• The Trump-class battleship program could cost the Navy $275 billion total
• First battleship alone carries a staggering $23.4 billion price tag
• Each ship weighs 35,000 tons and packs hypersonic missiles, nuclear missiles, lasers, and more

A new US Congressional Budget Office report has estimated that the Navy’s proposed Trump-class battleship program could ultimately cost taxpayers $275 billion.

The first vessel alone is projected to cost $23.4 billion, roughly $6 billion more than the Navy’s initial estimate initially offered in December 2025.

Before anyone starts marching on Google headquarters waving torches and 4K Blu-ray cases, one important fact needs to be established: this happened to one reported customer, not millions. There is no evidence that Google suddenly removed The Lord of the Rings movies from huge numbers of digital libraries or that widespread deletions are occurring.

What we do have is a Reddit user who says the Extended Edition Trilogy they purchased through Google Play Store in 2022 disappeared from their library. Screenshots shared by the user appear to show Google Support confirming that the title had been removed from its catalog and that it could neither restore access nor provide a refund.

That distinction matters because this isn’t a mass deletion story. It is, however, a very good example of why the word “Buy” has become increasingly slippery in the digital era.

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You Bought It. Sort Of.

According to the customer, they paid for the films four years ago and reasonably expected them to remain available. Google Support reportedly explained that because the trilogy had been removed from its system and the transaction dated back to 2022, it could not restore the movies or issue a refund.

You can understand why someone might find that response less satisfying than walking barefoot to Mordor.

Google’s own current terms make the larger issue fairly clear. After purchasing content, customers receive a non-exclusive right to access and use it. Google also states that purchased content generally remains available only as long as Google retains the right to provide it. If those rights disappear, content or services are discontinued, or certain other conditions arise, Google can stop providing access to something you paid for.

That little “Buy” button suddenly feels considerably less permanent.

Digital movies are enormously convenient. I buy them and stream them, and most consumers are not going back to walls filled with thousands of discs.

I might not be the best example.

I own more than 3,700 movies on DVD, Blu-ray, 4K UHD Blu-ray and even LaserDisc, and there is a reason I have never viewed that collection as obsolete. If I purchase The Lord of the Rings on disc and put it on my shelf, Warner Bros. cannot remove it because a licensing agreement changes. Google cannot decide my copy is no longer in the catalog, and the internet can disappear for the evening without taking Gandalf with it.

Physical media has limitations. Discs can be damaged or lost, players eventually fail, and 3,700 movies require slightly more storage space than an app icon. But access to them does not depend on someone else’s server continuing to recognize my license.

For home theater enthusiasts, there is also the performance argument. 4K UHD Blu-ray can deliver higher video bitrates and lossless audio without the compression and bandwidth compromises inherent to streaming. Physical media offers excellent performance along with something becoming increasingly unusual in modern entertainment: a copy you can actually keep.

Music Has Exactly the Same Problem

The same argument applies to Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, Qobuz and every other subscription music service. You don’t own those 100 million songs. You are paying for access to a catalog, and that catalog can change.

Albums disappear. Different masters replace older ones. Labels change distributors. Licensing agreements expire. The album you played yesterday may not necessarily be there tomorrow.

Qobuz offers an important alternative because it operates a download store alongside its streaming service. Customers can purchase albums and download actual music files to local storage. Roon Ready? Permanence sold separately.

But even Qobuz makes the distinction worth understanding. Its support documentation says customers can normally re-download purchases, while explicitly warning that albums may later become unavailable for download and recommending that customers create backups.

That is the key difference. If you bought the download, saved the files and backed them up, a record label removing the album from Qobuz’s streaming catalog doesn’t magically reach into your NAS and delete it. If you only streamed it, you never had anything to begin with.

One Customer Is Enough to Ask the Question

Millions of consumers buy movies digitally without anything disappearing, and this single case is not evidence that everybody’s library is about to evaporate. It would also be naïve to assume this is the only person who has ever lost access to something they purchased digitally. Most of us do not conduct annual inventory checks on libraries containing hundreds of movies, so a missing title could easily go unnoticed for months or even years. What we cannot say is how many customers this has affected because Google does not publish that data.

But the story matters because it demonstrates what can happen when ownership is replaced by licensed access.

The customer clicked “Buy,” paid for the movies and expected them to remain available. Four years later, according to the support exchange they shared, they didn’t.

Perhaps the industry needs a different word than “Buy.”

