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Inside Business Top Workplaces 2026: TowneBank

TowneBank President and Chief Experience Officer Dawn Glynn shared workplace insight.

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Aug 10 • 6:40 AM EDT • Business • pilotonline.com
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Inside Business Top Workplaces: The Sports Facilities Cos.

Virginia Beach Sports Center General Manager Ryan Ladd shared workplace insight for The Sports Facilities Cos.

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Aug 10 • 6:35 AM EDT • Business • pilotonline.com
Patriot Games open with dodgeball, lots of MAGA caps and even more questions

The youth contest for $250,000 — part of the White House's Freedom 250 festivities — featured over 120 competitors drawn from a murky selection process.

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Aug 10 • 6:00 AM EDT • Sports • washingtonpost.com
A pilot couple explains how they make money buying and renting RVs

Full-time pilots Carrie and Brian Smiths learned early on that owning an RV fleet would not be "a cakewalk."

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Aug 10 • 5:30 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com
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Opinion | The White House hopes AI replaces a lot of researchers

Basic scientific research gave the nation its technological edge. But the Trump administration is skeptical of the universities that do it.

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Aug 10 • 3:00 AM EDT • Science • bostonglobe.com
Support local artisans at upcoming Native Business Market

The Native Business Market will feature native-owned small businesses, artisans, and service providers on Saturday, Aug. 15, at the Tigua Business Center parking lot.

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Aug 9 • 9:47 PM EDT • Business • ktsm.com
Black Book: Australia's 2027 Health IT Market Shifts From Pilots to Proof

Post-HIC 2026, provider study finds interoperability, clinical cyber continuity and statewide EHR execution will dominate the next buying cycle NORTH SYDNEY, AU / ACCESS Newswire / August 9, 2026 / Black Book Research today announced the publication ...

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Aug 9 • 9:40 PM EDT • Health • finance.yahoo.com
PHOTOS: Metro Health offers back-to-school vaccines for Immunization Awareness Month

WOAI NBC News Channel 4 San Antonio provides local news, weather forecasts, traffic updates, investigations, and items of interest in the community, sports and entertainment programming for San Antonio and nearby towns and communities in South Central Texas, including Windcrest, Uvalde, Universal City, Somerset, Seguin, Schertz, San Marcos, Sabinal, Poth, Poteet, Pleasanton, Pearsall, New Braunfels, Live Oak, Kerrville, Hondo, Helotes, Goliad, Fredericksburg, Floresville, Eagle Pass, Devine, Del Rio, Cuero, Crystal City, Converse, Cibolo, Castroville, Carrizo Springs, Boerne, Bandera.

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Aug 9 • 5:28 PM EDT • Health • news4sanantonio.com
Max Miller locked in as Republican nominee after Ohio ballot deadline passes without withdrawal

Ohio Republicans now have no path to replace Max Miller after the ballot deadline passed despite domestic abuse allegations from his ex-wife.

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Aug 9 • 1:06 PM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com
Trump’s Hold on Republicans Tested in Race to Replace Lindsey Graham

The rush to succeed the late senator on the South Carolina ballot will test the durability of President Trump’s endorsement.

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Aug 9 • 1:00 PM EDT • Politics • wsj.com
California Prop 44 would force health clinics to spend 90% on patient care

A measure aimed at changing how community health clinics spend taxpayer dollars is heading to the ballot box this November. Voters will decide the fate of Proposition 44. Supporters say it will increase accountability, but opponents warn it could threaten services patients rely on.

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Aug 9 • 11:20 AM EDT • Health • kcra.com
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Radeon RX 9070 XT It only delivered 30 FPS in Doom The Dark Ages due to the PCIe x4 slot.

Owner of a system with a graphics processor Radeon RX 9070 XT and the Ryzen 5 9600X processor experienced a significant drop in performance in the game...

