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‘Say yes’: How Susanna Weir found her voice in sports as an NCAA postgraduate intern

Susanna Weir’s priority in athletics always has been to share athletes’ stories. Her coverage of the Olympics for the NCAA allowed her to do this at the highest level, building her confidence and guiding her to her passion for storytelling in the NFL.

Aug 5 • 10:00 AM EDT • Sports • ncaa.org

Burke Airport businesses demand chance to have their say amidst closing saga

A plan to close Burke Lakefront Airport faces opposition from businesses that are connected to the airport.

Aug 5 • 9:00 AM EDT • Business • crainscleveland.com

Chartbook 464 The"China squeeze" - the politics of development counterfactuals.

There are three types of China shock discourse. Each has a distinct temporal register. China shock 1.0 was a phrase coined by US academics in the 2010s to retrospectively summarize the impact on particular US labour markets, which they identified through painstaking empirical investigation. China shock 2.0 on everyone’s lips in Europe in the mid 2020s is an alarm raised by trans-Atlantic policy thinkers warning of a coming disaster which they project onto Europe’s ailing car industry. The third type of China shock discourse - commonly known as the “China squeeze” launched most recently by Indian economists Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian in the pages of Foreign Affairs - mobilizes a different, more speculative temporal register: the counterfactual realm of alternate history. The China squeeze argument asks not what has happened, or what is going to happen, but what might have been. Specifically, what options for economic development might have been open to Global South economies like India or the economies of sub-Saharan Africa, had it not been for China’s spectacular industrialization since the late 1990s and the persistent competitiveness of China’s manufacture in low-skilled segments. Chatterjee and Subramanian’s argument is that whilst China has built a powerful position in electrical machinery and other high-skill manufacturing, which is now delivering China Shock 2.0, it also continues to run a trade surplus in low-skill, labour-intensive manufacturing. This surplus is large and has remained largely unchanged in fifteen years. Indeed, in the 2010s, in trade with low-income countries, China’s surplus rapidly increased. On their reading, this squeezes low-income producers in low-skill sectors in which they “should” be able to compete. Source: “China’s Mercantilist Squeeze on Developing Countries” Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian. Peterson Institute for International Economics 26-7 May 2026 Chatterjee and Subramanian’s wording is telling: (emphasis mine) The canonical trajectory of economic development in the post-World War II period is for countries to transition from agriculture to manufacturing, first in low-skilled manufacturing and then later on to high-skill manufacturing (Herrendorf, Rogerson, and Valentinyi 2013). At the global level, this implies that high-income countries (HICs) that once specialized in low-skilled activities cede manufacturing export space to poorer countries that come along to occupy that space. In 1965, advanced economies accounted for about 60 percent of global value-added exports in four key low-skilled manufacturing sectors, i.e., apparel, leather, textiles, and footwear. Over time this share declined and began to be occupied first by the East Asian tigers and, beginning in the late 1990s, by China. Today China accounts for about 50 percent of the global market. The question is whether China, with its rising prosperity, is continuing to behave like its richer counterparts and ceding export space to poorer followers or to behave unlike them and continuing to occupy space. In terms of the conceptual maneuvers it performs, of the three China shock discourses, the “China squeeze” argument is by far the most ambitious. After all, it bases its critique of China on a counterfactual imagining of the world. Like any counterfactual argument, to construct this alternative reality it must rely on a heuristic model. To make their argument Chatterjee and Subramanian mobilize two key claims. The first reference point is the actual history of rich-country industrialization, what they refer to as the “canonical path”. The idea is that countries transition from agriculture to light industry and low-skilled manufacturing and from there up the value chain. To make this useful as a standard of comparison and a means to construct a normative standard, they adjust sectoral export shares for two factors: 1. the underlying level of economic development of the exporting country, as measured by national income and 2. the degree to which the sector in question is internationalized. The idea being that for a high income country to have a high export share in low-skill sectors is anomalous and even more so if that particular product is highly internationalized and thus suitable for being “conceded” to lower-income competitors. Where should this process end? Here Chatterjee and Subramanian introduce their second benchmark. Their normative idea of a global development path is one in which, in due course, low-skill manufacturing exports are distributed in proportion to a country’s share in the global labour force. They imagine, in other words, a world of proportional, polycentric global development without much national specialization