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IRS adds notices, payment features to business tax accounts
Eligible businesses and organizations can now view more digital notices, make payments on installment agreements, and obtain EIN verification documents online.
IRS adds notices, payment features to business tax accounts
Eligible businesses and organizations can now view more digital notices, make payments on installment agreements, and obtain EIN verification documents online.
Mitch McConnell Is Homeward Bound
He says he’s been discharged from the rehab hospital, but it’s still unclear when he might return to Capitol Hill.
Francesca Hong faces scrutiny over ‘cancel Thanksgiving’ post
Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist running for Wisconsin governor, is getting attention for social media posts calling for canceling Thanksgiving and abolishing police.
Why Normal People Aren’t Using AI Agents
The tech industry is realizing it needs to build agents based on what regular consumers want, not just what its AI models can do.
I got fired after announcing my pregnancy. I started my own company.
Kelly Ehlers says losing her executive job while pregnant led her to build a social media agency that now generates millions in annual revenue.
A socialist candidate criticized Thanksgiving — and unearthed a deeper debate on the left
Some of Francesca Hong’s fans are gently asking: Does she have a “woke 1.0” problem?
What Makes a Fact, According to a Harvard Social Scientist
Sheila Jasanoff has spent her career studying how societies produce knowledge, evaluate expertise, and make decisions about technology.
Munitions Shortage Has Trump Up in Arms and Aiming to Blame
Trump is denying ongoing reports of serious shortages of U.S. missiles amid the Iran war, while also reportedly lashing out at Hegseth and others.
Hawley, Banks, Tuberville File Amendment to Protect State Laws Banning Men in Women’s Sports
WASHINGTON -- Today, U.S. Senators Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Jim Banks (R-In.) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) filed an amendment to the Protect College Sports Act to ensure the bil
Free Play Days – NBA 2K26, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Wax Heads, and More
Game Pass members can hop into Sports Renovations this weekend, while all XBOX players can enjoy Ghost Recon Wildlands, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, NBA 2K26, and a free trial for Wax Heads.
Insults, Expletives and Fat-Shaming: Vance Trolls Critics on the Right and Left
The vice president has dispensed with the decorum and restraint of his predecessors to directly take on opponents and journalists on social media with sometimes profane and often personal jabs.
Why truckers always seem to be on the phone while they drive
Social media is linked to feelings of isolation, but less so for truckers. They benefit from long phone calls and connections on apps like FaceTime and WhatsApp.
Papa John’s Cuts Sales Forecast and Suspends Dividend
Papa John’s cut its outlook for the year and suspended its dividend, as the pizza chain’s North American business continues to face a soft consumer environment.
Amanda Paschoal: “Politics is built through dialogue, even with people who think differently.”
Amanda Paschoal is an activist and City Councillor in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She represents a new generation of feminist and LGBTQIA+ leaders, committed to social and climate justice. During her term, Amanda championed legislation on climate adaptation, gender equality, and environmental racism. Through her activism and legislative work, she has become a leading voice for intersectional approaches to sustainability, social justice, and the protection of marginalized communities in Brazil’s urban and political landscape.
2026 Fall Preview: Pleasant Hope Football
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter By Chris Parker Pleasant Hope football is looking to bounce back from an 0-10 season with six offensive and eight defensive starters returning. Daylin Campbell (junior) and Peyton Guy (senior) are
2026 Fall Preview: Hillcrest Football
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter By Chris Parker Hillcrest football is looking to bounce back from an 0-10 season with six offensive and four defensive starters returning this season. The offense will rely on speed. “I
AI isn’t enough to protect social media communities from AI
Why humans need to moderate humans.
Microsoft’s Quantum Chief Doesn’t Care That Scientists Don’t Believe His Results
Zulfi Alam thinks his team doesn’t need to “prove” they engineered a new state of matter in their bid to reinvent computing. Science would disagree.
Unregulated use of peptides raises alarm among researchers
Driven by social media hype and a growing distrust of public health guidance, consumer demand for experimental peptides has exploded over the last decade.
Perez Hilton, a medical emergency and how fans stepped in
In the age of social media, mental health crises are playing out differently. Perez Hilton's fans are one example.
Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left
One moderate group says the progressive wins are “deeply troubling” and is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism.
Senate Finance Committee wrestles with how to sustain Social Security benefits
The Senate Finance Committee held a hearing yesterday on how to prevent deep cuts to Social Security benefits in a few years. The math is simple but the politics are not.
