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Google's AI Is Telling Users That Flock Cameras Are Filled With Valuable Gold and Copper

Google's AI Overview is spreading misinformation about hidden treasure inside another AI-company's surveillance cameras.

Aug 5 • 9:41 AM EDT • Technology • futurism.com

ASUS Asks $5090 For RTX 5090 After Cancelling User’s Order Who Already Paid $4607

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Aug 5 • 8:01 AM EDT • Technology • wccftech.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

Polls, prediction markets and Oklahoma politics: What you need to know this election season

Oklahoma’s primary runoffs are weeks away, but people are already placing bets on who will win. Here is how prediction markets could impact our elections.

Aug 5 • 5:00 AM EDT • Politics • kosu.org

Why Liverpool are ready to make Barcola third £100m signing

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Aug 5 • 1:32 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

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Aug 5 • 1:25 AM EDT • Technology • bbc.com

Maxx Crosby Praises Klint Kubiak's Approach as Raiders' New Coach

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Aug 5 • 12:02 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

80-million-year-old snake brain reveals a surprising evolutionary secret

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Aug 4 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Bolstered Cubs ready for deep playoff push

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Aug 4 • 7:38 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

AI-generated stories rated better quality than human-written ones, study finds

Researcher says simpler writing by AI is easier to read and digest, but this does not mean human authors are obsolete

Aug 4 • 7:01 PM EDT • Technology • theguardian.com

The Beauty Of Settled Science

Commenters convinced me I made a subtle mis-step in my framing of Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine. My framing emphasized that social priming studies had failed to replicate, but that many other subfields of psychology hadn’t. This naturally led commenters to point to failed replications in other subfields. Although none of these were as bad as social priming, few or none were entirely problem-free. Instead of emphasizing the difference between social priming and other subfields, I should have emphasized the difference between settled science and novel research. Here are some of my favorite psychology findings: The brain is sculpted by reinforcement learning, and a key driver of this learning is a prediction-error-based algorithm located in the nucleus accumbens and implemented through dopamine. Psychedelic drugs exert their effects through 5-HT2A receptors, pointing to a role for these receptors in some sort of construct like the balance between priors and new evidence. Certain cognitive functions are localized to certain brain areas (for example, impulse control to the frontal lobes; linguistic structure to Broca’s area, linguistic meaning to Wernicke’s area. But injure one of these areas, or render a certain function useless (eg a blind person having no more use for their visual cortex), and these mappings can gradually shift - suggesting that neurons are general-purpose compute whose specialization is a contingent fact about convenience and efficiency rather than a necessity. Most personality traits and general capabilities are about 50% genetic and 50% random, with little role for family environment or childhood history, with a few notable exceptions like partisan preference. Recent research complicates this story, but the further you go from this basic picture, the gnarlier the chains of indirect causation you require. Neurons fire together in “brain waves”, whose exact frequency corresponds with the character of consciousness; These divide neurons into natural subpopulations and linked graphs. The gamma rhythm corresponds surprisingly well to items in conscious awareness. GABA receptors seem to be involved in something like relaxation. By hitting different GABA receptors in different ways, you can modulate the exact type of relaxation you produce. Hitting GABA-A directly is too powerful and can cause dangerous levels of sedation, but allosteric modulation of GABA is an incredibly fruitful strategy that underlies drugs from benzos to barbituates to alcohol. If you know your GABA-A subunits, you can target specific subtypes of relaxation; for example, Ambien hits GABA-A1 and induces sleep. Memory divides somewhat fuzzily into bins of immediate-sensory, short-term, and long-term, with separate retrieval and storage functions, and separate systems for declarative vs. procedural learning. These can be harmed selectively, usually by hippocampal injury, so that some patients can remember their life stories but not form new long-term memories, or learn new skills like bike-riding but not new facts. The exact substrate of memory is unclear but seems to involve new synaptic connections between neurons in at least some way. The ability of modern psychology and psychiatry to treat mental illness is real but limited. SSRIs work for half or slightly fewer than half of patients; antipsychotics work with extreme side effects; benzodiazpines work but produce addiction and tolerance in many (not all) people. Most supplements are stuck in Poor Quality Study Replication Crisis Hell, but melatonin and l-theanine stand out as especially promising. Psychotherapy works with moderate effect size, but (with a few exceptions) seems to be more about the relationship with the provider than the details of the therapy itself. Mental hospitalization can sometimes defuse immediate crises but work less well than mental hospitals would like, with some studies showing overall negative effects. Schizophrenia is mostly genetic, but risk also increases with prenatal infection (especially rubella) and obstetric complications; there is suggestive evidence for roles of social stress and drug use (with psychedelics and marijuana making things worse, and nicotine if anything making things better). Bipolar and schizophrenia are so closely linked on a pathophysiological level that it seems like they might be the same disease; on the clinical level, they do seem to follow two separate courses/prognoses but can sometimes surprise clinicians by eg someone who seemed condemned to permanent schizophrenia unexpectedly recovering. The brain’s native reinforcement learning algorithms cash out in the phenomena of classical and operant conditioning; different reinforcement schedules reinforce at different levels, which can be exploited by bad actors to make especially compelling products (eg slot machines). None of these are immune to doubt. A few are speculative; one or two are genuinely unorthodox. But they’re all a step above one p = 0.049 paper that might not replicate. If they get overturned, they’ll be overturned by the same sort of genuine scientific shift that replaced Ptolemy with Copernicus or Lamarck with Darwin, not some sort of sordid discovery about someone entering random numbers into a spreadsheet. In 2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about The Beauty Of Settled Science: If you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage. The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news. Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention. Worse, if you aren’t in the field and part of the game, controversies aren’t even fun. Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty [...] A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid. Psychology isn’t centrally the new paper in Annals Of Recently-Breaking News saying that an n=5 study showing that large portion sizes increase support for terrorism. Psychology is centrally ideas like brain waves, GABA receptors, reinforcement learning, twin studies, and connectionism. People who think differently are worrying too much about BREAKING NEWS!!!, and should stop. The key distinction isn’t “recent research in social psychology” vs. “recent research in cognitive/bio/behavioral psychology”, as my essay last week unfortunately implied. It’s recent research in general vs. the deposit of settled science, battle-tested hypotheses, and carefully-earmarked speculation. And part of the reason social priming in particular was such a disaster was that it defied that heuristic, building itself up over hundreds of studies until it approached or even entered the pantheon of settled science - before collapsing (5-HTTLPR was also sort of like this). This isn’t a claim that settled science is always right - Freud was “settled science” for a long time - just that there’s an intuitive distinction between the level of credence you should have in the existence of power posing vs. the existence of Broca’s Area. (I compounded this error by calling the last post “Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine”, which suggested I was talking about the new research rather than the settled science. I actually meant to distinguish between research-psychology-the-field vs. clinical-psychology-aka-therapy, but this framing unintentionally pushed against the point I wanted to make) Some commenters on the previous article understood this point, but challenged its weight. It’s very cool, they said, to know how many neurons are in which brain lobe, but the main way that Psychology affected their lives was through bad clickbait studies used to buttress dumb policies; some p = 0.049 study says that exposure to microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel into raisins, and now their company has to implement punitive DEI or be sued for hazardous work conditions. I won’t dispute this as an accurate description of how the sausage gets made, but it’s worth examining the trains of thought that connect this observation to a campaign against psychology in general: The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad, and I don’t have good heuristics for distinguishing dumb woke psychology from other psychology, so I’m going to assume it’s all wrong and bad. The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad; it seems useful to punish/discredit psychology as a whole to assist my campaign against it, so for propaganda purposes I will try to discredit psychology as a whole. To people in the first camp, my response is: come on, your heuristics aren’t that bad. “Microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel up like raisins” is in the woke category; “the hippocampal theta rhythm seems to be associated with both memory and pathfinding, suggesting an unexpected yet surprisingly compelling relationship between the two” is in the not-woke category, don’t play dumb here. To people in the second camp, my response is: deliberately exaggerated propaganda campaigns are bad and this is a confession, not an excuse. Inability to view science through anything but a political lens was what got us into this problem; doubling down on it is a temporary solution but a recipe for permanent disaster. If you pronounce entire fields of science to be acceptable collateral damage in your campaign against bad political actors, you will alienate not just scientists but patients, clinicians, and general lovers of truth. Instead, you can say the thing you mean - that woke partisans shouldn’t try to occupy and exploit the otherwise-noble science of psychology for their own political gain - and wage the same campaign with a halo rather than a comic-book-villain goatee. From the font of oracular wisdom that is Weird Sun Twitter: [ Vessel Of Spirit@VesselOfSpirit i love you all conditionally but i love the good part of you unconditionally. even if it becomes a very small part 2:11 AM · Jan 22, 2015 1 Reply · 5 Reposts · 29 Likes ](https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/558084551772471298) This is how I feel about psychology1, too, but with a touch more optimism. The good part of psychology is enormous, a hoard of endless treasures. You just have to look past the headlines! 1 To play devil’s advocate - should one always be so magnamious? Astrology? Phrenology? These seem different in that their entire orientation was flawed from the start; they didn’t simply fail to find the correct constellation-personality connections, the whole project of searching for connections between constellations and personality was doomed from the start. More difficult might be asking the same question about education research, which is notoriously bad. I don’t know enough about education research to know if there’s some settled science of correct and enlightening results lurking in the background beyond the day-to-day froth of poorly-conducted and politically-motivated studies. I think if it’s 90% bad, 10% good, it’s correct to call it bad as a compact way of communicating a useful truth; I think psychology is better than that, but admit it’s a tough judgment call.