in low-skill manufacturing. A useful benchmark is that, in labor-intensive manufacturing sectors, a country’s share of world exports should be broadly commensurate with its share of the world’s low-skilled labor endowment. … In the Heckscher-Ohlin model, this would be true if value added per worker and export propensities, i.e., fraction of output that is exported, are the same across countries. It is this pleasant liberal vista of orderly global development, progressing towards a general distribution of low-skilled manufacturing against which they judge reality and conclude that the low-income countries are suffering a “China squeeze”. China is not exiting low-skill sectors fast enough Allowing for its gdp level and the degree of globalization, China’s share of low-skill manufacturing exports is far higher than it “should” be. Relative to population, its low-skill share of exports is far too high. That in turn yields the conclusion that huge numbers of jobs - the authors suggest tens of millions - are being hoarded by China. For the four sectors captured in figure 4, this excess in value-added exports is $110 billion in 2022. For all low-skilled sectors overall captured in appendix figure D.1, excess value-added exports amount to $365 billion. The crowding out of LMIC exports by China is therefore substantial. Both these claims have in common that they are strong structuralisms. The first is that development paths ought to resemble each other. The second is that broadly speaking as far as low-skilled manufacturing is concerned, all countries are alike. If the world currently diverges from the distribution of trade implied by these assumptions, if China is not following the advanced economy path and has huge exports, this must be the result of “policy”, which the authors then put in question as illegitimate or unfair. Thus the naturalistic construction of a canonical path leading to a “level” distribution of low-skilled manufacturing reveals itself to be a polemical tool. From the point of view of China shock polemics, this discourse is no doubt welcome. But as an account of economic history, it must surely be regarded as nothing short of bamboozling. Development paths do not follow a regular, natural sequence. As David Fishman put it aptly, “development is not a queue”. They are always and everywhere, through and through political. Development is not so much a process, as a project. Each such project is more or less well adjusted to its context. As Gerschenkron taught uneven and combined development implies differentiation rather than simple imitation on a single parth. It may be true that Europe and the US exited relatively early from low-skill work. But clearly technology has changed. As C&S themselves point out, China no longer enjoys a low wage environment. Do they really believe that such huge differences can be accounted for either by industrial policy, which as they admit does not operate powerfully in low-skill sectors, or by exchange rate manipulation? What is overwhelmingly dominant in explaining the persistence of “low-skill” manufacturing in China are surely the network effects of complex supply chains. Indeed the label of “low-skill” may miss the point. The degree of globalization which Chatterjee and Subramanian decide to conjure away in their model of the development path - to allow for the fact that Europe and American textiles exporters did not enjoy just-in-time logistics in the 1950s - obscures the point that the networks through which Chinese factories supply the world are themselves key parts of the low-skill industrialization project. China isn’t knocking out 1970s style “cheap”. It has redefined the entire product cycle. C&S’s casual reference to “T-shirts” is telling. In today’s “fast fashion”, there is weight on both terms. Fashion and fast. China’s success in delivering on both at unprecedentedly high speed and at unprecedentedly low cost, isn’t a low-skill operation at all. If we see development trajectories not as the serial repetition of the same, but as distinctive, crafted projects that cumulate in complex agglomerations of skill, technology and labor, then this explains why the assumption that low-skilled manufacturing should follow the distribution of population flies in the face of all experience. As countless cases attest, low-wage, low-income developed economies are not by themselves the makings of a competitive production base. As Leon Liao puts it quite fairly: “International trade has never been allocated according to population. A country’s population gives it no natural claim to an equivalent share of global exports." And the remarkable fact is that Subramanian alone and with co-authors has long been making this point, not to pillory China, as is the case of the tendentious _Foreign Affair_s and Peterson pieces, but to highlight the great counterpart to China’s industrial success, namely India’s relative failure. The much-quoted Foreign Affairs piece showed low-skill export shares only for China, not for India. If you put both countries in the picture as Chaterjee and Subramanian have done on other occasions, the picture looks like this. China is far above the line, but India, almost as large in terms of population, is no less anomalous, just in the opposite direction. As far as global populations are concerned, and the imagining of tens of millions of “squeezed” jobs, it is this Sino-Indian pair that account for a huge share of the action. What this graph reveals is not