Disagreement doesn’t have to mean disrespect
By Vincent Atchity These days, it doesn’t take long to feel overwhelmed by politics. Turn on the news, scroll through social media or read the comments on almost any political post and you’ll find anger, outrage and personal attacks. For many of us, it’s becoming harder and harder to escape. At the same time, Colorado […]
Merck Lifts Guidance on Life Science, Electronics
Merck KGaA lifted its full-year earnings and sales outlook thanks to a stronger performance in its lab equipment and electronics businesses.
Exclusive | Trump Has Called Warsh Repeatedly Since He Became Fed Chair
The president has sought Kevin Warsh’s counsel on issues such as how the war in Iran is affecting the economy.
How much and why premiums are going up for small businesses in 2027 - Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker
Each year, health insurers submit rate filings to state regulators outlining their expectations for the coming year and proposing premium changes for Affordable Care Act (ACA)-compliant plans. This analysis examines filings in the small group market, which covers plans offered to small businesses (generally with 50 or fewer full-time equivalent employees). Some of this coverage is […]
Science|Business summer reads of 2026
As most people in the European research and innovation policy bubble are going on a well-deserved summer break, we have come up with a list of our favourite books, podcasts and essays from the past year that ask deeper questions about science, technology and politics.BooksPasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation, by Donald StokesIf you haven’t read Pasteur’s Quadrant yet, now is the time. In the EU and elsewhere, we’re living through a period of dwindling faith that curiosity-driven research automatically leads to economic growth and technological progress. Pasteur’s Quadrant, published in 1997 by the Princeton academic Donald Stokes, is the most influential critique of the standard “linear model” of R&D: the idea that new discoveries made in ivory-tower labs get neatly passed on for commercialisation by start-ups. In reality, Stokes argues, practical applications often inspire more theorical lines of inquiry. Of course, we have long known that things are more complex than the linear model, but even today, it’s still often assumed in Brussels discourse. The book is a useful corrective, and is being used now to argue for new types of scientific institutions. David MatthewsThe Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism, by Jacob Hale Russel and Dennis PattersonAre society’s problems solvable by technical expertise alone? “If only the benighted would listen,” say Jacob Hale Russel and Dennis Patterson, two professors at Rutgers Law School who got frustrated with how scientists and politicians handled public health communication during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the book, they argue that clichéd mantras about scientific evidence and expertise perpetrated by academics, journalists and politicians have harmed public trust in the very institutions they were trying to defend. Paradoxically, slogans such as “we believe in science,” “follow the science” and “defer to the experts” can fuel mistrust in science, experts and democratic institutions. The authors criticise “condescension” and “technocratic paternalism” in the public discourse and make the case for a more nuanced approach to scientific and expert policy advice that rests on humility, doubt, scepticism and open dialogue. “Most complex social questions in fact revolve around values, not the recitation of unambiguous facts,” they say. Florin ZubascuBreakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, by Dan WangIn this book, Dan Wang compares the structural differences between the US and Chinese industrial policies, but raises a very timely question for innovation policy wonks: how can advanced manufacturing know-how contribute to technology-intensive economic growth? Wang says technology has three components: the tools, the blueprints and patents, and the process knowledge. The third component represents the “proficiency gained from practical experience, which isn’t easily communicated and requires years of implementation.” According to Wang, rather than seeing tools and blueprints as the ultimate ends of technological progress, policymakers should see them as milestones in the training of better scientists and manufacturers. Over the past decades, China has amassed “process knowledge” because capital flowed to complex fabrication facilities, while investors in the West have parked their money in capital-light businesses such as digital platforms or chip companies that focus on design. As it turns out, thanks to its oversized focus on manufacturing, China has gained remarkable advantages in the global technology race. Florin ZubascuBaltic: The Future of Europe, by Oliver MoodyWhat can Europe learn from the nine countries surrounding the Baltic Sea? Alongside the familiar stories about Estonia's digital transformation, the book examines how the region has used technology, resilience, education, governance and long-term thinking to respond to geopolitical, economic and security challenges. Innovation policy wonks might find fresh perspectives on how innovation can strengthen defence, societal resilience and Europe's capacity to adapt in an uncertain world. Whether or not you agree with all of Oliver Moody's conclusions, the book is a useful guide to a region that is increasingly shaping European debates on security, competitiveness and technology. Goda NaujokaityteThe Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf This book chronicles the wild and adventurous life of natural science pioneer Alexander von Humboldt who at some point in the 19th century seems to have been just about the most famous person in the world. Through scientific expeditions to the Andes Mountains and to the depths of Siberia, von