Aug 4 • 5:33 PM EDT • Science • astralcodexten.com

Google's August Pixel update is here and ready to squash some bugs

Google's released the August update for Pixel phones running Android 17, and it includes a handful of bugfixes for Pixel 10 phones.

Aug 4 • 3:23 PM EDT • Technology • androidauthority.com

Steps announced to improve public safety in Chippewa Entertainment District

In a Tuesday press conference at Buffalo City Hall, Mayor Sean Ryan was joined by fellow city and business leaders to announce the next phase of his administration’s efforts to improve public safety in the Chippewa Entertainment District after several weeks of enhanced enforcement and evaluation. Read more from WBEN: | WBEN

Aug 4 • 2:34 PM EDT • Entertainment • audacy.com

Ariana Grande Says Planned Step Back Is About Boundaries, Not Rejecting Her Career

Ariana Grande says her coming break from public-facing work was planned long before recent headlines intensified questions about her health, appearance and future in entertainment. ... Read More

Aug 4 • 2:31 PM EDT • Entertainment • yahoo.com

Apple Starts Preparing for September iPhone Event

Apple is getting ready for its big September iPhone event, which is expected to see the debut of the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and an all-new foldable iPhone. Ahead of the event, Apple is holding an Event Support Experience Program lottery for U.S. retail employees who want to travel to its Apple Park campus to staff the in-person media gathering.

Aug 4 • 1:18 PM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com

MrBeast Sales Slow, Angel Stock Falls, MUBI and Neon Look for Hits, and Will an NBA Franchise Set a Sales Record?