China’s cheating, but India’s “greatest development failure”, at least this is the argument made Arvind Subramanian, this time in co-authorship with Devesh Kapur, in their major book, A Sixth of Humanity. Independent India’s Development Odyssey which appeared with Oxford University Press earlier this year. In this highly critical work on India’s development, China is repeatedly evoked, not to criticize but as a benchmark against which to illuminate what India’s political economy has not delivered i.e. large-scale formal employment for hundreds of millions of citizens. Kapur and Subramanian leave no doubt, if you want to understand why China, not India was the main driver of manufacturing globalization from the 1980s, don’t look to slots opening up in the division of labour thanks to the liberal mindedness of advanced economies, look to the contrasting political economy of the Maoist PRC and India’s post-independence political economy. As Kapur and Subramian note: The great divergence between China and India did not begin in 1978 with the Deng reforms—it was well underway by then. In one of the great ironies of modern history, the conditions created by Maoism turned out to be a great launching pad for industrial globalization. As the comparison of India and China in 1980 makes clear, to imagine manufacturing would be equally distributed when populations are so differently endowed in terms of educational and nutritional is fanciful. Here is the data from Kapur and Subramanian, data which I explored back at the very beginning of Chartbook. As Kapur and Subramanian insist, the striking fact is that even as India’s growth accelerated from the 1980s, structural change has not. Formal employment in India lags woefully behind. Why? As Kapur and Subramanian note, the path-dependent impact of India’s poor early start was devastating. The list of factors they mention is long and weighty: We argue for a new five-fold explanation applicable at different stages of Indian history: in the initial stages, the legacy of two key pre-1980s policies, the neglect of agriculture and the strangling of the domestic private sector, were critical. The failure of broad-based agricultural growth militated against rural industrialization, which would have been devoted to satisfying local needs that would have necessarily been labour intensive. Then, when the boom came after 1980, the thicket of regulation and broader labour protections that were legislated prematurely in a nascent democracy, underpinned by a deep ideological aversion to private capital in general and big capital specifically, became a barrier to attaining the size that would be necessary to compete globally. Similarly, the reforms after 1991, while wide-ranging, did not quite encompass non-tradeable inputs critical to manufacturing, namely, land, logistics infrastructure and power. A combination of low investment (logistics infrastructure), regulation (land) and the continued monopoly supply by state governments (power), combined with residual socialism, kept costs at 75–100 per cent above efficient supply. These factors were compounded on the supply side by the government, which dominated the formal labour market and established exorbitantly high wages at the lower end of the skill spectrum. This made their employment in the labour-intensive sector by the private sector less attractive. Finally, when the services sector and its exports boomed, wages soared even further via a Dutch Disease effect: one successful tradeable sector killed and cannibalized another less-skilled tradable sector, namely, manufacturing. Thus, scarcity-inducing policies of the planning era, precocious democracy and a Gandhian aversion to size; inefficient, monopolistic supply of critical non-tradable inputs; the behemoth of government; and super-successful skill-intensive services successively undermined India’s unskilled labour employment opportunities. The employment failure seems to have been over-determined. … Less quantifiable but no less important are some of the sociological factors that have undermined manufacturing and factory jobs. Take the impact of the success of the IT sector—located in urban areas with better working conditions, such as air-conditioned offices, good schools for children and attractive entertainment options. It became a more attractive place for engineering and management graduates to flock to. … Consider manufacturing and female employment. Indian society makes it difficult for women to work, reflected in India’s unusually low female labour force participation (elaborated in Chapter XIII). Indian society, in particular the routine harassment of women in public spaces, makes it even more difficult for them to travel long distances to take up work.37 Combined with onerous regulations on creating hostels and dormitories for women—which, in turn, prevents multiple shifts of operation—factories need to be located in areas with a large female labour pool. While firms can take apparel plants to female labour or bring them to the plants by building large-scale dormitories, this raises costs. If there was a case for subsidies to encourage labour-intensive manufacturing, housing subsidies to build dormitories for women workers would be a good place to start. All of this meant, that when opportunities did open up, in part thanks to adjustments in China, India was in no position to take advantage. Here is the account of the 2020s from Kapur and Subramanian. It stands in dizzying contrast to