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gamescom 2026’s Steam wishlist winners

gamescom wrapped up last weekend, and it was bloody fantastic. It really felt like the industry had a spring in its step again. The show itself was BUZZING, with 368K attendees (+3% over last year), maxed-out exhibit space, and Opening Night Live pulling over 78M online views (+7.5%). Let’s have a look at the games at the event that brought in the most new Steam wishlists between August 23 and 30. One quick thing before we start, and stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but wishlists are NOT a barometer for launch sales (they’re bookmarks, not baskets is what we always say over here at Alinea). With that aside, wishlists are a nice gauge of hype, so let’s dive in. Witche(r)s and Warlocks take the top two spots The biggest game of the event (by new wishlists, anyways) wasn’t a game at all. It was an expansion. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s upcoming expansion, Songs of the Past, nabbed 451K Steam wishlists by the end of the weekend. It’s a big example of something we bang on about constantly: proven IP with built-in fandom is the most powerful force in this market. But said IP can also ripple into other external success stories (more on that later!). Anyway, Songs of the Past debuted at Opening Night Live, and it’s the first Witcher 3 expansion in over a decade, landing next year after a full Witcher 3 remaster (free for existing owners!) arrives next month. The Witcher 3 has sold around 66M copies, and I’ll be one of those owners jumping back in to refresh myself on the core game (like there isn’t enough to play!), then play the expansion next year. This is all part of CDPR’s plan. The studio is clearly whetting everyone’s appetite for The Witcher 4 in 2028 via a classic bridge strategy. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Releasing a free 4K remaster next month – followed by a proper expansion in 2027 – keeps IP top-of-mind across a huge gap between content (games-wise, anyway). It kind of echoes Capcom’s evergreen catalogue strategy. And outsourcing co-development to Fool’s Theory (a studio led by trusted Witcher 3 veterans) keeps CDPR’s internal headcount focused on The Witcher 4. #2 by wishlists between Aug 23 and 30 went to another giant IP: Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons, published by Wizards of the Coast and developed by Invoke Studios (a team of ex-Far Cry, Watch Dogs, and Splinter Cell devs). It’s due to launch in 2027, and it looks brilliant so far. It’s a dark-fantasy open world with third-person spell-slinging. It’s a very Witcher-ish aesthetic. As you might expect, 48% of Warlock’s Steam wishlisters have played Baldur’s Gate 3, and 46% have played The Witcher 3. One to watch. For sure! Mash-ups: Anime GTA (!?) and a city-builder for kids (and adults) Ananta took #3 with 302K new wishlists. It’s an open-world game that looks like GTA and Persona had a baby. It was published by NetEase, developed by Naked Rain, and got a trailer at Opening Night Live. I got hands-on at the show, and it wears its influences openly; there’s literal web-slinging (very Spider-Man) and a LOAD of mini-games (Like a Dragon). It’s free-to-play and out in January. For Ananta, Naked Rain is taking the free-to-play, cosmetics-only route. That’s certainly a choice for a single-player open-world game. Without gacha mechanics driving high ARPU, Ananta is betting purely on top-of-funnel reach and long-term retention. This puts pressure on skin appeal when there’s no multiplayer lobby to flex in (although, co-op is reportedly coming later). Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Then there’s Lego Skylines (273K wishlists between Aug 23 and 30), which does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a cosy Lego twist on the city-builder genre, as shallow or as deep as you fancy (five min quick sesh or ten-hour no-lifer session; latter for me). There’s some family-friendly stuff in there like couch co-op, which is only really viable on console. Iceflake Studios, which Paradox acquired back in 2020 is developing this one. So Paradox is probably looking for a family-friendly onramp to its rad Cities: Skylines games. The overlap there is plain, with 33% of Lego Skylines wishlisters having played Cities: Skylines and 16% Skylines II. There’s no doubt plenty of parents here (and uncles, ahem) planning to indoctrinate the next gen of city-builders. I’ll definitely be playing with my youngest nephew. This one could be big and educational. I’m very curious to see more. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Mature IP, new and old, rounds out the list As for the rest of the list of gamescom games by new wishlists between Aug 23 and 30: Heroes of Might & Magic III Remake got 189K new wishlists. It remakes the iconic 1999 turn-based-strategy classic in full 3D and 4K. It follows this year’s Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era (~1.8M copies sold, as per our estimates), and around a quarter of the III Remake wishlisters have played Olden Era, including 7% of them this month. Wardogs – a $40 PvP shooter – added another 146K to an already massive pile (nearly 1.6M total). It’s published by Team17 and made by Bulkhead. It plays somewhere between the tactical squad stuff of … Squad and the all-out-chaos battlefield of … Battlefield. It’s up to 100 players, and it’s out in about 10 days. It’s already pre-sold over 500K copies on Steam ($16.6M), boosted by a pre-order-only beta. It sold another 70K copies during gamescom, too. Afterworld managed 121K new wishlists. It’s a Paradox-made post-apocalyptic grand-strategy game, and it was announced at the show. It’s a departure from Paradox’s usual historical stuff, and the studio’s first new setting in over a decade. The Paradox purists are into it, with over half its wishlisters having played Hearts of Iron IV (19% this month) and 41% Crusader Kings III (17% this month). Metro 2039 got 110K during the show, tunnelling its total past 1.3M. Nearly 40% of wishlisters have played 2020’s Metro Exodus, the previous mainline title in the series. The Metro novels are Russian, dev 4A Games is Ukrainian, and it’s set in Moscow, so it’s unsurprising that – after the US (17.3% of wishlisters) – the next two countries are Russia (12.7%) and Ukraine (10.0%). The Blood of the Dawnwalker drew in (the blood of) 108K new wishlisters, now totalling an impressive 1.7M (at a $70 price point, though). It’s an open-world dark-fantasy action-RPG set in 14th-century Europe (with vampires!), made by some former Witcher devs at Rebel Wolves. Again, it shows. Over half of Blood of the Dawnwalker’s wishlisters have played The Witcher 3, and its #2 market is Poland, home of Rebel Wolves. That’s that hometown-hero effect we keep banging on about again! And Blood of the Dawnwalker plays very well, by the way. While it looks like a Witcher clone on the surface, it actually brings a lot to the table mechanics-wise. I love the whole time-as-a-currency spin on RPG gameplay. It gives the game a different, refreshing pace. Essentially, you start Blood of the Dawnwalker with a pool of 480 action points spread across 30 days and 30 nights. As for how the game performs, we’ll be posting some numbers next week, so hit subscribe below to get that in your inbox when it’s ready. Subscribe The Witcher’s legacy ripples Make no mistake: on a high level, this was The Witcher‘s gamescom. The #1 game by wishlisters was a Witcher 3 DLC. Warlock is clearly Witcher-inspired – as is Blood of the Dawnwalker, which was made by ex-Witcher devs. There was a lot of other cool stuff on the floor that we’ll no doubt be covering in subsequent newsletters, though! As always, wishlists went through the roof for sequels, remakes, DLC, and licensed IP. As always, though, these wishlists will likely convert to about 5% to 10% of launch-day buyers, with the probable exception of The Witcher DLC – the exception that proves the rule. Either way, we’ve got a nice, diverse list here – one that is very Witcher-y, Paradox-y, and – if you’re a fan of great games on Steam – a bloody good list. We even got a bunch of new IP to get excited for. Great gamescom! Even if we are still processing that unfathomable number of mini Kölsch beers! One more thing: GTA 6 broke the internet (again) Move aside, Spider-Man and The Odyssey (I love you both, really). But the decade’s defining entertainment zeitgeist is round the corner. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that Rockstar dropped an extended look at GTA 6 last week. It was INSANE, the most impressed I’ve ever been by a showcase like this. You can see the budget seeping through every second of the extended look, and this level of game is unobtainable for any other publisher. Everyone’s going nuts, and rightly so. GTA 6 is out in holiday 2026, and it’ll be the biggest entertainment release ever, full stop. For those without a PS5 or Xbox Series console, a $500-$900 console is a big ask in this economy, but GTA will pull a lot of last-generation-console fence sitters over the current-gen fence either way: The autumn timing puts GTA 6 on (digital) shelves for the holidays, meaning a PS5 or Xbox (let’s be honest, mostly the former) will be on many a Christmas and Hanukkah list. Demand will outweigh the struggling supply, though, and PS5 Pros are already sold out and being sold at a markup via scalpers. Every console that isn’t on a shelf is a sale deferred or lost, and worse, it hands scalpers the margin. GTA has cultural clout that reaches everyone. It’s been a mainstream fixture since 2001’s GTA III and its clout has only grown exponentially since then. There’s a touchpoint for every generation alive. The FOMO-word-of-mouth double punch does the rest. Loading... It’ll reactivate the lockdown cohort, the millions who picked up gaming in 2020-21 and churned. GTA 6 will bring them back. Remember when College Football 25 brought a bunch of US gamers to current-gen consoles? GTA will do that globally. Once they’re back (or upgraded), and all GTA’d out, the fresh current-gen-console folks will check out the rest of the current-gen catalogue they missed. GTA Online, if not free to play, will also lead to a boost for PS+ and Xbox Game Pass, another boost for the ecosystem players. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Even some of the smug PCMR 60FPS crew won’t be able to resist their FOMO and will bite the bullet on a console to play this one early (then double dip). The consoles cost the same as a decent stick of RAM these days anyway lmao… Don’t get me wrong, though. GTA 6 is no silver bullet for the mature console market, but it does prime the current gen for a couple of strong swan-song years. And it’ll also give the consoles more users from which to maximise ARPU. ‘’We are in the latter half of the lifetime cycle of [the PS5],’’ said Sony President and CEO Hiroki Totoki in a Wall Street Journal interview. ‘’That means we do not need to aggressively sell the console today; rather than that, we are focusing on the current revenue from the current user base.’’ The biggest, best premium games always arrive late in a console cycle, so getting more players aboard now, ahead of that content storm (the new current-gen-only Call of Duty included), is a clear win for the platforms. On the Netflix thing, though: let’s all chill out a bit, like. Half my LinkedIn feed was going bonkers treating the reveal debuting on Netflix like it’s the future of entertainment. It wasn’t. It was a six-hour head start, and Netflix left that detail out of the “first-of-its-kind partnership” press release. The extended look hit Netflix at 3pm ET on 27 August, then went up on YouTube and Rockstar’s site for everyone six hours later. And it was all over social immediately, anyways. This reveal was going to reach an untold number of people whether it debuted on Netflix, YouTube, a Times Square screen, or a group chat. The last trailer did nearly half a billion views in a day with no gatekeeper at all. Netflix just stood next to that audience for six hours, borrowing it. It’s was a tidy deal for Netflix, sure. But every outlet on earth was breaking the thing down frame by frame by the evening anyway. Anyway. I’m hype. And we’ll be covering some GTA numbers on the newsletter soon. So hit subscribe below to get that in your inbox when it’s ready! Subscribe The last word Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover. [Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

