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Netflix’s Leadership Shake Up…Explained
(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.) Well, I had a simple article planned for this week. Called “Whoa, I Missed It!”, I’d take a gander at a few important-but-under-the-radar stories I didn’t cover while I wrote about all things “Skydance. (Formerly known as “the saga of Netflix trying to buy Warner Bros., but not Discovery, then Paramount-Skydance bought all of Warner Bros. Discovery”.) Alas, that article will have to wait. Netflix made news. Ironically, my “Whoa, I Missed It!” article would have mostly been about “content” strategy decisions, which is also what today’s article is about. But instead of the entire industry, this article will only cover Netflix’s decision to upend their film and TV content teams. Just that! So that’s the full topic of the day. I’m going to tackle the issue in the opposite direction of the way “stuff” flows: uphill. We’ll start at film, then move onto TV, and then onto the CEOs themselves, and the strategy questions that still remain. But we start with the numbers driving this. Let’s dive in. Subscribe Most Important Story of the Week - Netflix Upends Their Corporate Hierarchy I’ve got a lot of thoughts, but we’ll start with the most common response to yesterday’s article. Let’s Talk Stock Price More than one person, responding to what I published two days ago, pointed out that, well, actually, the thing driving Netflix’s actions is this: In short, stock price! Even if Netflix isn’t obsessed with their own share price—they probably are, but, for the record, my strategic advice to every CEO is to absolutely ignore stock prices, which will, ironically, probably help the stock price long-term—most everyone thinks they are. By the way, I prefer market capitalization to stock prices, because it’s a more apples-to-apples way to compare companies: But there’s an even better way to look at it, and it kinda casts some doubt on the entire push here: price-to-earnings. I have a long list of articles that I wish I had written, and chief among them is an article titled, “Am I Still a Netflix ‘Bear’?” meaning someone who thinks Netflix’s stock is overvalued. As of last summer, Netflix had solved their biggest problem—which for me (circa 2019) was the lack of free cash flow—but their stock was CRAZY overvalued. That’s this chart here: Why did Netflix’s stock price increase to a price-to-earnings ratio of 50 last summer? What financial metric changed so quickly? Nothing. Given that, historically, mature entertainment companies average 10 to 20, with 16 being the average, that increase made little sense. Netflix’s stock swoon these last eight or so months wasn’t irrational; the stock price rise last year was. So if you want a really hot Netflix take, here it is: Netflix’s stock price has been going down because the financial industry recovered its senses, not because of any strategic mistake. Yes, that would imply that cleaning house may have been a mistake. That’s why the charts yesterday are so important, because they show that Netflix did have a strategic problem (a lack of hits) and that’s what they moved to address. (One could also argue the industry drastically overrated Netflix’s growth prospects, but that’s a financial industry problem, not a Netflix strategy problem per se. Some growth estimates are just crazy. *cough* AI *cough*) Now, the last time Netflix’s stock price crashed—circa 2022—it gave them an opening. I’d argue Netflix insiders knew they needed to expand post-COVID-19 crisis, adding advertising, cracking down on password sharing, and dabbling in sports. But if they had done that when their stock price was high, it would give folks a reason to second guess their strategy. (Arguably, last year, when Netflix pursued the Warner Bros. merger, it gave the industry a chance to review their business.) Instead, after the 2022 fall, they had the opening to make strategic changes. We may see Netflix pivot again following this latest slide. For example, the “binge versus weekly” conversation is alive and well again. Same for expanding into theaters even more. And adding both linear channels and streaming bundles. And maybe more either social, user-generated, vertical, or creator content. But the first shift came with who is making the content calls. A Message from Our Sponsor Last winter Pulp Fiction was on Netflix. For those same 90 days, it was also free, with ads, on Pluto TV and the Roku Channel. That is not a glitch, and it is not rare. The title has run on 20 different US streaming services since 2019, across 80 separate windows, and for more than 600 of those days it sat on a paid subscription service and a free ad-supported one at the same time. Almost nobody can see this, because when a title leaves a service, the record that it was ever there tends to leave with it. Reelgood keeps that record, dated to the day rather than the month: 4MM+ movie, show and episode titles across 300+ services globally, with timestamped arrivals, departures and moves across SVOD, AVOD, TVOD and vMVPD. Licensing teams price against every prior window. Rights teams check what a licensee actually delivered, and when. Pick a title you think you know: data.reelgood.com/title-availability Film - Dan Lin Want to know why I don’t opine on individual film or TV executives, especially new hires? Dan Lin. As I always caution, it’s really, really, really tough to predict which executives will succeed in new roles and which won’t. The successful head of co-production/finance partner, Rideback, Lin was considered for the head of DC Studios job before taking the job as the head of Netflix. By all accounts at the time, this was a smart hire. (That’s my read of the news coverage anyways.) But now that Netflix has fired Dan Lin, we got a slew of news stories about how he was doing a terrible job. In sports media, Bryan Curtis, new Substack writer/podcaster from The Ringer, calls this the “now you tell us” story, when you only hear the bad news after a star athlete leaves a sports team. In this case, now they tell us that Dan Lin was bad with talent after he got kicked out the door. So was Dan Lin a flop? It’s actually tough to say. While film moves faster than TV, even two years isn’t really enough time to evaluate a person’s output. The new head hasn’t really taken control. As Emily Horgan noted, it takes much longer than two years to produce animated films, so yeah, it’s definitely too early to judge in that domain. As for live-action films, I just published an article by Brandon Katz called “Netflix’s Summer of Bummer”, but I’d point out Netflix had a bad summer two years ago too. Arguably, their best summer came from KPop Demon Hunters last year and Happy Gilmore 2, the latter of which I saw credited to Lin. Then, the stories came out that Dan Lin clashed with talent, both Ben Affleck and Greta Gerwig, classic “now they tell us” factoids to explain his firing. This may have been true, but also should have been expected given that he was given the mandate to bring budgets back in check, especially after Rebel Moon. So if he made folks upset, well, that’s what he was hired to do! But also, he was described as “well-liked” at his hiring! In that case, I’m a bit sympathetic to Lin, since he may have been undercut by senior leadership, as often happens. Basically, a CEO hires a subordinate to be their “bad cop” and keep budgets in check, but then when talent complains, the CEO ends up undercutting them. That’s how I think you end up with a Narnia movie as expensive as any of the other flops, along with a film executive the town no longer likes. As a result, I think that Netflix is now executing a classic “hire the opposite” move by hiring Peter Rice. This phrase comes from my experience following football and basketball coaching decisions, where teams generally hire the opposite of who they just had. If you have an offense-minded head coach, hire the defensive guy. Or in college football, if you have a strong recruiter, then you pivot to an “X’s and Os” type of guy. Or in pro basketball, if you have a very analytically minded coach, you hire the player-friendly guy. I see that here. After dropping Scott Stuber—arguably a talent-friendly executive with lax budget control—Netflix hired the business guy to keep costs in check. Now Netflix is pivoting back to Peter Rice and presumably a more talent-friendly regime. (Disney, by the way, has done this twice: hiring business guys to succeed talent-friendly Bob Iger. It didn’t work out last time.) When it comes to Peter Rice…we’ll see! Maybe he works out, but maybe he doesn’t. I’d actually say the biggest problem is that Netflix still hasn’t solved its “IP Problem”, in that they don’t own much IP, so they just have a lower hit rate. The new executive won’t solve that. (Though buying Lionsgate would help.) Share “Content” - Bela Bajaria I almost published yesterday’s article after this column, but ended up flipping the order, because it told the story so well. So if you want the data for why Netflix is looking at TV to fix their problems, it’s in that article, this graph in particular: I know I just wrote that it’s often hard to judge executives, but Bajaria ran TV for six years and film for three and a half more. That’s more than enough to judge hit rates, and Netflix needs more hits. That’s the story. Since 2023, Netflix hasn’t had as many hit shows as it used to, and many of its previous power house TV shows have ended their runs (Stranger Things most of all). Also, many shows from 2020 to 2022 probably pre-dated Bajaria’s tenure. (That said, one thing may have been outside of Bajaria’s control, which I explain below.) Let’s lump some content strategy thoughts about Netflix and TV into one place: We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… Why I partially blame Squid Game for Netflix’s latest troubles… What is “the football trap”... Why it might not be the TV shows or films’ fault at all… What change I don’t think Netflix will make... How Bela Bajaria evolved Netflix’s TV strategy in smart ways… Whose departure likely submarined Bajaria’s final few years… One sneaky explanation for Netflix’s content struggles... And a whole lot more... ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support.
