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Insmed Reports Second-Quarter 2026 Financial Results and Provides Business Update
—Total Company Revenues of $425.5 Million for the Second Quarter of 2026— —BRINSUPRI® (brensocatib) Revenues of $309.2 Million for the Second Quarter of 2026, Reflecting 49% Growth Over the...
Colts' Blake Grupe: Favorite to win kicking job
Colts' Blake Grupe: Favorite to win kicking job
Yankees' Jose Caballero: Fading into utility role
Yankees' Jose Caballero: Fading into utility role
Tigers' Javier Baez: Sitting Wednesday
Tigers' Javier Baez: Sitting Wednesday
Guardians' Angel Martinez: Losing out on playing time
Guardians' Angel Martinez: Losing out on playing time
Scandal Leaves North Carolina G.O.P. With No Candidate and Little Time
Representative Chuck Edwards’s decision to drop his re-election bid amid sexual harassment charges came as a Democratic farmer, Jamie Ager, was already making inroads.
Brewers' Jake Bauers: Not in Wednesday's lineup
Brewers' Jake Bauers: Not in Wednesday's lineup
House Ethics Committee has investigated nine Congressmembers so far this year
North Carolina Republican Cpngressman Chuck Edwards ended his reelection campaign on Wednesday
Sanofi suspends chronic lung disease phase 2 study, tied to ‘strategic business reasons’
Sanofi halted a phase 2 trial testing a monoclonal antibody, SAR445399, in non-cystic fibrosis bronchiectasis, Fierce Biotech has learned. The trial, which began only back in April, was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study to measure the reduction in mucus plug score following treatment with SAR445399 compared with placebo in adults aged 18 to 80 years with NCFB, a chronic lung disease. The trial was officially reported as halted on July 29, the day before Sanofi’s second-quarter earnings call. The decision to pause the trial was made “as part of a company-wide portfolio review for strategic business reasons,” and not due to safety concerns, a Sanofi spokesperson told Fierce. The move to pause the NCFB trial comes during a trying time for Sanofi following a year filled with a series of trial fails. In February, the French pharma ousted CEO Paul Hudson and appointed Merck KGaA leader Belén Garijo, M.D., Ph.D., to steer the ship. Since then, Garijo has been doing a deep dive on correcting the company’s strewn R&D and clinical strategies. On July 24, Sanofi scrapped amlitelimab for atopic dermatitis, despite its lore as being a potential $5 billion blockbuster. During its second-quarter report, the company abandoned two more assets, balinatunfib and itepekimab, following failed trial results in psoriasis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, respectively. SAR445399, only first revealed by Sanofi in 2023, is an anti-interleukin-1 receptor 3 monoclonal antibody developed to block the interleukin 1, 33, and 36 cytokine pathways. These pathways can be important in chronic immune-related dermatologic diseases, such as atopic dermatitis and hidradenitis suppurativa, as well as respiratory conditions, such as NCFB. Related Sanofi’s new CEO ‘looking deeply’ at late-stage pipeline as clinical clearout continues NCFB affects roughly half a million people in the U.S., with a global incidence of greater than one million cases. In August 2025, Insmed received FDA approval for Brinsupri, a DPP1 inhibitor targeting neutrophil activation, for treatment of NCFB in adults and kids ages 12 and older. The British biotech Infex Therapeutics showed promising NCFB phase 2a data using their monoclonal antibody, INFEX702, which acts by disabling Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacteria known to be a major pathogen of NCFB. Sanofi is currently running a separate phase 2 study testing SAR445399 as a potential treatment for the inflammatory skin condition hidradenitis suppurativa.
Penn State Smeal College of Business sets new fundraising record for fiscal year 2026
The Smeal College of Business set a new fundraising record by raising $45 million in fiscal year 2026 to support scholarships, faculty research, programs and facilities.
The Humiliated President
As Donald Trump faces one embarrassment after another, he is attacking those he blames.
Giants' Christian Koss: Heading to bench Wednesday
Giants' Christian Koss: Heading to bench Wednesday
House GOP anxiety spikes as scandals pile up in critical battleground seats
A series of serious allegations against GOP congressmen in key House districts have rattled party insiders this week, fueling Republicans’ anxiety that they could lose seats once considered mostly safe and further endanger their majority.
Video Game Giant Electronic Arts Closes $55 Billion Go-Private Sale of Its Business
CHICAGO (AP) — Video game giant Electronic Arts officially has new owners. The California-based maker of popular titles like “Battlefield” and “The Sims” announced Tuesday that it closed the $55 billion sale of its business to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund PIF, investment firm Silver Lake ...