Until then, I’ll keep my 4K discs, CDs, records and even those LaserDiscs. They take up more room, but none of them vanish because somebody in a licensing department changed a spreadsheet.

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The takeaway: AMD has published a new security bulletin about the Trusted Platform Module reference implementation used in its computer platforms. The disclosed flaws could have significant reliability and security implications, but updates for AMD’s numerous CPU families have already been available for months. Users simply need to install them.

Researchers working with the Trusted Computing Group recently identified a potential security issue in AMD’s TPM code, prompting the company to release new motherboard and firmware updates to address the vulnerability. The update process was not exactly swift, however, as the fixed TPM code had already been available for months. Meanwhile, AMD has only just released its AMD-SB-7064 bulletin detailing the issue.

The US chipmaker explained that the TCG Vulnerability Response Team was informed by Intel researchers about a potential out-of-bounds read vulnerability in its TPM 2.0 reference code. The flaw could be exploited by local attackers with elevated user privileges, allowing them to force the TPM code to read sensitive data stored in the firmware or even affect the availability of the TPM.

AMD programmers confirmed the issue, which affects the company’s TPM implementation in two different ways. The first flaw (CVE-2026-6726) could leak information and allow a malicious actor to recover credentials from a TPM-aware Certificate Authority, potentially enabling them to falsify TPM encryption keys or other TPM-based attestation mechanisms.

AMD describes the second flaw (CVE-2026-6727) as a timing side-channel vulnerability affecting decryption workloads using the RSA cryptosystem. The flaw could allow an attacker to decrypt encrypted data or falsify TPM 2.0 attestation keys. Both vulnerabilities require a local attack with “privileged” user access, meaning they should not pose a significant security risk to systems exposed solely to the internet.

Threat level aside, the two flaws have been assigned relatively high CVSS scores of 8.5 and 8.3, respectively, and are noteworthy for the large number of affected processors. AMD’s list includes Epyc 4004 and 4005 Series CPUs, several embedded processors, Ryzen desktop CPUs from the 3000 through 9000 series, Threadripper workstation processors, and more.

AMD recommends that users install the updated Platform Initialization firmware releases designed to address both CVE-2026-6726 and CVE-2026-6727. The fixed firmware versions have been available since at least May for most processors, while Ryzen Embedded CPUs received their updated firmware in July.

The Trusted Platform Module is a security-focused cryptoprocessor specification defined by the TCG in 2003, but the major TPM 2.0 implementation upgrade has been available since 2014. A TPM 2.0 hardware module or firmware implementation became part of Windows 11’s mandatory system requirements, providing a significant security improvement for the Windows ecosystem.

As these two AMD flaws clearly demonstrate, however, total security remains a distant goal even in the modern TPM-enabled PC world.

experts say this summer’s main threat of lettuce-borne cyclospora may finally be waning, with investigators having identified the likely culprit as iceberg lettuce sold through Taylor Farms de Mexico. But the fact remains that commercially-produced lettuce isn’t always safe.

The FDA continues to flag cluster outbreaks of cyclosporiasis and salmonellosis, with a recent cyclosporiasis outbreak possibly tied to parsley and cilantro. If you’re not growing your own food, you can never truly know what’s in it or on it.

For almost two years, I have been growing my own organic salad greens and herbs—and even vegetables like beans and zucchini—right in my living room in a Lettuce Grow Farmstand, producing enough food for my family of three to avoid purchasing nearly all our vegetables from the grocery store. Here’s what my garden looks like right now:

Photograph: Kat Merck

Photograph: Kat Merck

A full-size setup like Lettuce Grow’s is an investment, but one that’s likely to pay for itself over time; the water pump and LEDs don’t use a noticeable amount of power, and all Farmstands come with their own first round of seedlings and enough nutrients to last a couple of grows.

Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney spent months turning a mainframe curiosity into something that could sit in a bar and take quarters. Their 1971 creation, Computer Space, became the first coin-operated video game ever sold to the public. A rare two-player version of that same machine, finished in metallic green sparkle fiberglass and still working more than fifty years later, is now on the block at RR Auction with bids climbing toward an estimate north of $20,000.