You’ll Never Guess How Scalpers Are Reportedly Snagging Rare iPhone Duos
AI bots are apparently a factor.
James Webb telescope discovers most distant ring galaxy ever, hinting at an ultra-rare early universe collision
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have observed a galaxy with a ring of newborn stars as it appeared 2.1 billion years after the Big Bang — hinting that the early universe may have been more chaotic than once thought.
Fierce turtles square off in a rare woodland turf battle
Step aside, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
'This is so crazy!' Virginia college student looking for shark teeth finds rare Native American spearpoint
A biology student found a Native American stone spearpoint when searching for shark teeth along the coast of Virginia.
Intel "Larrabee" GPU System Surfaces with Working Drivers
Recovered drivers have reportedly restored 3D acceleration to an Intel "Larrabee" prototype, offering the community a rare chance to test the company's abandoned graphics project. Reddit user "pkellythompson" discovered the hardware in equipment purchased at a storage auction, along with two USB...
Corning’s American Tradition of Knowledge in Materials Science
Founded in 1851 in upstate New York, where it remains, Corning is a manufacturer of specialized glass that has a market capitalization of over $100 billion as of October 2026 (GLW), annual revenues approaching $20 billion, and nearly 70,000 employees worldwide.1 Corning is the world’s leading manufacturer of touchscreen glass, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of optical fiber for long-distance telecommunication, the leading U.S. manufacturer of polysilicon for solar panels, and one of two suppliers of glass for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) photomasks needed to make the world’s most powerful chips with ASML machines. Optical fiber is also increasingly crucial to expand the computational capacity of AI data centers with optical networking. Corning is a rare jewel of the American Industrial Revolution that has not just remained competitive to the present day but repeatedly enabled technological transformations: it developed the glass for Thomas Edison’s first light bulbs in the 1880s, invented optical fiber cable in the 1970s, and developed the “Gorilla Glass” touchscreens for Apple’s iPhones that kicked off the global smartphone revolution in the 2000s. Corning’s leading tradition of knowledge in materials science has allowed it to stave off successive waves of competition over the decades from Europe, Japan, and now China.
El Niño Is Warming Monterey Bay, Causing Trouble for Ocean Life
El Niño has pushed Monterey Bay’s ocean water temperatures to historic highs. One clear sign: warm-water species that are rarely seen offshore of the Central California Coast.
Sarah Michelle Gellar shares rare photo of look-alike daughter: ‘My built in bestie’
The “Buffy” star’s son Rocky is also the spitting image of his father, Freddie Prinze Jr.
Protalix BioTherapeutics to Announce Third Quarter 2026 Financial Results and Business Update on November 10, 2026
Protalix BioTherapeutics, Inc. (NYSE American: PLX), a biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery, development, production, and commercialization of innovative therapeutics for rare diseases with significant unmet needs, today announced that it will release its financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2026 and provide a business update on November 10, 2026.
When papers become currency: a Chinese debate about trust in science
Last Saturday, 31 October, I went to the University of Hong Kong’s Beijing Centre for its Talent Forum. It was the fourth stop in the series this year, following events in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang, Shenzhen’s Qianhai, and on HKU’s main campus. The programme covered a remarkable distance in one afternoon. HKU’s Xiao-Jing Wang discussed computational neuroscience, intelligence, and the prefrontal cortex—before even delivering his inaugural public lecture to students back in Hong Kong. His colleague Bing Zhang took us from the Big Bang to artificial intelligence. Tsinghua’s Xue Lan asked how AI might reshape the institutional infrastructure underpinning higher education. There were lively panels featuring industry leaders from JD.com, Xiaomi, Haier—and Kaiser Y Kuo on the closing panel discussing innovation and international connections. I cannot pretend to have followed every detail of the brain models or the astrophysics. The talk that stayed with me was closer to something we have covered before: Zhou Zhonghe 周忠和 on papers, evaluation, and scientific trust. Zhou is a palaeontologist, an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and an international member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He is also editor-in-chief of The Intellectual (知识分子), China’s leading science commentary platform. His subject was uncomfortable enough for a room full of successful academics: what happens when the system for recognising good science starts rewarding something else? Part of my interest came from our sister newsletter, The East is Read, which covered the controversy around “Geng Tongxue” in May. A PhD dropout from Beihang University, Geng has publicly challenged papers by prominent researchers through detailed online allegations of manipulated images and fabricated data. At Tongji University, an investigation into a challenged Nature paper found academic misconduct, and the dean of its life sciences school was removed. The affair brought doubts about academic integrity well beyond laboratories and university committees. How could someone outside the established hierarchy spot problems in papers that had passed through prestigious journals and institutions? And what, exactly, had all that prestige guaranteed? Zhou approached these questions through two essays published in July by The Intellectual: one by Wang Xiaodong, director of the National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing, and a response by Wang Liming, of Shanghai’s Shangsi Institute of Natural Sciences. Both began with the controversy over Geng. Their arguments deserve a wider audience, so I want to put parts of them alongside what Zhou said on Saturday. Wang Xiaodong’s starting point is evolution. A research system selects for the behaviour it rewards. Grants, jobs, journals, talent programmes, and prizes collectively determine which scientists prosper and which practices get passed down from advisors to students. “Whatever the system rewards is what it will evolve to produce,” he writes, citing the ancient Chinese saying: The King of Chu loved slender waists, and many in the palace starved to death. That is a more demanding diagnosis than saying there are dishonest people in science. Punishing a fraudster does not change the selective environment that made a particular kind of research profitable. His account also gives scientific success an awkward role in the story. As Zhou put it on Saturday, science became a victim of its own success. Once research became central to industry, national power, and economic growth, universities and laboratories expanded, and public money followed. That created an administrative need for rapid decisions: who should get the next grant, the next laboratory, the next appointment? The difficulty is that the true value of a discovery may take years or decades of testing and building to become clear. Resource allocation cannot wait that long. Publication counts, journal prestige, impact factors, and citations therefore become convenient ways to make an instant judgement. “The real problem is not that these indicators have no value,” Wang Xiaodong writes, “but that they are trying to answer a question that only time can answer.” Telling administrators simply to stop counting papers will never be enough. They still have budgets to distribute and appointments to make. Something has to replace the shortcut. Zhou described the consequences inside publishing. Papers acquire ever more requirements: a complete story, polished presentation, extensive datasets, and accessibility to readers beyond the immediate field. Individually, those demands sound reasonable. Together, he warned, they produce formulaic “eight-legged” papers 八股文 and rigid reviewing, while genuinely original or non-consensus work struggles to get past journal editors—some of whom wield immense gatekeeping power despite having limited laboratory experience themselves. Meanwhile, the demands for sprawling, “complete” narratives have fuelled a wider replication crisis. Wang Xiaodong uses a mahjong metaphor to describe the result: put the complex papers published by the exact same lab over several years side by side, and they often look like “Thirteen Orphans” (十三不靠)—every tile completely unrelated to the next, and none of them reproducible by outsiders. Zhou also spoke frankly as an editor who has trouble finding reviewers. Everyone wants someone else to review their work; qualified senior researchers have little time to return the favour. The labour is anonymous, unpaid, and brings almost no institutional recognition, so it increasingly gets passed down to postdocs and graduate students. And while anonymity protects reviewers from rank and personal favours, hyper-specialisation means an author’s most qualified reviewer is often a direct competitor, shielded from accountability. The protection and the problem coexist. Wang Liming takes the argument a step further. The decisive change, in his essay, is the instant conversion of academic honour into material resources. Once a paper can be cashed in for funding, a job, students, commercial investment, or even a company valuation, scientists are alienated from their work: they must keep minting this “research currency” to keep their teams alive. He is careful not to romanticise the past. The old world of gentleman scientists—financially independent figures like Boyle and Darwin who needed nothing from external funders—was also a closed club that excluded people without inherited