Humboldt contributed a host of discoveries and concepts. During his life he met and formed relationships with historical figures as different as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Simon Bolivar, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles Darwin. He is also claimed to be the person in the world with most things named after him, a list that includes an ocean current, a penguin and a region of the Moon. Still venerated in Germany, with numerous scientific institutions named after him, von Humboldt has slipped out of public consciousness in most of the rest of the world. For anyone not familiar with him, this book does a good job of describing his fascinating life. Ole EllekrogCareless People, by Sarah Wynn-WilliamsYou may have heard this referred to as the book Meta doesn’t want you to read. The 2025 memoir from Sarah Wynn-Williams, former director of global public policy at Meta, then just called Facebook, includes explosive claims about everything from a toxic workplace culture to how the company worked with advertisers to target vulnerable teens, and the lengths it was prepared to go to in order to break into China. It’s a fascinating insight into how and why the tech company gradually shifted its approach to policy, whether in the US, Europe or Asia. Meta has denied the allegations in the book, and last year won an emergency ruling to prevent Wynn-Williams from promoting it. In response, the author is now suing her former employer. If that doesn’t make you want to read it. Martin GreenacrePodcastsThe Europeans: Europe’s anti-ElonThis podcast is a great choice for a light-hearted dose of European policy and culture news. Most of it has little to do with research, innovation and technology, but this particular podcast features an interview with Mastadon’s founder Eugen Rochko. He talks about his experience running an open-source, federated, European-made social media platform, and leaving it all behind. The conversation, which starts 14 minutes in, gently encourages us to reflect on what kind of technology we, as Europeans, want to make. Goda NaujokaityteSolarpunk and how we escape dystopiaNew technologies are very often taken from science fiction. Alberto Santos-Dumont, inventor the airship, was inspired as a child by the adventure stories of Jules Verne. OpenAI’s attempt to build a personal assistant with the voice of Scarlett Johansson was lifted from the 2013 film Her, completely ignoring the movie’s cautionary message. So if we want better tech, we need to imagine it first. Unfortunately, the state of current sci-fi is relentlessly dystopian, giving inventors precious few ideas or hope. However, a new genre, Solarpunk, which envisages a technologically advanced but ecologically harmonious future, is now taking off. The actual tech the genre imagines, such as permaculture, renewable energy or community repair workshops, while nice, isn’t all that inspiring or ambitious. But it’s a first step towards rescuing sci-fi from its pessimistic Blade Runner rut. David MatthewsEveryday AbundanceLaunched in June, Everyday Abundance is a podcast that tells the stories of the inventions we now take so for granted that we barely given them a second thought. For example, the washing machine, which liberated women from a lifetime “bent over washtubs and washboards.” Or modern dentistry, which ended the reality that “tooth pain was simply part of human life.” Historians of technology, Virginia Postrel and Charles C Mann are very much on the optimistic end of the spectrum when it comes to the capacity of invention to improve human life. Here, they set out their case: if it wasn’t for progress, you might be hunched over a washtub with toothache rather than reading these words. David Matthews‘We will not know what we lost’: Conservation fallout a year after USAID shutdownSince his return to the White House, Donald Trump has been on a mission to undermine science. He slashed jobs at federal agencies, terminated grants in some research areas, took unprecedented control over university affairs and, within hours of his inauguration, suspended the US Agency for International Development. While its initial focus was to administer health and food aid around the world, it had since expanded to conservation projects. The result? Some of these projects were stopped abruptly. In this Mongabay podcast, environmental reporter Michelle Nijhuis tells the story of the EcoGuard conservation programme in Liberia, whose local patrols had helped protect rainforests, monitor endangered wildlife and track illegal threats. From one day to the next, these were left without salaries. Luckily, she notes, the initiative was able to get emergency funding from international NGOs, but its future remains “incredibly uncertain.” Juliette PortalaEssaysThe Mars Delusion, by Henry WismayerWhy is humankind so fixated on establishing a colony on Mars? asks London-based writer Henry Wismayer. From space evangelists promoting Martian settlement as an insurance policy, to billionaire Jeff Bezos, who said humans should settle on Mars “because it’s cool,” the mission is not running short of advocates. However, in this essay, Wismayer reminds us that some critics expect any future Mars pioneer to end up “irradiated, sick, mad and dead.” Scientists have already looked into the possible effects of prolonged exposure to Martian gravity, and it’s not pretty: muscle shrinking, bones weakening, changes to the central nervous system and other biological modifications to make us all reconsider the journey. “Some researchers have forecast that the future settler, after generations of evolutionary conditioning, will look less like an Übermensch and more like ET,” Wismayer writes. Juliette Portala
Exclusive | Senate Panel Says It Has Obtained Copy of Fauci’s Covid-Era Phone
Republicans in Congress have ramped up scrutiny of the retired government doctor, and one panel could vote on holding him in contempt on Thursday.
