Category: 5. Entertainment

Even by the exacting standards of France’s gastronomes, it sounds like a meal that is truly out of this world. When the French astronaut Sophie Adenot travels to the International Space Station next year, she will dine on French classics such as lobster bisque, foie gras and onion soup prepared specially for her by a chef with 10 Michelin stars.

Parsnip and haddock velouté, chicken with tonka beans and creamy polenta, and a chocolate cream with hazelnut cazette flower will also be on the menu, the European Space Agency said on Wednesday.

Food delivered to the ISS must meet strict specifications. It cannot be crumbly or too heavy and must be able to be stored for two years, the agency said.

Fresh fruit and vegetables are available only when a new spacecraft arrives with supplies. So most meals in space are canned, vacuum-packed or freeze-dried from a set of options provided by space agencies.

To spice things up, one out of every 10 meals is prepared for specific crew members according to their personal tastes.

Adenot said: “During a mission, sharing our respective dishes is a way of inviting crewmates to learn more about our culture. It’s a very powerful bonding experience.”

Her menu was developed by the French chef Anne-Sophie Pic, who holds 10 Michelin stars and was named best female chef by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2011.

Pic said it was an “exhilarating challenge” to develop the menu, which includes four starters, two mains and two desserts.

Adenot, 42, a former helicopter test pilot, is scheduled to arrive for her first tour on the ISS in 2026.

A pair of Nasa astronauts returned to Earth in March after being unexpectedly stuck on the ISS for more than nine months because of problems with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.

The Princess of Wales has spoken candidly about the life-changing long-term challenges of recovering after chemotherapy, as she visited a hospital in Essex.

Catherine said during treatment “you put on a sort of brave face” but afterwards it can still feel “really difficult”.

She told patients at the hospital about life after cancer treatment: “You’re not able to function normally at home as you perhaps once used to.”

It was Catherine’s first public engagement since pulling out of an appearance at Royal Ascot, when it was said she needed to find the right balance in her return to work.

In January, Catherine announced she was in remission from cancer, which had been diagnosed last year. But her latest comments are a reminder how this is a gradual path to recovery.

She said: “You put on a sort of brave face, stoicism through treatment, treatment’s done – then it’s like ‘I can crack on, get back to normal’.

“But actually the phase afterwards is really difficult, you’re not necessarily under the clinical team any longer, but you’re not able to function normally at home as you perhaps once used to,” said the princess.

“But it’s life-changing for anyone, through first diagnosis or post treatment and things like that, it is life-changing experience both for the patient but also for the families as well.

“And actually it sometimes goes unrecognised, you don’t necessarily, particularly when it’s the first time, appreciate how much impact it is going to have.

“You have to find your new normal and that takes time… and it’s a rollercoaster it’s not one smooth plane, which you expect it to be. But the reality is it’s not, you go through hard times,” said Catherine.

The princess was in a conversation with a group of patients – and one told her: “It can be very discombobulating, in that time when you’ve finished active treatment.”

“Your reality has completely changed,” the patient told the princess.

Catherine talked of the need for recovery time: “There is this whole phase when you finish your treatment that you, yourself, everybody, expects you, right you’ve finished your time, go, you’re better, and that’s not the case at all.”

There had been much attention paid when the princess did not take part in an engagement at the Ascot racecourse.

But royal sources say that her comments on Tuesday will send an important message of support for other former cancer patients who are facing challenges in their own journey of recovery.

She made the comments as she visited a “well-being garden” at Colchester, which helps to use nature to support patients in their recovery from illness.

Catherine has spoken of the healing power of the natural world and how it has been a source of strength for her during her return from illness. She has described nature as her “sanctuary”.

In May, the Royal Horticultural Society launched a “Catherine’s rose”, which was sold to raise funds for the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, at a hospital where the princess had been treated.

There are 50 of this variety of rose that have been donated to Colchester Hospital, with the princess helping to plant the roses during her visit.

The well-being garden at the hospital is intended to provide a place to relax and recuperate for patients, recognising how nature can help people to feel better, both in their physical and mental health.

Irreverent, bouncy and as suitable at 4am in a club as it is at 4pm in a field, the music of Fatboy Slim dovetails perfectly with Glastonbury. And the man himself, Norman Cook, seems to know it.

This year’s festival marked a big milestone: Cook has now played 100 Glasto sets – or thereabouts – over the years, popping up everywhere from vast stages to tiny tents. To document the occasion, Guardian photographer David Levene bedded in with the DJ for the weekend, while Cook explained why it holds such a special significance for him.

“We’re not doing a kind of 100th show extravaganza on the grounds that we don’t actually really know which would be the 100th. It’s not an exact science, it’s a guesstimate. Thing is, I play so many shows, and so many of them are just like impromptu that we really don’t know. So I think it’d be a bit much to really get the bells and whistles out. We think it’s the Block9 show in the afternoon tomorrow – we think! But no candles, sadly.

“I’m very, very proud of my relationship with Glastonbury and my history with it and I’m lucky, because as a DJ, you can play multiple sets. Obviously, there’s probably people who’ve been to more Glastonburys, but they’ve only played one show per festival – that’s not going to get you into big high figures.”

“My first Glasto show was on the Pyramid stage in 1986 with the Housemartins, and we didn’t know anything really about Glastonbury or festivals. We’d never played in daylight before – we only ever played in clubs – and also we thought that Glastonbury was full of bearded hippies who would probably throw mud and bottles of piss out at us. So we went on quite nervous and quite agitated, but that was quite good in the Housemartins, channelling that aggression – we had the nice tunes, but there was a lot of aggression. We made an awful lot of friends, and it changed our view about Glastonbury. The only weird thing was me and Paul [Heaton] have both had fairly successful careers, but neither of us had managed to get back on the Pyramid stage for 38 years. Last year, Paul played the Pyramid stage and he phoned me up and said, ‘Will you come on and do a song with us, just to celebrate?’”