the one-sided, “China squeeze” argument delivered in the Peterson and Foreign Affairs pieces: In 2022, for example, India’s share of global exports in clothing (the canonical labour-intensive sector) was 3.1 per cent compared to 32 per cent for China. This is extremely disappointing because China started vacating export space in this sector after the Global Financial Crisis as its wages started rising; it then vacated further space in the aftermath of geopolitical developments that led investors to seek alternative investment locations. Between its peak and today, China lost about 7.5 percentage points of global export share (worth about $43 billion in 2022); over this period, India’s export share remained stagnant at 3 per cent, while that of Vietnam and Bangladesh rose by 3.5 to 4 percentage points. China’s loss did not translate into any gain for India in terms of low-skill exports and employment. Put differently, when the conditions for dynamism and prosperity were established after 1991, and even more tantalizingly when the global export opportunities opened up, it was as if India was a high-wage economy and only skilled labour could benefit from the dynamism. It had converted its physically abundant unskilled workforce into an economically expensive resource, penalizing its use. It is not my mission here to argue for or against Kapur and Subramanian’s interpretation of India’s development trajectory. The point in this context is simply that the “China squeeze” such as it is can only be understood, in relation to the heavy burden of domestic constraints that Kapur and Subramanian so unsparingly enumerate. I am concentrating here on India because it is the great counterpart to China and the unspoken reference point of the “China squeeze” discourse. But the point is more general. Can anyone with a straight face suggest that the main problems afflicting the development of South Africa or Nigeria, the great centers of mass underemployment in sub-saharan Africa, are cheap competition from China driven by Beijing’s industrial policy and an undervalued RMB? Likewise, is the main problem of the American working-class the threat of Chinese competition or the manifest crisis of social reproduction in the United States itself? The point here, as in the discourse around China shock 2.0 in Europe, is to insist that we should not normalize the world and pathologize China, without actually investigating what is going on in America’s industrial wastelands, the German car industry, or India’s lopsided labour market. One-sided pathologization should be understood for what it is, a polemical gesture. Concepts like China shock and China squeeze are, what Reinhart Koselleck, following Carl Schmitt, would have described as “asymmetrische Kampfbegriffe”, or “asymmetrical counter-concepts” or “asymmetrical combat concepts”. If the function of arguments like the “China squeeze” is to alert elites in the rest of the world of the need to rejuvenate and energize their development projects, so be it. But let us see the resulting discourses as the mobilizing interventions that they are. Interestingly, a significant slice of China’s public sphere - the so-called industrial party - have been obsessed for the last twenty years with precisely these questions of counterfactual economic history. Since the mid 2000s, a massive online discourse developed around an alternative history in which Chinese techno-patriots were asked to imagine how they would proceed if they had the possibility of traveling back in time to transport modern technology into the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) thus averting the “great divergence” of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a fantasy of course, but also a goad. The point was not directed at Westerners. The alternate history is dramatically nationalist, but few n the West had even heard of it until recently. The adherents of the industrial party are not liberal moralists. They don’t project natural ladders of international development and ask why others don’t cede space. They take the Realpolitik of global economic development for granted. Their pointe was directed against fellow Chinese. The rallying cry of the alternative narrative was this: Now that we are beginning to gain steam and push forward on our national development path, now that we are breaking out of the inferior position assigned to us even in the early years following WTO accession, do not lose yourself in humanistic imaginings about better futures. In the spirit of Deng, they called on China to embrace the hard truth of development. Perhaps one might of the Industrial Party as a cultural trend born out of desire for symbolic revenge against those who had inflicted the century of humiliation. In terms of the various temporalities of the “China shock” - retrospective, prospective and counterfactual - one might think of the Industrial Policy discourse as truly speculative, conjuring up the China shock that never was. Or perhaps one might better think of it as imagining a world in which a powerful China was no shock at all, but simply a defining fact of modern history. I love putting out Chartbook. I am particularly pleased that it goes out for free to thousands of subscribers around the world. But, writing this newsletter takes a lot of work. If you are enjoying it and would like to support the project, sign up for one of the subscription options here. It is the equivalent of a fancy cup of coffee per month! Subscribe