Patriots' Terrell Jennings: Competing for RB3 role
Patriots' Terrell Jennings: Competing for RB3 role
Cardinals' Jeremiyah Love: Won't play in preseason opener
Cardinals' Jeremiyah Love: Won't play in preseason opener
Cyclosporiasis Cases in Michigan Climb to Over 12,000, State Health Officials Say
Aug 5 (Reuters) - Michigan health officials reported 12,218 cases linked to an outbreak of cyclosporiasis on Wednesday, an increase of 710 cases since its last update a day earlier. Michigan has reported the first two deaths associated with the outbreak, saying both individuals had significant ...
Reds' Emilio Pagan: Collects sixth straight save
Reds' Emilio Pagan: Collects sixth straight save
Angels' Grayson Rodriguez: Revenge game wasted Tuesday
Angels' Grayson Rodriguez: Revenge game wasted Tuesday
Rep. Chuck Edwards drops reelection bid after censure recommendation for sexual harassment claims
The House Ethics Committee said there is "substantial reason to believe" Rep. Chuck Edwards violated House rules related to sexual harassment and hostile workplaces. Edwards denied any wrongdoing.
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
Some businesses in New Castle County getting a tax double-check
New Castle County has to check some assessments on some businesses, and here are some of them getting another look.
Diamondbacks' Nolan Arenado: Goes deep in Tuesday's loss
Diamondbacks' Nolan Arenado: Goes deep in Tuesday's loss
Padres' Jackson Merrill: Provides three hits in win
Padres' Jackson Merrill: Provides three hits in win
Tigers' Gleyber Torres: Launches homer in win
Tigers' Gleyber Torres: Launches homer in win
Rockies' Jordan Romano: Falters in save chance Tuesday
Rockies' Jordan Romano: Falters in save chance Tuesday
Rays' Bryan Baker: Converts 32nd save
Rays' Bryan Baker: Converts 32nd save
Pirates' Endy Rodriguez: Pops sixth homer
Pirates' Endy Rodriguez: Pops sixth homer
Blue Jays' Trey Yesavage: Slated for MRI
Blue Jays' Trey Yesavage: Slated for MRI
Buccaneers' Jalen McMillan: Held out of practice Tuesday
Buccaneers' Jalen McMillan: Held out of practice Tuesday
This year’s US News ‘best hospitals’ list has some standouts among the standouts
The latest lineup of America’s “best of the best” hospitals from US News & World Report is something of an embarrassment of riches for a few cities and health systems.
Braves' Ray Kerr: Back to full health
Braves' Ray Kerr: Back to full health
National Park Service says Trump's arch would adversely affect 37 historic sites
President Donald Trump proposed the 250-foot-tall arch last year to commemorate the country's 250th anniversary
National Park Service says Trump's arch would adversely affect 37 historic sites
President Donald Trump proposed the 250-foot-tall arch last year to commemorate the country's 250th anniversary
Allegations against several GOP congressmen highlight the party’s quandary
The political situation is becoming dicey for Republicans clinging to a narrow House majority, underscoring how fine a line they might need to walk in the weeks to come.
National Park Service says Trump's arch would adversely affect 37 historic sites
President Donald Trump proposed the 250-foot-tall arch last year to commemorate the country's 250th anniversary
New ASE guideline aims to improve workplace safety for cardiac sonographers
Work-related musculoskeletal disorders are a major safety concern in the field of echocardiography, impacting up to 90% of all cardiac sonographers.
Sony Music Appoints Stephanie Yu to General Counsel and Executive Vice President, Business and Legal Affairs
Sony Music today announced the appointment of Stephanie Yu to General Counsel and Executive Vice President, Business and Legal Affairs. She reports to Rob Stringer, Chairman, Sony Music Group and Kevin Kelleher, COO, Sony Music. Yu will be responsible for overseeing the business, legal and governmental affairs strategies and activities for the company globally. Stringer […]
Sony Music Appoints Stephanie Yu to General Counsel and Executive Vice President, Business and Legal Affairs
Sony Music today announced the appointment of Stephanie Yu to General Counsel and Executive Vice President, Business and Legal Affairs. She reports to Rob Stringer, Chairman, Sony Music Group and Kevin Kelleher, COO, Sony Music. Yu will be responsible for overseeing the business, legal and governmental affairs strategies and activities for the company globally. Stringer […]
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.
Rice researcher honored for advancing science behind AI and human assessment
Rice psychological scientist recognized with early career award for distinguished contributions to research methods research, practice, education and service.