“My favourite Glastonbury moment was playing for [Rob da Bank’s label] Sunday Best. I was four days in at that point, my mind had been expanded, altered and distorted, as was everybody’s around me. So I decided if I played a record backwards, would people dance backwards? And it was a good theory. Obviously with CDJs, you can press reverse, but with the record, you have to physically rewind it. So I played Block Rockin’ Beats, by the Chemical Brothers, pretty much at the right speed but backwards. And it worked. Everybody got the joke. It was just after Twin Peaks too, so everybody was like, dancing backwards to the music. What I forgot was that Ed from the Chemical Brothers was in the DJ booth with me, and he went, ‘What are you doing?’ I’m like, ‘I want to see if they can dance backwards.’ He’s like, ‘Oh, great!’ That’s probably the most out there I’ve ever been.”

“I loved the Rabbit Hole. It was never the same [after it closed]. Absolutely anything could happen, and sometimes it did. I much prefer the smaller stages to the big ones, but having said that, when we did the Park the other year, that felt pretty much like the perfect gig. We brought Rita Ora on – I don’t normally do showbiz-y things like that. It’s probably my favourite set.”

“My son Woody is playing here this year, and it’s just fabulous. My daughter’s here, my ex wife [Zoe Ball] is here. We’re all hanging out. It’s beautiful. Woody came to Glastonbury when he was about eight, and it didn’t go well for him or for me and Zoe. But when he started coming under his own steam, it’s weird, because we didn’t teach him anything, he just assimilated himself into the fabric of it and made all these friends the first year he went. He was built for Glastonbury: he’s just got that energy, he wants to talk to everybody, he wants to change the world. Everybody keeps telling me how cool my son is or how mental my son is, sometimes both.”

“As a festival, Glastonbury never sold out to the man. The Eavis family have kept it independent, which means they’re in charge of the way it feels and the way it looks, and people respect that. There’s nothing corporate that interferes and dictates, you know, and it’s not about making money. The music business, especially when money comes in, it distorts your creative ideas and the feel of it and it becomes a money-making machine. But the Eavis family never sold out. They don’t do it for money. They do it because they love watching this going on on their farm every year.”

“I genuinely love this place so much. I feel proud if I’m promoting the Glastonbury brand, or just being part of the furniture or just wandering around saying hello to everyone. Michael Eavis can’t get around so much any more, but I was always so impressed about the fact that he would just spend the whole festival wandering, saying hello to everyone.”

SALT LAKE CITY, July 2, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — On Sunday, July 13, The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square’s signature program, Music & the Spoken Word will reach a historic milestone as it airs its 5,000^th episode from the Conference Center in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Music & the Spoken Word has aired weekly since July 15, 1929 and is enjoyed by more than six million people in more than 50 countries throughout the world on radio, television, and online streaming.

“The 5,000^th episode of Music & the Spoken Word represents more than longevity and international reach,” said Perry Sook, Joint-Board Chairman of the National Association of Broadcasters. “It represents unwavering excellence, a commitment to public service and the enduring power of faith and music to unite us all.”

Choir President Michael O. Leavitt said, “The Choir’s mission is to perform music that inspires people throughout the world and to feel God’s love for His children. We are grateful that Music & the Spoken Word has brought hope and peace to millions around the world each week and look forward to continuing that legacy for many years to come.”

Music & the Spoken Word began in 1929, shortly before the Great Depression and has aired each subsequent week for nearly a century. The music and inspirational messages have endured through times of struggle; including through the duration of World War II, following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, 9/11 and during the COVID pandemic, and through times of celebration; including the end of World War II.

“Music & the Spoken Word is a gift to the people of the world, to any who are looking for peace and solace in a world that is growing increasingly busy. It allows for a moment of peace and stillness that we all need,” said Derrick Porter, executive producer, principal writer and presenter of Music & the Spoken Word.

About The Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square

The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square is a world-renowned, 360-member choir credited with over 4,900 episodes of its weekly live performance of Music & the Spoken Word. The program is the longest continuing live network broadcast in history, now in its 96th year. The Choir has traveled around the world performing in acclaimed concert halls, for the inaugurations of seven U.S. presidents beginning with its first for President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, at World’s Fairs and expositions, in acclaimed concert halls, on television and radio broadcasts and now internet streams, and numerous other prestigious events and occasions. The Choir has won four Emmy Awards, one Grammy Award and multiple Grammy nominations, was awarded the National Medal of the Arts in 2003 and inducted into the Classical Music Hall of Fame in 2015.

Music & the Spoken Word has been awarded a Peabody Award in 1943, was inducted into the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2004, and into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2010.  The Choir has released over 200 recordings which have earned two platinum and five gold albums and hit #1 on Billboard’s classical music charts 15 times.

The Orchestra at Temple Square is a 200-member, all-volunteer symphony orchestra organized in 1999 to perform and accompany the musical ensembles of The Tabernacle Choir organization. The Choir and Orchestra, with their incomparable medley of voices and instruments and their shared faith in God, are a significant, recognizable presence in the world of music, giving service through song. More info at https://www.thetabernaclechoir.org or by following the Choir on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

SOURCE The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square

Lawyers often tell their clients that everyone should have a will that clearly states who should inherit their assets after they die. But even having a will is not necessarily enough to avoid a costly and contentious legal dispute.