(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.) You probably remember egg prices spiking a few years ago. This led to a lot of debate between the pro-market/pro-competition/antitrust/Neo-Brandesian crowd and the center/center-right/center-left/abundance/libertarian crowd over the cause, whether it was the avian flu outbreak or whether industry consolidation led to price fixing, using avian flu as a convenient cover. Basel Musharbash wrote a whole investigation at BIG looking at it. Well, two years later, we have our answer: it was price fixing. The Justice Department found proof, via emails, of price fixing. Indeed, just the threat of an investigation brought prices down two years ago: I bring this up because at least half a dozen of my favorite political writers and pundits, who were skeptical about price fixing at the time, haven’t written any mea culpas on this issue. It’s really dispiriting and makes it much, much harder to trust their work on other issues. If you take a hard stand on an issue, then you get it wrong, you need to explain how and why you got it wrong. Or update your priors. This is how epistemological bubbles are formed! All of which is to say, it’s time for another installment of “What I Got Right, What I Got Wrong”. Last issue, I mostly focused on the “wrong” side of the equation, so today’s is a bit more balanced, but with one big mea culpa (though I still stand by my original concerns). Let’s dive right in! Subscribe CORRECTION: UFC Didn’t Release Subscriber Data (But Seems to Have Bragged About It Internally) In my analysis of the viewership of UFC Freedom 250, I wrote... “Paramount has also released datecdotes bragging about their subscriber numbers. Earlier this year, they claimed that the first UFC fight on Paramount+ brought in 1 million subscribers.” Well, that datecdote did not come from a PR rep, but from great reporting from James Faris at Business Insider. The actual quote was this: “Paramount’s flagship streaming service generated about a million new subscribers on the day of its first-ever UFC event, Paramount product chief Dane Glasgow told employees in a town hall on Tuesday morning, three staffers who attended the meeting told Business Insider.“ This wasn’t the biggest goof in the world; even Faris emphasized to me that this is more a “clarification” than a correction. Still, it sounds like, internally, the folks at Paramount were very happy about this result—and I’m guessing they were happy with this news getting out—even though the gains didn’t last through the quarter, dropping to 700K adds. RIGHT: MrBeast’s Struggles Continue... I’m very skeptical about MrBeast’s burgeoning media “empire” and, in particular, its $5 billion valuation, as I wrote earlier this year and last year. Sure enough, according to Business Insider, regarding its “booming” consumer products division_:_ “US sales volume grew 13% year-over-year in 2025, following a 33% leap the previous year, according to a presentation deck dated May 2026....A February 2025 investor deck viewed by Business Insider showed Feastables’ net revenue more than doubled in 2024 from 2023, to $215 million, and was forecast to grow 74% in 2025, to $375 million.” [Emphasis mine.] If you told investors that you projected 74% growth but delivered 13%,1 that’s not ideal. But it’s not just MrBeast. Logan Paul and KSI’s Prime had sales drop in half for their energy drinks. It’s one thing to build a successful entertainment company and an entirely different thing to succeed in the heavily-consolidated-but-also-very-competitive consumer packaged goods space! CPGs are dominated by a few firms with very wide moats compared to YouTube, which has few barriers to entry. These businesses require different skill sets and have completely different business environments. WRONG: Does the NBA Have an $8 Billion Bidder? Almost as soon as I published my article about the NBA’s finances, casting skepticism on NBA expansion, I saw this Front Office Sports headline: One group “claims to have already raised $8 billion” for the Vegas expansion team. I mean, wow. That’s just $2 billion less than what the Los Angeles Lakers were valued at when they were sold just last year. And they’re arguably the most popular team in the NBA. (Side note: the new owner is now under an investigation for fraud in how he went about financing the Lakers and the Dodgers purchases.) So much for the “dried up” language I used in that article. (This is why I usually stick to my “Entertainment Nuance Guy” tone in articles...) I went off old information—from April, when I read/heard about the NBA downplaying expansion efforts—instead of doing a quick double-check for new news. That said...if you read the article, the market for Seattle is “slow”, with just one reported bidder. So I wasn’t entirely off. This goof has annoyed me since I first published it, mainly because it undercut that article’s real point, which I stand by: NBA franchises are really overvalued right now. Now, I get why NBA teams are overvalued. When it comes to owning sports teams, it’s basically never wrong to assume that some rich person somewhere will care more about owning a team (or just being part of a group since they’re so expensive) than the actual financials. There are only so many teams to own, and opportunities to buy in preferred markets don’t come along very often. This explains why the teams sell for such high multiples (usually above a 10 to 12.5 revenue multiple, which is very high). You only need one person to overpay! Beyond the ultra-wealthy luxury good explanation, I worry NBA teams are becoming speculative assets. More and more private equity investors are buying into NBA teams. But the value, in owning a team, comes from selling it later, not any meaningful relationship to revenue or profit growth. In other words, the newer NBA owners are increasingly expecting someone later to buy their inflated asset. That’s not sound economics; that’s the “greater fool” theory at work.2 At some point, actually making money has to matter. Especially since revenue growth is now below the growth of the stock market. (And this matters because the NBA doesn’t have easy levers to pull to drastically lower their costs—half of their revenue has to go to players and then you actually have to run a team, including coaching, training, travel, media expenses, and more—or raise revenues aside from one-off expansions in America and overseas.) I just don’t see how investors make their money back buying NBA teams, except for selling at a higher price later on down the line. But if revenue/profit growth continues to slow, at some point, someone will be left holding the bag. RIGHT: Baseball and Basketball are about equally popular. Related to the above, I wanted to cite two quick pieces of evidence for one of my other theories: that the NBA and MLB are about as popular as each other, but the NBA gets much, much better media coverage. One YouGov survey has that fans prefer basketball to baseball by 52% to 48%, which I’m guessing is within the margin of error for that poll. That’s virtually even, meaning they’re about the same popularity. Over on NBC, a recent Red Sox-Yankees game averaged 4 million viewers, higher than Sunday Night Basketball’s average of 3.4 million on the same network. A Yankees-Dodgers game averaged 3.9 million two weeks ago. Not every game averages this much, but it shows you that baseball isn’t far off from basketball, depending on the matchup. Altogether, the NBA is just slightly more popular than baseball, but NBC is paying MLB a fraction of what they pay the NBA, a point I’ve made before. RIGHT: Angel, MUBI and Neon Updates... I’ve long been skeptical about many of Hollywood’s buzziest startups/smaller indie studios. It’s not that they don’t make great movies—films like Anora and Everything Everywhere All at Once are amazing—or that they’re not (rightfully) pushing the majors to make better films, but...they get a ton of hype, and that hype often doesn’t live up to the reality or difficulty in scaling up. Starting with MUBI, well, The Wall Street Journal wrote a feature on MUBI’s struggles last April, best summarized by the subheader “After Sequoia valued Mubi at $1 billion, a left-wing revolt sent the indie film company into a tailspin”. MUBI lost $7.3 million on $200 million in revenue in Q4 2025, but reportedly hit a record 1.7 million subscribers at the end of Q1. As for Neon, Department M purchased a “significant stake” in the company earlier this year. How much is that “stake” worth? According to Deadline, “No financial figures for the Neon-Department M deal were disclosed.” So...that’s not great! If it was a big valuation, we’d hear about. Also, I found this curious: “Both Neon and Department M already have separate partnerships with Qatar. The Qatar Film Committee has a slate deal in place with the former, and a biopic production pact with the latter.” Color me skeptical about much Middle Eastern investment dollars. See: LIV Golf. Finally, as for Angel (formerly Angel Studios), their stock very, very slightly popped last month after Young Washington ($20 million budget) which made $45 million in the US, but their stock is still way down from its opening. Smaller Updates RIGHT: The WGA should focus on antitrust concerns! I’ve been on this for years. Post-WGA/AMTPT deal in 2023, I wrote an article for the Ankler calling on the WGA to focus and organize against industry consolidation. Sure enough, the WGA filed a lawsuit against the Paramount-WBD merger, and people are organizing around this issue now. I wish this energy had coalesced earlier (specifically to lobby Washington much earlier), but better late than never! WRONG: Actually, the chip shortage might be due to market manipulation. In my last “Long Reads for the Long Summer” article, I shared an article about how LLMs are causing memory chip prices to spike, which will make all electronics more expensive. Well, turns out, three RAM manufacturers control 90% of the market, and now a private lawsuit accuses them of price-fixing. So yeah. WRONG/UPDATE: The Odyssey will hold! Two weeks ago, I wrote, “As of this moment, we haven’t had a super-blockbuster, though The Odyssey, Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday could all cross the $500 million mark. (At this point, The Odyssey would need a very strong hold to get there.)” Well, it’s safe to say it’s going to have that hold! It only dropped 30% in weekend two and IMAX screenings are sold out all month. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is also off to a great start. RIGHT: People are rushing to get shows out yearly. I’ve long been bullish on yearly, weekly-released shows, and Leslie Goldberg at The Ankler wrote about how many people in town are now listening. WRONG: Mark Carney reverses Canada’s stance on homegrown production. After writing about Canada installing domestic production quotas, Canada has backed off. WRONG: I don’t trust Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s online “views”. When I originally wrote about the latest Spider-Man film’s record-breaking trailer, I thought this was just YouTube views, but after watching this Corridor Crew video and doing more research, well, it’s all social views of the trailer globally. Really? That stat includes TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts views. Basically, I don’t trust it anymore. (This film will probably set record, but I trust the pre-sales data more.) RIGHT: Celebrity Production companies are still struggling. I’ve written about this for years, but the company that I didn’t track was Kevin Hart’s HartBeat, which was valued at $650 million but is struggling now and might just end soon, especially after Kevin Hart pulled his endorsement deals. And Bad Robot is moving to NYC. CORRECTION: SpongeBob is a “second run” title. In my 2025 recap article, I had _SpongeBob SquarePants_labelled as a “library” title, when it is still a “second run” show, with new episodes still coming out on Nickelodeon. CORRECTION: In my last “What I Got Right, What I Got Wrong” update, I offered a correction from Doug Creutz and misspelled TD Cowen. Thanks, Grammarly! 1 Though he could have increased prices to make up for the gap, he couldn’t have increased them that much. 2 There’s a theory, which I think that Daryl Morey created and Bill Simmons popularized, that, to be successful building your team, you only need a handful of bad GMs in the league to take advantage of. To be clear, Daryl Morey’s theory was also for signing bad contracts, that you could always get out of bad contracts. Basically, there’s always someone who will make a bad trade. It’s not the same exact thing, but similar enough to the Greater Fool Theory that I really like it.

Aug 4 • 11:55 AM EDT • Entertainment • entertainment.substack.com

Detroit Lions LB Malcolm Rodriquez Suffers Injury at Training Camp

Malcolm Rodriguez left Lions practice early Tuesday with an ankle injury. The setback comes as Detroit is already managing another significant absence in its linebacker room.

Aug 4 • 10:55 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Meet S&T at the Missouri State Fair for hands-on fun

Missouri University of Science and Technology will bring hands-on activities for fairgoers of all ages to the Missouri State Fair, Aug. 13-23 in Sedalia, Missouri. Engage in hands-on activities, meet student design teams, watch science demonstrations and play with robots....Continue Reading Meet S&T at the Missouri State Fair for hands-on fun

Aug 4 • 10:26 AM EDT • Science • news.mst.edu

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner's daughter Violet stuns with Baywatch-ready outfit in new pictures

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner's daughter, Violet Affleck, looked stylish in red shorts and a white baby tee during her latest outing

Aug 4 • 10:04 AM EDT • Entertainment • yahoo.com

Former Saban assistant gets ‘long-term’ contract extension at current school

Already under contract through 2031 at $8 million per year

Aug 4 • 9:42 AM EDT • Sports • al.com

The Purple-State Problem

Most close readers of this column know that I see our nation’s political divisions as so great as to make the last line in the Pledge of Allegiance, that we are “one nation” and “indivisible,” hardly descriptive.While some states or congressional districts are characterized as red for Republicans or blue for Democrats, purple states or districts are thought of as fair fights where neither party has a distinct advantage. In those purple regions, it’s often thought that to win, a candidate must do well with voters near the ideological center.

Aug 4 • 9:41 AM EDT • Politics • cookpolitical.com

Managing shadow AI: a 10-point governance road map

Unapproved and unmonitored AI use is spreading inside businesses faster than leadership teams know, and it may be one of the biggest privacy and security blind spots companies have today.

Aug 4 • 9:33 AM EDT • Business • nhbr.com

Alvernia University Names Penn Medicine as Official Sports Medicine Provider

Reading, Pa. (August 4, 2026) - Alvernia University announced the selection of Penn Medicine as the official sports medicine provider to Alvernia Athletics on Wednesday.

Aug 4 • 9:12 AM EDT • Sports • auwolves.com

AI Is Making Cyber Scams Harder to Spot. Is Your Business Ready?

Hackers are getting more personal while AI poses new challenges

Aug 4 • 8:00 AM EDT • Business • comstocksmag.com

'He Was Ready to Take on the World': Jamaican Entertainment Community Mourns Ras Ajai After Fatal Shooting

'He Was Ready to Take on the World': Jamaican Entertainment Community Mourns Ras Ajai After Fatal Shooting - DancehallMag. The Jamaican entertainment industry is struggling to come to terms with the violent death of reggae artiste and actor Brian "Ras Ajai" Boucher, whose life. DancehallMag is an independent news outlet that covers all things Dancehall and Reggae music, the artists, and culture.