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Aug 9 • 11:00 AM EDT • Technology • en.gamegpu.com
Science 4 Everyone: The difference between a storm and sanitary sewer system

What happens to the sewage system when it rains a lot? Storm Team4 meteorologist and science teacher Ryan Miller explains the difference between a storm and sanitary sewer system.

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Aug 9 • 10:23 AM EDT • Science • nbcwashington.com
‘What About Garmin?’ I Tested the Company’s Answer to Whoop

The Cirqa health tracker, Garmin’s screenless health band, offers lots of data with no distractions.

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Aug 9 • 9:00 AM EDT • Technology • wsj.com
Review: In new 'Spider-Man' flick, the web slinger's stuck in a superhero plot retread

Movie reviewer Joshua Hill says 'xxxxxxx' xxxxxxxxx.

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Aug 9 • 7:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • wvgazettemail.com
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The Weeknd is busy gaming — and he wants everyone to play this indie gem

While he’s breaking records touring as the Weeknd, Abel Tesfaye is gaming — a lot. He got in touch to talk “About Fishing.”

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Aug 9 • 6:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • washingtonpost.com
Darline Graham has Donald Trump in her corner. Will it be enough to win her brother’s Senate seat?

Tuesday’s special GOP primary to replace the late Sen. Lindsey Graham on the November ballot is likely heading to a runoff, despite Trump’s endorsement and his popularity with the base.

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Aug 9 • 5:00 AM EDT • Politics • nbcnews.com
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Here are The Observer’s top 25 NC football recruits. Where will they play in college?

In all, 16 of the top 25 are headed out of state, including the state’s top player. How many are going to Duke, NC State or UNC?

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Aug 9 • 5:00 AM EDT • Sports • charlotteobserver.com
Lakers' Austin Reaves' future in limbo after Walker Kessler's blockbuster trade, says NBA insider

The Los Angeles Lakers have had added a lot of new talent this summer. However, it could very well put Austin Reaves future in LA on the line.

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Aug 9 • 1:07 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Vintage shoppers support local businesses at New Haven Flea

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (WTNH) — For a lot of folks in New Haven, the second weekend of August is the perfect time to find a new fit. The New Haven Flea hosted its first-ever Summer Vintage Crawl on…

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Aug 8 • 7:52 PM EDT • Business • wtnh.com
49ers' Kyle Shanahan says his car was on autopilot at the time of his recent accident

Shanahan publicly addressed the accident for the first time on Saturday.

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Aug 8 • 7:40 PM EDT • Sports • cbssports.com
Fringe review: Too-long ‘In the Moonlight’ falls short on murder-mystery entertainment

With no arguments at the trial — just dancing — and a confusing plot, an audience vote feels arbitrary and pointless.

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Aug 8 • 6:46 PM EDT • Entertainment • twincities.com
49ers’ Kyle Shanahan speaks on his health, players’ injuries, Tesla autopilot

Kyle Shanahan is better but coping with headaches and fatigue from his July 14 car crash that may have involved a malfunction in Tesla’s autopilot program.

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Aug 8 • 6:12 PM EDT • Health • mercurynews.com
New beginnings at BYU with familiar faces

There is a lot of newness at BYU's fall camp, but fortunately for the Cougars, there is a lot of familiarity too.

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Aug 8 • 6:02 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Editorial: Trump admits his funding decisions driven by politics, revenge

Governing in such a manner is contemptible and contradictory to the founding principles that Americans celebrated on Independence Day this year.

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Aug 8 • 4:15 PM EDT • Politics • pilotonline.com
Business Notes: Norfolk shipyard honored; state chamber of commerce names new CEO

View which businesses are celebrating milestones and who is getting accolades.

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Aug 8 • 3:00 PM EDT • Business • pilotonline.com
Is watching too much TV bad for your brain? Possibly

Watching a lot of television was linked to smaller brain volume in areas important for language and thinking, new study finds. Here’s what that means.