Consider what happened after Jimmy Buffett died of skin cancer at the age of 76 in 2023. The singer and entrepreneurial founder of the Margaritaville brand ordered in his will that his fortune be placed in a trust after his death. To manage the trust, Buffett named two co-trustees: his widow, Jane Slagsvol, and Richard Mozenter, an accountant who had served as the singer’s financial adviser for more than three decades.

In dueling petitions filed in Los Angeles and Palm Beach, Florida, in June 2025, however, Slagsvol – identified as Jane Buffett in her legal filing – and Mozenter are both seeking to remove each other as a trustee.

The outcome of this litigation will determine who gets to administer Buffett’s US$275 million estate.

As law professors who specialize in trusts and estates, we teach graduate courses about the transfer of property during life and at death. We believe that the Buffett dispute offers a valuable lesson for anyone with an estate, large or small. And choosing the right person to manage the assets you leave behind can be just as important as selecting who will inherit your property.

Buffett’s business empire

Buffett’s estate includes valuable intellectual property from his hit songs, including “It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere,” “Oldest Surfer on the Beach” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” Buffett’s albums have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide and continue to generate some $20 million annually in royalties. Buffett also owned a yacht, real estate, airplanes, fancy watches and valuable securities.

In addition, he owned a 20% stake in Margaritaville Holdings LLC, a brand management company he and Slagsvol founded in the 1990s. Margaritaville owns 30 restaurants and 20 hotels, along with vacation clubs, casinos and cruise ships. It also sells branded merchandise.

According to Slagsvol’s petition, Buffett’s trust was set up to benefit his widow. Slagsvol, who married Buffett in 1977, is one of two trustees of that trust, which is required to have at least one “independent trustee” in addition to her “at all times.” That requirement is stated expressly in Buffett’s trust declaration.

Slagsvol receives all income earned by the trust – an estate-planning technique for giving away property managed by a trustee on behalf of the trust beneficiaries – for the rest of her life. She can also receive additional trust funds for her health care, living expenses and “any other purpose” that the independent trustee – Mozenter, as of July 2025 – deems to be in Slagsvol’s best interests.

The estate plan also created separate trusts for their three children: Savannah, Sarah “Delaney” and Cameron Buffett, who are in their 30s and 40s. Each child reportedly received $2 million upon Jimmy’s death. When Slagsvol dies, she can decide who will receive any remaining assets from among Buffett’s descendants and charities.

The structure of Buffett’s plan is popular among wealthy married couples. It provides lifelong support for the surviving spouse while ensuring that their kids and grandchildren can inherit the remainder of their estate – even if that spouse remarries. This type of trust typically cannot be changed by the surviving spouse without court approval.

Dueling trustee removal petitions

Slagsvol is trying to remove Mozenter as the trust’s independent trustee.

She claims he refused to comply with her requests for financial information, failed to cooperate with her as her co-trustee, and hired a trust attorney who pressured her to resign as trustee. Slagsvol also raised numerous questions about the trust’s income projections and compensation paid to Mozenter for his services.

Mozenter’s petition, filed in Florida, is not available to the public. According to media coverage of this dispute, he seeks to remove Slagsvol as trustee. He claims that, during his decades-long role as Buffett’s financial adviser, the musician “expressed concerns about his wife’s ability to manage and control his assets after his death.”

That led Buffett to establish a trust, Mozenter asserted, “in a manner that precluded Jane from having actual control” over it.

Estate planning lessons

We believe that the public can learn two important estate planning lessons from this dispute.

First, anyone planning to leave an estate, whether modest or vast, needs to choose the right people to manage the transfer of their property after their death.

That might mean picking a professional executor or trustee who is not related to you. A professional may be more likely to remain neutral should any disputes arise within the family, but hiring one can saddle the estate with costly fees.

An alternative is to choose a relative or trusted friend who is willing to do this for free. About 56% of wills name an adult child or grandchild as executor, according to a recent study. Some estates, like Buffett’s trust, name both a professional and a family member. An important consideration is whether the people asked to manage the estate will get along with each other – and with anyone else who is slated to inherit from the estate.

The second lesson is, whether you choose a professional, a loved one or a friend to manage your estate, make clear what circumstances would warrant their removal. Courts are reluctant to remove a handpicked trustee without proof of negligence, fraud or disloyalty. But trustees can be removed when a breakdown in cooperation interferes with their ability to administer the estate or trust.

Some trusts anticipate such conflicts by allowing beneficiaries to replace a professional trustee with another professional trustee. That can resolve some disputes while avoiding the cost of seeking court approval.

Preventing disputes from erupting in the first place can help people avert the costly and embarrassing kind of litigation now ensnaring Jimmy Buffett’s estate.

Every time I read about another advance in AI technology, I feel like another figment of science fiction moves closer to reality.

Lately, I’ve been noticing eerie parallels to Neal Stephenson’s 1995 novel “The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.”

“The Diamond Age” depicted a post-cyberpunk sectarian future, in which society is fragmented into tribes, called phyles. In this future world, sophisticated nanotechnology is ubiquitous, and a new type of AI is introduced.

Though inspired by MIT nanotech pioneer Eric Drexler and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, the advanced nanotechnology depicted in the novel still remains out of reach. However, the AI that’s portrayed, particularly a teaching device called the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, isn’t only right in front of us; it also raises serious issues about the role of AI in labor, learning and human behavior.

In Stephenson’s novel, the Primer looks like a hardcover book, but each of its “pages” is really a screen display that can show animations and text, and it responds to its user in real time via AI. The book also has an audio component, which voices the characters and narrates stories being told by the device.

It was originally created for the young daughter of an aristocrat, but it accidentally falls into the hands of a girl named Nell who’s living on the streets of a futuristic Shanghai. The Primer provides Nell personalized emotional, social and intellectual support during her journey to adulthood, serving alternatively as an AI companion, a storyteller, a teacher and a surrogate parent.