Spacewar! had been running on pricey university computers since 1962. Players were launching rocket ships around a large star, firing missiles at each other as gravity pulled them in. Bushnell and Dabney, working as Syzygy Engineering, reduced the game to its bare essentials, running it on a few logic boards and a black-and-white television. There’s no need for a minicomputer or gravity; only one player in a rocket, two hardware-driven saucers, and a starfield made up of static dots. They created an extremely futuristic cabinet out of fiberglass, the kind of flowing design you see on hot tubs rather than pinball machines, and brought four solid color prototypes to the Music Operators of America convention in Chicago in October 1971.

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Nutting Associates in Mountain View, California, took the game to the next level and put it into production. In 1972, approximately 1,300 to 1,500 single-player cabinets were produced, each painted in metallic flake red, blue, or the uncommon green. Sales were consistent around college campuses, but everyplace else, operators discovered that the controls were too complex for the usual bar population to handle. Still, it demonstrated that a video game can earn money. Bushnell and Dabney withdrew from Nutting, renamed their firm Atari, and published Pong the following year. Computer Space had finished its duty.

However, Nutting kept the game alive. In July 1973, the business began shipping a two-player successor. Steve Bristow handled the engineering, and the design was altered; the new cabinet was now solely green metallic flake. The original push-button configuration was replaced by two rotational joysticks and a set of red fire buttons. A green button labeled “Two Player Operation” sat between the coin slot and the red start button. Instructions printed under the screen were simple: drop a quarter, choose one or two players before you hit start, then fight. In single-player mode you still faced the computer-controlled saucer. In two-player mode the two human rockets dueled each other across the same starfield.

Unfortunately, we don’t know how many two-player versions were made. Some collectors believe there were just a few hundred, and the Video Game Preservation Society has confirmed that less than ten originals remain. Working versions are practically never for sale. One recent green example was apparently sold to a museum for almost $20,000. Paul Allen, one of Microsoft’s co-founders, once owned a blue single-player device that would have sold for a much higher price. Obtaining parts has become nearly impossible, as vacuum-tube monitors and discrete logic boards are just unavailable.

The one being auctioned has serial number 30644 and model number 724C. The cabinet has some scuffing, but the machine still works and displays the game on the screen. The original joysticks and buttons are still attached, indicating that it is in excellent shape. Dave Perry, the game designer of Shiny Entertainment, is the current owner who is selling since he has run out of space at home. The auction is part of RR Auction’s larger “Steve Jobs & the Computer Revolution” sale and is set to end on August 20.

For decades, building a proper home theater required a fairly predictable piece of hardware sitting somewhere beneath the television. The AV receiver accepted all of your sources, decoded the soundtrack, powered the speakers, managed the subwoofer, corrected for the room and generally acted as traffic cop for everything involving sound. The television mostly knew its place.

That relationship is changing rather quickly. TV manufacturers are increasingly turning the display into something far more important than the final stop for the picture. Samsung, LG and TCL are moving speaker coordination, room optimization and immersive audio processing directly into their television ecosystems, while Sony has already turned compatible BRAVIA TVs into active participants in its home theater systems. Apple and Google are approaching the same problem from another direction, shifting much of the responsibility into their streaming platforms.

None of this means the AV receiver is about to disappear. Someone running an Anthem AVR with seven passive speakers and four ceiling channels isn’t unplugging it tomorrow. The family buying a 77-inch OLED who wants Dolby Atmos without speaker wire, an equipment rack and a Saturday afternoon spent deciphering channel assignment menus? That’s the customer the industry is coming for, and there are millions more of them.

The TV Is No Longer Just Passing the Sound Along

The important distinction here is control. A television connected to an AVR through HDMI eARC is still largely handing audio responsibility to another component. The receiver determines how the soundtrack is decoded, how speakers are configured, where bass gets redirected and how the system interacts with the room.

The newer wireless ecosystems begin moving some of those decisions upstream. Compatible televisions can identify speakers, coordinate their output with the TV’s internal speakers, compensate for placement and distribute different parts of an immersive soundtrack around the room. Streaming apps are already inside the display, HDMI sources are connected directly to it, and increasingly the audio system is configured through the television’s interface or companion app.

The television isn’t becoming an AV receiver in the traditional hardware sense, but it is starting to perform some of the jobs that made the AV receiver necessary for mainstream users in the first place. That’s an important distinction because the disruption isn’t really about replacing a Denon, Marantz or Anthem feature for feature. It’s about removing enough complexity that millions of people decide they never needed one to begin with.

Samsung Has Been Quietly Building This for Years

Samsung’s Q Symphony originally looked like a clever way to stop customers from wasting the speakers already inside their expensive television whenever they added a soundbar. The 2026 version is considerably more ambitious.