Aug 5 • 7:18 AM EDT • Politics • adamtooze.substack.com

Crooked Letter Sports: 111 years of sports writing… | Ep. 308

In Tyler CLeveland's absence, 51-year Mississipppi sports writing vetran Billy Watkins joins the podcast to co-host with Rick Cleveland, who has been covering

Aug 5 • 7:00 AM EDT • Sports • mississippitoday.org

Delaware Keeps Business Filing Edge as Texas Starts Fast Service

Although the creation of the Texas Express service is an improvement for Texas entities, the Delaware Division of Corporations still provides a superior level of speed, responsiveness, efficiency, and cost, write Francis G.X. Pileggi and Aimee Czachorowski.

Aug 5 • 4:30 AM EDT • Business • news.bloomberglaw.com

Browns Part Ways With Rookie Receiver After Injury

The Cleveland Browns have parted ways with a rookie receiver after a training camp injury. The post Browns Part Ways With Rookie Receiver After Injury appeared first on HEAVY.

Aug 5 • 1:15 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Browns' Shedeur Sanders Lands Brutal Take From NFL Execs

Cleveland Browns quarterback Shedeur Sanders has received a harsh take from NFL executives.

Aug 4 • 8:50 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Source: Voluntary federal regulatory framework for advanced AI models finalized

The meeting was described as “staff-level.”

Aug 4 • 7:16 PM EDT • Politics • ny1.com

'Putting Politics to One Side': Aaron Rai Makes Feelings Clear on DP World Tour's Future

Aaron Rai thinks the DP World Tour matches the PGA Tour’s high-level play and strong competitive depth—a stark contrast from what a majority believe. For professional golfers, the PGA Tour is the biggest platform to showcase their skills.

Aug 4 • 6:12 PM EDT • Politics • sports.yahoo.com

The Beauty Of Settled Science

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

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

Exclusive | Pete Hegseth Army Chief Pick in Jeopardy Over Republican Objections

Some lawmakers and experts say Gen. Christopher LaNeve lacks experience at the four-star level.

Aug 4 • 5:17 PM EDT • Politics • wsj.com

The Cleveland Sirens are honoring its past, setting sail to the future

Here's how Cleveland's new WNBA franchise plans on honoring the history of the Rockers while also looking ahead at their future.

Aug 4 • 4:56 PM EDT • Sports • theixsports.com

Browns DROY Carson Schwesinger Sits Out Practice Again

Carson Schwesinger's "minor" injury is becoming more concerning. The Cleveland Browns middle linebacker and reigning NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year was absent at practice for the third consecutive day Tuesday. Schwesinger missed three straight days of practice, including the Browns' first full-pad practice Monday, with what head coach Todd Monken called "a little minor injury."