The AI is able to weave fairy tales that help a younger Nell cope with past traumas, such as her abusive home and life on the streets. It educates her on everything from math to cryptography to martial arts. In a techno-futuristic homage to George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play “Pygmalion,” the Primer goes so far as to teach Nell the proper social etiquette to be able to blend into neo-Victorian society, one of the prominent tribes in Stephenson’s balkanized world.

No need for ‘ractors’

Three recent developments in AI – in video games, wearable technology and education – reveal that building something like the Primer should no longer be considered the purview of science fiction.

In May 2025, the hit video game “Fortnite” introduced an AI version of Darth Vader, who speaks with the voice of the late James Earl Jones.

While it was popular among fans of the game, the Screen Actors Guild lodged a labor complaint with Epic Games, the creator of “Fortnite.” Even though Epic had received permission from the late actor’s estate, the Screen Actors Guild pointed out that actors could have been hired to voice the character, and the company – in refusing to alert the union and negotiate terms – violated existing labor agreements.

In “The Diamond Age,” while the Primer uses AI to generate the fairy tales that train Nell, for the voices of these archetypal characters, Stephenson concocted a low-tech solution: The characters are played by a network of what he termed “ractors” – real actors working in a studio who are contracted to perform and interact in real time with users.

The Darth Vader “Fortnite” character shows that a Primer built today wouldn’t need to use actors at all. It could rely almost entirely on AI voice generation and have real-time conversations, showing that today’s technology already exceeds Stephenson’s normally far-sighted vision.

Recording and guiding in real time

Synthesizing James Earl Jones’ voice in “Fortnite” wasn’t the only recent AI development heralding the arrival of Primer-like technology.

I recently witnessed a demonstration of wearable AI that records all of the wearer’s conversations. Their words are then sent to a server so they can be analyzed by AI, providing both summaries and suggestions to the user about future behavior.

Several startups are making these “always on” AI wearables. In an April 29, 2025, essay titled “I Recorded Everything I Said for Three Months. AI Has Replaced My Memory,” Wall Street Journal technology columnist Joanna Stern describes the experience of using this technology. She concedes that the assistants created useful summaries of her conversations and meetings, along with helpful to-do lists. However, they also recalled “every dumb, private and cringeworthy thing that came out of my mouth.”

These devices also create privacy issues. The people whom the user interacts with don’t always know they are being recorded, even as their words are also sent to a server for the AI to process them. To Stern, the technology’s potential for mass surveillance becomes readily apparent, presenting a “slightly terrifying glimpse of the future.”

Relying on AI engines such as ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini, the wearables work only with words, not images. Behavioral suggestions occur only after the fact. However, a key function of the Primer – coaching users in real time in the middle of any situation or social interaction – is the next logical step as the technology advances.

Education or social engineering?

In “The Diamond Age,” the Primer doesn’t simply weave interactive fairy tales for Nell. It also assumes the responsibility of educating her on everything from her ABCs when younger to the intricacies of cryptography and politics as she gets older.

It’s no secret that AI tools, such as ChatGPT, are now being widely used by both teachers and students.

Several recent studies have shown that AI may be more effective than humans at teaching computer science. One survey found that 85% of students said ChatGPT was more effective than a human tutor. And at least one college, Morehouse College in Atlanta, is introducing an AI teaching assistant for professors.

There are certainly advantages to AI tutors: Tutoring and college tuition can be exorbitantly expensive, and the technology can offer better access to education to people of all income levels.

Pulling together these latest AI advances – interactive avatars, behavioral guides, tutors – it’s easy to envision how an AI device like the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer could be created in the near future. A young person might have a personalized AI character that accompanies them at all times. It can teach them about the world and offer up suggestions for how to act in certain situations. The AI could be tailored to a child’s personality, concocting stories that include AI versions of their favorite TV and movie characters.

But “The Diamond Age” offers a warning, too.

Toward the end of the novel, a version of the Primer is handed out to hundreds of thousands of young Chinese girls who, like Nell, didn’t have access to education or mentors. This leads to the education of the masses. But it also opens the door to large-scale social engineering, creating an army of Primer-raised martial arts experts, whom the AI then directs to act on behalf of “Princess Nell,” Nell’s fairy tale name.

It’s easy to see how this sort of large-scale social engineering could be used to target certain ideologies, crush dissent or build loyalty to a particular regime. The AI’s behavior could also be subject to the whims of the companies or individuals that created it. A ubiquitous, always-on, friendly AI could become the ultimate monitoring and reporting device. Think of a kinder, gentler face for Big Brother that people have trusted since childhood.

While large-scale deployment of a Primer-like AI could certainly make young people smarter and more efficient, it could also hamper one of the most important parts of education: teaching people to think for themselves.

Millions of children in more than 150 countries have watched a 7-year-old Latina with her trademark purple backpack take friends on fun television adventures.

Now, Nickelodeon’s animated series “Dora the Explorer” is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a live-action movie, premiering on Nickelodeon and Paramount+ on Wednesday, ahead of the July 4 holiday weekend.

“Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado” tells the story of 16-year-old Dora (played by Samantha Lorraine) who is budding into a skilled treasure hunter.

The movie follows Dora and her friend Diego (Jacob Rodriguez) as they trek through a jungle to find an ancient treasure that could grant a magical wish.

This teenage version of Dora, Mexican director Alberto Belli says, is like Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, but with a spunky “lo hicimos” (“We did it”) attitude that makes her uniquely Latina.

But according to Belli, Dora is more interested in the adventure because it can help her figure out who she is and what other people are like.

Developing this larger sense of finding her place became a guiding theme for the movie.