Sep 1 • 10:27 AM EDT • Technology • alineaanalytics.substack.com

TP-Link’s first Wi-Fi 8 router is almost here

The Wi-Fi 7 certification is still very fresh.

Sep 1 • 6:18 AM EDT • Technology • theverge.com

Scientists added sulfuric acid weekly to an Ontario lake for 17 years, lowering pH from 6.8 to 5.2; decades later its lake trout population remains below half its former level

A lake in northwestern Ontario became the setting for a landmark experiment on the effects of acid rain. For 17 years, scientists deliberately added sulfuric acid to Lake 223 every week, gradually changing the water's chemistry to mimic the effects of acid rain that was damaging lakes across North America and Europe.

Sep 1 • 5:55 AM EDT • Science • timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Indiana hospitals end routine ambulance diversion

Indiana hospitals and emergency medical providers entered into an agreement with the Indiana Department of Health Monday to stop directing ambulances to other facilities when emergency departments become overcrowded.

Sep 1 • 4:30 AM EDT • Health • indianacapitalchronicle.com

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Aug 31 • 10:33 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Seven Scorers Lift No. 1 Stanford to 7-0 Rout

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Aug 31 • 7:50 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

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Aug 31 • 6:29 PM EDT • Health • wcpo.com

Game on: Delta takes sports fandom global with new Sport 24 partnership

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Aug 31 • 9:00 AM EDT • Sports • news.delta.com

Red Sox news: Ceddanne Rafaela grabs attention with post after controversial no-catch

Boston Red Sox outfielder Ceddanne Rafaela made his frustration clear after a disputed defensive play became a major turning point in a 16-1 loss to the New York Yankees on Sunday . Boston and New York was tied 0-0 in the fifth inning when Jazz Chisholm Jr. sent a 299-foot fly ball toward right-center field. Rafaela adjusted his route, charged […] The post Red Sox news: Ceddanne Rafaela grabs attention with post after controversial no-catch appeared first on ClutchPoints.

Aug 31 • 2:04 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Hotlines can’t aid maternity-care capacity

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Aug 30 • 10:25 PM EDT • Health • washingtonpost.com

3 takeaways as Pitt routs short-handed Wisconsin volleyball

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Aug 30 • 2:52 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

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Aug 30 • 5:00 AM EDT • Business • heraldonline.com

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Aug 29 • 6:00 AM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com

Department experiments with adding ‘like’ button into radiology reporting workflows

Diagnostic radiologists rarely receive routine feedback from referring clinicians on the quality and value of their work, likely contributing to burnout and poor job satisfaction, experts write.