Aug 4 • 4:32 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Series Preview: Mets at Guardians

The New York Mets come to town to face the new look Cleveland Guardians. The Mets are 47-66 with a -58 run differential, 27th in wRC+ at 92, and 15th in team ERA at 4.15 (4.00 FIP). The Guardians are 57-56 with a -16 run differential, 25th in wRC+ at 93 and eighth in team […]

Aug 4 • 3:31 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Rock Entertainment plans to take 'big swings' with Cleveland Sirens

Aug 4 • 2:45 PM EDT • Entertainment • beaconjournal.com

Devin Bush Makes Noise at Chicago Bears Practice

One of the biggest standouts based on what I’ve seen from those covering Chicago Bears training camp today, August 4th, is Devin Bush. It’s been discussed in a previous Athlon Sports article that Bush was essentially brought in to replace Tremaine Edmunds in Chicago. Following the season that Bush had with the Cleveland Browns, where he recorded 125 tackles and three interceptions, expectations are high.

Aug 4 • 1:54 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Rep. Max Miller to seek ethics probe into himself over abuse claims

Rep. Max Miller is the former son-in-law of U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno.

Aug 4 • 1:53 PM EDT • Politics • crainscleveland.com

Small business work hours grew in July

Growth in the number of weekly hours worked at small businesses hit its highest level in over five years last month, according to Paychex.

Aug 4 • 1:49 PM EDT • Business • accountingtoday.com

Health alert issued for popular Costco food

A recall wasn't implemented since this product isn't available for purchase anymore.

Aug 4 • 1:10 PM EDT • Health • cleveland.com

Cleveland Browns Coach Admits QB is Earning More Reps

As the old saying goes, when you have two quarterbacks, you really don’t have any. Well, right now, the Cleveland […]

Aug 4 • 12:58 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Rock Entertainment Group unveils Cleveland Sirens as city’s WNBA expansion team

Cleveland’s new WNBA team has a name and a look.Rock Entertainment Group unveiled the name and brand identity for Cleveland’s WNBA franchise: the Cleveland Sir

Aug 4 • 12:46 PM EDT • Entertainment • abc6onyourside.com

When does advanced science create entrepreneurs — and does it matter?

A new NSF Engine in Cleveland revives an old question — whether a startup or an incumbent should turn research into products — and brings up a better one: whether that distinction serves the people it’s meant to.

Aug 4 • 10:00 AM EDT • Science • siliconprairienews.com

Here's what happens to your brain when you stop drinking alcohol

Though even relatively low levels of drinking can cause harm, the brain can recover to an extent if you stop or cut back, evidence shows.

Aug 4 • 6:00 AM EDT • Health • washingtonpost.com

Browns QBs Deshaun Watson, Shedeur Sanders Get Harsh Madden Rating

Cleveland Browns quarterbacks Shedeur Sanders and Deshaun Watson received an unflattering Madden rating amid their starting competition. The post Browns QBs Deshaun Watson, Shedeur Sanders Get Harsh Madden Rating appeared first on HEAVY.

Aug 3 • 9:44 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Guardians' playoff push includes moves to strengthen rotation and offense

The Cleveland Guardians have made three trades to bolster their lineup and surprisingly their rotation as they seek a third consecutive AL Central title

Aug 3 • 7:44 PM EDT • Sports • foxsports.com

Browns Send Strong Message to QB Dillon Gabriel

Dillon Gabriel entered training camp on the outside of the Cleveland Browns’ quarterback competition, but his performance is forcing the team to reconsider his workload. The post Browns Send Strong Message to QB Dillon Gabriel appeared first on HEAVY.