“When you’re taking a cartoon character into a live action, you need to go a little bit deeper. So we tried to create some more problems,” Belli said in an interview, accompanied by actress Samantha Lorraine. “She (Dora) loses her bag, which is a spoiler, but it’s also in the trailer. So now she needs to find who she really is. And I think right now, more than ever, people feel a little lost.”

Dora’s backpack typically contains specific items, including a map, which she will need on her adventures. And Belli says that when “you don’t know exactly where you need to go,” you have to look inside yourself to figure it out.

Lorraine says that “Sol Dorado” (“Golden Sun”) is more about finding an internal space — “who you are as a person.”

“When she (Dora) finds Sol Dorado, to me, it was this full circle moment that we had finally finished this character arc,” the young actress said.

Many iconic action-adventure characters “usually go and explore someone else’s culture. They never explore their own culture,” Belli said. “What’s really exciting about Dora is she loves history. She’s exploring her own culture.”

The movie incorporates Indigenous Latino traditions that influence Dora’s identity.

One such tradition was based on “ayllu,” which is the Andean way of organizing communities to support each other through shared land, resources and responsibilities.

“When it comes to ayllu, friendship and connection is so important, and I think Dora is the epitome of that. She’s the connection through most cultures of the world,” Lorraine said, adding that “Dora the Explorer” has been translated into more than 30 languages.

Belli said that they had an expert on set to guide them through different Indigenous traditions, including quipus, which are knotted cords that were used by the Incas to record information.

They also had two consultants to work on pronunciation for when Dora had to speak in Quechua, which is an Indigenous language spoken by people in parts of Perú, Bolivia and Ecuador.

Lorraine, who identifies as Cuban American, says that playing Dora was a privilege because she offers many Latino children visibility.

“I kept thinking to myself, what do I want my little cousins to see when they watch this movie?,” she said.

Lorraine wants “Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado” to help viewers — regardless of their age — keep their sense of adventure and curiosity alive.

Dora has “always been part of pop culture,” Belli said, adding that he has a 5-year-old who’s a big fan.

“When I got the job, he got more excited than I did,” the director said with a laugh. “What I love about Dora is she’s a positive influence in people; she teaches you how to be positive, energetic and adventurous — and at the same time she teaches Spanish in a fun way, which I think is very cool.”

Squid Game director Hwang Dong Hyuk recently revealed that the globally streamed Netflix drama originally had a different finale.

In an interview with Joongang Ilbo, he said the first version of the script ended on a more hopeful note, with protagonist Seong Gi Hun meeting Hwang Jun Ho and travelling to the US to see his daughter.

Hwang said he changed course after reflecting on present-day global crises. “I personally started to feel that surviving in this world was becoming increasingly difficult. Inequality is deepening, the threat of war is growing, and yet no one is taking responsibility,” he explained.

The director added that stories of extreme wealth, including Jeff Bezos’s reported $51.7 million wedding, helped solidify his decision to rework the ending.

“I felt that now is the time for older generations to let go a bit of their growth, development, and desires,” Hwang said, noting that this inspired him to include a child in the final storyline to symbolise future generations.

The newly shared version of events has reignited discussion about the show’s conclusion and the societal critique embedded within. Hwang’s comments offer deeper insight into the intentions behind the darker direction, even if it diverged from what many expected.

HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Leadership, case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts—hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you.

When a CEO steps down, it can trigger a domino effect of chaos. Boards—often caught off guard—have to jumpstart the search for a successor. And in the process, they sometimes exclude the departing CEO from the search or transition—leading to a loss of institutional knowledge and broken trust. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Leadership advisors Rebecca Slan Jerusalim and Navio Kwok say the relationship between a board and CEO can make or break the changing of the guard. They spoke to Curt Nickisch on HBR IdeaCast in 2024 about best practices for CEO transitions.

CURT NICKISCH: Rebecca and Navio, welcome.

REBECCA SLAN JERUSALIM: Thank you. We’re thrilled to be here.

NAVIO KWOK: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

CURT NICKISCH: Obviously, the CEO transition is super important to a company. Is that importance something that means that people really give it a lot of attention and do it right, or that there’s so much pressure to do it right that people kind of fumble it as they try to manage it well?

REBECCA SLAN JERUSALIM: Well, I would say there’s tons of work out there looking at the succession process, what parts of the succession process are really critical, and particularly even around CEO succession. What is the right step and cadence to this? What is the board’s involvement? What role does the incoming CEO play?

And what hasn’t been studied or looked at or really understood is the experience of that person who’s so pivotal to the organization; the person who has been at the helm of the organization, setting the strategy, managing the strategy, creating the organizational culture. How does that person’s experience in transitioning out of the role really impact the organization, the succession experience, as we are really very much focused on the incoming CEO?

NAVIO KWOK: I think we often also see that there’s a bit of this tension between how urgent something is and how important it needs to be. And so CEO succession for a board and possibly the top team as well is something that is extremely important, but not very urgent, because these decisions tend to happen well in advance unless there was an emergency situation. And so what a board will do is they’re going to focus on the day-to-day, and naturally, non-urgent important things are always going to get pushed off, and I would bucket succession in that category, and as a result, it’s not always top of mind.

CURT NICKISCH: And then it becomes top of mind very quickly often. In your research, you found that 83% of CEO successions were initiated by the CEO themselves, which kind of surprised me a little bit. You kind of feel like these people are supposed to be in the hot seat and if they’re not performing, they’re out and we need to get somebody else in. And really, it’s kind of mostly largely on their timelines.