wealth, women, and much of humanity outside the West. Professional science allowed ordinary people, himself included, to become researchers. Nobody should want to undo that. The problem, in his account, is an exchange system that becomes too uniform and too difficult to correct. His most pointed Chinese example is the “hat” (帽子): the prestigious talent designation that brings continuing access to money, laboratory space, students, and institutional influence. “If papers are the circulating currency of the research system, then a ‘hat’ is a bond that pays interest over the long term,” he writes. A paper at least requires another round of peer review. A title in the Chinese context can lock in a judgement made years ago and turn it into permanent status rent, regardless of whether its holder is still doing good science. Here, official institutions hire, organise, and evaluate scientists. Unlike honours awarded by autonomous academic communities in the West, a Chinese “hat” blends non-scientist administrative power with state authority. Once granted, it turns a past judgement into permanent status rent that is nearly impossible to revoke—because taking a hat off would imply that official authority erred in putting it on. Both Wangs see China as experiencing, at compressed speed, pressures present across global science. Research expansion, rising investment, publication growth, and elaborate evaluation metrics arrived in China within two or three decades rather than two or three centuries. Zhou agreed with that international framing—noting that recent US White House science policy documents and the new president of the US National Academy of Sciences, a fellow palaeontologist who recently visited Zhou’s institute in Beijing, have raised strikingly similar warnings about consensus-bound peer review, short-term project grants, and the replication crisis. Still, Zhou emphasised that China’s traditional hierarchy, personal networks (guanxi), and the ethos that “a good scholar becomes an official” (学而优则仕) amplify those pressures at home. So what would change things? Here Zhou’s tone differed from the call for a revolution in scientific trust in Wang Xiaodong’s essay. As an evolutionary biologist, Zhou favoured patchwork repair (修修补补). Living systems survive through accumulated adjustments; dramatic mutations are usually fatal. Science cannot return to a small, slow-moving pastoral era, especially after the successive accelerations of professionalisation after the Second World War, the internet, and now artificial intelligence. But it can alter the local environment in which researchers work. He pointed to domestic experiments designed to support unconventional research and diversify funding, including Tencent’s New Cornerstone Investigator Program, the Xplorer Prize, and the Future Science Prize. He also mentioned participating in reviews for “major non-consensus projects” under the National Natural Science Foundation of China. One guiding principle he recalled was wonderfully direct: “Failure is allowed; corruption is not” (允许失败，不允许腐败). That distinction would mean quite a lot if taken seriously. An honest attempt that fails should not have to disguise itself as a success to survive an assessment. Wang Liming’s essay adds a sharp caveat to the optimism about new domestic funders. Multiple organisations do not automatically produce multiple ways of judging science. If the same pool of senior domestic scientists makes the decisions through the same two-round review procedures, it is still “fake diversity.” He argues for three distinct kinds of money: broad baseline funding governed by fair procedures; patient funding for questions that take ten years; and non-consensus funding based on individual taste, deliberately empowering a few genuine experts to make biased, contrarian bets on eccentric ideas that would inevitably be averaged out by a committee. Replacing one monopoly with another achieves little; a healthy ecosystem needs variance. Zhou’s proposals for publishing were similarly concrete: strip papers of their resource-allocation burden and return them to recording discoveries and establishing priority; separate dissemination from evaluation, as eLife and Peer Community In do; adopt more modular “micro-publications” and real-name endorsements; recognize the labour of editors and reviewers; and give replication work proper credit rather than treating it as an unpublishable dead end. AI makes every part of this debate more urgent—and Zhou wove it throughout his talk. In his own preparation, he used AI to survey the declining influence of academic monographs, noting how tools are already changing how scholars gather information. More fundamentally, he placed AI as the latest great acceleration in scientific history: just as the internet sped up the pace of research and tightened external resource pressures, AI is compressing the cycle again. In the essays Zhou cited, AI cuts both ways. Wang Xiaodong expects large language models to erase much of the English-writing disadvantage long faced by Chinese scientists, further swelling the flood of papers coming out of Chinese labs. Wang Liming sees AI accelerating both ends of the trust crisis: it lowers the cost of paper mills and fabricated images just as quickly as it lowers the cost of automated image forensics, data auditing, and code reproduction. “Whoever builds the verification layer wins,” Wang Liming writes. His proposed alternative to the static, packaged “story paper” is a continuously versioned “unit of discovery” containing a falsifiable claim, raw data, analysis code, experimental parameters, and an ongoing log of independent checks—where negative results and failed replications are recorded rather than buried. Zhou ended his keynote by bringing AI back to the question of scientific honour and credit. Citing a recent Intellectual discussion on “What AI Means for Mathematics” featuring Fields Medalist Deng Yu 邓煜—at a moment when AI is already batch-solving mathematical conjectures, as HKU Vice-President Lin Chen noted in his opening remarks—Zhou agreed that human researchers must remain the principal agents: AI is a tool that frees scientists from tedious calculation to think about deeper, messier real-world problems. Yet that partnership creates a thorny new evaluation problem. When a breakthrough is made with AI, what is the human contribution and what is the machine’s? And since AI models distil centuries of accumulated human scholarship, is it right that the credit and value flow so heavily to the private AI companies building the tools? The old struggle over how to assign scientific honour is acquiring a whole new layer. What I took away was a serious discussion of how science can remain trustworthy as its scale, incentives, and tools change. These were scientists with real standing inside China’s system questioning how that standing is produced, and proposing changes that would affect their own institutions and peers. That made the afternoon at HKU’s Beijing Centre worthwhile. At the close, Wang Feng, Director of Communications and Public Affairs at HKU, said the value of the forum series—which heads to Hangzhou in December and cities like Chengdu early next year—would lie in the real cooperation it helped bring about. The university has plenty to celebrate: this week it topped the QS Asia rankings for a second consecutive year, alongside its 11th-place position in the QS World University Rankings 2027. For me, bringing this debate to an audience beyond the people who review papers and allocate grants was a useful contribution. Share [ The East is Read PhD dropout’s exposé forces an academic fraud reckoning in China A former doctoral student turned blogger has shaken China’s academic establishment by publicly accusing prominent university scholars of fabricating data and manipulating papers, triggering investigations at several leading institutions and drawing rare attention from state media… Read more 5 months ago · 43 likes · 8 comments · Yuxuan JIA ](https://www.eastisread.com/p/phd-dropouts-expose-forces-an-academic?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web&embedding_publication_id=47580)
Colorado's Joseph Williams joins rare company, eyes national award
Joseph Williams has 46 catches for 643 yards and five touchdowns, reaching a program milestone with five regular-season games remaining.
Fortnite's Ultra-Rare Pirate Shop Token Hunt Sparks Wave of Profiteering and eBay Listings
Fortnite Players Are Doing Things Epic Would Probably Prefer They Didn't to Try to Get the Ultra Rare Pirate Shop Token.
Can a National Political Wave Reach the County Legislature?
In a heavily Republican New York county, Democrats are mounting an unusually large challenge in races that rarely attract much attention, testing how far national political engagement extends into local elections.
‘I love spending time with them’: Lewis Hamilton opens up about Kim Kardashian’s kids
Lewis Hamilton and Kim Kardashian have been one of the most talked-about couples in sports and entertainment this year, but the seven-time Formula 1 world champion has rarely said much about the relat...
75,000-year-old Neanderthal may have been killed by a spear aimed at the heart
A Neanderthal who died 75,000 years ago may have been killed by a wooden spear deliberately aimed at the heart, revealing rare evidence of prehistoric violence. A circular hole in the shoulder blade suggests the weapon pierced the chest and caused a rapidly fatal injury. Surprisingly, the same individual had survived an earlier devastating facial injury, suggesting other Neanderthals provided care and support.
Could LeBron James Get Fined After 76ers-Bulls Game?
During the Philadelphia 76ers‘ matchup against the Chicago Bulls at Xfinity Mobile Arena on Monday night (November 2), LeBron James was spotted having a rare moment with a fan. Behind the basket, James grabbed a cup from a fan and reportedly took a sip. According to ESPN’s Kris Rhim, the fan, who was identified as […] The post Could LeBron James Get Fined After 76ers-Bulls Game? appeared first on HEAVY.