Compatible Samsung TVs can now coordinate with as many as five Samsung audio devices through Q Symphony, including soundbars and Wi-Fi speakers, while automatically adjusting how the system behaves based on speaker placement. SmartThings provides another layer of system management for playback and audio settings. In other words, the television isn’t merely outputting Dolby Atmos to another box; it is becoming an active participant in the system.

Samsung’s Music Studio 7 can operate independently or become part of a larger Q Symphony installation with compatible Samsung televisions, soundbars and wireless speakers. The company’s 2026 Neo QLED and OLED televisions continue pushing Q Symphony deeper into the television lineup as well.

There is, however, a rather large Samsung shaped catch: it is still Samsung. Q Symphony remains a proprietary ecosystem. Buy the television and the appropriate Samsung audio products and the integration can be compelling. Decide two years later that you prefer speakers from somebody else and the doors to the clubhouse become considerably less welcoming. That isn’t necessarily a deal breaker, but consumers need to understand what they’re buying into.

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Dolby Atmos FlexConnect Could Change the Rules

Dolby Atmos FlexConnect is potentially much more disruptive because the long term goal isn’t supposed to be another closed ecosystem. The technology allows a compatible television or soundbar to work with wireless speakers placed around a room and then automatically determines their locations, calibrates the system and adjusts how Dolby Atmos content is reproduced.

Precise symmetry is no longer mandatory, which matters in actual homes where one surround speaker ends up beside a bookcase, another gets moved because somebody objected to its presence next to the sofa, and the architect apparently designed the room without consulting Dolby Laboratories.

TCL was first out of the gate with commercial FlexConnect support. Its compatible TVs can integrate their own speakers with Z100 wireless speakers, using processing to compensate for imperfect placement and create immersive audio without conventional speaker wiring. We heard the technology at CEDIA Expo and found that it produced convincing positional effects even when the physical speaker arrangement wasn’t ideal.

TCL has continued the technology into its 2026 lineup. The QM8L, for example, supports FlexConnect configurations with the Z100 speakers and Z100 SW subwoofer, while the flagship X11L expands the same idea around its integrated Bang & Olufsen audio system. This is much closer to the television becoming the audio system’s conductor rather than merely feeding a signal to something else.

LG Takes the Idea Even Further

LG’s 2026 Sound Suite makes the same argument from another direction. The H7 soundbar, M5 and M7 wireless speakers and W7 subwoofer use Dolby Atmos FlexConnect to create a modular system that can grow from a relatively simple arrangement into something LG describes as a 13.1.7 channel configuration. More importantly for this discussion, FlexConnect is also being integrated into LG’s premium televisions.

At CES 2026, we heard the system progress from the television’s internal speakers to the TV combined with a pair of M7 wireless speakers, and finally to a much larger configuration incorporating the H7, subwoofer and additional M7 speakers. Automatic calibration compensated for the physical layout and created a genuinely immersive presentation without conventional speaker wiring.

That demonstration gets directly to the point: you don’t necessarily need a soundbar sitting beneath the television just to begin building the system anymore. You can start with the TV and add components around it, which represents a fairly profound change in architecture.

There is also an important caveat surrounding Dolby’s promise of interoperability. FlexConnect is designed to be brand agnostic, which theoretically opens the door to compatible televisions and wireless speakers from different manufacturers. We have not yet seen enough real world cross brand interoperability, however, to declare the walled gardens demolished.

Can an LG FlexConnect television eventually work seamlessly with a TCL speaker? Will another loudspeaker manufacturer be able to enter the ecosystem without requiring its own television platform? Those questions matter enormously, and until that actually happens, brand agnostic remains the destination rather than proof that we’ve arrived.

Sony Is Heading in the Same Direction but Isn’t There Yet

Sony presents another variation on the idea. Acoustic Center Sync allows compatible BRAVIA televisions to become the center channel in systems built around products such as the BRAVIA Theater Bar 9 or Theater Quad. Dialog originates at the screen while the external audio system handles the surrounding information.

We’ve found the implementation quite effective with the BRAVIA 8 II and Theater Bar 9. Dialog became better anchored to the image and the television behaved like another active component in the overall loudspeaker system.

This is not quite the same architecture as TCL or FlexConnect because the external Sony audio product remains essential, and the television isn’t taking over the entire processing and distribution role. Sony nevertheless reinforces the broader point: the television speaker is no longer something manufacturers necessarily expect you to turn off the moment you buy better audio hardware. It is becoming part of the home theater.