Aug 4 • 7:36 AM EDT • Entertainment • dancehallmag.com

Samsung experience shows Apple's timing for the iPhone Ultra couldn't be better

Apple has waited a very long time to launch its first foldable iPhone, with Samsung already eight generations in to...

Aug 4 • 7:03 AM EDT • Technology • 9to5mac.com

Lainey Wilson sold out at Iowa State Fair. Which concerts are next?

Iowa State Fair Grandstand concert tickets are selling quick, with one show already sold out. See which acts still have tickets.

Aug 4 • 7:01 AM EDT • Entertainment • desmoinesregister.com

Class of 2027 football player rankings update: The top 100 players entering the season

The nation's top 100 players have already made their college decisions. Here are the top seniors entering the season.

Aug 4 • 6:01 AM EDT • Sports • usatoday.com

David Bailey Already A Pain For Jets’ Membou

Jets rookie David Bailey is making life tough for offensive tackle Armand Membou in training camp, with the veteran calling him a "pain" after just a few practices.

Aug 4 • 3:27 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Aug. 4 Home Entertainment Releases Include 'Evil Dead Burn' Digitally, 'Talladega Nights' 4K Steelbook

The slate of new releases for Aug. 4 includes Evil Dead Burn, Lucky Strike, The Isolate Thief and LifeHACK digitally, while Talladega Nights gets a 20th anniversary 4K Steelbook. New Line’s Evil Dead Burn will be available for premium digital rental and sale Aug. 4 from Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment. In the latest entry in the “Evil Dead” … Continue reading "Aug. 4 Home Entertainment Releases Include ‘Evil Dead Burn’ Digitally, ‘Talladega Nights’ 4K Steelbook"

Aug 4 • 3:07 AM EDT • Entertainment • mediaplaynews.com

Raiders’ Maxx Crosby Has Blunt Message for Fernando Mendoza

The Las Vegas Raiders are looking to be competitive this upcoming 2026 NFL season after a disastrous 2025 campaign under former head coach Pete Carroll. One of the new faces on the team is No. 1 pick Fernando Mendoza, and Maxx Crosby is already taking him under his wing.Despite both players being on opposite sides […] The post Raiders’ Maxx Crosby Has Blunt Message for Fernando Mendoza appeared first on HEAVY.

Aug 4 • 1:43 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

5 generations now mingle in the healthcare workforce. Can they continue doing so without driving each other away?

A cursory glance at the workforce in any U.S. hospital in 2026 reveals four kinds of readily observable diversity. Three get plenty of attention. One gets almost none.

Aug 4 • 12:00 AM EDT • Health • healthexec.com

TCL Tab A1 Plus Nxtpaper is now available in the US

And its price is already reduced by 25%. TCL unveiled the Tab A1 Plus and its Nxtpaper variant in early March at MWC, and now the Nxtpaper version is...

Aug 3 • 9:09 PM EDT • Technology • gsmarena.com

Why Farmers' California business filing is a signal to go back to clients on the FAIR Plan

While US commercial rates ease nationally, California's wildfire-exposed segment is moving the other way, and brokers need to be ready to explain both stories

Aug 3 • 8:20 PM EDT • Business • insurancebusinessmag.com

A common sugar may help cancer cells break free and spread

Chemotherapy-surviving ovarian cancer cells may release fructose to help neighboring tumor cells loosen, escape, and spread. The discovery suggests that sugary diets and cholesterol-lowering drugs could influence cancer progression, though the effects have not yet been confirmed in patients.

Aug 3 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Ernst Names Small Business of the Week, Present Company

Read the release on Sen. Ernst's website here. Throughout this Congress, Chair Ernst plans to recognize a small business in every one of Iowa’s 99 counties. RED OAK, Iowa – U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Chair of the Senate Small Business Committee, today announced her Small Business of the Week: Present Company of Audubon County. Throughout the 119th Congress, Chair Ernst plans to recognize a small business in each of Iowa's 99 counties. "Present Company has been the gift that keeps on giving to Audubon for more than three decades," said Chair Ernst. "From helping revitalize Main Street to supporting countless local events and charities, Telia Carter and her team continue to present the very best of Iowa's entrepreneurial spirit. Their commitment to exceptional service, unique products, and hometown values proves that investing in your community always comes back around." Founded in 1990 by Nancy Oleson, Present Company opened its doors in downtown Audubon as a home décor boutique. After more than three decades of serving southwest Iowa, ownership transitioned in 2022 to Telia Carter. Under her leadership, Present Company has continued its tradition of personalized customer service while adapting its inventory to meet the needs of customers from Audubon and the surrounding communities. Today, Present Company remains a downtown Audubon staple, offering a carefully curated selection of gifts, home décor, apparel, jewelry, and specialty items. The boutique has earned a reputation for unique merchandise, friendly service, and a welcoming atmosphere that reflects the character of small-town Iowa. Stay tuned as Chair Ernst continues to recognize outstanding Iowa small businesses with her Small Business of the Week award. ###

Aug 3 • 5:56 PM EDT • Business • sbc.senate.gov

S&T honors Dennis and Janet Jaggi for transforming business education

Dennis and Janet Jaggi pose on July 30 with family members by the sign bearing their name in S&T’s Engineering Management Building with the whole family on July 30 in front of their sign in Engineering Management during the reception in their honor. From left: daughter-in-law Christie Jaggi, son Greg Jaggi, Dennis, grandson Nicholas Jaggi,...Continue Reading S&T honors Dennis and Janet Jaggi for transforming business education

Aug 3 • 5:42 PM EDT • Business • news.mst.edu

5 generations now mingle in the healthcare workforce. Can they continue doing so without driving one another away?

A cursory glance at the workforce in any U.S. hospital in 2026 reveals four kinds of readily observable diversity. Three get plenty of attention. One gets almost none.

Aug 3 • 5:26 PM EDT • Health • healthexec.com

Packers dealt two more injuries at tight end position

The Packers are dealing with two more injuries at an already hobbled tight end position.

Aug 3 • 4:42 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

AG candidate's new challenge: overcoming 'political no one' status

After surviving a ballot access challenge, Republican candidate for attorney general Michael Walsh is ready to move past allegations that he submitted fraudulent nomination signatures, and realistic about the uphill

Aug 3 • 3:50 PM EDT • Politics • statehousenews.com

MDE names 15 Mississippi Science of Reading School awardees

JACKSON, Miss. (WJTV) – The Mississippi Department of Education (MDE) designated 15 Mississippi elementary schools with state recognition for excellence in the Science of Reading (SOR) for th…

Aug 3 • 3:31 PM EDT • Science • wjtv.com

Brewers 2026 Trade Deadline Discussion Thread

What will the Crew do at the deadline?

Aug 3 • 3:23 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

2064: Read Only Memories Studio Files For Bankruptcy

2064: Read Only Memories dev MidBoss' filing was made by former and now-current CEO Matt Conn

Aug 3 • 1:20 PM EDT • Technology • kotaku.com

Women’s sports are No. 1 at this new bar in North Park

One of Us in North Park is San Diego’s first women’s sports bar. It’s already become the go to spot to watch Wave FC matches.

Aug 3 • 1:19 PM EDT • Sports • kpbs.org

The first-gen Kindle Scribe is a big e-reader and digital notebook that’s $150 refurbished

The deal lasts through August 8th.

Aug 3 • 1:17 PM EDT • Technology • theverge.com

If Not AOC, Then Who?