Aug 28 • 2:13 AM EDT • Business • radiologybusiness.com

Florence Harding Photographed Taught Me About Women Partaking in Politics

What would Florence Kling Harding think now? A week or so ago when I cast my ballot at my designated polling place this thought crossed my mind. I imagine the former first lady would be pleased about how routine voting has become for women in the United States. But perhaps she would not be satisfied. Today, a published essay I wrote for In Pursuit spotlights a lesson in leadership demonstrated by First Lady Florence Harding. In my research, I discovered there’s a lot to be said about this strong female historic figure. But it was the blurry photograph capturing Mrs. Harding voting for her husband Warren G. Harding, one of two presidential candidates from Ohio, on Nov. 2, 1920—Election Day—that drew my attention. It was the first presidential election held in the United States after the ratification and certification of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote. Its 106th anniversary was marked on Wednesday. I remember thinking what a shame it was that her presence in the image was imperfect while the mostly men surrounding her were in sharp focus. Perhaps cynically I thought, “No surprise!” On further examination, though, the clear reaction of the people surrounding Mrs. Harding was equally important. In that snapshot of time, many of their expressions were serious. One man stood elevated above the rest with a slight smile as he caught a glimpse of history. Mr. Harding hovered over his wife’s shoulder closely observing the last seconds of her vote being cast. Their gazes were locked in on who would hours later become first lady. Subscribe The attention she drew is worth noting, mostly because, as I learned, Mrs. Harding understood the power her image could have on women across the country. She and I share in common a career in newspapers—hers the business side and mine on the editorial side. Nevertheless, it became clear to me as I write in the essay that she understood if she was seen voting, other women would follow suit. That wouldn’t necessarily be the case in that 1920 election, though, Karen Kedrowski, the director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University, explained to me. Florence Harding was a suffrage advocate. But, suffrage was a contentious issue and women were far from united at the time of the election. In fact, a substantial number of women and active anti-suffrage organizations thought women participating in elections was a “bad idea and antithetical to their roles in the private sphere as mothers and homemakers,” Kedrowski said, adding that women were also viewed as the moral compass for their husbands and sons. If women got involved in politics they would become contaminated by it. Suffragists, on the other hand, wanted to bring that moral presence into politics to help clean things up. Only about 30% of women voted in that 1920 presidential election. That was a start. More than 100 years later in the 2024 presidential election, 66.9% of eligible women voted (91.3 million), compared to 63.7% of men who voted (82.6 million), according to the League of Women Voters. Yes, Florence Harding would be pleased. Subscribe That imperfect Election Day image was important symbolism about women’s potential during what was known as the “Modern Woman” era and the growing public role women were taking in the 1920s. I imagine Florence Harding might agree with other succeeding first ladies when it comes to gender equality and the importance of the vote. Like Michelle Obama when she said in her memoir Becoming, “We all play a role in this democracy. We need to remember the power of every vote.” Or Hillary Clinton during her unsuccessful run for president in 2016 when she remarked on International Women’s Day: “We celebrate the progress we’ve made to advance the full participation of women in economies and societies. And most importantly, we recommit to finishing the unfinished work that remains …” I hope if you are reading this, you will also read my essay on Florence Harding’s leadership lesson for In Pursuit. And perhaps that will move you to dig deeper and read more about Florence Harding’s life circumstances in biographies like First Lady Florence Harding: Behind the Tragedy and Controversy by Katherine A. S. Sibley. No, I do not think Florence Harding would be satisfied despite how far women have come from that day she first entered her polling place. She once wrote to the Camp Fire Girls, “The part that women play in the world has been greatly changed … It has been broadened and enlarged …” It has. And as women continue to engage in civics it continues to be. I imagine Florence Harding would want women to keep meeting the moment. Read the In Pursuit essay Watch on C-SPAN Share East Wing Magazine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe

Aug 27 • 5:01 PM EDT • Politics • eastwingmagazine.com

Oura Health's Tom Hale discusses his daily work routine

The CEO of Oura Health, Tom Hale, shares his wellness-focused routine, integrating health data and time management for productivity and balance.

Aug 27 • 5:05 AM EDT • Health • businessinsider.com

Illinois schools prepare for mandated student mental health screenings

Back-to-school season can bring excitement over new classrooms, friendships and routines. But for some students, returning to school can also bring anxiety and other mental health challenges.

Aug 26 • 7:17 AM EDT • Health • firstalert4.com

“Beginning of the End”: Fans React as SEC Statement Clears Eligibility Rules Amid Dae’Quan Wright’s Return

The SEC has laid down a huge marker when it comes to the eligibility of players returning to college, finally putting out a statement that seemingly makes it clear that players who have been a part of professional leagues like the NFL and NBA will not be able to return to college for another year of eligibility. The statement reads as follows and is an attempt to clamp down on players who have been seeking extra eligibility via the legal route.

Aug 26 • 4:41 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Canadians Unveil Major Change At Bell Centre

The Montreal Canadiens have routinely been regarded as enjoying arguably the top home ice advantage not only in the National Hockey League, but in North American professional sports.Bell Centre has routinely been described by Canadiens players and opponents alike as an intimidating and special atmosphere to play in thanks not only to the history forever […] The post Canadians Unveil Major Change At Bell Centre appeared first on HEAVY.

Aug 26 • 12:43 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Dolly Parton: Interesting things you never knew about the music legend

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Aug 25 • 3:44 PM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Alfalfa sprouts linked to food poisoning in 15 states, officials say

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Aug 24 • 3:56 PM EDT • Health • latimes.com

This Week: SF Politics, Bike East Bay Volunteer Night, SFMTA Photo Archive

Here is a list of events this week. Tuesday SF Politics 101 with Joel Engardio. ​SF Politics 101 is a look at how local politics work and the history that shaped San Francisco—brought to life with visuals and narrative storytelling. Tuesday, August 25, 6-7:15 p.m. SPUR Urban Center, 654 Mission Street, S.F. Register to attend. Tuesday Bike East Bay Volunteer Night. Tackle projects while socializing with fellow advocates. Snacks provided. Tuesday, August 25, 6-8 p.m. Bike East Bay Office, 466 Water Street, Oakland. Wednesday SFMTA Photo Archive and Peter Hartlaub. Go back in time for an evening of photos, stories and conversation with the Chronicle, Mayor Art Agnos, and S.F. Muni. Wednesday, August 26, 5:30 p.m. Gray Area Foundation / Grand Theatre, 2667 Mission Street, S.F. Get tickets. Wednesday Smart City Cycling. Join the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition for a presentation for people interested in biking but intimidated by urban traffic plus anyone already riding who wants to hone their skills. Wednesday, August 26, 6-7:30 p.m. Anza Branch Public Library, 550 37th Avenue, S.F. Thursday Member Repair Party. Join the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and learn how to repair your bike. Thursday, August 27, 5-7 p.m. San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, 1720 Market Street, S.F. RSVP required. Saturday The Bay Ride. Circumnavigate the San Francisco Bay while raising funds for cycling infrastructure that makes streets safer for everyone. Saturday, August 29, 7 a.m.-5 p.m. Starts at Sports Basement Presidio, 610 Old Mason Street, S.F. Saturday Flat Fix Clinic for Students and Families. Join the Safe Routes to School team at the Marina Branch Branch Library for a hands-on flat fix clinic. Saturday, August 29, 2-3:30 p.m. Marina Branch Public Library, 1890 Chestnut Street, S.F. Got an event we should know about? Drop us a line.

Aug 24 • 11:44 AM EDT • Politics • sf.streetsblog.org

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Aug 24 • 6:00 AM EDT • Science • scientificamerican.com

Tricky Business clear-cut winner of $200K Albany

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Aug 23 • 7:17 PM EDT • Business • nyra.com

This kind of throw will keep Stetson Bennett employed

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Aug 23 • 9:30 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Executive coach shares Monday morning and Friday afternoon routine

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Aug 23 • 5:55 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Minnesota grower’s alfalfa sprouts linked to illnesses in 15 states, health officials say

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Aug 22 • 8:29 PM EDT • Health • startribune.com

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Aug 22 • 4:46 PM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Back-to-school healthy habits for the family

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Aug 22 • 11:49 AM EDT • Health • fox5atlanta.com

Tennis in 2026 is a reminder of what Williams, Federer, Nadal and Djokovic made the sport forget

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Aug 22 • 5:32 AM EDT • Sports • nytimes.com

Alfalfa sprout linked to food-poisoning outbreak in 15 states, health officials say

U.S. health officials say a food-poisoning outbreak tied to alfalfa sprouts and involving multiple germs has sickened people in 15 states.

Aug 21 • 3:42 PM EDT • Health • cnn.com

US health agencies report 55 cases of E. coli and salmonella infections tied to alfalfa sprouts

U.S. health officials on Friday said they were investigating a multistate outbreak of E. coli and salmonella ​infections linked to alfalfa sprouts.

Aug 21 • 3:06 PM EDT • Health • reuters.com

US Health Agencies Report 55 Cases of E. Coli and Salmonella Infections Tied to Alfalfa Sprouts

Aug 21 (Reuters) - U.S. health officials on ⁠Friday ⁠said they were investigating ⁠a multistate outbreak of E. coli and salmonella infections linked to alfalfa sprouts. Here are more details: • The Food ‌and Drug Administration and Centers ‌for Disease Control and Prevention have reported 55 cases ...