Speed dating? Shark Tank? Trainees promote their ideas for incorporating AI into their science
As AI becomes more entrenched in society, scientists are increasingly exploring ways that the technology can enhance their work and make the way they approach both research and patient care more efficient. At the Translational Data Science Integrated Research Center’s annual retreat, the highlight was a rapid-fire session that felt like a cross between speed dating and “Shark Tank”, the reality show where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their products in hopes of securing start-up funding. Fast Pitch AI featured graduate students and postdocs presenting a three-minute pitch about their project and how applying AI would enhance the outcomes.
Oscar Health Stock Has Doubled This Year. The ACA Insurer Reports Thursday.
Oscar Health reports second-quarter earnings Thursday morning. The results should show trends in its Affordable Care Act membership.
11-year-old taken into custody after stabbing at St. Cloud business
Police say an 11-year-old boy stabbed an 18-year-old man at a St. Cloud business on Tuesday, landing him in the hospital.
Will Trump Try to Keep His Qatari-Gifted Flying Palace?
Recent comments from Eric Trump indicate that the Qatari-gifted luxury Air Force One won’t be heading for his dad’s presidential library after all.
Progressive Victory in Michigan Senate Primary Deepens Democratic Divide
Abdul El-Sayed showed the far left can win a battleground state, but the fight for control of the party is far from over.
A Democratic Socialist Disparaged Thanksgiving. Will Voters Forgive Her?
“Cancel Thanksgiving,” she wrote. “VDay” brings out “the worst of humanity,” she mused. Francesca Hong’s old social media posts get a fresh look ahead of Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for governor.
Cyclosporiasis Map 2026, Foods to Avoid as Outbreak Spreads to 47 States
A massive outbreak of the “explosive diarrhea parasite” cyclospora has been linked to shredded lettuce. Where are cases rising, and what are the other possible sources?
Dietitian Shares No. 1 Plant-Based Protein to Support Bone Health
It’s not just about dairy.
Some Gen Zers swap their smartphones for "dumb" phones to curb social media habits
Amid tension, Cunningham says she wants to 'get back to basketball'
Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham said Wednesday that she wants the focus to return to basketball after her comments on transgender athletes sparked heated national debate, three rallies and social media reaction all the way to the White House.
Dave Portnoy has message for 'trashy, ratchet influencers' amid viral Nantucket sign controversy
Dave Portnoy defends a Nantucket business's viral "No Influencers" sign, saying the island should not be treated as a prop for social media content.
Live entertainment permit approved for Mills Modern Social in Tempe
The Tempe Design Review Commission recently approved a permit to allow live entertainment until 1:55 a.m. at the Mills Modern Social bar and billiards hall in a commercial center at the southeast …
Fact vs. Fiction: Separating the Myths from the Science Behind GLP-1 Medications
From social media claims to questions about safety, UConn Health OB/GYN and obesity medicine specialist Dr. Jason Schneider explains what patients should re ...
ICYMI: Sen. Banks Joins the Bottom Line on Fox Business Network
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Last night, Senator Jim Banks (R-Ind.) joined The Bottom Line on Fox Business Network to discuss the Senate’s priorities ahead of the August recess, the AI race, and how AI is reshaping government and the workforce. Click the image above for the full discussion. Key Excerpts on Senate priorities: Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.): “We have a full […]
Five Things to Know About Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed
The 41-year-old progressive won the state’s hotly contested Democratic Senate primary, the most significant 2026 win for the party’s far left.
Shri Thanedar Is Ousted by a Democratic Socialist in a Michigan House Primary
Representative Shri Thanedar is among a wave of Democratic incumbents in Congress whom primary voters have sent packing in a surge of anti-incumbent fervor this cycle.
The Science Lab Where Technicians Are Drowning in Feces
Samples—and a certain stink—are accumulating at Quest Diagnostics thanks to the cyclosporiasis outbreak. “You get used to it.”
Flutter Entertainment CEO Jackson to Step Down, Says Company
Flutter Entertainment said Chief Executive Peter Jackson is stepping down, while lowering its profit outlook and swinging to a loss as its U.S. business continues to struggle.
Flutter Entertainment CEO Jackson to Step Down, Says Company
Flutter Entertainment said Chief Executive Peter Jackson is stepping down, while lowering its profit outlook and swinging to a loss as its U.S. business continues to struggle.
New York seeks to block sharing data of millions who receive social service
More than 20 states sued the Trump administration on Monday to block it from getting wide access to the personal information of millions.