What do we do if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decides not to run for president in 2028? It makes sense that many leftists are currently focused on calling on her to take the plunge. But the absence of a Plan B, or even much discussion about one, is worrisome. The US Left can’t afford to sit out the 2028 Democratic primary. Doing so in 2024 was a disaster: our abstention self-marginalized anti-billionaire politics from the national conversation and thereby gave space for Harris to pivot to the “center” (i.e. the policy preferences of corporate donors, establishment hacks, and AIPAC). Abstaining again in 2028 would be especially counterproductive since democratic socialists now have so much wind in our sails after our big electoral wins in NYC and across the country. It’s time to deepen our momentum, organization, and profile — not to retreat to the margins during America’s single most important political battle. Even more urgently, keeping Trump’s heir out of the White House may depend on whether leftists and the party’s unprecedentedly disenchanted base can force the Democrats in 2028 to take meaningful steps towards a very angry electorate and away from the corporate-consultant blob that has helped get us into this mess. If AOC (or Abdul El-Sayed) decides to run, we should enthusiastically go all in — DSA, fighting unions, progressive organizations, anybody who wants to see a better country and world. But, as far as I can tell from the outside, there’s a real chance that she doesn’t run. And we can’t just wait and see where she lands before discussing alternatives, since AOC’s decision might not come for quite a while, giving us little time to scramble at the last minute for an alternative. So we should start working now on getting a Plan B into motion, and recruiting a good candidate for the role. Here’s one idea. A Worker Candidate — Healthcare Not Warfare 2028 Run a union worker Leftists don’t need to always run experienced, well-known socialist politicians for high-profile contests. Lula, the current president of Brazil, began his political career as a metalworker militant who ran for governor of São Paulo in 1982. Especially in an era of institutional distrust, it’s possible to lean hard into making a virtue out of a working-class comrade’s distance from traditional politics. Experience abroad shows this clearly. Rachel Kéké — an immigrant hotel housekeeper — ran as the candidate of the leftist La France Insoumise for the National Assembly in 2022, defeating a former minister in the Macron government. The Belgian Workers’ Party in 2024 won its first Flemish seat in the European Parliament by running Rudi Kennes, a three-decade veteran of the Opel Antwerp auto factory. And the South Korean left in 2024 elected auto factory militant Yoon Jong-oh to the National Assembly. If a tiny French Trotskyist organization could make such a big splash in 2002 and 2007 by running a well-spoken postal worker cadre for office — the LCR’s Olivier Besancenot received about 1.5 million first-round votes — it’s not far-fetched to expect that a much larger organization like DSA, together with a broader coalition of the willing, could run this playbook to much greater effect. This is especially the case now that almost everything DSA does immediately becomes a national news story. We don’t need someone famous. We just need a charismatic, well-vetted comrade who works in a relatable working-class occupation — e.g. a nurse, or a worker in auto or construction, or at Amazon. Ideally, they have a compelling personal story or have been part of a significant strike or organizing campaign, but even those criteria don’t necessarily have to be deal-breakers. The main lesson of the Graham Platner fiasco isn’t that we should never run outsiders for office (the momentum he generated proves the exact opposite), but that they need proper vetting and roots in democratic membership organizations like DSA or a union. In any case, there are plenty of ways to signal working-class authenticity without resorting to Platner’s or Fetterman’s performative macho white dude affect. Better to have someone of any gender or race who is actually working class, with firm socialist politics, who can speak from experience about the day-to-day realities of trying to make it in America. There are surely at least a dozen such worker leaders in our movement nationwide; we just need to sit down and convince one that their personal sacrifice for the greater good (i.e. running for president) will be worth it. If we don’t have a frontrunner with a clear path to victory like AOC (or El-Sayed, were he to win Michigan), it’s better to embrace someone whose decision to run in itself tells an important story about US politics: workers have been iced out of our political system and are now fighting hard to break back in. The novelty factor, in itself, would generate press. And it would help democratic socialists signal to the American public that our movement’s defining characteristic is that we represent workers vs. bosses, not that we’re “the furthest left” force in American politics — a framework that suggests we’re extremists and that helps our opponents isolate us from non-college-educated voters by highlighting extremely minoritarian (and misguided) stances included in DSA’s platform like prison abolition. We don’t get many opportunities to speak to tens of millions of Americans; we need to use these opportunities to broaden our appeal beyond those already in our orbit. Run to polarize the 2028 primary and general election around “Medicare for All” and “End All Aid to Israel” Why should democratic socialists use our scarce time and volunteer energy to run in a race we’re unlikely to win? Running in the 2028 primary will not only recruit us scores of members (imagine having a DSA member intervening in eleven nationally televised primary debates!), but — more importantly — it has the potential to be a decisive leap forward towards an America that finally starts meeting the needs of working people instead of HMO and AIPAC billionaire donors. Polarizing litmus tests are good, actually — as long as they’re fought for around popular demands in a thoughtful and strategic way. Democratic socialists have an opportunity and responsibility to make the 2028 primary about two of the most widely and deeply felt issues of our moment: domestically, America’s unaffordable, family-breaking private healthcare system; internationally, America’s bankrolling of the genocidal Israeli government. A candidacy relentlessly demanding Medicare for All and No Aid to Israel would pose a sharp question to the American public, the Democratic Party, and other 2028 contenders: Why can’t working-class Americans afford their healthcare bills at the same time that our government is spending at least $3.8 billion yearly to fund an Israeli regime eager to keep dragging us and the world into more forever wars? Our candidate can agitate around a clear message: I’m running to give voice to all those working-class Americans who are struggling to get by. No matter what state you live in, who you voted for in 2024, or your background, it’s just plain common sense that we should make healthcare more affordable instead of spending billions to enable the Israeli government’s crimes against humanity. Every American who agrees with me when I say ‘Medicare for All — Not a Dime for Israel’ should make their voice heard through our campaign. Racking up a high number of votes for this agenda is a crucial way to show the Democratic Party and the country as a whole that we can’t keep supporting a life-destroying status quo in our healthcare system and in the Middle East. If we want to defeat Trump’s handpicked crony this coming November, we need to speak to ordinary people’s frustrations with the status quo — we can’t keep running the same tired establishment playbook and expecting a different result. For those highly engaged voters (or skeptical media pundits) who raise concerns about wasting votes, the candidate can take the time to explain why this isn’t the case: It's true I'm a long shot. But Zohran showed anything can happen — and voting for me is a pragmatic decision, not a wasted vote. In a heavily divided primary with a large number of candidates and a very discredited establishment, my campaign and the democratic socialist movement I’m part of are positioned to be the balance of power if we can get a large enough number of voters to loudly demand Healthcare Not Warfare. Since there’s a high chance no candidate will get to 50% in the 2028 primaries, the Democrats could very well be heading towards a brokered convention, where a disciplined, principled current committed to breaking from corporate donors can play an outsized role in making sure whoever ends up with the nomination raises the banner of single-payer healthcare and cutting aid to Israel. How exactly could running this sort of primary campaign be translated into actual leverage? The candidate replies: I’m aiming to win the nomination, but if I don’t achieve that goal, my delegates and I will pledge our support in the primary only for a candidate who agrees in the general election to call for ending US aid to Israel and establishing Medicare for All at home. These are both winning planks for November against the Republicans, and the only reason I can see that other candidates haven’t yet raised these is that they’re still more scared of the donor class than they are of the people. That needs to change. If Democratic leaders want young people, workers, and those sick of the status quo to show up in big numbers this November, they need to meet us halfway. In this way, whether or not we win the nomination, democratic socialists could still play a decisive role in 2028. The approach outlined here is similar to what radical left parties periodically do in parliamentary democracies like Denmark or Sweden when they find themselves as a junior partner electorally: they dictate to center-left allies what their terms would be for enabling, from the outside, the formation of a new government. Running a Healthcare Not Warfare candidate will make it significantly more likely that the 2028 Democratic candidate stands with ordinary people instead of donors on these two pivotal planks — a shift that will, in turn, make it easier to achieve the existentially important task of defeating MAGA’s heir in November. Look at how much popular traction the Uncommitted movement got with a similar strategy in 2024 with so little on-the-ground organization — surely we can go much further with a working-class candidate, a much bigger DSA, and a Democratic Party base that has turned against Israel, billionaires, and the