NAVIO KWOK: Yeah. I had seen some research. I think they plotted the performance trajectories of CEOs, those that were performing well and those that weren’t, and then they kind of looked at whether or not they initiated succession or if they were forced out, and actually, that isn’t a strong predictor. So in recent years, the performance of the CEO doesn’t always have that direct contribution to when they step down. And so I think that plays into why mostly, we found in our sample, it’s CEO initiated and it aligns to what you can gather from public CEO data on at least why CEOs or why boards reference CEOs stepping down is it’s a retirement decision.

REBECCA SLAN JERUSALIM: I would say we were also quite surprised at the number of CEOs who self-initiated the succession. I mean, if you go through any kind of board governance training, you really know that succession is supposed to be really top of mind and not a last minute decision in and around who will be the next successor, but this should be a real process around identifying early, building up the capabilities of internal successors and running through different scenarios to be able to put the right person in the role. And very much a good portion of our sample, and you referenced 83%, many of them self-initiated, and what we found was also fascinating was that they really surprised the board.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. You had a story in the article of a board that met eight times to try to convince the CEO to stay when they needed to be spending that time on not trying to arm twist an unwilling executive to be unhappy longer, but go out and find the replacement.

REBECCA SLAN JERUSALIM: And some of the reasons that CEOs were initiating the succession were reasons that the board could have and should have had better insight into long before the CEO made that declaration, so things like we talk about temporal reasons, age and tenure in role. Those are easy things that a board can have regular ongoing conversations with the CEO about.

A couple of the other reasons CEOs announced their readiness for succession were really around, they saw that there were future needs of the organization that they couldn’t necessarily or shouldn’t necessarily be the ones delivering on. And they also recognized that they could potentially be a blocker to succession and that there were people ready or really should be in the process of being ready for that CEO role, and they didn’t want to block their opportunity.

And so these are two things that really stood out to us because a lot of what has been written about CEO succession speaks to the ego that’s involved in being at the top of the house and not wanting to relinquish that seat for others. And in actual fact, there were some really important and different ideas that came through these conversations that boards should really be talking to the CEOs about and not worried to the same extent that it is purely ego-driven or a hold on power that is keeping these CEOs in place.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, no, I suppose stories of people being CEOs, being forced out, burning it all as they go, right, those are big things that scare boards and scare a lot of people, but it’s probably few and far between when it’s really somebody who just says, “It’s time. I’m getting tired,” right?

REBECCA SLAN JERUSALIM: They probably make the news more.

CURT NICKISCH: You’ve outlined the ways that they should be more proactive before this news comes. Once the news comes, what mistakes do you see boards make at that point?

NAVIO KWOK: One that comes out through that research is the level of CEOs’ involvement in their own succession process. So in our research, we identified five things that they did all the way from just canvassing for candidates all the way to onboarding. And so if we leave aside onboarding, which most CEOs did have some degree of involvement there, we found nearly one in four CEOs were excluded from that process entirely. You know, leave it to us.

We didn’t use this language in our paper, but it reminds me of the RACI framework when it comes to project management. You’ve got responsible, accountable, consulted and informed, and the board is accountable for succession because the board will be there when the old CEO steps down and new one comes in, but who’s responsible? I think we would say that it should be the outgoing CEO to some extent – more than one in four being excluded entirely. And there’s all these reasons we found why it’s very important actually for the organization.

CURT NICKISCH: Well, it just stands to reason for any job, right? We’ve all left jobs and known that ideally when you leave a job, it’s a place that’s better than it was before you arrived. And it’s not just the hours of your time doing something that can be replaced, that it’s actually a stronger organization after you leave, but I don’t know, if you overlap with the person who’s replacing you to help train them, that that’s a very positive thing for an organization and it’s almost the same idea for CEOs, it’s just that it’s a lot trickier when you can only have one person in charge, but you go from one person to the next, so how do you handle that transition? So what do you tell CEOs that are in this position? What’s your advice for them?

REBECCA SLAN JERUSALIM: Listen, ultimately, when done right, there is a role for them to play in the succession process, but that they do also have to recognize that they aren’t going to have full control. The control here will ebb and flow throughout the process. And for them, what the connection is that the control piece, we likened it to or we connected it to mattering, that they are so used to having such a tremendous impact on every decision that the organization makes, that not having the ability to have some control or impact here actually connects to their ability to feel like they matter, like they have value, like they have input. And when they’re not given that kind of opportunity to weigh in, there’s a deeper kind of psychological need in and around wanting to show that they still have some value here to add.

CURT NICKISCH: It’s kind of an interesting dance, right? Should they offer information? Should they wait until they’re asked? What is the protocol there?

REBECCA SLAN JERUSALIM: Much of that has to do with how they operate with the board in any other matter. One of the strongest findings that we found is the connection and the strength of relationships between the CEOs and boards were predictive, and I say predictive, predictive, air quotes, this was a qualitative study, not a causative exploration, but the strength of the relationship between the boards and the CEOs really impacted how the overall experience of the CEOs in the succession process.

NAVIO KWOK: It’s like when you want to ask for a favor from someone in your network, it’s much more helpful and productive if you’ve had an existing relationship with them and then the request comes. But sometimes we have friends in our network where they only come to us when they need something. And that to me, what might be akin to a CEO board relationship, which is there’s quite a bit of a chasm between it, and so they’re only communicating when there are things that need to be discussed, and now you’ve got this big thing that we have to work with in theory together. It’s not the first time they’re meeting, but the relationship is so new and you’re trying to build this relationship at that very tricky point in time where there is so much risk even on a good day and a well-thought-out succession process.

CURT NICKISCH: Well, it makes it sound like then it’s also incumbent on the outgoing CEO to be communicating with the board earlier so that it isn’t a surprise and that emotions don’t flare up when they do give that announcement.