Apple and Google Move the Hub Into the Streamer

Apple and Google complicate the argument in a useful way because neither makes the television itself the center of the system. They make the streaming platform the center.

One or two Google Home Speakers can pair wirelessly with the Google TV Streamer. Two speakers create genuine physical stereo separation and Google’s Spatial Audio processing can simulate a broader surround presentation. There is an important limitation, however, that we’ve already highlighted in our coverage.

Google has not confirmed that the Home Speaker pair constitutes a Dolby Atmos playback system, even though the Google TV Streamer itself supports Dolby Atmos. Google describes the speaker implementation as Spatial Audio rather than confirmed Atmos reproduction. It also hasn’t documented an equivalent to Apple’s eARC arrangement for routing sound from external devices such as a game console or Blu ray player through the Google speakers.

Apple goes further. A full size HomePod or stereo pair connected to Apple TV 4K can reproduce Dolby Atmos, Dolby Digital 7.1 and Dolby Digital 5.1. Apple TV’s eARC support can also accept audio originating from other devices connected to the television and send it to the HomePods.

In Apple’s world, therefore, the Apple TV increasingly behaves like a miniature wireless home theater processor. It’s a different architecture, but the trajectory is the same: the dedicated box filled with speaker terminals is no longer mandatory for everyone.

Where the AV Receiver Still Wins and It Isn’t Close

Before anybody starts boxing up their Denon, Marantz, Anthem, Yamaha or Onkyo, there are some rather substantial differences between these systems and a traditional AVR.

An AV receiver provides real amplification for passive loudspeakers and considerably greater flexibility for speaker selection, subwoofer integration, source connectivity, surround formats, bass management, channel assignment and system expansion. A conventional 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos installation also uses actual loudspeakers positioned around and above the listener.

No amount of spatial processing changes the physical reality that discrete speakers placed in the correct locations can create localization, scale and dynamics that a handful of wireless speakers attempting to generate phantom channels may struggle to equal.

We saw exactly that kind of compromise during our Sony BRAVIA Theater Bar 9 testing. The soundbar by itself delivered impressive spaciousness but lacked convincing deep bass and benefited substantially from adding the dedicated subwoofer and rear speakers. We also noted that a component based system at roughly the same total price could provide higher overall performance, albeit with greater complexity.

There is another distinction that marketing departments tend to whisper: wireless speakers are usually wireless for the audio signal. They still need electricity. You may have eliminated speaker cable running across the room, but four powered speakers and a subwoofer can still require five convenient AC outlets. David Copperfield has not joined the engineering department. The wires have not vanished entirely.

The Biggest Advantage Is Simplicity

This is where the traditional home theater industry needs to pay attention. Most consumers don’t want to learn what an 11.2 channel receiver actually means, determine crossover frequencies, assign height channels, understand HDMI handshake problems or wonder why the streaming box suddenly produces sound but the PlayStation doesn’t. They want to turn on the television and have everything work.

If the TV detects two or four wireless speakers, measures where they are, determines what each one should reproduce and automatically configures an immersive soundtrack, that’s enormously attractive. FlexConnect also allows unconventional placement, which matters outside dedicated theater rooms. Apartments, open concept living spaces, bedrooms and multipurpose family rooms rarely permit the kind of symmetrical loudspeaker layout installers would choose if given a blank sheet of paper.

Software can compensate for some of that. Not perfectly, but possibly well enough, and well enough plus vastly easier has destroyed more than one consumer electronics category.

The Pros and Cons

For mainstream consumers, these TV centered and platform centered systems offer some very real advantages: far less speaker wiring, fewer components beneath the television, automatic speaker detection and room calibration, greater freedom with placement, easier expansion and tighter integration between the television and external speakers. They also make considerably more sense in apartments and multipurpose rooms where a traditional component system simply isn’t practical.

The tradeoffs are just as real. Many of today’s ecosystems remain proprietary, wireless speakers still require AC power, and ultimate output, bass extension and dynamics can trail a good component system. Virtual channels are not identical to correctly positioned physical speakers, input and codec support vary wildly between platforms, and network reliability suddenly becomes part of the audio chain.