Miranda Lambert makes rare comment about Blake Shelton divorce: ‘Not fun’
Luckily, the Grammy winner channeled her “misery” into her music.
Rare Debut Win For Red Wings Homegrown Goalie
The performance by Detroit Red Wings goalie Michal Postava in his first NHL start, as he downed Connor McDavid and […]
Chinese astronomers find real 3-body system. It is not what Liu Cixin thinks
In a case of life imitating art, Chinese researchers have discovered an ‘extremely rare’ three-star system that is not science fiction.
Phantom Blade Zero made $223M on Steam and PS5 in five days
Phantom Blade Zero was always going to be a hit. We’ve been banging on about it for months now. Well, the results are in, and Phantom Blade Zero has indeed been a hit. Yesterday, S-Game reported that Phantom Blade Zero has sold 4M copies. As of this morning, our estimates show that Phantom Blade Zero has generated $223M via 4.3M copies sold across Steam (3.1M) and PlayStation (1.2M). This instantly makes Phantom Blade Zero this year’s #10 new 2026 game by premium revenue across Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation – and without an Xbox release to boot. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Combined, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong account for 55% of Phantom Blade Zero’s copies sold – 56% of copies on Steam and 50% on PlayStation. But revenue is slightly different. Phantom Blade Zero actually made more revenue outside of China However, due to regional pricing, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong account for a lower share of revenue, 45%. The three countries account for 40% of Phantom Blade Zero’s revenue on PlayStation, and 47% on Steam. This is due to regional pricing, which you can easily check in our platform: Using the $59.99 USD base price as a starting point, we can see that Phantom Blade Zero costs the equivalent of $40.31 in China (-32.8% of the US price) and $41.80 in Hong Kong (-30.3%). So while Chinese culture is at the heart of Phantom Blade Zero (in terms of theme and player base), it’s actually making more money in non-China markets. In fact, markets outside of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan account for $123M in Phantom Blade Zero revenues via 2M copies. Even when we remove revenues from these markets from the analysis, Phantom Blade Zero remains a top 20 new 2026 title by revenue across Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe In other words, Phantom Blade Zero is a global hit. It’s not all China – or even majority China, when it comes to revenues. The China spring board helped, but a successful State of Play and – more importantly – positive reviews helped this one land in other markets. Quality sells. China was hyped from the start, but Western players needed more convincing As we wrote back in August, China was always going to show up early for Phantom Blade Zero. Our daily Steam revenue data shows just that, and we can see when S-Game’s banging RPG won over players outside of China: On the day Phantom Blade Zero’s Steam pre-order button went live in mid-August, China accounted for nearly 70% of Phantom Blade Zero’s Steam revenue. The shares hovered around 68% throughout August. This is the hometown-hero effect we’ve covered in the past, with the home market committing first – almost sight unseen – on national pride and a lush-looking trailer alone. Then things get even more interesting. Following the State of Play on August 18, US daily revenue more than doubled (from $72K to $146K), China’s daily take nearly quadrupled ($237K to $892K), and the rest of the world’s revenues also more than doubled. As China spiked so much harder than the others, its share of revenue hardly moved, holding at around 68%. So the by-all-counts-awesome State of Play got non-China markets and the West interested (you can see daily spend jump), but it didn’t move the needle for overall revenue shares. Positive reviews were the Western tipping point. US daily revenue went from $106K on October 25 to $230K when the embargo lifted on the 26th, to $463K on the 27th, to $899K on the 28th. So nearly 8.5x more revenue in four days, boosted by the positive reviews and subsequent word of mouth. When Phantom Blade Zero launched on the 29th, things hit critical mass. On launch day, the US and the rest of the world combined out-earned China for the first time in Phantom Blade Zero’s whole pre-order history. You can see this unfolding pretty nicely in the revenue shifting shares, too. China’s lifetime revenue share sat at 68% in August and was still 65% as late as October 25th, but it dropped to 45% by November 2. Over that same period, the US nearly doubled its share from 10% to 18%, and the rest of the world climbed from 25% to 38%. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe That’s not to say that China sold less – far from it. The West and non-China markets just showed up later, won over by the reviews and word of mouth. However you look at it, Phantom Blade Zero has become one of this year’s highest-grossing premium games. Daily volume seems to be decelerating a bit (which is natural), so subscribe below for more updates on performance. Speaking of performance and deceleration… Gran Turismo 7 is one of PlayStation’s biggest earners While games like Ghost of Yotei, Helldivers 2, Astro Bot, Wolverine (2.7M now, by the way), and even Marathon and Saros tend to get all the headlines (we hold our hand up there, too!), there’s one PlayStation game from the past five years that’s earned more than all of these games: and it’s one that’s rarely talked about in enthusiast circles. Gran Turismo 7, which launched in March 2022, has sold 12.7M copies. This amounts to $840M in revenue, second only to Spider-Man 2’s $1.3B – if we’re talking PlayStation first-party for this generation. Gran Turismo 7 still brings in around 3M players every month (and between 400K and 700K active players per day). It’s also an evergreen seller every year. For example, Gran Turismo 7 generated: $189.7M in 2023 via 2.9M copies $161.3M in 2024 via 2.7M copies $119.1M in 2025 via 1.7M copies This year, Gran Turismo 7 has already sold 1.3M copies, generating $74.7M And there’s more laps to come Every December is comfortably GT7’s biggest month of the year (except launch), and the gap is widening there. December generated 2.1x a normal month in 2023, and by 2025 that had grown to 2.8x. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe As the typical months cool off with age, Christmas always holds strong, so the holiday period is becoming a bigger slice of Gran Turismo 7 yearly revenue. For Gran Turismo 7, the week around Christmas does 3x to 5x a typical week – three years running: Christmas week 2023: $14.7M (4.6x the year’s median week) Christmas week 2024: $9.3M (3.3x) Christmas week 2025: $8.5M (4.6x) These Christmas peaks happened at the full $59.99 (Gran Turismo 7 wasn’t discounted at all in December 2023 or December 2025). And although there was a discount late in December 2024, GT7’s peak week that year still happened at full price. You can really see why PlayStation hasn’t added this one to PlayStation Plus, eh? Say it after me: Subscriptions cannibalise premium revenue! On that note… Let’s take a quick look at how Gran Turismo 7 is doing versus its nearest competitor, Xbox console exclusive and long-running sim racer Forza Motorsport (released in 2023 as a reboot for the franchise, about 19 months after GT7). Forza Motorsport has sold around 1.3M copies across Xbox (75.4% for Xbox console and PC) and Steam (24.6%), grossing $89.9M across those platforms. Launch aligned, and on just PlayStation, Gran Turismo 7 had sold 10.2M copies, generating $676.1M, by that point. In other words, Gran Turismo 7 has sold the same number of copies this year as Forza Motorsport has sold since launch. When all is said and done, Gran Turismo 7’s 2026 revenues will have lapped Motorsport’s lifetime, too. It’s worth noting that Forza Motorsport was not released on last-gen consoles, and under a quarter of Gran Turismo 7’s revenue has come from PS4 consoles. Critically, Forza Motorsport is also on Game Pass, where nearly 7M players have accessed it. Meanwhile, the Forza Horizon series has been performing incredibly in terms of revenue. This year’s Forza Horizon 6 has generated $583.7M across Xbox and Steam despite Game Pass cannibalisation, and last year’s Forza Horizon 5 PlayStation port has generated $383.5M on PS5 alone. So two questions, then: How well is Forza Horizon 6 going to do when it launches on PS5 in January? Hit subscribe to get that in your inbox in January (which is in two months somehow!?) Subscribe 2. Open-world arcade Gran Turismo when? Also, if you like arcade racers, go and play Star Wars Galactic Racer. It rules. Like GOTY material, seriously. The last word Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover. [Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]
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Business Owners Have a Window. Most Aren't Ready to Use It. by Tully Ryan