Aug 21 • 3:05 PM EDT • Health • usnews.com

FDA confirms Class I recall for thousands of stroke prevention devices

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Aug 21 • 10:49 AM EDT • Business • cardiovascularbusiness.com

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Aug 21 • 7:03 AM EDT • Technology • eurogamer.net

RayNeo's New Smart Glasses Are Taking the Cameraless Route

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Aug 21 • 3:00 AM EDT • Technology • gizmodo.com

Health officials trace E. coli and salmonella outbreak to Minnesota alfalfa grower

Twenty-three E. coli and salmonella illnesses in Minnesota were linked to produce grown by Everything Sprouts and sold under the Calco and Everything Sprouts brands.

Aug 20 • 5:15 PM EDT • Health • startribune.com

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Aug 20 • 5:05 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Colts TE Tyler Warren exits practice with an injury

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Aug 19 • 4:07 PM EDT • Sports • nbcsports.com

Stripe Buys A.I. Start-Up OpenRouter for $7.5 Billion

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Aug 19 • 1:39 PM EDT • Business • nytimes.com

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Aug 18 • 8:42 AM EDT • Sports • theconversation.com

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Aug 18 • 8:00 AM EDT • Sports • uta.edu

Try This Doctor-Approved Walking Routine to Preserve Bone Health in Mid-Life

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Aug 18 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • today.com

Scientists Uncover a Surprising New Route for Stonehenge’s Most Mysterious Stone

Stonehenge’s Altar Stone may have traveled south through a combination of glacial transport and deliberate human movement. Stonehenge was assembled from stones weighing between 2 and 25 tons, an astonishing construction effort for people living before the wheel was invented. Yet the puzzle extends beyond how such massive rocks were raised. Many of the stones

Aug 17 • 10:47 AM EDT • Science • scitechdaily.com

Scientists reveal the real culprit behind the surge in dangerous flight turbulence - Futura-Sciences

Why Turbulence Is on the Rise Many travelers believe flights feel more turbulent than they used to. Atmospheric measurements prove they’re right, at least when it comes to certain types of turbulence. In fact, a particular kind of turbulence has jumped by 55% along major air routes. What’s behind this...

Aug 16 • 1:30 PM EDT • Science • futura-sciences.com

Arsenal rout Man City in Community Shield masterclass

Arsenal powered to a 3-0 win against Manchester City in the Community Shield on Sunday, delivering a swaggering statement of intent ahead of their Premier League title defence.Only City, in 2019, have gone onto become Premier League champions among the previous 15 winners of the Community Shield.

Aug 16 • 11:59 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Researchers Use Ordinary WiFi Connections to Create Images of Nearby People and Their Surroundings

Science Daily reports: Researchers showed that unencrypted signals routinely exchanged between WiFi devices and routers can be used to create radio-based images of people and recognize them within seconds. In tests involving 197 participants, the system identified individuals with nearly 100% accu...

Aug 16 • 8:00 AM EDT • Technology • mobile.slashdot.org

A31 ongoing closure 'painful' for New Forest businesses

The main route between Southampton and Bournemouth has been closed by a major fire since Sunday.

Aug 15 • 2:15 AM EDT • Business • bbc.com

Chiefs heiress Gracie Hunt reveals why she lifts heavy weights

Gracie Hunt reveals her farmer's litmus test for clean eating and explains why heavy strength training replaced marathon running in her fitness routine.

Aug 14 • 11:35 PM EDT • Health • foxnews.com

‘Monkey Island’ Creator Finds Wealthy Investor for Next Game

Ron Gilbert didn’t want to go with a traditional publisher for ‘Thimbleweed Park 2,’ so he took an unorthodox route

Aug 14 • 12:00 PM EDT • Technology • bloomberg.com

Get informed, Get Protected: Catch Up on HPV Vaccination

by Lucia Gutierrez, VDH Summer Intern Academy Becoming a young adult brings new routines and responsibilities, from managing school and work commitments to taking a more active role in your […]

Aug 14 • 11:00 AM EDT • Health • vdh.virginia.gov

HHS seeks comments on collection of customer feedback for national health information exchange network

The Department of Health and Human Services Aug. 14 released a request for comments through the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT on a proposed three-year generic clearance to collect routine customer feedback on service delivery and performance related to the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement.

Aug 14 • 10:22 AM EDT • Health • aha.org

Google should have gone the GTA 6 route with its Pixel 11 show; instead, we got the Trevor Noah cringe fest

Why did they do a show eight hours AFTER the phones were announced??

