about 7.5% lower. Other makers of water-cooled systems and similar products—including Johnson Controls International Plc, Trane Technologies Plc, and Carrier Global Corp.—also fell as much as 6.2% on Tuesday. To blame? The next generation of Nvidia’s computer chips, announced on Monday, which won’t require the same type of cooling systems. That’s be…