I spend my working life on both sides of a business sale. As an M&A advisor based in Wilmington, I help lower middle market owners across North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia sell what they've built. As the founder and CEO of IQExit, I work with the bankers, wealth advisors, CPAs and attorneys who sit beside those owners for years before a sale ever comes up. From both seats, I keep seeing the same thing. The market is ready for our owners. Too many of our owners aren't ready for the market. Start with our own backyard. Wilmington's metro area added more than 12,000 residents between July 2024 and July 2025, a 2.6% jump that ranked seventh in the country. It also posted the highest job growth rate of any metro in North Carolina. I see the same pattern in the growth markets I work in across the Southeast. New residents mean new customers and new workers. They also mean new buyers: people who moved here from corporate jobs and want to own something, private equity groups looking for add-ons in HVAC, electrical, landscaping and other trade services, and younger entrepreneurs who would rather buy a running business than start one from scratch. The ownership numbers are hard to ignore. About half of North Carolina's small businesses have an owner who is 55 or older, and roughly 85% of those owners have no succession plan, according to the North Carolina Employee Ownership Center. Nationally, more than half of Baby Boomer business owners have no documented transition plan. That isn't a crisis yet. It's a timing problem. A lot of businesses will change hands over the next decade, and the prepared ones will get the better buyers and the better terms. Buyers have money and they're using it. But an active market doesn't mean a fast one. The IBBA's latest Market Pulse survey found that Main Street deals took six to 10 months from engagement to close in the second quarter, and lower middle market deals took 11 to 12 months. That clock starts after the owner decides to sell. In my experience, the real preparation has to start years before. Two clocks, two playbooks When I sit down with an owner or their advisor, my first question isn't “What's it worth?” It's “When?” The answer puts the owner in one of two groups. If the owner wants out within 24 months, we're in execution mode. There's no time to rebuild the business. The work is cleaning up what a buyer will test: three years of financials that tie to the tax returns, an add-back schedule you can prove, customer and vendor contracts in writing, a lease that can be assigned, and a price the market will actually pay. The goal is certainty to close. If the exit is two to five years away, the owner has something worth more than time. They have choices. That window is where most value gets built, and most owners waste it by waiting. What kills deals In the lower middle market, deals rarely die over the headline price. They die in diligence, or they get retraded late in the process. I see the same causes again and again. The owner is the business. If every key customer relationship runs through the owner's cell phone, a buyer sees risk and a lender sees more of it. The books don't hold up. Buyers spot weak accounting fast. Statements that get revised mid-process, a revolving door in the bookkeeper's chair, revenue tracked on a side spreadsheet, and margins that slip while sales climb with no clear reason all make a buyer nervous. So does an owner who pushes back when asked for documents. And plenty of private owners run personal expenses through the company. Add-backs are normal. Add-backs you can't document turn into a lower offer. The real estate isn't sorted out. Many owners hold their building in a separate LLC. That's fine, but the lease terms or the property sale should be settled before a buyer shows up, not halfway through diligence. Revenue sits in too few hands. Picture a contractor with 40% of its work coming from one builder, or a service company running on handshake deals. Buyers will still look, but the terms shift toward more seller financing, an earnout, or less cash at closing. Owners and advisors: if your exit is three to five years out • Get a baseline now. Find out where the business really stands today: what a buyer would pay, who that buyer is likely to be, and which gaps would hurt you in diligence. You can't fix what you haven't measured, and the answer is often different from what the owner expects. • Make yourself less necessary. Spend the next few years building a manager or small team that can run daily operations and own customer relationships. Put handshake deals into written contracts. A business that runs without its owner is worth more and is far easier to finance. • Clean the books for three straight years. Buyers and lenders look back at least three years. Separate personal expenses, keep the financials tied to the tax returns, track every add-back as you go, and settle the real estate plan early. A word to CPAs CPAs often see a sale coming before anyone else, and you're usually the most trusted voice an owner has. Year-end meetings are the right time to start this conversation. Here's what I'd ask every CPA to do this season with business owner clients over 55: • Ask the timing question. “Do you see yourself owning this business in five years? If not, who takes it over?” Write down the answer and bring it up again at next year's meeting. • Run a proof of cash and review revenue recognition. Make sure the cash in the bank ties to the revenue on the books. Pay close attention to contractors with work in progress and to companies selling memberships or service plans. These issues are easy to fix with years of lead time and painful to fix a month before closing. • Pair the tax return with an exit readiness review. Invite clients to complete IQExit's Exit Readiness Intelligence (ERI) process as part of year-end planning. It gives you and the client a shared picture of readiness gaps and an indicative value range, and the results come back to you as the advisor. That turns a tax meeting into a planning relationship, and it puts you in position to bring in tax and M&A help early, when choices like purchase price allocation can still save the client real money. Changing the conversation For bankers, wealth advisors and attorneys, the hard part is raising the subject without seeming to nudge a client toward the door. I understand that. Nobody wants to tell a 60-year-old owner it's time to sell. So don't. Ask a different question: “If a buyer called tomorrow, what would they find?” That's a planning question, not a pitch, and it's useful whether the exit is two years out or 15. It's the question we built IQExit to help advisors answer. Whether you're in Wilmington, Raleigh, Charleston, Richmond or anywhere else, owners have a real opening right now. The buyers are out there and so is the capital. The owners who come out ahead will be the ones who start getting ready before they're ready to sell.
Kerzner CEO on luxury hospitality, crisis and global expansion
Kerzner International CEO Philippe Zuber discusses how the luxury hospitality group navigated the disruption to Dubai’s tourism market in 2026 while protecting its brands and pursuing global growth. He explores the business behind Atlantis, One&Only, SIRO and Rare Finds, how the definition of luxury is changing, and why international expansion and branded residences are central to the company’s next phase.
A golden age of science is coming
It’s almost hard to remember, but just a few years ago, a lot of very smart people thought that science was in terminal decline. Respected researchers were writing papers with titles like “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time”, and “Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science”. In 1996, science writer John Horgan even published a book called The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age. The fundamental idea was that the Universe only has so many insights to discover, and that we’ve picked the low-hanging fruit. It was the idea that Joseph-Louis Lagrange expressed when he said that “we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish.” As the big ideas and the simple ideas get mined out, we’re forced to throw ever more brains at the mysteries of nature just to keep scientific progress going at a fraction of its old pace: It looked like science was hitting a wall. Then along came AI. It’s far too early to tell how much AI will eventually speed up the growth of total factor productivity. But already we can see signs of a speedup in science. Anthropic Founder Jack Clark assembled some of the hopeful data points in a recent lecture: [ Dror Poleg@drorpoleg "If you pick different parts of science, you see the same pattern show up: Progress is accelerating, and it has started to accelerate in the last two years." Jack Clark @jackclarkSF I’m speaking at the IMF in an hour about the singularity and why I believe it has begun and the choices we'll need to make. Watch live here: https://t.co/Hj9HzcXx5h 6:08 PM · Oct 18, 2026 · 21.2K Views 2 Replies · 10 Reposts · 123 Likes ](https://x.com/drorpoleg/status/2111882070376980529) Anthropic is accelerating its investment into drug discovery, and is already announcing some impressive preliminary results: [ BioTender@Junioryu136689 BREAKING: Anthropic unveils early results from six Claude-powered drug development collaborations. • 70% shorter CAR-T signaling domain • ~35,000 antibody designs • >10× tighter antibody binding • 89% less batch-record review time Still largely preclinical. Anthropic @AnthropicAI Over the past few months, Anthropic scientists have engaged in deep research partnerships with six organizations developing new medicines. We've also begun drug discovery efforts of our own. In doing so, we’ve learned much more about how Claude can support the many stages of 9:43 PM · Oct 27, 2026 · 11.2K Views 3 Replies · 24 Reposts · 205 Likes ](https://x.com/Junioryu136689/status/2115197821150495150) Claude also appears to be enabling rapid progress toward a treatment for food allergies. OpenAI, meanwhile, announced a possible breakthrough treatment for neurodegenerative disease. Meanwhile, Google Cloud Chief Scientist Pushmeet Kohli has a list of recent scientific advances that have been enabled by its new Gemini model, including breakthroughs in nuclear fusion reactor design, rare disease research, and quantum computing: [ Pushmeet Kohli@pushmeet Gemini 4 Argon is a step change in model performance. In recent weeks, it has had a transformative impact on the Science projects in our team at @GoogleDeepMind and our external collaborators, and helped make a number of remarkable advances across scientific disciplines. 