REBECCA SLAN JERUSALIM: That’s right. It should be a long ongoing conversation. And CEO succession should not be considered kind of a momentary or moment in time. It should be a years in the making, ongoing conversation between the CEO and the board and real identification and preparation of key successors along the way; should make the board feel confident that they’ve got optionality, that the CEO is on top of this and helping and developing these folks; that the board has visibility to them.

And so when the CEO then announces their willingness and readiness for succession, the board should really feel like they’ve got a line of sight to who those high potentials and those potential candidates are, that they’ve been built up over the years, that they have clarity around what that profile looks like. And yes, there might be tweaks along the way, but it shouldn’t come as such a shock and surprise that this is happening.

NAVIO KWOK: I think the implication too for any manager of a team or a leader in an organization is to always have a strong bench. We’re not expecting boards to be not surprised when a CEO says they want to step down. We’re not asking boards to not try and persuade and shift the timeline a little bit, but they should be prepared for that very inevitable outcome. And so for any leader or manager, you should have a deep bench. An example is the Vancouver Canucks were just in a playoff run.

CURT NICKISCH: This is an NHL hockey team…

NAVIO KWOK: Yes, NHL hockey team and the goalie was the back-up to the back-up. That was the one who ended up playing because the first goalie was injured and then something happened with the second goalie. So we’re thinking that all sports teams, sports team managers, they have an awareness of where they’re going to pull talent. Now, whether or not it comes to fruition like this case, it’s not always going to be a success story, but at least having an awareness of the key players that you can pull on when needed is very important and when it comes to CEOs, especially so because there is so much that is on their shoulders when they step into that role.

CURT NICKISCH: What did your research find for the best practices for outgoing CEOs?

NAVIO KWOK: I’ll share a story. One CEO said to more clearly demarcate their roles and responsibilities and the time at which one person was officially going to be enrolled. So this particular CEO had said they felt they were quite clear that, “I’m still CEO until a certain date, then you’re going to step in,” but it seemed to blur, and in fact, he could see the board members and certain top team members shift their allegiance to the new individual, and so there’s a bit of almost encroaching of responsibilities. So being more clearly demarcating, whose responsibility is going to stop and start when that was fairly notable, and I would say, Rebecca, it’s probably part of the transition phase of succession.

REBECCA SLAN JERUSALIM: Yeah, I would say two related things. One is many of them talked about taking their successor with them to any meetings, external meetings, vendors, suppliers, board meetings, et cetera, so that they could really get the benefit of the outgoing CEOs’ relationships and the tie to whatever relationship they were fostering.

This clarity and demarcating roles and responsibilities is true for the board with the CEO and really laying out what that transition plan should be and look like, what the timeline is, what the responsibilities are. And some of them even talked about, and few, but some of them did talk about the board having a role in that being their end of the day performance review of how much have you helped support your successor in transitioning.

CURT NICKISCH: Now, no matter how clear the role is, it’s still hard, right? You may have a very clearly demarcated when the other person takes over, but then they take over and their priorities are different. The things that you’ve really thought are important as CEO all of a sudden are maybe lower down on the priority list. Even though you want to leave the role, to see somebody else do things differently, there’s got to be tough emotions there.

REBECCA SLAN JERUSALIM: There is a tremendous amount of emotion throughout the entirety of this process. A real roller coaster, again, buffered by the strong trusting relationship with the board. But I’ll give you a sense of what that roller coaster looked like. The emotions, the outgoing CEOs were very much managing their own emotions as well as the board’s emotions, the senior team’s emotions as well.

Prior to announcing that the succession process, it can be quite lonely for CEOs, for outgoing CEOs, knowing that they will at some point exiting that role. Lonely, I say, because they’re not necessarily able to share the news that they will be finding a successor initially, and there’s not that many people or places that they can turn to share some of that emotion. It can feel dishonest in some way.

But post-announcement, there can be excitement about handing over to the next successor. We heard stories of grief and distress in giving up the job. There can be a frustration with lack of involvement. And Navio shared some stories about the senior team kind of turning away from the outgoing CEO, even if they were still in the seat.

CURT NICKISCH: Sort of a lame duck kind of response?

REBECCA SLAN JERUSALIM: That’s right. They can feel guilty if they’re blamed for this process going poorly. One of the CEOs who we spoke to even talked about the stages of grief having to give up that seat, and this CEO actually didn’t fully exit from the organization, stayed on in an executive chair role, and so was still tied to the organization in some way, and yet still likened the experience of moving out of that role – it was his decision – but moving out of that role and still feeling like this was a tremendous emotional impact.

And so when asked about, “How do you deal with that? How do you recognize that?”, he said even just naming the experience and being aware or cognizant that this could and very likely that this roller coaster of emotions is present and can impact you – leaning into that a little bit more. We’re kind of taught there’s no emotions in the boardroom, but in actual fact, this is a very real human experience.

CURT NICKISCH: Personal, yeah.

REBECCA SLAN JERUSALIM: It’s very personal. And so it’s really critical to have good trusted advisors to talk through that experience, to recognize that it may very easily happen and have some plan around how you’re going to manage that kind of feeling and emotion.

NAVIO KWOK: Yeah. I want to give my wife Alana credit for this. She’s a clinical psychologist in training. She says, “name it to tame it,” with regards to emotions, so just simply being able to have a label for it is actually quite impactful in understanding what it is. And emotions in general I think especially in business, we talk about how important emotional intelligence is, but we don’t actually create or facilitate an environment where people are comfortable to talk about their emotions, and so it’s a little paradoxical to expect someone to have that skill, but there’s no opportunity to really kind of practice it.