Aug 13 • 12:44 PM EDT • Technology • androidcentral.com

AI needs science’s search history

“Actually, that’s where the gold is,” said Alasdair Russell, my graduate school friend who leads a pre-clinical genome editing group at Cambridge. He was talking about the winding road of science that is omitted from published papers. “When you’re discussing how to do the experiment, and why this way is better than another way, and what does the data really mean? I know what it shows, but what does it mean?” At RAAIS 2026, he described how his group has begun logging the twisting path of discovery as it happens, recording the verbal and written exchanges that normally disappear. Ideas become nodes in a living graph: they branch when a meeting produces two plausible experiments, merge when separate lines of evidence converge, and go dark when someone quietly stops pursuing them. In his implementation, one agent scores novelty, while another tries to learn “how scientists think and how they navigate through a complex world of data,” so that high-potential nodes can trigger deeper investigation. As frontier AI labs deploy agents toward scientific discovery, giving AI authentic scientific taste remains a trillion-dollar dilemma. The bottleneck is that the record we have kept for centuries of science might be insufficient to get us there. The experiments that never make the paper Peter Medawar, 1960 Nobel laureate and “father of transplantation,” asked in 1963 whether the scientific paper was a fraud, and answered yes: the form of the paper misrepresents the thinking that produced it. Sixty years on, the diagnosis is unchanged. A paper presents a clean progression from hypothesis to result to conclusion. Lost along the way are the unconventional theories, the abandoned or unaffordable methods, and the underwhelming and inconclusive data. It reads like a browser history with every dead end deleted: the ten open tabs, the four rephrased queries, the wrong turn down a subforum. All scrubbed, leaving one clean path from question to answer as the canonical path. What has changed since then is that the discarded material is now worth something. No high-impact journal wants these artifacts, but raw trial and error is the most likely source of the training data required to develop scientific intuition, or what researchers call taste. Earlier attempts to capture the discards were motivated by scientific integrity. The Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine launched in 2002 to publish rigorous studies that disputed established models or exposed ineffective treatments. Its archive preserved negative conclusions after they had become papers, rather than the live alternatives and arguments that produced them. BioMed Central closed it in 2017, saying the mission had been served now that other journals publish null results. A less generous reading is that in fifteen years it published around 200 papers because almost nobody wants to read a negative result, let alone write one up when it will not count toward academic tenure. AI models are different. Even an uninteresting negative result can be useful, provided it is labeled. Earlier this year, Anthropic put a version of this to the test. The company pulled 129 decision points from real Claude Code sessions between January and March 2026, showed models the work up to a human detour, and asked what should happen next. Claude Mythos Preview beat the human choice 64% of the time, while Opus 4.5 managed 51%. The comparison was tilted toward the models because Anthropic deliberately chose moments where the human decision had room for improvement. On 127 further scenarios where the human action was already strong, the models improved on it only about 20% of the time. The study was possible because Anthropic’s researchers work inside a tool that logs by default. The reasoning, detours and outcome are produced in the same working environment. Biology has no equivalent. Its reasoning happens in hallways, at benches, in Slack threads and on whiteboards, while the outcome arrives weeks later somewhere else. The record has to emerge from the work itself. Ask scientists to reconstruct it afterwards and we’ll create another polished account. Subscribe A log is not a label Before any of this becomes training data, a negative result has to say what failed. The first paper published in the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine examined 234 negative studies across five leading medical journals. Only 30% discussed statistical power, and half clearly defined a primary outcome. Tell a model an experiment failed, without telling it whether the assay was underpowered, a reagent had degraded, or the hypothesis was simply wrong, and it will learn noise with confidence. Decision histories have a second missing label too. When a lab considers five experiments and runs one, only the chosen branch returns an outcome. The other four are experimental counterfactuals. Researchers call this the selective labels problem: the data reveal results only for the actions someone chose to take. Such a record can teach a model to imitate a lab’s taste, but it cannot establish that the taste was good. It also smuggles local constraints into general lessons. A lab that never ran cryo-EM because it did not own a microscope teaches a model that cryo-EM is rarely the right call. Alasdair’s nodes preserve the candidate set, which is the necessary first step. To be useful, each decision record needs six fields: The evidence available at that moment, and nothing that arrived later. The candidates considered, including the ones dismissed in a sentence. For each candidate: the expected result, the confidence attached to it, and the cost in time and money. The route chosen, and the reason. What happened next. How the evidence changed the scientist’s view. These must be timestamped before the outcome, because hindsight turns uncertainty into inevitability. Disagreement also has to survive. Averaging three scientists into one clean rationale reproduces exactly the information loss we are trying to fix. But there is an obvious failure mode here. Once decisions are logged and scored, people log for the record post-facto. Anyone who has watched an electronic lab notebook fill up with retrospective tidying knows how quickly a research tool becomes a compliance exercise. A record that costs a scientist ten minutes of honest reflection per decision is worth far more than one that costs an hour of performance. A publication initiative called Registered Reports offers a useful starting point. Here, researchers submit their rationale, methods and analysis plan for peer review before the data exist, and the journal commits in principle to publish if they follow the approved plan. Nature has now expanded the format across every field it covers. This approach to paper writing timestamps intent before the outcome, but it freezes one plan. A useful search history must also preserve how the plan changed, which alternatives were rejected, when, and on what evidence. Subscribe Run the runner-up Autonomous labs show what happens when decisions and outcomes are connected in a loop. Liverpool’s mobile robotic chemist ran 688 experiments over eight days in a ten-variable formulation space. A batched Bayesian search used each result to choose the next experiments and found photocatalyst mixtures six times more active than the starting formulations. Every completed experiment changed what the system did next. The robot optimized within a goal and search space that humans had already chosen. It did not decide which scientific question mattered. So what this work demonstrates is narrower, but still useful: a search history pays off when the options return standardized outcomes quickly. Open-ended biology is harder because branches can take weeks and the discarded alternatives may never be run. Some exploration therefore has to be bought. Where two branches are plausible and the stakes justify the cost, a lab should sometimes run the runner-up. Otherwise the record captures what today’s scientists usually chose and stays silent on what they systematically overlooked. A funder could ring-fence a small fraction of a grant for the branch not taken, provided that the decision record and the outcome are both deposited. That costs money, but so does having every lab rediscover the same abandoned path. Test whether taste transfers When it comes time to evaluate if our new AI system exhibits taste, the comparison should run across laboratories and fields. At selected decision points in a live research campaign, we should freeze the six fields: the evidence, the candidates, expected results, confidence, costs and the choice made. Experts then rank the options before the outcomes are known, and those outcomes are checked independently later. We could give models one of two diets - papers alone, or papers plus decision histories - and ask them to rank the next experiment on unfamiliar projects. Then, we score information gained per dollar and week, calibration, and how quickly weak branches are abandoned. If histories improve choices only inside the lab that produced them, they amount to useful organizational memory. If they improve choices on unfamiliar problems elsewhere, Alasdair’s group will have captured something science has never managed to write down: a transferable record of taste. Until that happens, a scientific search history is a promising record, not yet a training set.

Aug 13 • 11:16 AM EDT • Science • press.airstreet.com

'Sky is the limit' for Karoline Leavitt: Political analysts weigh-in on Trump White House departure

Former teachers of Leavitt while she studied at Saint Anselm College suggest there are multiple routes Leavitt could take after exiting White House Press Secretary role

Aug 12 • 11:12 PM EDT • Politics • wmur.com

In Senate race, Flanagan and Tafoya bring vastly different politics, experience

Democrat Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and Republican Michele Tafoya have come to politics from very different routes and backgrounds. As the two battle it out for an open U.S. Senate seat, analysts expect a large amount of money to flow into the race.

Aug 12 • 5:22 PM EDT • Politics • mprnews.org

Baltimore entertainment venue, The 8 X 10, sold

The 8x10, a Baltimore live music venue, sold to Pennsylvania-based Rising Sun Presents, real estate firm Trout Daniel & Associates announced.

Aug 12 • 4:56 PM EDT • Entertainment • thedailyrecord.com

Aaron Bruno of AWOLNATION, Alexia Jayy, Junior Raiderettes highlight Thursday's gameday entertainment

Aaron Bruno will take the stage at halftime while Alexia Jayy will perform the National Anthem. The Junior Raiderettes will perform a special routine pregame.

Aug 12 • 4:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • raiders.com

Tiger Woods Announces Personal News After Recent Business Development

Tiger Woods shared his personal outlook Tuesday regarding Trout National. The course opened April 15. It is his years-long collaboration with Los Angeles Angels star Mike Trout.Woods was out of the country during the opening. He was undergoing rehab in Zurich.“From vision to reality,” he said. “It has been incredibly rewarding to work alongside @miketrout , John […] The post Tiger Woods Announces Personal News After Recent Business Development appeared first on HEAVY.

Aug 12 • 11:34 AM EDT • Business • sports.yahoo.com

Storms leave over 729,000 homes and businesses without power in US Midwest

Over 729,000 homes and businesses were without power on Wednesday as severe ​storms battered the U.S. Midwest, according to ‌data from PowerOutage.us.

Aug 12 • 8:28 AM EDT • Business • reuters.com

Trump brushes off reporter question about running for third term in 2028: 'The law is very strong'

President Donald Trump told reporters "the law is very strong" on a third term but has previously outlined a JD Vance route scholars reject.

Aug 12 • 8:20 AM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com

Dan Campbell Makes Exciting Declaration About Lions' Wide Receiver Room

The Detroit Lions' offense has been one of the most productive units in the NFL over the past few years, and the wide receiver room has been a primary reason for their success. Obviously, the position group is fueled by the duo of Amon-Ra St. Brown and Jameson Williams. The pair complement each other very well, as St. Brown is a savvy route runner with exceptional hands, while Williams adds speed, explosiveness, and big-play ability.

Aug 11 • 8:38 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Tesla's New 'Preferred Routes' Doesn't Require the Summer Update

One of Tesla's most exciting Summer Update features does not require receiving the 2026.26 vehicle update.

Aug 11 • 1:44 PM EDT • Technology • notateslaapp.com

Inside David Hatcher's day as Baringa's managing partner

David Hatcher is the managing partner of Baringa, a global consulting firm. He shared his daily routine and some of his best productivity hacks.

Aug 11 • 5:17 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

HeyDay Entertainment to close after nearly 20 years amid planned Norman turnpike route

Aug 10 • 11:14 PM EDT • Entertainment • okcfox.com

Opinion | How We Talk About Mental Health Challenges

The National Alliance on Mental Illness responds to an Opinion guest essay. Also: President Trump’s arch; a retreat on vaccines; Mr. Trump and Canada.