There is also a longer term issue that deserves far more attention than it receives: software support. A pair of passive loudspeakers bought in 1996 can still work perfectly with an amplifier purchased this afternoon. Nobody has to maintain a cloud service so that your KEFs remember how to reproduce the left channel. Whether today’s networked wireless speaker ecosystems demonstrate that kind of longevity remains to be seen.

Who Is This Really For?

If you own a dedicated theater, care deeply about channel separation, use multiple subwoofers, want Dirac Live or similarly sophisticated room correction, own high quality passive speakers or regularly upgrade individual parts of your system, the AVR isn’t going anywhere. Keep it.

The new model makes far more sense for the much larger audience that wants better home theater audio without turning the living room into a rack of electronics. Buy the television, add two wireless speakers and decide six months later that you want surrounds and a subwoofer. Let the system find them, measure them and figure out what to do.

That’s a far easier proposition to sell at Best Buy than explaining why somebody needs eleven channels of amplification when they’re still trying to determine which HDMI port says eARC.

The Bottom Line

The AV receiver isn’t dying, but it is being pushed toward the enthusiast, performance and custom installation markets where its flexibility, amplification and upgradeability still matter enormously. What’s changing is everything underneath that market.

Samsung’s expanding Q Symphony ecosystem, TCL and LG’s embrace of Dolby Atmos FlexConnect, Sony’s integration of BRAVIA displays into the speaker system and the increasingly sophisticated Apple and Google streaming ecosystems all point toward the same destination: fewer boxes, fewer cables and more of the home theater being controlled by software.

The television doesn’t need to become a literal AV receiver to threaten the receiver’s position in the living room. It only needs to make millions of consumers ask a much more dangerous question: Do I still need one?

For an increasing number of people, the answer may soon be no.

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By any metric, the horror film Obsession has been one of the most extraordinary Hollywood success stories of 2026.

Made on a budget of around $750,000 and released in May, it went on to earn $488 million worldwide, catapulting 26-year-old director and screenwriter Curry Barker—originally known for his YouTube sketch comedy—to the top of the industry’s “it” list.

So why, you might ask, are people creating a stink over Universal Studios, the international distributor of Obsession, adding its lead female character, Nikki, to the cast of the Halloween Horror Nights event at its Hollywood theme park? Even though the actor who plays her seems very much on board? To answer that, one has to review three months of fierce and enduring debate.

Since the movie hit theaters, fans and critics have been at odds over a thorny question: Who is the victim in Obsession? The plot concerns an awkward, painfully insecure young man, Bear (Michael Johnston), who yearns to be in a romantic relationship with his friend, the seemingly unattainable Nikki (Inde Navarrette). In a moment of frustration, he snaps something called a “One Wish Willow”—believing it to be a whimsical and harmless novelty gift—and voices his desire that she love him more than anyone else in the world.

From that moment forward, Nikki is an unnatural version of herself, moving as if controlled by another consciousness. Her need to be with Bear around the clock is marked by increasingly alarming performances of total devotion that finally escalate to murder. Bear recognizes almost right away that something is wrong but cannot resist acting out his fantasy with the helpless and brainwashed woman who has taken to his bed.

As a consequence, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing as to whether viewers understood that Nikki was not the true villain or monster of the story, regardless of the acts she was cursed to commit. “Nikki was the victim and only Nikki,” insisted one representative X user in a viral post in June, adding that it would be “delusional” to apply the same label to Bear.

Whether anyone did try to defend Bear (as, for example, a guy who had no idea he was casting a real magic spell) seemed beside the point. Commentators wanted to hammer home that Nikki was robbed of her autonomy and that she was effectively raped due to her inability to consent to sex. Again and again, they invoked some theoretical viewer who saw her as the monster in the situation, decrying this reading of the film.

Then, on Monday, Universal Studios Hollywood officially announced that an actor portraying Nikki would haunt the park during its upcoming Halloween Horror Nights, which will run from late September 3 to November 1 and will also feature attractions like a haunted house based on Sinners. Mentioning the addition of Nikki to the event in a press release, Universal teased that “guests may find themselves face-to-face with the latest victim of the One Wish Willow’s terrifying curse,” apparently agreeing with the consensus that the character is at the mercy of a paranormal force rather than intentionally malicious.

It didn’t matter. X users called it a “catastrophically bad idea,” said it was in poor taste to portray “a victim of sexual assault” as a frightening figure, and worried about the actor’s safety as they interacted with park guests. A few argued that it should be Bear wandering the park, overlooking the problem that the character has no distinguishing visual shorthand, whereas Nikki, as in the climax of the film, will be “all bloody,” with tattoos scribbled on her body, according to John Murdy, the creative director and executive producer of Halloween Horror Nights.