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Aug 8 • 6:30 AM EDT • Health • cnn.com
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AMD's Data Center Business Is Skyrocketing. The Stock Is Falling. Here's Why.

A lot of AMD's success has already been priced into the stock.

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Aug 8 • 6:20 AM EDT • Business • finance.yahoo.com
Man living inside 'The Last House' billboard in daring Netflix stunt

With Hollywood billboards everywhere you look, Angelenos know it takes a lot for an advertisement to leave an impression, and so Netflix got to work.

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Aug 7 • 9:25 PM EDT • Entertainment • centraloregondaily.com
Avon farm owner says road construction project threatens nearly 175-year-old business

The fifth-generation owner of Pickering Hill Farms says a road construction project on Detroit Road has blocked access to his parking lot for more than 100 days, cutting into business during the farm’s peak season.

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Aug 7 • 6:29 PM EDT • Business • cleveland19.com
Pacific Grove business creates clothing inspired by Navy secretary's 'witchcraft' comments

A Pacific Grove business has created a clothing collection inspired by acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao's viral comments about "a lot of witchcraft" in the area.

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Aug 7 • 5:27 PM EDT • Business • ksbw.com
UVA School of Data Science launches assured enrollment program for 2026-2027 academic year

UVA School of Data Science has launched a new pilot program designed to reduce the application burden on students interested in the data science major.

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Aug 7 • 5:26 PM EDT • Science • 29news.com
THQ Nordic Showcase 2026: All The News, Trailers, And Reveals

From Abba DLC to whole lot of classic Gothic, here’s a closer look at every announcement from the THQ Nordic Showcase.

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Aug 7 • 3:30 PM EDT • Technology • gamespot.com
Timberwolves' Joan Beringer: Slots in as No. 2 center

Timberwolves' Joan Beringer: Slots in as No. 2 center

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Aug 7 • 1:40 PM EDT • Sports • cbssports.com
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Business reacts to ‘disturbing’ viral video that appears to show man punch woman on Charlotte sidewalk

Paper Skyscraper's sign appeared in the background of a viral assault video.

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Aug 7 • 11:36 AM EDT • Business • wbtv.com
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Exclusive: Kalshi launches ‘Blanket’ to help small businesses hedge against risk—with help from the guru of ‘hypergamblification’

Lauris Zminsky says "a lot of young people are embracing lottery-ticket economics" — but his new project with Kalshi is totally separate from that.

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Aug 7 • 11:02 AM EDT • Business • fortune.com
The Odds: The Ballot Battle
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Aug 7 • 9:54 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com
These New Donkey Kong Clothes From Nintendo And OppoSuits Are Bananas

We want them all

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Aug 7 • 8:45 AM EDT • Technology • nintendolife.com
Science Needs Storytellers — And Museums Know How

Museums have been telling science stories for generations, and science communicators can learn a lot from them.

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Aug 7 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • elm.umaryland.edu
Latest PS5 Pro Firmware Beta Automatically Enables PSSR 2.0 Override

Given how much better it is, this makes a lot of sense.

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Aug 7 • 8:00 AM EDT • Technology • digitalfoundry.net
Political shifts make NC-11 more competitive than ever, analysts say

Republicans in North Carolina's 11th Congressional District are just days away from choosing a candidate to replace U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards on the ballot.

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Aug 6 • 4:22 PM EDT • Politics • wlos.com
Trump has broken a lot of rules of politics. He’s about to face his biggest test.

After the midterms, he could quickly become a lame duck.

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Aug 6 • 3:17 PM EDT • Politics • ms.now
New creative hub uptown draws hundreds of entrepreneurs, lands first office tenant (PHOTOS)

Sparkhouse Uptown, a 20,000-square-foot creative hub in Charlotte, has attracted hundreds of entrepreneurs since opening in June at 500 N. Tryon St.