Aug 10 • 12:26 PM EDT • Health • nytimes.com

Los Angeles Angels Announce Mike Trout Change During Marlins Series

The Los Angeles Angels are coming off a 7-0 loss Saturday against the Miami Marlins, setting the stage for Sunday’s matchup to decide who takes the weekend series. Ahead of Sunday’s game, which will feature Grayson Rodriguez for the Angels and Ryan Gusto for the Marlins, Angels manager Kurt Suzuki made a few tweaks to […] The post Los Angeles Angels Announce Mike Trout Change During Marlins Series appeared first on HEAVY.

Aug 9 • 2:52 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Grants Boost New Waynesboro Businesses

Heading into Waynesboro on Route 250 past the Rockfish Gap entrance of Shenandoah National Park and the Blue Ridge Tunnel’s western portal, signs of an entrepreneurial wave are easy to spot. The Virginia Metalcrafters Marketplace, a cavernous industrial space where metalworkers forged iron and brass products for more than a century before sitting vacant for

Aug 9 • 11:58 AM EDT • Business • crozetgazette.com

VistaJet founder Thomas Flohr shares his daily routine in St. Moritz

Thomas Flohr is the founder of VistaJet, a private aviation service. He's based in Switzerland but travels often between their 25 offices worldwide.

Aug 9 • 5:05 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

American Airlines Just Made It Harder for Elite Flyers to Get Free Business-Class Upgrades

Starting August 25, AAdvantage members flying economy are losing a valuable perk on popular Hawaii and coast-to-coast routes: a chance to score a complimentary lie-flat seat.

Aug 8 • 5:53 PM EDT • Business • inc.com

OC Jim Bob Cooter discusses health at wide receiver | 2026 Training camp media availability

While unfortunate to have veteran players out for a day or two, the Colts offensive coordinator appreciates the chance to better evaluate younger players who now get a chance to run routes they might not otherwise.

Aug 8 • 12:35 PM EDT • Health • colts.com

American Airlines ends free business upgrades on select Hawaii routes

American Airlines is ending free economy-to-business-class upgrades for its most loyal customers on select long-haul domestic routes where the carrier offers three classes of service.

Aug 8 • 12:00 PM EDT • Business • staradvertiser.com

Angels' Mike Trout: Birthday homer in Miami

Angels' Mike Trout: Birthday homer in Miami

Aug 8 • 12:29 AM EDT • Sports • cbssports.com

Braves' Michael Harris: Crosses plate three times in rout

Braves' Michael Harris: Crosses plate three times in rout

Aug 7 • 9:19 AM EDT • Sports • cbssports.com

American Airlines will stop upgrading elite flyers to business from coach on long domestic flights

American Airlines will no longer give elite frequent flyers free upgrades from economy class to business on some of its longest domestic routes

Aug 6 • 3:55 PM EDT • Business • cnbc.com

Michigan health officials lift lettuce, salad greens warning as cyclosporiasis cases decline

Michigan residents can resume routine guidance on eating lettuce and salad greens, state health officials said Thursday, as cyclosporiasis cases begin to decline.

Aug 6 • 1:55 PM EDT • Health • clickondetroit.com

Sanofi suspends chronic lung disease phase 2 study, tied to ‘strategic business reasons’

Sanofi halted a phase 2 trial testing a monoclonal antibody, SAR445399, in non-cystic fibrosis bronchiectasis, Fierce Biotech has learned. The trial, which began only back in April, was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study to measure the reduction in mucus plug score following treatment with SAR445399 compared with placebo in adults aged 18 to 80 years with NCFB, a chronic lung disease. The trial was officially reported as halted on July 29, the day before Sanofi’s second-quarter earnings call. The decision to pause the trial was made “as part of a company-wide portfolio review for strategic business reasons,” and not due to safety concerns, a Sanofi spokesperson told Fierce. The move to pause the NCFB trial comes during a trying time for Sanofi following a year filled with a series of trial fails. In February, the French pharma ousted CEO Paul Hudson and appointed Merck KGaA leader Belén Garijo, M.D., Ph.D., to steer the ship. Since then, Garijo has been doing a deep dive on correcting the company’s strewn R&D and clinical strategies. On July 24, Sanofi scrapped amlitelimab for atopic dermatitis, despite its lore as being a potential $5 billion blockbuster. During its second-quarter report, the company abandoned two more assets, balinatunfib and itepekimab, following failed trial results in psoriasis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, respectively. SAR445399, only first revealed by Sanofi in 2023, is an anti-interleukin-1 receptor 3 monoclonal antibody developed to block the interleukin 1, 33, and 36 cytokine pathways. These pathways can be important in chronic immune-related dermatologic diseases, such as atopic dermatitis and hidradenitis suppurativa, as well as respiratory conditions, such as NCFB. Related Sanofi’s new CEO ‘looking deeply’ at late-stage pipeline as clinical clearout continues NCFB affects roughly half a million people in the U.S., with a global incidence of greater than one million cases. In August 2025, Insmed received FDA approval for Brinsupri, a DPP1 inhibitor targeting neutrophil activation, for treatment of NCFB in adults and kids ages 12 and older. The British biotech Infex Therapeutics showed promising NCFB phase 2a data using their monoclonal antibody, INFEX702, which acts by disabling Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacteria known to be a major pathogen of NCFB. Sanofi is currently running a separate phase 2 study testing SAR445399 as a potential treatment for the inflammatory skin condition hidradenitis suppurativa.

Aug 5 • 2:50 PM EDT • Business • fiercebiotech.com

Don't Worry, PS5 Has Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave at Home

Beaten Path paves a route to release in 2027

Aug 5 • 12:45 PM EDT • Technology • pushsquare.com

Pixel Watch 5 leaked marketing images surface one week before launch

Google’s marketing images for the Pixel Watch 5 have sprouted up online, and they dive a little deeper into some...

Aug 5 • 10:58 AM EDT • Technology • 9to5google.com

Vehicle crashes into the front of Lisbon business, major traffic impacts

A vehicle crashed into the front of a business on Route 196 in Lisbon on Wednesday morning, knocking out power and creating major traffic issues.

Aug 5 • 9:04 AM EDT • Business • wmtw.com

How trains can transform Persian Gulf politics and global security

Once completed, the 2,177-kilometer GCC Railway will connect six Gulf kingdoms and provide alternative routes to Europe and Asia.

Aug 5 • 8:32 AM EDT • Politics • theconversation.com

Chartbook 464 The"China squeeze" - the politics of development counterfactuals.