Health advice is a click away on social media, but doctors caution against trusting "SickTok"
Doctors are finding they are faced with questions about health advice from social media, but they caution that you can't always trust what you find.
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. 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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.
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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.
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What to Eat and What to Avoid for Optimal Gut Health
Gut health can impact everything from sleep to the immune system, so Dr. Roshini Raj, associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health, shares her recommendations for preserving your gut microbiome. She shares the signs of an unhealthy gut, and what to eat to improve it. Dr. Raj also shares her tips for avoiding cyclosporiasis.
Inside The Heartthrob Industrial Complex
Streaming, social media, and luxury brands have changed how Hollywood creates heartthrobs. Inside the formula behind today's biggest internet crushes.
2026 Fall Preview: Diamond Football
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter By Chad Hayworth (for OzarksSportsZone.com) Nearly every man who has coached the Diamond football team in the past two decades has pointed to Brad Hocker’s tenure there as proof the Wildcats
2026 Fall Preview: East Newton Football
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter By Chad Hayworth (for OzarksSportsZone.com) For new East Newton Coach Jacob LaSalle, finding consistency will be the key to success for the Patriots. That started this summer in the weight room
Longtime Health Educator, Internship Coordinator Named Maxwell Professor of Practice
Susan Coots brings expertise in family planning and reproductive health to her new faculty role, teaching and mentoring public health students.
UNC Health Pardee Expands Specialty Network with Two New Providers
UNC Health Pardee Expands Specialty Network with Two New Providers
The No. 1 Daily Exercise to Boost Gut Health, According to a GI Doctor
In TODAY.com’s Expert Tip of the Day, a doctor explains how physical activity supports better digestion and gut health.
Socialist Mamdani launches new war on NYC business leaders -- kicking them off mayor's fund that backs city programs
What to Watch for in Michigan’s High-Drama Primary | WSJ Politics Newsletter for Aug. 4
Plus, Democrats woo religious voters, and why the Trump administration moved to support the cratering Japanese yen
Auto & Transport Roundup: Market Talk
Find insight on Continental, Lufthansa , Kia and more in the latest Market Talks covering auto and transport.
How Data Centers Broke American Politics
What the Unabomber, Steve Bannon’s tech guy, and Bernie Sanders taught me about the great data center backlash of 2026.
Massachusetts marijuana repeal effort threatens social equity businesses
A November ballot question could end recreational marijuana sales, potentially sinking dozens of businesses in the state's social equity programs.
Continental on Track to Reach Tires Business Outlook Despite Rising Costs
The German tire company said it is in the final stage of its strategic realignment and warned of a substantial increase in raw-material costs in the second half of the year.
Cubs insider retracts Reid Detmers trade report, apologizes
It was falsely reported on social media that Los Angeles Angels pitcher Reid Detmers was traded to the Chicago Cubs.
How ICE Is Weaponizing Social Media Against Its Critics
The agency says its surveillance program searches for threats to agents, but critics see free-speech infringements.
UC San Diego Students Learn Spatial Data Science Through Real-World Applications
UC San Diego students are bridging GIS and machine learning to solve real-world challenges in public health and urban planning. In a new spatial analysis course, they analyze complex geospatial data to identify environmental risks and support smarter community decision-making.
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. ###
Pittsfield's Highland Restaurant Closing After 90 Years of Business
PITTSFIELD, Mass.— The Highland Restaurant will close after 90 years of serving locals pasta, seafood, and other Italian favorites. On Sunday, the restaurant announced on social...
ON Semiconductor Earnings Beat Estimates Driven by AI Data Center Growth
The chipmaker reported net income of $226.8 million in the second quarter, up from $170.3 million a year earlier.
Effective August 12: Bipartisan Legislation to Prevent Harms Caused by Addictive Sports Betting
DENVER, CO – Bipartisan legislation to prevent harms caused by addictive sports betting practices will go into effect on August 12. SB26-1 31 , spon sored by Senator Matt Ball, D-Denver, addresses problems arising from the growing online sports betting industry by implement
Wisconsin governor’s race tests limits of Democrats’ leftward shift
After years of Republican rule, Wisconsin Democrats are testing whether a democratic socialist is a viable candidate for governor in a swing state.
States sue Trump administration over federal assistance data sharing
Filed by 23 state attorneys general and two governors, the lawsuit alleges the federal government is sharing Social Security numbers with DHS
What is Truth API? The Truth Social tool for traders, explained
Trump Media launched Truth API on Saturday, selling traders faster access to some Truth Social posts. Here's how it works, and who it's for.