Aug 3 • 6:03 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Guardians' Foster Griffin: Dealt to Cleveland

Guardians' Foster Griffin: Dealt to Cleveland

Aug 3 • 5:42 PM EDT • Sports • cbssports.com

Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department Narcotics Unit puts drug organization out of business

Two men are under arrest after a two-month-long investigation by the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department for selling large amounts of drugs across the city of Cleveland and throughout Cuyahoga County.

Aug 3 • 5:19 PM EDT • Business • cleveland19.com

Browns partake in first padded practice without numerous key players

As the Browns held their first padded practice of the summer, they did so without Carson Schwesinger and other expected key contributors

Aug 3 • 4:45 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

4 Anne Arundel beaches placed under no-swim advisories for high bacteria levels

Water-contact activities, including swimming and waterskiing, are prohibited.

Aug 3 • 2:58 PM EDT • Health • capitalgazette.com

Cleveland Browns upset NFL world by making another bad decision

The NFLPA won't be happy with Cleveland's latest decision regarding their new stadium surface.

Aug 3 • 2:06 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Patriots training camp notebook: Gabe Jacas increases participation level

The Patriots held their eighth training practice on Monday, August 3.

Aug 3 • 1:45 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

If Not AOC, Then Who?

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

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

As computer science enrollments drop, artificial intelligence classes fill up

Hiring for entry-level software developers has slowed, and college enrollment in computer science is declining

Aug 3 • 9:50 AM EDT • Science • latimes.com

3 Takeaways after 4 days of Browns Training Camp

Cleveland Browns training camp enters Week 2, a look back at Week 1’s takeaways including QB, Denzel Boston, and defense

Aug 3 • 8:49 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Browns reunion spurned by DE Jadeveon Clowney; signs with Texans

The Browns wanted to bring defensive end Jadeveon Clowney back, but he had other plans.

Aug 3 • 8:23 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

With Numbers Of Uninsured for Healthcare Rising, Hospitals Raise The Alarm

As more people go without insurance, hospital revenues decline, insurance premiums throughout the system increase and medical debt levels rise.

Aug 3 • 8:19 AM EDT • Health • forbes.com

Join MDI Mah Jongg at The Neighborhood House

NORTHEAST HARBOR — MDI Mah Jongg hosts invite players of all skill levels to join in an afternoon of fun, including social play, dessert and a raffle. The event takes

Aug 3 • 8:08 AM EDT • Entertainment • mdislander.com

A simple supplement could help the immune system fight cancer and viruses

Low arginine levels may allow cancer cells and viruses to slip past the immune system by reducing production of a crucial cellular warning protein. In mice, arginine-rich diets led to fewer colon tumors and milder viral infections, suggesting a simple supplement could have powerful therapeutic potential.

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

St. Edward High School

St. Edward High School, a Catholic school in the Holy Cross tradition, educates the hearts and minds of a diverse group of young men to have the competence to see and the courage to act as men of hope for the transformation of the world.

Aug 3 • 5:00 AM EDT • Business • crainscleveland.com

AI Identifies Previously Unrecognized Health Insights in Routine Sleep Studies

Interdisciplinary research team develops foundation model that identifies patient groups with markedly different long-term health risks

Aug 3 • 5:00 AM EDT • Health • newsroom.clevelandclinic.org

Why hybrid healthcare is a business imperative for employers in Ohio

The hybrid healthcare approach can help Ohio employers improve employee experience while managing healthcare costs.

Aug 3 • 5:00 AM EDT • Health • crainscleveland.com

Why hybrid healthcare is a business imperative for employers in Ohio

The hybrid healthcare approach can help Ohio employers improve employee experience while managing healthcare costs.

Aug 3 • 5:00 AM EDT • Business • crainscleveland.com

Palworld Online is a new MMORPG coming to iOS and Android later this year

Developed by Garena, Palworld Online is a shared world MMO where players can collect and level their Pals together.