🧵👇 4:47 PM · Oct 13, 2026 · 36.5K Views 8 Replies · 41 Reposts · 497 Likes ](https://x.com/pushmeet/status/2110049807385702623) But as cool as these stories sound, they’re just very minor, preliminary efforts. There are a number of reasons to think that AI is going to propel us into a golden age of scientific discovery. That age might not last forever — AI might still run into diminishing returns eventually. But the next few decades are probably going to be an absolutely amazing time for human science. The number of “effective researchers” is no longer limited The most important input into science is scientists themselves. Until this year, that meant human brains — talented, highly trained human brains. The number of trained human brains could be increased by sending more people to grad school, but only to a point — the smartest people tend to be sent into the hardest research fields first, and if you 10x the number of researchers, the average quality will go down. This constraint was already starting to bite, as Ekerdt and Wu argued in 2024: We argue that a substantial portion of the downward historical trend in U.S. research productivity is a composition effect resulting from self-selection in researcher ability and the dramatic expansion of the research sector…[W]e find that this composition effect has lowered average researcher ability by between 37% and 53%[.] And of course, low fertility was making the problem worse, because fewer children meant fewer people who were able to become future scientists. AI just blows up this constraint completely. If an AI agent can function as an autonomous researcher, there’s no constraint on the number of researchers in the world — you can just build more of them, by building more computer chips and data centers that enable the running of more AI agents. Whether or not massive hordes of agents can collaborate to solve individual problems much faster, increasing the number of agents allows them to tackle many different research questions in parallel. What’s more, these AI “researchers” can be trained incredibly quickly compared to human beings. A human scientist takes decades to train, and more years to reach the frontier of their research field by diligent reading and conversation. This is the “burden of knowledge”, and it’s commonly believed to be one reason ideas have been getting harder to find — by the time human scientists can get up to speed, they’re often so old that their ideas are no longer novel. AI just annihilates this constraint — it can assimilate the entire literature and reach the frontier of research extremely quickly, and it can also tell human scientists where the frontier lies without forcing them to discover that for themselves. It can also pivot to new research directions more easily than humans can. And there’s also a self-reinforcing economic cycle here. Because scientific advances enable higher GDP, they enable more resources to be invested into the creation of yet more electronic “scientists”. Now that doesn’t mean the amount of scientific research goes to infinity — there may still be some essential bottleneck task that human researchers are still needed to perform. There are some indications that AI’s progress on open-ended conceptual research tasks is slower than in other dimensions, and it may be that humans are still needed to provide some of this long-term conceptual thinking. I’d bet against this being true for much longer, but it might be true for a long time. Even in this most “pessimistic” case, though, the amount of effective capital that scientists can use to leverage their work just went up by a lot. AI eliminates the theory bottleneck Science proceeds by an iterative process of theory and experiment. The theory part of that cycle is typically short, but non-trivial — it took a couple of years after the blackbody radiation spectrum was observed for Max Planck to come up with the quantum hypothesis to explain it, and decades longer before quantum theory as we now know it was created. It took about a year for Watson and Crick to figure out the shape of DNA after the requisite data was gathered. AI will basically eliminate the theory bottleneck entirely — or at least shorten the turnaround time between experiment and theory by an order of magnitude. AI is an absolute beast at math. Recently, an OpenAI model solved some of the most important open problems in computer science, math, and theoretical physics, and no one even batted an eyebrow because that sort of triumph is becoming increasingly commonplace. One of those solutions was a proof that the Standard Model of Particle Physics could be mathematically well-defined — a problem that human theorists had so far been unable to tackle. Not all research relies equally on theory, but understanding novel experimental results almost always involves some important component of either mathematical or spatial reasoning. That part of the task has now been made much, much faster. And on top of that, science is now open to a greater number of humans who aren’t naturally good at theorizing. AI can read the whole literature Much of the work of human scientists involves reading and understanding endless amounts of papers and going to endless conferences and seminars. The purpose of that work is to understand the existing scientific literature. Understanding the literature allows scientists to do the following things: Come up with new ideas for hypotheses to test Avoid doing research that someone else has already done Synthesize approaches from different areas or fields AI can reduce this effort to almost zero. Consider this excerpt from OpenAI’s blog post about their new research into neurodegenerative disease: The team divided the analysis among thousands of AI agents powered by GPT‑Rosalind, an approach we call distributed biological reasoning. The agents examined a whole-brain CRISPR atlas…a dataset showing how gene disruptions affect different types of cells across the mouse brain. Each agent investigated a gene disruption, analyzed cellular responses, searched scientific literature, and proposed explanations for the results. Their reports were combined into a reasoning atlas linking genes, cellular effects, relevant publications, and possible biological mechanisms. The research team estimated that comparable human analysis and literature review, conducted one perturbation at a time, would take months to a year. The agents reproduced findings from human analyses while uncovering additional leads. Their assessments of novelty and scientific value also aligned with judgments from blinded human experts. These findings help prioritize further experiments needed to test the proposed biological mechanisms. Some of these insights point to new leads for understanding brain disease. [emphasis mine] This is one case in which parallel work by a large number of agents really does make a huge difference: [ Haider.@haider1 this is actually insane openai deployed thousands of GPT-Rosalind agents to analyze millions of mouse brain cells in 32 minutes, work that could take human researchers months to a year also the agents uncovered new leads for brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's OpenAI @OpenAI GPT-Rosalind surfaced a new lead for drug discovery: could restoring cholesterol transport protect neurons from degeneration? DCTN1 is a gene linked to Perry syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disorder. In mouse-brain data, disrupting it increased expression of genes involved in 2:41 PM · Oct 21, 2026 · 51.5K Views 26 Replies · 95 Reposts · 1.26K Likes ](https://x.com/haider1/status/2112917197903540516) Not only does instantaneous literature review vastly speed up the research process, but it allows AI to make novel conceptual leaps from combining approaches from wildly different fields of research. AI regularly does this in math research, combining results, approaches, and theorems from far-flung places that no human mathematician would have thought to combine. It can do it in science, too. Much of scientific innovation, historically, has been “recombinant” innovation — scientists applying insights from one field to another. With AI, essentially all research is now cross-disciplinary — AI can read not just the literature on a particular subject, but the literature on a million other subjects that might have produced useful techniques or insights for the problem at hand. Superscience So far, all of the factors I’ve listed are ways that AI can speed up science as it’s already done. I’ve basically described how AI can send gigantic hordes of superhumanly fast, superhumanly well-read, superhumanly mathematically gifted researchers to re-accelerate scientific discovery. But it’s also possible that AI will enable types of discovery — and ways of understanding the natural world — that no network of humans, no matter how large or how brilliant it was or how long it had to work, would ever be able to discover. In a post back in July, I wrote about how that might work: What if there are lots of…aspects of the Universe that [are] too complex to understand in terms of simple laws, but not so complex that they just dissolve into unknowable chaos? It’s possible that we can reliably control these complex phenomena with AI, even if we never reduce them to the kind of principles that we can teach a grad student in a textbook… Another way of saying this is that there may be laws of the universe that humans can’t understand but AI can. I call these “cloud laws” — causal regularities that can be exploited by technology, but which are too diffuse and complex for an individual human being to either intuit or communicate… Perhaps social sciences like economics, sociology, and political science obey similarly complex regularities, and AI can help us find them. Perhaps there are physical processes — plasma, or topological materials, or aerial turbulence, etc. — that obey cloud laws instead of chaos?… [H]uman collaboration is bottlenecked — it’s limited by our ability to intuit patterns at an individual level, and to communicate these patterns from one individual to another. AI, being a computer, just doesn’t have this sort of limitation; it can work with vast, diffuse patterns without having to break them into pieces or simplify them in order to compress them into the tiny pipelines of person-to-person explanation… If much of the Universe turns out to be ruled by cloud laws, we could be on the precipice of a scientific renaissance. In order to discover cloud laws, AI will need huge amounts of data about the natural world. AI figured out human speech by assimilating essentially all of the text humans have ever written. If it’s going to figure out hidden patterns in biology, neuroscience, materials science, etc., it’s going to need similarly massive amounts of data from physical instruments. That data will be far, far more than humans — individually or collectively — would be able to parse, label, characterize, or model. But AI was built to do this. If scientists simply build huge arrays of sensors to measure complex phenomena like the brain, the cell, the economy, etc., they may be able to feed this flood of data to AI directly and bypass human cognitive intermediation entirely. AI would then learn about the world directly, and it might learn things that humans never could. This “superscience”, if you want to call it that, would actually go beyond the kind of science humans have done heretofore. Many of the technologies it yielded would be beyond human comprehension — indistinguishable from magic. But to the AIs, they would make perfect scientific sense. In any case, it seems clear that the scientific slowdown that threatened human progress will now be delayed — at least for a while. Unless humans have somehow found most of the actual exploitable regularities in our Universe, we’re about to enter a new golden age of science. Subscribe Share
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The costars dated for several years after playing love interests on the CW drama.