And then when there’s something as major as a succession when you probably should be fully ready to utilize those skills, well, you never had any opportunity to practice up until that point, and we’re asking the CEO that they actually can’t talk about at all. So it’s this weird dynamic they have to deal with.

With that CEO that Rebecca had just mentioned too, he raised a good point that you might want to be aware of just what your triggers are, and you might not know what they are until you see them. So for that individual, what really struck them initially was when their office was no longer in the center of their building. So it was when they were more on the periphery physically, that’s when he felt, “Okay, this is real. This is significant and I’m the old guard leaving.”

So I think that speaks to an earlier question you had about just what a CEO can do, the outgoing CEO and the incoming CEO, is being aware of the symbolic nature of executive leadership at the top. And so this CEO actually made a concerted effort to move his office away from the center, and still he was hurt. That symbolic nature is very important, and it can both help people support the incoming CEO and sometimes unexpectedly can make it very real for the outgoing CEO that it’s very real and it’s time for you to step down.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. You’ve gone from being a very, very important person; it’s a part of your identity, it’s a big identity change.

REBECCA SLAN JERUSALIM: It’s interesting you call that out. One of the key questions that we asked our participants is, is CEO something you do or did or something you are? And it’s very hard at the top of the house to really be able to separate an identity. These CEO jobs are 24 hours, seven days a week. You’re all in. And when we asked that question, there was kind of a rough split. 47% said that it is something that they did, and 43% said it was something that they were. The rest were kind of a bit of both.

And that’s telling. I mean, even for the folks who had what we would say very low ego, kind of salt of the earth, very humble folks who would describe their role as CEO at the bottom of the organization, it was still a very personally challenging roller coaster experience to navigate. And many of them felt it was really helpful to have the reflection, the time to reflect on that experience, because very few people actually, as you’re going through it, you’re not taking the time to reflect on it.

And then you’ve left the role and there’s very little that people want to know and understand of your experience through that, but yet it was helpful to both understand and then for them in their next role, iteration, whether it’s as another CEO or on a board, to actually have really strong sentiment and feeling about how this should go and what feels right beyond the specific governance of it was helpful and impactful for them.

CURT NICKISCH: What are some of the best lessons here for other executives or really anybody leaving a job and handing it over to somebody else that you think we all can learn from?

NAVIO KWOK: I’d say relevant even well before you’re leaving a job is to not fully tie your identity to either your job or a role. I think that has particular implications with AI and its potential risk of displacing certain workers and at a minimum, changing the job that they’re doing in ways that we can’t necessarily forecast.

So Microsoft and LinkedIn came out with a work trends report just very recently, and they found that on LinkedIn’s fastest growing jobs in the U.S., many of them, I think maybe the number was two-thirds, weren’t in existence 20 years ago, so you don’t even actually know what job you might do in the future. And so if you tie your identity and sense of self to what you’re doing right now in the organization you’re in, it’s going to make that process of letting go, stepping down or changing jobs much more difficult.

So I’m not saying don’t tie it to it, but I’m saying consider it a little bit differently. So what do you tie it to?

And so I read a story in a book by Dan and Chip Heath, they’re brothers, one of them at least is with Stanford, and they shared a story of Floyd Lee, who was a retired Marine Corps and Army chef. He was 25 years in service, had retired, then the Iraq war happened, so he actually re-enlisted as a chef to help out. And typically, army food is very bland, and the mess hall he was leading was pristine food. Things were beautiful, food tasted great, and people would come from outside of that mess hall on weekends to eat his food. And he said for him, it’s not that he’s in charge of food, he’s in charge of morale.

And so if you align your identity to that kind of message for you and your role, I’m in charge of morale, then if for whatever reason you can’t be a chef anymore, there are still other ways in which you can satisfy that personal value and need of being in charge of morale. But if you’re tied exclusively to being a chef, an army chef for that individual in particular, then it makes stepping down very hard if that job no longer exists in the future.

REBECCA SLAN JERUSALIM: I would just add, and we asked this of some of the CEOs, what kind of advice would you have for folks? Part of it is like Navio mentioned, finding your intrinsic purpose. What is the value that you want to add? Where do you get the most joy? Many of the CEOs in our sample did not step down and retire. They went on to do other things.

There was also this question of avoiding just creating some busy work because you’re kind of worried you’ve got such a full work life and many can step on wanting to keep that pace up, not recognizing that without true planning and recognizing what next – they’re very strategic in their work life, but not very strategic in planning their personal life outside of this key role. And so thinking about that, having regular conversations, planning for it before the last day is really important.

We also heard about spouse and family renegotiations. What? You’re around now more? What does this look like? Or we said we would travel and now you’ve kind of thrown yourself into all this other-

CURT NICKISCH: I don’t know you! Yeah.

REBECCA SLAN JERUSALIM: Yeah. Board work, busy work. So there’s some renegotiation that needs to happen as well, but it does go hand in hand with really purposely thinking about and planning for that next stage.

CURT NICKISCH: Rebecca and Navio, thanks so much for coming on the show to share your research and to talk about this really important transition.

NAVIO KWOK: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

REBECCA SLAN JERUSALIM: Thanks for having us.

HANNAH BATES:  That was Rebecca Slan-Jerusalim and Navio Kwok of the executive search and leadership advisory firm, Russell Reynolds Associates—in conversation with Curt Nickisch on HBR IdeaCast. Jerusalim and Kwok wrote the HBR article, “The Vital role of the Outgoing CEO.”

We’ll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about leadership from Harvard Business Review. If you found wthis episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there, be sure to leave us a review.

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This episode was produced by Mary Dooe and Me, Hannah Bates. Curt Nickisch is our editor. Music by Coma Media. Special thanks to Maureen Hoch, Rob Eckhardt, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Khabbaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.