Schools are navigating a steady stream of change, from new technologies to shifting expectations about what students need to know and be able to do. Yet anticipating change is different from knowing how to prepare for it.

A classroom teacher early in her career, Katie King has spent the last decade helping educators think about that challenge. Now senior director of strategic engagement at KnowledgeWorks, she works at what she describes as “the intentional intersection of futures thinking and education,” helping schools and systems consider possible futures and what those possibilities mean for decisions they make today.

EdSurge spoke with King about futures thinking, the forces shaping the next decade of education and how educators can turn long-term reflection into practical action.

EdSurge: What are the most significant forces shaping the future of learning right now, and how do they show up in your work with educators and systems?

King: The first is AI and integrating with AI, how the next generation of artificial intelligence, which is coming ever more rapidly, has the potential to change how humans think and feel, challenging our current notions of skill development and human relationships.

The second is disruption and its potential to upend daily life in school and learning environments. Our traditional approaches to managing our day-to-day lives and creating change in education really feel insufficient in the face of this very volatile environment.

The third driver is a lack of trust in public institutions: declining confidence, economic constraints and just more market-based competition in education. The good news is that most surveys show that people do have trust in their local schools and their teachers, so I think public education has an opportunity to leverage that by thinking creatively about who they can be in this community.

The fourth driver is the gap in education relevance. The education system faces this urgent need to integrate students’ emerging needs, concerns and aspirations into what they’re learning. The world that they’re living in today and going out into is different from the one schools are setting them up for.

When you talk about “futures thinking,” how is that different in practice from forecasting or strategic planning in education?

Futures thinking is a disciplined research and strategy practice: noticing change, examining assumptions, exploring possibilities and making future-informed decisions — building our mental muscles to avoid making predictions. In futures thinking, we’re actually saying, “We don’t know. Let’s explore a lot of possibilities and then use that range to make informed decisions.” I think when people build these skills and mindsets, they become more flexible and nimble, more attuned to change as it’s happening. I think it’s an avenue toward more proactive leadership than crisis response.

How do you think about forecasts in education, and what role are they meant to play for school and system leaders?

The purpose of a forecast is to synthesize research, trends and emerging issues affecting education. It’s meant to boil it down to some digestible ideas that leaders can then use. We do that by exploring forces that are already affecting education, from AI and workforce changes to shifting expectations of learners, and then how those changes could evolve and shift over time.

We’re hoping our publications [futures forecast and strategy guide] will help people step back from the day-to-day pressures, see the larger patterns shaping the future, and begin to think about how things might be different. What should that mean about what we’re doing today?

AI is one of the forces reshaping education. What does it reveal about how educators can plan in the face of uncertainty?

I think AI is the perfect topic to test how willing we are to avoid predicting the future and instead get comfortable with uncertainty and accept that there is a range of possibilities. We do not have any facts about the future; that is the core tenet. So, when we’re faced with that level of uncertainty about AI, what do we do? In our view, we can plot out as many possibilities and ideas as we can. Then we can decide what we want to do that’s most aligned with our vision.

A recurring challenge in your work seems to be moving from big-picture futures conversations to concrete decisions. What does it take to make that shift effectively in schools and districts?

Try not to resolve uncertainty by moving to strategy too quickly; sometimes a sense of urgency can backfire when we haven’t allowed for the possibilities, contradictions and questions. It can’t be, “Let’s have one big conversation about the future, set our five-year strategic plan and then be done.”

Make sure you have a vision for your school or district that’s more than words on the website. Once you’ve thought about the longer-term future and considered many possibilities, you can use that vision as a filter and revisit decisions as the landscape evolves.

We’re constantly saying: “What have we learned when we’re looking out for the future? And what does that mean for what we do today?”

How can schools balance immediate day-to-day priorities with longer-term futures work in meaningful ways?

We wanted our most recent publication to be concrete, so it focuses on three practical calls to action:

• Remake your role by connecting leaders, educators and everyone in the system to their personal vision.

• Turn down the noise by creating transparency and clarity so schools can focus on shared goals for young people.

• Seed new systems by piloting new approaches and doing small experiments that can grow over time.

None of those are about changing everything at once. They focus on shifting what educators are already doing in ways that support longer-term transformation.

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