Suki Waterhouse makes rare comments on wedding plans with Robert Pattinson
Robert Pattinson’s fiancée, Suki Waterhouse, made a rare comment about the couple’s wedding plans after getting engaged in 2023.
Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato recreate their most iconic moments for new Rare Beauty campaign
Once a princess, always a princess.
What Chelsea Did Wrong vs Tottenham
After a stellar run following the international break, things came crashing down for Chelsea as they lost 2-0 to Tottenham Hotspur at the weekend. This marked an extremely rare defeat at Stamford Bridge to the Lilywhites, a crack in a strong record of home wins that has left fans reeling. In this, we will be …
Country music legend's massive California property hits the market
"A Rare Opportunity to Own a Piece of Bakersfield History!"
Spurs seal rare win at Chelsea as Palmer sees red
Tottenham clinched a Premier League win at Chelsea for just the second time in 36 years as a woeful own goal from Blues keeper Mike Penders was followed by Cole Palmer's red card in Saturday's 2-0 victory.When Palmer's run was halted by Fernandes's handball, the Chelsea star escaped with a yellow card after barging into his rival with such aggression that the Tottenham midfielder was sent crashing to the sodden turf.
MLS Could Use A Few Owners Acting Like Manchester City’s
In MLS, the rare clubs that have dared run afoul of the league's cumbersome roster regulations are also the ones that have been staples of the league's growth.
Pokémon TCG: Mega Evolution—Delta Reign Mega Rayquaza ex Card Preview
Take an early look at this new special illustration rare card from the upcoming Pokémon TCG expansion.
ESMO: Roche touts ‘convincing’ phase 3 KRAS data after win over rivals
Roche has shed more light on its investigational KRAS G12C inhibitor's phase 3 victory over Amgen’s Lumakras and Bristol Myers Squibb’s Krazati. The open-label Krascendo 1 trial enrolled 338 people with previously treated KRAS G12C-mutated non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Patients who had already received a KRAS G12C inhibitor or pan-KRAS/RAS inhibitor were excluded from the trial. Participants received either divarasib once daily, Lumakras once daily or Krazati twice daily. Roche announced back in July that divarasib had demonstrated statistically significant improvements in progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS), meeting the trial’s primary and key secondary endpoints. But the Swiss pharma had been holding back the detailed data until now. At the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress in Madrid, Roche revealed that median OS for the 167 patients who received divarasib was 17.7 months, compared to 12 months for the 171 patients who received Lumakras or Krazati. The benefit was similarly clear when it came to median PFS, which stood at 9.8 months versus 5.7 months, respectively. A total of 44% of patients receiving divarasib were alive without disease progression at one year, compared to 24% of the control group, according to Roche’s presentation. It was a similar story for the objective response rate, which came in at 58% for divarasib versus 32% for the control group, while median duration of response was 11.9 months versus 6.9 months. Stefan Frings, M.D., Ph.D., deputy chief medical officer at Roche Pharma, told Fierce that the data made for a “very comprehensive, strong package, which should be convincing to health authorities.” “It’s an important advance for patients with lung cancer,” Frings said in an interview at a Madrid hotel during the conference. “It's a second-line setting, and patients who receive divarasib benefit compared to the current first-generation KRAS G12C inhibitors by having far longer overall survival,” he continued. “They live longer. They have better progression-free survival, better response rates, and with a safety profile which is—if [anything]—even better,” he said. According to Roche, 4.8% of patients receiving divarasib discontinued treatment due to treatment-related adverse events, compared to 11.7% in the control group. Serious treatment-related adverse events were also less common with divarasib, at 7.8% versus 15.2%. Roche’s confidence in divarasib had been building even before this phase 3 success. The candidate had already shown better potency and selectivity than the incumbent KRAS G12C inhibitors Krazati and Lumakras in preclinical tests. After cross-trial comparisons suggested that the edge translated into better clinical outcomes, Roche axed a study comparing divarasib to the chemotherapy docetaxel and went toe-to-toe with Lumakras and Krazati. “We designed the drug on purpose with higher potency and better selectivity,” Frings explained. “So, based on preclinical models, we clearly knew it would be superior to the first generation.” “It’s honestly not so frequent that pharma companies go head-to-head,” he added. “But if you want to make a point, if you want to convince payers, prescribers and patients … then a head-to-head win is rather rewarding.” While Amgen and BMS reached the regulatory finish line first for KRAS G12C-mutated, locally advanced or metastatic NSCLC in 2021 and 2022, respectively, they have struggled to capitalize on their head start. Krazati brought in $55 million for BMS in the second quarter, while Lumakras delivered $111 million to Amgen. For its part, Roche is aiming for peak divarasib sales of 1 billion to 2 billion Swiss francs ($1.2 billion to $2.5 billion), according to Frings. The Big Pharma is currently recruiting patients into a phase 3 trial comparing divarasib plus Keytruda against Keytruda plus chemotherapy in previously untreated advanced or metastatic nonsquamous KRAS G12C-mutated NSCLC. Roche has previously suggested that sales in metastatic disease would account for most of the forecast. Frings was tight-lipped on the exact timeline for a regulatory filing but said the Swiss pharma is “certainly keen to get this to as many patients as possible around the world.” Roche has more RAS drugs coming up behind divarasib. The pharma has already launched phase 1 trials of a pan-RAS inhibitor called RG6505 and a KRAS G12D inhibitor dubbed RG6620 in solid tumors. Roche’s partner Chugai Pharmaceutical is also testing a pan-KRAS inhibitor called AUBE00. Roche has made a “deliberate effort” to test a range of RAS drugs, Frings said. “If you have many rare mutations and you are scrambling to find sufficient patients, a pan-RAS inhibitor makes a lot of sense,” he explained.
‘Gossip Girl’ star Kelly Rutherford makes rare red carpet appearance with 20-year-old son
‘Gossip Girl’ star Kelly Rutherford attended the London ‘Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping’ premiere alongside her 20-year-old son, Hermès, years after fighting her ex-husband for custody.
Apple’s latest AirTag 2 tracker just fell to a new all-time low price of $23
Apple’s improved second-generation AirTags are now as affordable as $22 apiece when you take advantage of today’s rare deals.
Sandra Bullock shares rare look at past Halloweens with kids in touching throwback photos
The Oscar winner quipped that “nothing is off limits” during Halloween in their household.
Ancient migration linked to genetic health risks for Native Hawaiians
Rare genetic variants found among Polynesians reveal gaps in global databases that could have implications for health care.
5 Players Withdraw from ATP Paris
The final Masters 1000 of the season, ATP Paris, has arrived, a rare one-week event that could finalize the lineup for the ATP Finals. The draw is stacked, but several players will be absent as they are unable to compete in this final stretch. Which Players Have Withdrawn from ATP Paris? Defending champion Jannik Sinner’s …
Full Intel Larrabee GPU development system has been found in storage unit, reportedly runs Crysis
A rare Intel Larrabee development system was discovered at a storage-unit auction and restored to working condition. Its owner claims Crysis runs at 720p.
16 celebrity couples you had no idea dated
Celebrity romances rarely stay secret, but some manage to fly under the radar. Revisit 16 surprising Hollywood couples, from forgotten flings to relationships you never knew existed.