hacks in the party who prop them up. Objections and Responses There are quite a few objections to this proposal, many of which are very reasonable. Let me briefly address each here. Socialists shouldn’t waste their scarce time and resources on a candidate unlikely to win. This is a good rule in general, but there are important exceptions, and presidential elections are the main one. There’s no other political contest that gets anything like this level of attention and engagement in the US, so if you want to be a serious force in nationwide politics, you basically can’t afford not to have a candidate. Far from being an overall drain on our resources, running a dynamic 2028 campaign would likely result in a major net increase in members and capacity. In that spirit, the very pragmatic Milwaukee sewer socialists — who mostly ran to win at home in Wisconsin — supported Eugene Debs’s propagandistic presidential campaigns, which they correctly saw as a crucial means of recruiting to the Socialist Party. And now that the (post-1972) Democratic Party gives more weight to voters than party operatives in determining its presidential nomination, it’s become feasible to run as a socialist in primaries without risking a split in the vote against the Republicans in November. We should just support Ro Khanna, who also supports M4A and ending aid to Israel. I like Ro Khanna and would enthusiastically vote and canvass for him for president were he to get the nomination. But there’s a real chance that Khanna’s bid for office doesn’t catch on; he lacks the grassroots organizational apparatus of DSA, and, because he’s not really of the Left or labor (despite his current very good positions), he’s unlikely to generate the type of buy-in and enthusiasm that a DSA candidate would. Moreover, Khanna would be running as an individual, not as someone emerging from and building an organized movement — his campaign would not likely focus on building sustained power from below, nor would it likely polarize the 2028 primary around M4A and Israel aid. Also, and not inconsequentially, the poor electoral results for Tom Steyer and Saikat Chakrabarti this spring suggest that there’s perhaps not much of a popular appetite in the Democrats’ base to support multi-millionaire class traitors. Much better, then, to run a democratic socialist worker. If by Super Tuesday it’s clear that our campaign has captured the main left lane in the primary, Khanna should drop out and endorse us; conversely, if he’s managed to capture this lane, DSA could at that point transform its Healthcare Not Warfare campaign into an independent campaign to elect Ro Khanna focused on winning (and holding him accountable to) those two critical planks. An openness to consolidating an anti-corporate candidate by Super Tuesday is a necessary component of the strategy I’m proposing, because otherwise we risk splitting the primary votes (per DNC rules, you need at least 15% to get any delegates to convention). We should convince Shawn Fain or Sara Nelson to run for president instead. I agree it’d be great if either ran for president, but my impression is that there’s basically no chance that will happen in 2028, because both are firmly focused on their union leadership duties (and, in the case of Fain, beating back a federal witch-hunt). This plan could have DSA end up endorsing a non-socialist, non-DSAer for president. That’s against our principles. It’s a myth, and bad politics, that socialists can’t ever support candidates who aren’t members of their organization and/or who don’t call themselves socialists. Bernie, after all, was not a DSAer. And socialists abroad regularly make tactical decisions about if and when supporting a non-socialist candidate makes sense from the standpoint of promoting working-class interests, defending democracy, and building a socialist current in the process. If your “principles” prevent you and DSA from helping achieve the momentous stride forward of having a Democratic candidate in 2028 run on Medicare for All and ending aid to Israel, those “principles” are not very good. In fact, they actively undermine the causes they’re aiming to support. We shouldn’t confuse principles (working-class independence) with tactics (the best way to advance this in a given context). In my recent article in Catalyst on Milwaukee sewer socialism (I’ve uploaded the full text here), I have a section showing how similarly rigid rules about endorsements had to be eventually discarded in the old Socialist Party nationwide after WWI because they tended to lead socialists towards a sectarian abstention from broader anti-corporate electoral insurgencies beyond their party’s control. For what it’s worth, Lenin’s current under Tsarism frequently backed bourgeois candidates in the second round of elections and Lenin himself advocated that British Communists support Labour Party candidates; for his part, Kautsky in 1912 defended the German Social Democracy’s electoral pact with the Progressives in the runoffs. If our predecessors could be that tactically flexible in an era before the limits of their underlying strategic assumptions about intransigent class politics in capitalist democracies were made clear, then there’s no need to insist on being more tactically rigid today, after a century’s worth of accumulated experience. As long as you maintain your own political profile and organization while engaging in broader coalitional efforts, there’s zero inherent contradiction with the principle of political independence. More specifically: DSA and allied organizations should enthusiastically back Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed if AOC declines to run and he throws his hat in the presidential ring. (I have no idea whether he’s even considering this path, but there’ll surely be chatter about it if he wins his Senate race this November.) Though he doesn’t call himself a socialist, El-Sayed is a principled Berniecrat, a consistent fighter for Palestine, and would have a clear path to victory. Using the “s” word is far less important than whether a campaign fights for the interests of working people at home and abroad — and whether actively participating in it can grow the organized working class and the Left. And the same holds true if a less anti-corporate candidate were, under pressure, to adopt our two Healthcare Not Warfare planks. Why focus only on M4A and ending US aid to Israel? There are so many other important issues to fight for! Obviously there are many pivotal issues beyond healthcare and Israel, and our candidate — and especially our organizations involved in the campaign — should be prepared to speak on all of these. But one of the crucial lessons of the Zohran campaign is that you have to relentlessly stay on message if you want to cut through the noise. CNN and Fox News will want to talk about DSA’s views on Venezuela and abolishing the police; we need to polarize the debate on the widely and deeply felt issues that are most favorable for growing the Left, isolating our opponents, and winning urgently needed changes. One recent poll found 63% of Americans support M4A, even after respondents were told it would raise taxes and eliminate most private insurance. Another found that 74% of Democrats opposed “providing additional economic and military support to Israel.” And focusing on two demands sets the campaign up to be able to leverage its mandate to make clear demands upon other candidates (which we can’t do if we run with a laundry list of demands). Talking about a Plan B is a distraction from the more urgent work of building a groundswell of calls on AOC to run. It’s good for DSAers, fightback unionists, and progressive organizations to try to convince AOC to run. This proposal is meant as an addendum to pushes to get AOC to run and to line DSA up for that eventuality, not as a substitute for those efforts. But I’m worried that, like in 2024, we might eventually find ourselves with no time to find a viable alternative unless we start now. DSA, with its abundant deliberative processes, moves slowly. The approach you’re suggesting seems risky. If a DSA candidate runs but doesn’t receive a lot of votes, it’ll undercut our current national momentum. This is a reasonable worry. All big initiatives always carry risks, and the path I’m advocating is certainly not free of these. That said, if a Healthcare Not Warfare campaign doesn’t catch on like we envisioned, it’s a pretty simple pivot in March 2028 to explain that in the future we really need our standard-bearers like AOC, or our growing bench of national electeds, to step up in presidential primaries. Moreover, it’s worth noting that the risk of my Plan B proposal is on the whole significantly less than the risk entailed by an AOC run. We should all back her if she runs, since she’d fire up the base, provide huge openings for organizing, have a real shot at defeating a Republican (especially given MAGA’s unpopularity), be a great standard-bearer for our issues, particularly M4A and ending aid to Israel, and be less willing than mainstream candidates to capitulate to any anti-democratic machinations from Trump and co. But it’s also true that AOC could lose, which would be a devastating setback to the country and the Left. Or she could win and find herself unable to pass much, if any, of her (and our) program, a demoralizing prospect. So if we’re willing to take these risks with AOC (and we should), it follows that we should be able to take lower-level risks if she doesn’t throw her hat in the ring. What’s Your Plan B? The US Left is facing its biggest opening for growth and influence since the 1930s. Initiatives that would have been impossible a few months ago are now potentially feasible. A President AOC is now easier to imagine, but if she ultimately assesses that the risks aren’t worth the potential reward in 2028, we can’t be left flat-footed. So even if you’re not convinced by the specifics of my Plan B, I hope you can at least agree that it’d be a disaster for us not to have one — and not to start getting a Plan B into motion. Hopefully other organizers and political currents will put forward their responses and alternative ideas ASAP. The stakes are too high to just wait and see. More As always, please share this article widely. This newsletter depends on all you lovely people to get the word out. Thank you! I uploaded the full text of my Catalyst article on Milwaukee sewer socialism here (it’s updated and 3x as long as the version published earlier on this substack). If you haven’t yet, please make sure to subscribe to Catalyst here; I read every issue front to back, highly recommend. 🌹🎵 Ivan Lins (arranged by Arthur Verocai) — “General da Banda” 🌹🎵