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Aug 6 • 2:23 PM EDT • Business • bizjournals.com
OpenAI and four rivals just agreed on one standard for AI agents

OpenAI, Amazon, Microsoft, Cursor and Vercel launched Agent Plugins, an open standard letting an agent extension run across ChatGPT, Copilot and more.

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Aug 6 • 2:00 PM EDT • Technology • thenextweb.com
ACF Unveils Proposed Head Start Reforms to Expand Access and Empower Parents

Proposed Rule Could Create Up to 268,000 New Slots While Strengthening Focus on Health and Nutrition

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Aug 6 • 9:30 AM EDT • Health • hhs.gov
Ranking the 10 best secondaries in college football for 2026: Lots of good options, but Notre Dame is No. 1

Notre Dame, Miami and Oregon headline the defensive backfields best equipped to shut down opposing passing attacks

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Aug 6 • 9:19 AM EDT • Sports • cbssports.com
Medicare pushes ACCESS but doesn't tell patients what providers offer it

In this edition: Progress report on ACCESS, Medicare's chronic care pilot, and health regulators courting industry on AI regulation.

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Aug 6 • 8:54 AM EDT • Health • statnews.com
Newcastle plot £85m Nmecha bid as Guimaraes replacement

Newcastle United are lining up a club-record bid for Borussia Dortmund’s Felix Nmecha as the club seek a replacement for Bruno Guimaraes.Guimaraes is closing in on a £75m transfer to Arsenal after ...

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Aug 6 • 5:50 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Best of - Arts, Entertainment & Recreation

Best Night Club and Best Place to Shake Your BootyThe BasementLots of night clubs are cool. But walking into The Basement and taking a seat with a swanky cocktail or mocktail, surrounded by polished wood and good lighting, makes you feel a little cooler, too. Which might contribute to one’s confidence at booty shaking. The […]

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Aug 6 • 3:01 AM EDT • Entertainment • northcoastjournal.com
Moorpark Approves Entertainment Zone: Two-year pilot program will allow public alcohol consumption on High Street during special events

The Moorpark City Council has approved Ventura County’s first “entertainment zone,” authorized by Senate Bill 969, allowing people to drink alcoholic beverages on public streets, sidewalks or public rights-of-way under

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Aug 6 • 3:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • vcreporter.com
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Politics in the Park: Ballot access divides Republicans vying for Wyoming secretary of state

CASPER, Wyo. — Four Republicans running to be Wyoming’s next secretary of state took the stage at Washington Park on Wednesday, agreeing on much of what the office does and dividing mainly over how easy it should be to vote. The seat is open because Secretary of State Chuck Gray is running for Congress. The […]

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Aug 5 • 11:36 PM EDT • Politics • county17.com
Politics in the Park: Ballot access divides Republicans vying for Wyoming secretary of state

CASPER, Wyo. — Four Republicans running to be Wyoming's next secretary of state took the stage at Washington Park on Wednesday, agreeing on much of what

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Aug 5 • 11:36 PM EDT • Politics • capcity.news
Politics in the Park: Ballot access divides Republicans vying for Wyoming secretary of state

CASPER, Wyo. — Four Republicans running to be Wyoming's next secretary of state took the stage at Washington Park on Wednesday, agreeing on much of what

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Aug 5 • 11:36 PM EDT • Politics • oilcity.news
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Amazon, Avril, Ferguson team up for housing as questions hang over WA's business climate

"Seattle's given me a lot," Avril said. "For me, it was all about just being able to pour back into the city that's given me so much."

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Aug 5 • 8:55 PM EDT • Business • komonews.com
Six Businesses You Can Start From Home For Under $500

The side hustle and gig economy are booming, with lots of options for entrepreneurs, from dog walking to renting baby cribs.

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Aug 5 • 4:50 PM EDT • Business • forbes.com
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Bijan Robinson: Jahmyr Gibbs and I told each other to hang in there

Bijan Robinson and Jahmyr Gibbs have been mentioned in conjunction with one another a lot this offseason and their contract pushes were also the subject of conversations between the two running backs.