UMass Chan receives Massachusetts Life Sciences Center funding to advance health equity in pregnancy care and biomedical discovery
UMass Chan Medical School researchers have received funding from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center to advance research using artificial intelligence to improve early identification of pregnancy-induced hypertension and to establish a colorectal cancer biobank that will accelerate biomedical discoveries.
People With Disabilities Fear Service Cuts as Trump’s DOJ Questions Legal Protections
By Stephanie Armour | KFF Health News Amanda DeSimone-Shabrack relies on a home healthcare aide to help her high-needs autistic 12-year-old son. Virginia’s Medicaid program covers the assistance, enabling her to work as both an education technology specialist and a professor, run errands, and keep ...
Phillies' Brandon Marsh: Getting break with lefty starting
Phillies' Brandon Marsh: Getting break with lefty starting
Guardians' Foster Griffin: Dealt to Cleveland
Guardians' Foster Griffin: Dealt to Cleveland
House Ethics Panel Finds Rep. Chuck Edwards Likely Violated Sexual Harassment Rules
The Ethics Committee called for the censure of Representative Chuck Edwards, Republican of North Carolina, who showered two female staffers with lavish gifts and affection.
Ethics panel finds GOP Rep. Chuck Edwards violated House sexual harassment rules and recommends censure
The bipartisan House Ethics Committee said Monday it has found “substantial evidence” that GOP Rep. Chuck Edwards repeatedly made unwanted advances toward two of his female staffers and is recommending that the full House vote to punish him on the floor.
Orioles' Anthony Eyanson: On move to Baltimore
Orioles' Anthony Eyanson: On move to Baltimore
Orioles' Alex Hoppe: Baltimore-bound in four-player deal
Orioles' Alex Hoppe: Baltimore-bound in four-player deal
Angels' Jacob Cozart: On move to Anaheim
Angels' Jacob Cozart: On move to Anaheim
Giants' Jung Hoo Lee: Multi-hit effort in loss
Giants' Jung Hoo Lee: Multi-hit effort in loss
Tigers' Jackson Jobe: Looks strong in latest rehab start
Tigers' Jackson Jobe: Looks strong in latest rehab start
Nationals' Andrew Alvarez: Recalled to start Monday's game
Nationals' Andrew Alvarez: Recalled to start Monday's game
Red Sox's Willson Contreras: Hitless in return
Red Sox's Willson Contreras: Hitless in return
Reds' Tyler Stephenson: Heating up since break
Reds' Tyler Stephenson: Heating up since break
UMass Chan summer outreach programs inspire next generation of physician-scientists
Classrooms and labs kept busy this summer at UMass Chan, hosting high school and college students participating in outreach programs.
Fire reported at downtown De Smet business
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Diamondbacks' Merrill Kelly: Tagged for five runs in loss
Diamondbacks' Merrill Kelly: Tagged for five runs in loss
Tigers' Spencer Torkelson: Plates three in win
Tigers' Spencer Torkelson: Plates three in win
White Sox's Everson Pereira: Season-high four RBI on Sunday
White Sox's Everson Pereira: Season-high four RBI on Sunday
Athletics' Mason Barnett: Garnering another start
Athletics' Mason Barnett: Garnering another start
Angels' Ryan Zeferjahn: Secures five-out save
Angels' Ryan Zeferjahn: Secures five-out save
Dodgers' Ben Casparius: In midst of rehab assignment
Dodgers' Ben Casparius: In midst of rehab assignment
Dodgers' Shohei Ohtani: Set to play catch
Dodgers' Shohei Ohtani: Set to play catch
Giants' Christian Koss: Retreating to bench Sunday
Giants' Christian Koss: Retreating to bench Sunday
Mets' Emilien Pitre: Sent to New York in Peralta deal
Mets' Emilien Pitre: Sent to New York in Peralta deal
Rays' Freddy Peralta: Heading to Tampa Bay
Rays' Freddy Peralta: Heading to Tampa Bay
Nationals' Luis Garcia: Late scratch from starting nine
Nationals' Luis Garcia: Late scratch from starting nine
Royals' Luinder Avila: Hits shelf with forearm tightness
Royals' Luinder Avila: Hits shelf with forearm tightness
Rays' Victor Mesa: Left out of lineup vs. lefty
Rays' Victor Mesa: Left out of lineup vs. lefty
Kelvin Sheppard Sends Blunt Message About Terrion Arnold
Kelvin Sheppard delivered a pointed assessment of former Lions cornerback Terrion Arnold. Detroit’s former first-round pick is now facing a serious legal battle after his release from the organization.