Aug 3 • 12:50 PM EDT • Politics • laborpolitics.com

Xbox Price Hikes Are Now In Effect Worldwide

Get ready to pay more.

Aug 3 • 12:19 PM EDT • Technology • gamespot.com

Proposed west Cheyenne business park addition gets final committee look Monday

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — The City of Cheyenne's Public Services Committee meets today to make one final read-through of two ordinances enveloping more business

Aug 3 • 12:03 PM EDT • Business • capcity.news

FIRST ON FOX: Trump to open direct line with military families in ground-up readiness push

Trump's executive order creates a Military Spouse Commission chaired by Jennifer Hegseth to address childcare, housing, employment and health care.

Aug 3 • 12:01 PM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com

Who's building and who's buying in Greater Baton Rouge

A look at the latest property transactions and issued permits in East Baton Rouge, Ascension and Livingston parishes. East Baton Rouge Dr. Jeremy Comeaux purchased a medical office building on… Already an INSIDER? Sign in. Already an INSIDER? Sign in

Aug 3 • 10:46 AM EDT • Business • businessreport.com

The Business of Second Chances: Inside the Jefferson Correctional Institution Employer Partner Showcase

Struggling to find the right employee? Have you ever considered looking inside of a correctional facility? It may not be your first thought when looking to hire for your company, but there is an untapped workforce ready to be hired with proper training and earned certifications. Studies even show that these candidates would more than

Aug 3 • 10:20 AM EDT • Business • rightoncrime.com

How to Train, Fuel, and Recover, According to Science

I've spent 17 years writing about how the human body builds fitness, and I distilled the most important lessons into a new ten-part email series. Read the first installment below, and sign up today to get the rest delivered directly to your inbox.

Aug 3 • 9:30 AM EDT • Science • outsideonline.com

Good Communication Is Good Business by Geoffrey Losee

The following column was contributed by J.D. Fisher. Mixed-use communities are increasingly common. Restaurants, breweries, retail stores, entertainment venues, and professional offices often operate within walking distance of established neighborhoods. That proximity creates tremendous opportunity, but it also means that a business's decisions may affect more than just its customers. Many business owners understandably focus on obtaining the permits necessary to open their doors. However, municipal approval is rarely the end of the conversation. As a business evolves, whether by adding outdoor seating, live entertainment, extended operating hours, or other new amenities, the applicable zoning ordinance may require additional approvals or impose operational standards designed to balance commercial activity with nearby residential uses. From a business perspective, the question should not simply be, "Can we do this?" It should also be, "Have we communicated with everyone who may be affected?" Recent local news coverage highlighted how differing interpretations of a municipal ordinance can quickly become the subject of public hearings, legal arguments, and significant uncertainty for a business. While every situation turns on its own facts, one common theme emerged: practical solutions are more difficult to achieve if communication breaks down. Businesses can often reduce that risk by engaging early with the relevant stakeholders. That begins with municipal staff. Planning departments are oftentimes willing to discuss how an ordinance applies before substantial investments are made. Seeking clarification in advance may identify permitting requirements or operational limitations that can be addressed proactively rather than after enforcement action. Communication should not stop with local government. Nearby property owners and neighborhood representatives frequently appreciate being informed about proposed changes before they occur. A brief meeting, an informational email, or an invitation to discuss concerns can foster goodwill and reveal potential issues while there is still flexibility to adjust operations. That’s why such meetings often required for substantial projects and may be a good idea even if not required. Perhaps most importantly, businesses should view compliance as an ongoing process rather than a one-time event. Operational changes that seem minor from a business standpoint may have regulatory implications under local development ordinances. Periodically reviewing proposed changes with experienced land-use counsel or planning professionals can help identify issues before they become disputes. No ordinance can eliminate every conflict between commercial activity and residential expectations. Nor should every disagreement become a legal controversy. But businesses that invest in transparent, proactive communication place themselves in the strongest position to protect both their operations and their relationships within the community. In today's regulatory environment, good communication is more than good public relations, it is good risk management. If your business is planning to expand its operations, introduce a new use, or simply wants to better understand how local land development regulations apply, the attorneys at Rountree Losee LLP are available to help. Our land use and local government practice works with businesses throughout southeastern North Carolina to navigate municipal approval processes, identify potential issues before they become disputes, and keep projects moving forward with confidence. Read more at rountreelosee.com.

Aug 3 • 8:00 AM EDT • Business • wilmingtonbiz.com

Read the key chapter in dispute

Here is the section that the author of the Democratic Party’s 2024 autopsy says was missing when the Democratic National Committee released a draft of the overall document in May. The party denied ever receiving the chapter.

Aug 3 • 6:47 AM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

Galaxy S27 Ultra is already cooking, and I know what software Samsung is testing it with right now

Galaxy S27 Ultra news has been making headlines in the past couple of weeks, and the latest leak details one key component — the software.

Aug 3 • 6:37 AM EDT • Technology • phonearena.com

The MLB trade deadline is here, plus Rodgers talks reconciliation

The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox. Good morning! It’s great to be back with you. Coming up: ⚾ MLB trade deadline latest ⚽ Soccer mess deepens 🗣️ Rodgers speaks out Just 12 hours separate the time this email landed in your inbox and MLB’s trade deadline at 6 p.m. ET today. It’s easy to wonder if there will be any intrigue at all, with the market’s biggest name already settling into his new Dodger home. Let’s catch up on yesterday’s deals before we get to today:...

Aug 3 • 6:12 AM EDT • Sports • nytimes.com

Clinical Trials Aren’t the Only Way to Know if Flu Shots Work

With a bit of creativity, evidence can be drawn from data we already have in the form of natural experiments, write Christopher M. Worsham and Anupam B. Jena.

Aug 3 • 6:00 AM EDT • Health • time.com

Flock cameras explained: How the license plate readers work

Flock Safety's license plate readers are raising privacy concerns and igniting a surveillance debate. Here's what you need to know.

Aug 3 • 5:19 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Australia warns H5N1 likely to spread after first mass mortality episode

Aug 3 • 5:04 AM EDT • Health • aljazeera.com

Opinion | A Reading List for Our Age of A.I.

A.I. is a political theory. And it is gobbling up our democracy.

Aug 3 • 5:01 AM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

‘The Democratic Party is asleep at the wheel’: Democratic socialists are strategizing for their biggest moment yet

DSA has taken a strategic approach to grow its power within the Democratic Party, picking off two House incumbents already this year and potentially a third on Tuesday in Michigan. As the group’s summit in Chicago made clear, its members see this as only the beginning of a fight against both Republicans and Democrats alike.

Aug 3 • 5:00 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

BUSINESS BRIEFS August 3, 2026: Business news in the Berkshires and beyond

Business news from Berkshire Community College, MountainOne Bank, Dewey Hall, and more

Aug 3 • 12:01 AM EDT • Business • theberkshireedge.com

The ‘Science of Reading’ Movement Is Evolving. Is Math Next?

Schools can expect more change—and continued debate—as the push for evidence-based instruction continues.

Aug 3 • 12:01 AM EDT • Science • edweek.org

Washington County readies land for development

Washington County is seeking nearly $2 million in federal funding to transform undeveloped acreage at Highlands Business Park into a 10-acre, pad-ready

Aug 2 • 11:55 PM EDT • Business • virginiabusiness.com

Readers respond: Politics don’t belong at pulpit, in favor of Christian ‘cult’ and more

WEB-- can you include as a box below?

Aug 2 • 11:01 PM EDT • Politics • timesfreepress.com

Homewood Science Center thanks community for 10 years of support

This year’s Summer Fest was a celebration of 10 years of the Homewood Science Center’s work sharing the wonders of science with the community. The evening’s program also included special recognition to Edie Dobrez, HSC’s executive director. The annual fundraising event brought several hundred people to Idlewild Country Club on[Read More...]

Aug 2 • 9:18 PM EDT • Science • hfchronicle.com

Updated Vikings' 53-Man Roster Projection After First Four Practices

The first week of Vikings training camp is now in the books, and week 1 was eventful, with the QBs entering camp amid a dramatic battle, as well as a few front office moves that have already helped shake up the roster a bit. Notice that three of the players below have asterisks next to their names indicating that they are not currently on the roster, but that I feel strongly that the Vikings could sign them in the next couple of weeks. Kyler Murray is the odds-on favorite and has looked sharp getting the ball down the field in camp so far.