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Aug 5 • 3:57 PM EDT • Sports • nbcsports.com
Fields Of Mistria Exits Beta With A Big Rideable Chicken

Move over, Stardew Valley. The 1.0 release of Fields of Mistria has a lot to offer players, including a giant chicken that you can ride throughout the land.

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Aug 5 • 3:53 PM EDT • Technology • gamespot.com
Drew Brees’ NFL broadcast season on Fox Sports opens Sept. 13 in Charlotte

Hall of Famer can be seen exclusively on Fox 8 this season

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Aug 5 • 1:16 PM EDT • Sports • fox8live.com
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The Democrats’ Riskiest Midterm Play

They have been backing independent Senate candidates in red states. But Montana is not working as planned.

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Aug 5 • 12:01 PM EDT • Politics • theatlantic.com
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Abdul El-Sayed calls for unity amid tight Senate race: "There's a lot of healing to do after a hard-fought primary like this"

Abdul El-Sayed​ has a narrow led in the state's Democratic Senate primary​ against Rep. Haley Stevens.

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Aug 5 • 9:21 AM EDT • Politics • cbsnews.com
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Marvel Rivals’ next update drastically reduces the game’s install size on PC and console

As of Season 9.5, Marvel Rivals is going to take up a lot less space on your platform of choice.

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Aug 5 • 7:28 AM EDT • Technology • eurogamer.net
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

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Aug 5 • 7:18 AM EDT • Politics • adamtooze.substack.com
Christ the Good Shepherd to hold Parish Festival

Christ the Good Shepherd’s annual Parish Festival will be held Friday (4-8 p.m.) and Saturday (2-8 p.m.) in the church parking lot and in the parish hall, 135 E. Fourth

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Aug 5 • 7:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • oswegocountynewsnow.com
The Onetime Boy Wonder of Texas Politics Has a Lot of Stories to Tell

But at 88, Ben Barnes is still haunted by one unanswered question.

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Aug 5 • 7:00 AM EDT • Politics • texasmonthly.com
How one couple is turning an RV rental business into a retirement plan

At the end of 2023, airline pilots Carrie and Brian Smith bought seven Class C RVs and launched Suite Glamping Adventures.

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Aug 5 • 5:30 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com
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New "Ted Lasso" season features NWSL's Kansas City Current as plot point

The new season of "Ted Lasso" was filmed in the U.S. at a real-life NWSL club for a cameo that serves as a key plot point of the show.

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Aug 5 • 4:06 AM EDT • Sports • espn.com
New sport and event center to bring tourism and business to Greer

A massive sports and event center in Greer is under construction and hard to miss. Mayor Rick Danner says it'll offer lots of activities for those who live and work in Greer and draw in tourists.

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Aug 4 • 8:53 PM EDT • Business • wyff4.com
Live Missouri election results: Bell vs. Bush, St. Louis, St. Charles and Jefferson counties

Voters will weigh in on an effort to remove the Missouri income tax, a measure to make it harder to pass ballot initiatives and a rematch between U.S. Rep. Wesley Bell and Cori Bush.

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Aug 4 • 7:00 PM EDT • Politics • stlpr.org
Orange County weighs restrictions on exotic wildlife entertainment after Sloth World controversy

Nearly a year after the Sloth World controversy sparked outrage across Central Florida, Orange County leaders are exploring whether they can prevent a similar situation from happening again.

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Aug 4 • 6:15 PM EDT • Entertainment • clickorlando.com
Everything Apple Is Expected to Announce in September

Apple is going to announce at least five new devices next month at its annual iPhone-centric event, though it's possible we'll also get devices that were waiting on Siri AI. Here's what's coming. iPhone 18 Pro Rumors suggest the iPhone 18 Pro is going to look a lot like the iPhone 17 Pro, but with a smaller Dynamic Island. It's getting a new Wide camera with a variable aperture for more control over lighting and background blur, plus a faster A20 Pro chip.