There are three types of China shock discourse. Each has a distinct temporal register. China shock 1.0 was a phrase coined by US academics in the 2010s to retrospectively summarize the impact on particular US labour markets, which they identified through painstaking empirical investigation. China shock 2.0 on everyone’s lips in Europe in the mid 2020s is an alarm raised by trans-Atlantic policy thinkers warning of a coming disaster which they project onto Europe’s ailing car industry. The third type of China shock discourse - commonly known as the “China squeeze” launched most recently by Indian economists Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian in the pages of Foreign Affairs - mobilizes a different, more speculative temporal register: the counterfactual realm of alternate history. The China squeeze argument asks not what has happened, or what is going to happen, but what might have been. Specifically, what options for economic development might have been open to Global South economies like India or the economies of sub-Saharan Africa, had it not been for China’s spectacular industrialization since the late 1990s and the persistent competitiveness of China’s manufacture in low-skilled segments. Chatterjee and Subramanian’s argument is that whilst China has built a powerful position in electrical machinery and other high-skill manufacturing, which is now delivering China Shock 2.0, it also continues to run a trade surplus in low-skill, labour-intensive manufacturing. This surplus is large and has remained largely unchanged in fifteen years. Indeed, in the 2010s, in trade with low-income countries, China’s surplus rapidly increased. On their reading, this squeezes low-income producers in low-skill sectors in which they “should” be able to compete. Source: “China’s Mercantilist Squeeze on Developing Countries” Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian. Peterson Institute for International Economics 26-7 May 2026 Chatterjee and Subramanian’s wording is telling: (emphasis mine) The canonical trajectory of economic development in the post-World War II period is for countries to transition from agriculture to manufacturing, first in low-skilled manufacturing and then later on to high-skill manufacturing (Herrendorf, Rogerson, and Valentinyi 2013). At the global level, this implies that high-income countries (HICs) that once specialized in low-skilled activities cede manufacturing export space to poorer countries that come along to occupy that space. In 1965, advanced economies accounted for about 60 percent of global value-added exports in four key low-skilled manufacturing sectors, i.e., apparel, leather, textiles, and footwear. Over time this share declined and began to be occupied first by the East Asian tigers and, beginning in the late 1990s, by China. Today China accounts for about 50 percent of the global market. The question is whether China, with its rising prosperity, is continuing to behave like its richer counterparts and ceding export space to poorer followers or to behave unlike them and continuing to occupy space. In terms of the conceptual maneuvers it performs, of the three China shock discourses, the “China squeeze” argument is by far the most ambitious. After all, it bases its critique of China on a counterfactual imagining of the world. Like any counterfactual argument, to construct this alternative reality it must rely on a heuristic model. To make their argument Chatterjee and Subramanian mobilize two key claims. The first reference point is the actual history of rich-country industrialization, what they refer to as the “canonical path”. The idea is that countries transition from agriculture to light industry and low-skilled manufacturing and from there up the value chain. To make this useful as a standard of comparison and a means to construct a normative standard, they adjust sectoral export shares for two factors: 1. the underlying level of economic development of the exporting country, as measured by national income and 2. the degree to which the sector in question is internationalized. The idea being that for a high income country to have a high export share in low-skill sectors is anomalous and even more so if that particular product is highly internationalized and thus suitable for being “conceded” to lower-income competitors. Where should this process end? Here Chatterjee and Subramanian introduce their second benchmark. Their normative idea of a global development path is one in which, in due course, low-skill manufacturing exports are distributed in proportion to a country’s share in the global labour force. They imagine, in other words, a world of proportional, polycentric global development without much national specialization in low-skill manufacturing. A useful benchmark is that, in labor-intensive manufacturing sectors, a country’s share of world exports should be broadly commensurate with its share of the world’s low-skilled labor endowment. … In the Heckscher-Ohlin model, this would be true if value added per worker and export propensities, i.e., fraction of output that is exported, are the same across countries. It is this pleasant liberal vista of orderly global development, progressing towards a general distribution of low-skilled manufacturing against which they judge reality and conclude that the low-income countries are suffering a “China squeeze”. China is not exiting low-skill sectors fast enough Allowing for its gdp level and the degree of globalization, China’s share of low-skill manufacturing exports is far higher than it “should” be. Relative to population, its low-skill share of exports is far too high. That in turn yields the conclusion that huge numbers of jobs - the authors suggest tens of millions - are being hoarded by China. For the four sectors captured in figure 4, this excess in value-added exports is $110 billion in 2022. For all low-skilled sectors overall captured in appendix figure D.1, excess value-added exports amount to $365 billion. The crowding out of LMIC exports by China is therefore substantial. Both these claims have in common that they are strong structuralisms. The first is that development paths ought to resemble each other. The second is that broadly speaking as far as low-skilled manufacturing is concerned, all countries are alike. If the world currently diverges from the distribution of trade implied by these assumptions, if China is not following the advanced economy path and has huge exports, this must be the result of “policy”, which the authors then put in question as illegitimate or unfair. Thus the naturalistic construction of a canonical path leading to a “level” distribution of low-skilled manufacturing reveals itself to be a polemical tool. From the point of view of China shock polemics, this discourse is no doubt welcome. But as an account of economic history, it must surely be regarded as nothing short of bamboozling. Development paths do not follow a regular, natural sequence. As David Fishman put it aptly, “development is not a queue”. They are always and everywhere, through and through political. Development is not so much a process, as a project. Each such project is more or less well adjusted to its context. As Gerschenkron taught uneven and combined development implies differentiation rather than simple imitation on a single parth. It may be true that Europe and the US exited relatively early from low-skill work. But clearly technology has changed. As C&S themselves point out, China no longer enjoys a low wage environment. Do they really believe that such huge differences can be accounted for either by industrial policy, which as they admit does not operate powerfully in low-skill sectors, or by exchange rate manipulation? What is overwhelmingly dominant in explaining the persistence of “low-skill” manufacturing in China are surely the network effects of complex supply chains. Indeed the label of “low-skill” may miss the point. The degree of globalization which Chatterjee and Subramanian decide to conjure away in their model of the development path - to allow for the fact that Europe and American textiles exporters did not enjoy just-in-time logistics in the 1950s - obscures the point that the networks through which Chinese factories supply the world are themselves key parts of the low-skill industrialization project. China isn’t knocking out 1970s style “cheap”. It has redefined the entire product cycle. C&S’s casual reference to “T-shirts” is telling. In today’s “fast fashion”, there is weight on both terms. Fashion and fast. China’s success in delivering on both at unprecedentedly high speed and at unprecedentedly low cost, isn’t a low-skill operation at all. If we see development trajectories not as the serial repetition of the same, but as distinctive, crafted projects that cumulate in complex agglomerations of skill, technology and labor, then this explains why the assumption that low-skilled manufacturing should follow the distribution of population flies in the face of all experience. As countless cases attest, low-wage, low-income developed economies are not by themselves the makings of a competitive production base. As Leon Liao puts it quite fairly: “International trade has never been allocated according to population. A country’s population gives it no natural claim to an equivalent share of global exports." And the remarkable fact is that Subramanian alone and with co-authors has long been making this point, not to pillory China, as is the case of the tendentious _Foreign Affair_s and Peterson pieces, but to highlight the great counterpart to China’s industrial success, namely India’s relative failure. The much-quoted Foreign Affairs piece showed low-skill export shares only for China, not for India. If you put both countries in the picture as Chaterjee and Subramanian have done on other occasions, the picture looks like this. China is far above the line, but India, almost as large in terms of population, is no less anomalous, just in the opposite direction. As far as global populations are concerned, and the imagining of tens of millions of “squeezed” jobs, it is this Sino-Indian pair that account for a huge share of the action. What this graph reveals is not China’s cheating, but India’s “greatest development failure”, at least this is the argument made Arvind Subramanian, this time in co-authorship with Devesh Kapur, in their major book, A Sixth of Humanity. Independent India’s Development Odyssey which appeared with Oxford University Press earlier this year. In this highly critical work on India’s development, China is repeatedly evoked, not to criticize but as a benchmark against which to illuminate what India’s political economy has not delivered i.e. large-scale formal employment for hundreds of millions of citizens. Kapur and Subramanian leave no doubt, if you want to understand why China, not India was the main driver of manufacturing globalization from the 1980s, don’t look to slots opening up in the division of labour thanks to the liberal mindedness of advanced economies, look to the contrasting political economy of the Maoist PRC and India’s post-independence political economy. As Kapur and Subramian note: The great divergence between China and India did not begin in 1978 with the Deng reforms—it was well underway by then. In one of the great ironies of modern history, the conditions created by Maoism turned out to be a great launching pad for industrial globalization. As the comparison of India and China in 1980 makes clear, to imagine manufacturing would be equally distributed when populations are so differently endowed in terms of educational and nutritional is fanciful. Here is the data from Kapur and Subramanian, data which I explored back at the very beginning of Chartbook. As Kapur and Subramanian insist, the striking fact is that even as India’s growth accelerated from the 1980s, structural change has not. Formal employment in India lags woefully behind. Why? As Kapur and Subramanian note, the path-dependent impact of India’s poor early start was devastating. The list of factors they mention is long and weighty: We argue for a new five-fold explanation applicable at different stages of Indian history: in the initial stages, the legacy of two key pre-1980s policies, the neglect of agriculture and the strangling of the domestic private sector, were critical. The failure of broad-based agricultural growth militated against rural industrialization, which would have been devoted to satisfying local needs that would have necessarily been labour intensive. Then, when the boom came after 1980, the thicket of regulation and broader labour protections that were legislated prematurely in a nascent democracy, underpinned by a deep ideological aversion to private capital in general and big capital specifically, became a barrier to attaining the size that would be necessary to compete globally. Similarly, the reforms after 1991, while wide-ranging, did not quite encompass non-tradeable inputs critical to manufacturing, namely, land, logistics infrastructure and power. A combination of low investment (logistics infrastructure), regulation (land) and the continued monopoly supply by state governments (power), combined with residual socialism, kept costs at 75–100 per cent above efficient supply. These factors were compounded on the supply side by the government, which dominated the formal labour market and established exorbitantly high wages at the lower end of the skill spectrum. This made their employment in the labour-intensive sector by the private sector less attractive. Finally, when the services sector and its exports boomed, wages soared even further via a Dutch Disease effect: one successful tradeable sector killed and cannibalized another less-skilled tradable sector, namely, manufacturing. Thus, scarcity-inducing policies of the planning era, precocious democracy and a Gandhian aversion to size; inefficient, monopolistic supply of critical non-tradable inputs; the behemoth of government; and super-successful skill-intensive services successively undermined India’s unskilled labour employment opportunities. The employment failure seems to have been over-determined. … Less quantifiable but no less important are some of the sociological factors that have undermined manufacturing and factory jobs. Take the impact of the success of the IT sector—located in urban areas with better working conditions, such as air-conditioned offices, good schools for children and attractive entertainment options. It became a more attractive place for engineering and management graduates to flock to. … Consider manufacturing and female employment. Indian society makes it difficult for women to work, reflected in India’s unusually low female labour force participation (elaborated in Chapter XIII). Indian society, in particular the routine harassment of women in public spaces, makes it even more difficult for them to travel long distances to take up work.37 Combined with onerous regulations on creating hostels and dormitories for women—which, in turn, prevents multiple shifts of operation—factories need to be located in areas with a large female labour pool. While firms can take apparel plants to female labour or bring them to the plants by building large-scale dormitories, this raises costs. If there was a case for subsidies to encourage labour-intensive manufacturing, housing subsidies to build dormitories for women workers would be a good place to start. All of this meant, that when opportunities did open up, in part thanks to adjustments in China, India was in no position to take advantage. Here is the account of the 2020s from Kapur and Subramanian. It stands in dizzying contrast to the one-sided, “China squeeze” argument delivered in the Peterson and Foreign Affairs pieces: In 2022, for example, India’s share of global exports in clothing (the canonical labour-intensive sector) was 3.1 per cent compared to 32 per cent for China. This is extremely disappointing because China started vacating export space in this sector after the Global Financial Crisis as its wages started rising; it then vacated further space in the aftermath of geopolitical developments that led investors to seek alternative investment locations. Between its peak and today, China lost about 7.5 percentage points of global export share (worth about $43 billion in 2022); over this period, India’s export share remained stagnant at 3 per cent, while that of Vietnam and Bangladesh rose by 3.5 to 4 percentage points. China’s loss did not translate into any gain for India in terms of low-skill exports and employment. Put differently, when the conditions for dynamism and prosperity were established after 1991, and even more tantalizingly when the global export opportunities opened up, it was as if India was a high-wage economy and only skilled labour could benefit from the dynamism. It had converted its physically abundant unskilled workforce into an economically expensive resource, penalizing its use. It is not my mission here to argue for or against Kapur and Subramanian’s interpretation of India’s development trajectory. The point in this context is simply that the “China squeeze” such as it is can only be understood, in relation to the heavy burden of domestic constraints that Kapur and Subramanian so unsparingly enumerate. I am concentrating here on India because it is the great counterpart to China and the unspoken reference point of the “China squeeze” discourse. But the point is more general. Can anyone with a straight face suggest that the main problems afflicting the development of South Africa or Nigeria, the great centers of mass underemployment in sub-saharan Africa, are cheap competition from China driven by Beijing’s industrial policy and an undervalued RMB? Likewise, is the main problem of the American working-class the threat of Chinese competition or the manifest crisis of social reproduction in the United States itself? The point here, as in the discourse around China shock 2.0 in Europe, is to insist that we should not normalize the world and pathologize China, without actually investigating what is going on in America’s industrial wastelands, the German car industry, or India’s lopsided labour market. One-sided pathologization should be understood for what it is, a polemical gesture. Concepts like China shock and China squeeze are, what Reinhart Koselleck, following Carl Schmitt, would have described as “asymmetrische Kampfbegriffe”, or “asymmetrical counter-concepts” or “asymmetrical combat concepts”. If the function of arguments like the “China squeeze” is to alert elites in the rest of the world of the need to rejuvenate and energize their development projects, so be it. But let us see the resulting discourses as the mobilizing interventions that they are. Interestingly, a significant slice of China’s public sphere - the so-called industrial party - have been obsessed for the last twenty years with precisely these questions of counterfactual economic history. Since the mid 2000s, a massive online discourse developed around an alternative history in which Chinese techno-patriots were asked to imagine how they would proceed if they had the possibility of traveling back in time to transport modern technology into the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) thus averting the “great divergence” of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a fantasy of course, but also a goad. The point was not directed at Westerners. The alternate history is dramatically nationalist, but few n the West had even heard of it until recently. The adherents of the industrial party are not liberal moralists. They don’t project natural ladders of international development and ask why others don’t cede space. They take the Realpolitik of global economic development for granted. Their pointe was directed against fellow Chinese. The rallying cry of the alternative narrative was this: Now that we are beginning to gain steam and push forward on our national development path, now that we are breaking out of the inferior position assigned to us even in the early years following WTO accession, do not lose yourself in humanistic imaginings about better futures. In the spirit of Deng, they called on China to embrace the hard truth of development. Perhaps one might of the Industrial Party as a cultural trend born out of desire for symbolic revenge against those who had inflicted the century of humiliation. In terms of the various temporalities of the “China shock” - retrospective, prospective and counterfactual - one might think of the Industrial Policy discourse as truly speculative, conjuring up the China shock that never was. Or perhaps one might better think of it as imagining a world in which a powerful China was no shock at all, but simply a defining fact of modern history. I love putting out Chartbook. I am particularly pleased that it goes out for free to thousands of subscribers around the world. But, writing this newsletter takes a lot of work. If you are enjoying it and would like to support the project, sign up for one of the subscription options here. It is the equivalent of a fancy cup of coffee per month! Subscribe

Aug 5 • 7:18 AM EDT • Politics • adamtooze.substack.com

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Aug 3 • 11:49 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

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Aug 3 • 11:00 AM EDT • Health • newsroom.uw.edu

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Aug 3 • 7:00 AM EDT • Health • vdh.virginia.gov

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Aug 3 • 5:00 AM EDT • Health • newsroom.clevelandclinic.org

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Aug 2 • 1:01 PM EDT • Business • tribalbusinessnews.com

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Aug 2 • 9:30 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

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Aug 2 • 7:00 AM EDT • Politics • orlandosentinel.com

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Jul 31 • 8:00 AM EDT • Sports • espn.com

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Jul 31 • 6:00 AM EDT • Health • usnews.com

Anthropic says its AI models also broke out and hacked other companies

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Jul 30 • 10:09 PM EDT • Business • cnn.com