Aug 2 • 8:38 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

The genius narrative isn’t inspiring

Analysis of over 400 children's books finds ideas around early interest in science and innate ability could turn young readers away from science

Aug 2 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • chemistryworld.com

Let’s do science: Share your wild turkey sightings

MAINE—All good wildlife management starts with science, and all good science starts with data. That’s where you come in. Maine’s Wild Turkey August Production Survey invites community scientists to play a direct role in monitoring our state’s wild turkey population. Whether you enjoy watching wildlife from your window, spend time hiking, hunting, or exploring the outdoors, or just need an excuse to get outside, you can help. Each summer, Maine’s wild turkey hens are busy raising the next generation of birds. By reporting your sightings and observations, you’ll help our biologists monitor annual reproduction rates, track population trends, and make informed management decisions that support healthy, sustainable turkey populations for generations to come. The information collected helps ensure there are abundant opportunities for both wildlife watchers and hunters to enjoy Maine’s wild turkeys. It’s easy to participate! Whenever you see wild turkeys anywhere in Maine during August, simply report: Date and location of your observation Number of adult females (hens) Number of adult males (gobblers) Number of poults (young turkeys) Estimated poult size relative to the adult hens Every observation counts, even if you don’t see poults. Together, these reports provide a clearer picture of turkey productivity across the state and are an important part of Maine’s wildlife management. Ready to help? Report your turkey sightings online using the Wild Turkey August Production Survey. Submit an Observation Subscribe Share Leave a comment

Aug 2 • 4:11 PM EDT • Science • barharborstory.substack.com

GameThread: Detroit Tigers vs. Athletics, 4:05 p.m.

Detroit Tigers vs. Athletics Time/Place: 4:05 p.m., Sutter Health ParkSB Nation Site: Athletics NationMedia: Detroit SportsNet, MLB.TV, Tigers Radio Network

Aug 2 • 4:00 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Business Weekly Agenda for August 2

Events for the Greater Berks business community.

Aug 2 • 2:45 PM EDT • Business • readingeagle.com

New Jersey and New York sue to block Trump admin. changes to health insurance marketplaces

The attorneys general argue that the changes would make it harder for Americans to get insurance and could raise prices for people who already have it.

Aug 2 • 2:06 PM EDT • Health • gothamist.com

PlayStation Petition Loses Steam Even As Sony Doubles Down on Disc Decision

Sony Interactive Entertainment has not backed down from the decision to scrap discs, but the energy in the debate is already waning.

Aug 2 • 10:29 AM EDT • Technology • insider-gaming.com

📚 The Inoculation Project 8/2/2026: Science in Sacramento and Youngstown

This week, we’re helping a California fifth grade do a balloon car project, and an Ohio high school science class do a variety of cool labs. We hope that readers who support quality public school…

Aug 2 • 10:00 AM EDT • Science • dailykos.com

Southern university requires business suits, bans du-rags and other headwear in new dress code

Tuskegee University's new dress code bans du-rags, bonnets, and sagging pants in classrooms as part of its broader workforce readiness push.

Aug 2 • 9:36 AM EDT • Business • foxnews.com

Is Jaydon Blue Ready To Break Out For The Cowboys?

Jaydon Blue discusses his Year 2 growth, route running and Cowboys backfield chemistry in a new DXSN interview from training camp.

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

Arsenal 2026/27 third kit release date leaks

Arsenal’s third and final kit for 2026/27 will be released on Monday, new leaks have confirmed, with photos already appearing online.Photo via @IamCrisJ on TwitterFooty Headlines and Arsenal Shirt r...

Aug 2 • 9:05 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

The Vikings’ Starting Lineup as Training Camp Gets Rolling

The Vikings’ starting lineup isn’t set in stone. That being said, there are many details that are already known. Nobody […]

Aug 2 • 8:00 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Without this protein, damaged muscle turns to fat and scar tissue

A protein once thought to mainly protect chromosome ends may also be essential for keeping muscle stem cells ready to repair injuries. Researchers found that TRF2 helps these cells maintain their identity and coordinate the cycle of rest, repair, and renewal.

Aug 2 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

What are the health impacts of wildfire smoke amid 'apocalyptic' air quality levels?

As local air quality readings remain in the unhealthy to hazardous range, what are the impacts of wildfire smoke on people's health?

Aug 2 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • kunc.org

Rays Reacts Results: Winning the AL East

The trade deadline approaches tomorrow afternoon, and we’ve already seen one major domino fall in the last few hours, as the Dodgers have miraculously scooped up Tarik Skubal for just OF Zyhir Hope (ranked in the 25-50 range on MLB top prospect lists) and two throw-ins (injured RHP River Ryan and wonky RHP Brady Smith). […]

Aug 2 • 7:38 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

CB Jaylon Johnson Confirms What Chicago Bears Fans Already Knew

Aug 2 • 7:00 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Denver Broncos roster review: Tight end Adam Trautman

Veteran Adam Trautman enters the Denver Broncos training camp ready to show the young pups how to be a NFL tight end

Aug 2 • 7:00 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Today on Pinstripe Alley

Get ready for an adrenaline rush of trades coming in over the next two days.

Aug 2 • 6:00 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

How this New Orleans prosthetics expert helps VA patients find the right fit

“The younger guys, if they have to wear a leg, they want it to be blinged out. All shiny. Silver showing. As fancy as possible,” Blake Robichaux said. Read more.

Aug 2 • 5:00 AM EDT • Health • nola.com

Kids receive screenings, supplies and more at Asheville back-to-school health fair

In Asheville, Appalachian Mountain Health helped get young ones ready for school.

Aug 1 • 7:43 PM EDT • Health • wlos.com

Steelers Training Camp Week One's Five Winners and One Loser

The Pittsburgh Steelers have wrapped up their first week of training camp. Pittsburgh has already seen several early developments. Here are the Steelers' early five winners and one loser from the first week of training camp.

Aug 1 • 7:00 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Small-Business Owners Put Millions Into “Good Faith Accounts.” He Bought a Yacht

Small-business owners transferred millions of dollars to William Thomas Engle after he promised to help them obtain large commercial loans and assured them that their ... Read More

Aug 1 • 6:35 PM EDT • Business • yahoo.com

Saturday night Orioles game thread, vs. Phillies, 7:05 ET

After last night’s thrilling win, the Orioles face a monumental task in solving lefty Christopher Sánchez.

Aug 1 • 6:35 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Panama: Haemophilus influenzae meningitis case reported in Veraguas Health Region

The Veraguas Health Region, located in the central-western region of Panama, confirmed a case of meningitis caused by the Haemophilus influenzae bacteria in a 12-year-old student from La Primavera School, diagnosed on July 29. The patient remains hospitalized, is receiving appropriate treatment, and is in stable clinical condition. The regional health director of Veraguas, Xavier A. Torres Domínguez, reported that, once the diagnosis was confirmed, the Ministry of Health (Minsa), in coordination with the Social Security Fund (CSS), immediately activated the epidemiological investigation and health response protocols established for this type of event. Canada: Haemophilus influenzae type B outbreak in Calgary As part of the actions implemented, the Epidemiology teams carried out the identification and monitoring of the patient’s close contacts, applying the corresponding preventive measures to reduce the risk of transmission and safeguard the health of the educational community. Health authorities explained that meningitis caused by Haemophilus influenzae is a bacterial disease that requires timely medical attention. In that regard, they urged the population to immediately seek medical attention if they experience symptoms such as high fever, severe headache, stiff neck, vomiting, drowsiness, or altered mental status. They also reiterated that vaccination is the main preventive measure against this disease, and therefore called on parents and guardians to verify that their children’s immunization schedules are complete, in accordance with the Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI). Outbreak News Today is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe

Aug 1 • 6:29 PM EDT • Health • outbreaknewstoday.substack.com

A Courthouse Employee Got $41,250 for a Business That Didn’t Exist, She Won’t Go to Prison

A former Illinois courthouse employee admitted obtaining $41,250 in Paycheck Protection Program loans for a remodeling company that investigators said did not exist. Erica L. ... Read More

Aug 1 • 5:35 PM EDT • Business • yahoo.com

Saturday Night Open Thread: Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping…

Come and join this merry band of Steelers’ faithful for some lively debate about our Steelers, good food, music, and the merits of the odd cold beverage.

Aug 1 • 5:30 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com