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Aug 4 • 6:10 PM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com
We Just Got Our First Real Look At How Small X's Ad Business Is

Advertisers seem to be spending a whole lot less than they used to on the platform.

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Aug 4 • 5:49 PM EDT • Business • engadget.com
US midterm primary elections live updates: High-stakes Michigan Senate race among key contests in five states

Voters in Michigan, Missouri, Washington, Kansas and Virginia head to polls to select candidates who will appear on November ballots

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Aug 4 • 5:38 PM EDT • Politics • theguardian.com
The Beauty Of Settled Science

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

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Aug 4 • 5:33 PM EDT • Science • astralcodexten.com
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Hoskins rejects Missouri congressional redistricting map referendum, setting up court fight

The GOP Secretary of State’s decision was expected. Proponents of placing the GOP-leaning map up for a statewide vote will go to court to put a vote on the plan on the November ballot.

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Aug 4 • 5:30 PM EDT • Politics • stlpr.org
Accel Entertainment (NYSE:ACEL) Posts Better-Than-Expected Sales In Q2 CY2026

Slot machine and terminal operator Accel Entertainment (NYSE:ACEL) reported Q2 CY2026 results topping the market’s revenue expectations, with sales up 9.6% y...

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Aug 4 • 5:20 PM EDT • Entertainment • stockstory.org
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Tough Champions League challenge for Hearts and Rangers

Heart of Midlothan and Rangers start their new season in the Champions League qualifying group stage on Wednesday, but how are they are prepared?

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Aug 4 • 2:49 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Apple Starts Preparing for September iPhone Event

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

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Aug 4 • 1:18 PM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com
CFP bracket predictor: Where the preseason rankings get it wrong

Don’t automatically slot teams from the preseason poll into the 12 precious spots of the College Football Playoff. Let's play CFP predictor!

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Aug 4 • 12:31 PM EDT • Sports • usatoday.com
Feastin' at Musikfest: Vendors whip up delicious treats, offer iconic eats

You have lots of time to check out all of the food because Musikfest runs through Aug. 9.

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Aug 4 • 12:15 PM EDT • Entertainment • wfmz.com
MrBeast Sales Slow, Angel Stock Falls, MUBI and Neon Look for Hits, and Will an NBA Franchise Set a Sales Record?

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

Judge overturns SCGOP decision, ruling Danny Ford can appear on ballot

A judge ruled that farmer Danny Ford II can run in the special GOP Senate primary after the party initially blocked him.

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Aug 4 • 11:41 AM EDT • Politics • greenvilleonline.com
Harger: My primary ballot is sitting on my microwave. If a politics nerd is cramming, the August primary isn't working

We moved primaries from September to August in 2008 to give election officials more time to process mail-in ballots. That made logistical sense. For actually getting people to vote, it's a flop.

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Aug 4 • 9:51 AM EDT • Politics • mynorthwest.com
Coming to XBOX Game Pass: Gears of War: E-Day Open Beta, Cricket 26, Date Everything!, and More

Grab your COG tags, we’re jumping into the Early Access Open Beta for Gears of War: E-Day! You can also grab your Dateviators to Date Everything!, and your bat to rule the field in Cricket 26. Lots of accessories in this next round of games coming soon to XBOX Game Pass!

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Aug 4 • 9:00 AM EDT • Technology • news.xbox.com
Washington primary election voting ends today. The race for its 3rd Congressional District is just getting started

Ballots should be turned in to official drop boxes by 8 p.m. on Aug. 4.

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Aug 4 • 9:00 AM EDT • Politics • opb.org
It's primary day in WA. Here's what to know

It's not too late to return your ballot or register to vote and vote in person this primary day. See what's on the ballot and how you can vote.