Mineral separation facility coming to Eastman Business Park secures $54M; Aims to strengthen American supply chains
A rare earth mineral separation facility that's coming to Eastman Business Park has secured about $54.2 million.
Garrett Wilson makes decision on Jets
New York Jets wide receiver Garrett Wilson has been visibly frustrated in recent weeks, with the team sitting at 2-5 and the star wideout rarely getting the ball. And with the trade deadline approaching, that frustration has led to plenty of speculation about his future in New York. On Wednesday, Wilson addressed that speculation head-on,…
Xeris adds longtime biotech exec to its board
The move to bring Menassie Taddese on comes amid reports that the Chicago-based rare disease and endocrinology drug company is being considered for acquisition.
Packers' Zaire Franklin Ruled Out vs. Lions
A rare injury blow sidelines the Packers’ defensive workhorse for Sunday’s divisional clash.
In Idaho, independent political polls are rare ahead of elections. Here’s why.
In the lead up to the 2026 general election, candidates for U.S. Senate in Idaho are releasing dueling political polls about their odds.
CDC scientists sought urgent alert on measles in pregnancy. It wasn’t approved.
The report could fill major gaps about a condition doctors have rarely seen for decades.
Rare tiger behaviors captured on camera show 'we really know nothing about them'
The PBS Nature film "Tiger Island" captures rare glimpses of tiger behavior, including a mother, father and cubs spending time together — a first for these usually solitary cats.
It Really Sounds Like The Mass Effect 5 Team Had Figured It All Out Before The BioWare Shutdown: ‘I’ve Rarely Seen A Group So Good At Working Together’
The studio had a notoriously tumultuous development streak before its closure
The Best Time to Fix Your Business Is When Things Are Going Well by Nathan Tayloe
There's a pattern I've noticed working with growing businesses over the years. Conversations about what needs to change rarely happen when things are going well. They tend to happen when growth slows, a competitor starts winning business, or something that used to work stops producing the same results. By then, the decisions are often harder, more expensive, and more urgent than they needed to be. It's understandable. When revenue is growing, customers are coming in, and employees are busy, there's little incentive to question what's working. Leaders have plenty to manage without creating new challenges for themselves. Running my own business has taught me that it's easy to get caught up in what's happening today and put off improvements you know will matter tomorrow. Those periods of success may actually be the best opportunity a business has to make meaningful improvements. When Success Makes Change Less Urgent Most businesses have things they know could be better. The challenge is finding a compelling reason to address them when everything appears to be working. Maybe the company has outgrown its original positioning. Perhaps internal processes haven't kept pace with growth, or the customer experience has become inconsistent as the organization has expanded. These issues don't necessarily prevent a business from growing. Strong demand can make them easier to overlook, especially when teams are focused on keeping up with the work already coming in. Over time, small inefficiencies become accepted ways of operating. Outdated processes remain in place because they've always worked well enough, and opportunities to improve get pushed aside in favor of more immediate demands. The business continues moving forward, but some of the things supporting that growth aren't getting stronger along with it. The Advantage of Acting Early When a business is performing well, leadership has something valuable: options. There's more flexibility to invest, experiment, develop people, and make thoughtful decisions without the pressure of an immediate problem that needs solving. Compare that with trying to make the same changes when revenue is declining, or the market has shifted. Investments become harder to justify, timelines get compressed, and decisions that could have been made strategically become urgent responses to circumstances. I've seen businesses postpone improvements for years because there was never a particularly good time to address them. Eventually, circumstances decide for them, often when they have fewer resources and less flexibility to respond. Growth Changes What a Business Needs This is especially relevant in a growing market like Wilmington, where new businesses, new residents, and continued investment are creating opportunities across the region. As organizations grow, the expectations placed on them change. Customers expect greater consistency, employees need clearer processes and opportunities, and leadership has to make decisions that support a larger, more complex business. What worked when a company was smaller may still work today, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will support where the organization wants to go next. Sometimes the most valuable improvements are the ones that prepare a business for demands it hasn't experienced yet. That might mean: Strengthening internal processes before they become bottlenecks Developing leaders before the organization depends on them Improving the customer experience before inconsistencies affect retention Revisiting positioning before the market outgrows the company's story None of these changes requires a crisis. They require recognizing that a growing business needs to keep evolving, even when current performance gives leadership little reason to worry. Use the Good Years Wisely Successful businesses don't need to constantly reinvent themselves. There's value in knowing what works and having the discipline to build on it. There's also value in occasionally asking whether the business is as strong as its current performance suggests. Are there problems we've learned to work around instead of solving? Are we still operating the way we did several years ago, even though the business has changed? What would we improve today if we weren't waiting for something to go wrong? Success creates the freedom to ask those questions and act on the answers. The businesses that make the most of that opportunity are often better prepared for whatever comes next. The strongest businesses don't need a crisis to recognize an opportunity to improve. They use the good years to prepare for the years ahead. — Learn more about how we help organizations strengthen their positioning, align their strategy, and prepare for what's next at tayloegray.com, or reach out directly at nathan@tayloegray.com.
Colorectal cancer cases in kids have risen sixfold over past 2 decades — researchers are racing to understand why
While rare, colorectal cancer is becoming more common in kids, teens and young adults, and the disease appears particularly aggressive in this age group.
Browns QB Shedeur Sanders Makes Rare Post Amid Trade Talks
Browns quarterback Shedeur Sanders made a post on social media amid ongoing and consistent trade rumors. The post Browns QB Shedeur Sanders Makes Rare Post Amid Trade Talks appeared first on HEAVY.
Tiny fish, big hope: The science bringing rare epilepsy research home
Latest press releases and corporate announcements from EdgeNewswire
What Anthropic’s potential IPO reveals about its business model, growth trajectory, customer base and path to profitability
A UMD Smith expert says Anthropic's IPO filing reveals more than rapid growth, highlighting a predominantly enterprise-focused business with strong customer expansion, improving unit economics and signs of profitability. The filing also offers a rare look at the evolving economics of generative AI.
Commentary: Sledgehammers for you, pillows for me: the politics of selective morality in Tennessee
There is something almost theological about watching a politician suddenly discover grace. State Sen. Brent Taylor, the Republican nominee for Tennessee’s newly redrawn 9th Congressional District, is now asking voters to extend him something he has rarely seemed eager to extend to the people he criticizes: mercy. The Nashville Scene reported this week that Taylor […]
'Sound of Music' star Julie Andrews spotted in rare Hamptons outing weeks after turning 91
Julie Andrews, 91, was photographed in the Hamptons wearing a purple raincoat and pink sunglasses in a rare public outing in the coastal city.
128,000-year-old ice in Tibet could rewrite climate history
Ancient ice discovered high in Tibet may be more than 128,000 years old, preserving an extraordinary record of Earth's climate that scientists previously thought had been lost. The discovery reveals a rare glimpse into the last ice age and could reshape our understanding of how glaciers survive dramatic changes in global climate.
The huge stakes of an unusually momentous midterm election
Midterm elections are always a verdict on a sitting president. But the 2026 edition could become something rarer and more significant — a catalyst that points the way to a new political era.
A first look inside IU Health’s $4.7B downtown hospital
IndyStar got a rare look inside the IU Health Medical Center under construction downtown, estimated to cost $4.7 billion.
‘Zeptoverse’: CERN scientists uncover evidence of extraordinarily rare particle decay
Scientists at CERN have found evidence of an extraordinarily rare particle decay using the Large Hadron Collider. The process is predicted to occur just once in every 10 billion cases, offering resear...
Molly Ringwald posts rare photos of daughter Mathilda on her birthday
Molly Ringwald posted rare photos of daughter Mathilda on her 23rd birthday. The ‘Pretty in Pink’ star and husband Panio Gianopoulos have three kids.
Brian Sabean Humbled by Hall Of Fame Bid
Brian Sabean admits he is the "least iconic" on his Hall of Fame ballot. His honest reaction to the 2027 vote is a rare moment of clarity in baseball.
Trump administration asks Washington state to set aside ballots from 400 voters it says may be noncitizens
The effort is the latest by the administration to identify noncitizen voters, even though noncitizen voting is exceptionally rare.