Diamondbacks' Paul Sewald: Falters in low-leverage spot
Diamondbacks' Paul Sewald: Falters in low-leverage spot
Athletics' Tommy White: Three knocks in Saturday's loss
Athletics' Tommy White: Three knocks in Saturday's loss
Padres' Freddy Fermin: Snaps power drought Saturday
Padres' Freddy Fermin: Snaps power drought Saturday
Pirates' Gregory Soto: Locks down 14th save
Pirates' Gregory Soto: Locks down 14th save
Dodgers' Will Klein: Lands on IL with elbow discomfort
Dodgers' Will Klein: Lands on IL with elbow discomfort
Rays' Drew Rasmussen: Dominates in win No. 10
Rays' Drew Rasmussen: Dominates in win No. 10
Dodgers' Mookie Betts: Getting rest Saturday
Dodgers' Mookie Betts: Getting rest Saturday
Angels' Jose Soriano: Scratched from start
Angels' Jose Soriano: Scratched from start
Twins' Garrett Acton: Activated, optioned to Triple-A
Twins' Garrett Acton: Activated, optioned to Triple-A
Angels' Ryan Johnson: Handed sixth loss
Angels' Ryan Johnson: Handed sixth loss
Smerconish: The growing power of the Democratic Socialists of America
Champion Aphrodite FNCS Cup Battle Royale in NA Central: Session 1
Drop into the Champion Aphrodite FNCS Cup! Duo up and compete for a chance to earn Aphrodite cosmetic rewards before they hit the shop. Good luck and have fun!
FTC Sues Hims & Hers Over Health Privacy And Billing Practices
By Ellyn Vohnoutka HealthDay ReporterFRIDAY, July 31, 2026 (HealthDay News) — The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sued telehealth company Hims & Hers, alleging it shared consumers' private health information with advertising platforms and unknowingly charged some customers for ...
What Dad Eats Before Conception May Influence Baby's Health
By HealthDay Staff HealthDay ReporterFRIDAY, July 31, 2026 (HealthDay News) — When it comes to preparing for a healthy pregnancy, the focus is usually on moms. But new research suggests dads' nutrition plays an important role, too. "Maternal nutrition and health before, during and after the baby's ...
FIFA wants World Cup expansion assessment amid pressure on Infantino
FIFA is seeking an independent agency to assess the expansion of the men’s World Cup to 64 teams, according to documents seen by the Press Association. FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, is under increasing pressure amid mounting opposition to plans to seek private investment in a company which would run the World Cup, with three confederations having rejected it and his senior adviser having quit over it.
Daily Routine Key To Good Health, Study Says
By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterFRIDAY, July 31, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Finding a comfortable, consistent daily schedule could be crucial to boosting your mental and physical health, a new study says. People who maintain a consistent routine tend to have lower levels of pain and depression,
Local advocates mark Medicare, Medicaid anniversary, push for affordable health care
13WHAM ABC Rochester provides local news, weather forecasts, traffic updates, health reports, notices of events and items of interest in the community, local sports and entertainment programming for Rochester and nearby towns and communities including Greece, Victor, Pittsford, Penfield, Henrietta, Webster, Irondequoit, Fairport, Chili, Gates, Rush, Wheatland, Canandaigua, Farmington, Spencerport and Hilton.
They Worked To Protect Public Health. Now They Want the Public’s Votes.
By Phil Galewitz, Christine Mai-Duc, and Amanda Seitz | KFF Health News A handful of former public health officials are campaigning for top statewide offices across the country, testing whether their experience with covid and other hot-button health issues will appeal to voters in November. The ...
Nationals getting healthier in time for Braves series
Jake Irvin will come off the 60-day injured list to make his first start in more than two months when the Washington Nationals open their four-game series against the host Atlanta Braves on Thursday.
Meet & Greet with Laura Galloway
Laura Galloway began her new role as dean of Whitworth University’s School of Business on July 1 after relocating to Spokane from San Diego, where she previously worked for University of Massachusetts Global, a California-based online institution, most recently as associate vice chancellor for institutional curriculum, assessment, and academic policy.
Top entertainment headlines on Wednesday, July 29 with Studio 13 Live
Mireya Garcia dives into the top entertainment headlines for Wednesday, July 29 on Studio 13 Live—From a new documentary exposing Jared Leto's sexual harassment allegations to updates on box office performances and celebrity engagements.
Opinion: Data disruptions put powerful maternal and child health tool at risk | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
The consequences of disruptions to the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System are falling heaviest on already-vulnerable populations.
Fauci to face Republican questions over Covid pandemic origins
Veteran medical adviser likely to face questions over disputed ‘lab leak’ theory in investigation seen by scientists as ‘vilification and harassment’ of 85-year-old