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Aug 4 • 9:00 AM EDT • Politics • seattletimes.com
'More akin to a political slogan': Judge orders rewrite of property tax amendment's ballot language

The amendment stays on the ballot, but Attorney General has 10 days to rewrite the sales pitch as a description.

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Aug 4 • 8:21 AM EDT • Politics • floridapolitics.com
Ukraine drones have target lock to strike even when pilot link is lost

Russian jamming can sever Ukrainian pilots' drone links, but target-lock technology can still guide the drones to their targets.

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Aug 4 • 8:12 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com
Holland & Knight Health Dose: August 4, 2026 | Insights

Holland & Knight's Health Dose reviews Senate funding negotiations, CMS payment rules, FDA actions, HRSA's 340B pilot and key healthcare policy developments.

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Aug 4 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • hklaw.com
Answer Man: Helene Business Recovery Fund borrowers facing skyrocketing rates? Messy I-26 median?

Today’s round of questions, my smart-aleck replies and the real answers: Question: You should look into the disaster bridge loans a lot of people took out through Mountain BizWorks and the Golden Leaf Foundation after Helene. These were loans with a 1 percent interest rate for 12 months, which was later extended to 24 months. […]

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Aug 4 • 7:17 AM EDT • Business • avlwatchdog.org
Negative, false and misleading political ads pollute and undermine the election process

What is your reaction when viewing TV, listening to the radio or surfing digital platforms and there is a political ad filled with false and misleading information that you can neither verify nor confirm? Billions of dollars are spent in a national election cycle. Millions of those dollars are spent by candidates and ballot-measure campaigns […]

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Aug 4 • 6:45 AM EDT • Politics • missouriindependent.com
📸 A Peruvian club unveils the year's most surprising shirt!

An impossible challenge and a great story!Jerseys with lots of sponsors are always tricky! The design often gets ruined by an overload of logos and text.For example, people still remember Chambly’s ...

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Aug 4 • 5:37 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Analysis

A lot of money is being spent in this year’s primaries. It’s becoming a huge focus of the races.

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Aug 4 • 5:31 AM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com
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.

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Aug 4 • 5:30 AM EDT • Business • bostonglobe.com
Deep dive
😐 Neutral (8%)
wow
65%
ahah
35%
Cowboys’ Ryan Flournoy steps up as offense loads up with playmakers

The pads are on at Dallas Cowboys training camp, and one thing is becoming increasingly clear: The Cowboys have a lot of mouths to feed on offense.

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Aug 3 • 11:57 PM EDT • Sports • ksat.com
Top candidates for Usman Nurmagomedov’s opponent in potential UFC debut

Usman Nurmagomedov could be joining the UFC sooner rather than later. There are lots of fun options for his potential UFC debut opponent.

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Aug 3 • 8:40 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
😐 Neutral (25%)
2026 MLB trade deadline winners and losers: Giants, Mets enjoy seller's market, Yankees don't do enough

The 2026 MLB trade deadline is in the books; there were a lot of deals and a handful of winners and losers

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Aug 3 • 8:02 PM EDT • Sports • cbssports.com
Former Raptor Chris Bosh Sends Encouraging Message To Victor Wembanyama

Bosh, who has dealt with blood clots, extended his advice to Wembanyama, who has also dealt with the diagnosis.

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Aug 3 • 5:18 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
AG candidate's new challenge: overcoming 'political no one' status

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

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Aug 3 • 3:50 PM EDT • Politics • statehousenews.com
Democratic states urge Supreme Court to block Trump's new limits on mail ballots

President Trump's executive order required the U.S. Postal Service to use state-by-state lists of eligible voters who may send a ballot by mail.

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Aug 3 • 3:43 PM EDT • Politics • latimes.com
Anticoagulant recalled after failed test

The new recall includes multiple lots of dabigatran etexilate capsules, a DOAC that reduce's a heart patient's risk of stroke or blood clots.

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Aug 3 • 3:08 PM EDT • Business • cardiovascularbusiness.com