Aug 3 • 4:58 AM EDT • Technology • eurogamer.net

Demand for experiences surges as travelers prioritize activities over relaxation

Hit especially hard by the COVID pandemic, the experiences sector of the travel industry has returned to pre-pandemic levels of business, growing faster than much of the rest of the

Aug 3 • 4:15 AM EDT • Entertainment • thederrick.com

At colleges, the AI boom means everyone wants to dabble in computer science

Hiring for entry-level software developers has slowed, and college enrollment in computer science is declining.

Aug 3 • 12:15 AM EDT • Science • seattletimes.com

Xbox Consoles Are Now Much More Expensive In The EU And UK

The entry-level price for an Xbox now starts at 499.99€/£429.99.

Aug 2 • 3:04 PM EDT • Technology • engadget.com

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

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

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

EA-Clinton Institute VideoCast: Ireland and The Making of America - How The Irish Influenced US Politics

Terry Golway on how Irish immigrants helped transform American politics --- from local political machines to highest levels of public office

Aug 2 • 3:49 AM EDT • Politics • eaworldview.com

Cleveland Browns Training Camp: Day 4 Recap

Aug 1 • 6:31 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

‘It’s unacceptable’: Cleveland Browns owner says fans ‘deserve better’

The Cleveland Browns have not performed well the past two seasons, and team owner Jimmy Haslam knows it. However, despite the recent struggles, it sounds like Haslam is optimistic about this season. During a recent interview, Haslam acknowledged the team’s frustrating record the past two years, but he made it clear that he thinks the…

Aug 1 • 4:03 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

America In Focus: US economy expands at sluggish pace, mortgage rate hit the highest level in a year

The U.S. economy expanded at a sluggish 1.5% pace from April through June as rising imports weighed on growth.

Aug 1 • 10:11 AM EDT • Business • seattletimes.com

Science Inquiry Comes Alive for Jacket Middle Schoolers

Snails, sidewalks and Double Stuff Oreos... At Partnership Middle School, instructors are finding innovative ways to help students connect the classroom to what they see in the real world every day. By integrating hands-on experiences and scientific investigations into weekly lessons, 6th and 7th grade science teachers push their classes to explore the curriculum standards through the lens of critical thinking, communication with their peers, experimentation, and scientific inquiry. Last week, two different approaches for two different grade levels saw Jacket teachers ignite the same spark for learning. On Tuesday, 6th graders in Lydia Jones' science class took their lessons outside as they explored the school grounds to identify living and non-living things. Despite the warm temperatures, they engaged in discovering unexpected objects on the campus and connecting that to what they learned in class about the criteria for what qualifies a thing as "living". Ms. Jones tasked students with walking the grounds and listing as many living and non-living things they could find in just a few minutes. Students spotted a fire hydrant, construction vehicles, grass, trees, soccer equipment, rocks, sidewalks, and even a snail hidden in the plants. After they finished the exploration, students returned to the regular classroom to discuss their results and whether their objects were classified correctly. On Thursday, 7th graders in Omini Parks' science class participated in their first lab of the semester as they explored and identified the physical properties of a favorite snack -- Oreos. Ms. Parks identified the class objective before the lab activity began by writing the academic standard on the dry erase board in a declarative statement: "I can collect and evaluate qualitative data to describe substances using physical properties." Students watched a video about how Oreo sandwich cookies are made, and then engaged in a question and answer discussion to give observations on the manufacturing process, review various types of physical properties and their scientific terminology, and talk generally about how the lab inquiry would work. The Q&A ended with a predictable question from students... "Will we be able to eat the Oreos?" The hands-on lab exercise required the 7th grade scientists to observe and record the differences between regular Oreos and the Double Stuff variety based on their physical properties. They followed the instructions in their lab brief to chart a comparison between the two types of cookies by observing properties with their magnifying lenses, measuring the height and diameter of both, and weighing the cookies with and without their filling. The activity let students put their lessons about physical properties into practice with real objects while also practicing vocabulary and writing skills to record their observations and using math skills from the last school year like taking measurements and calculating averages. Of course, they ended the lab by charting the taste of the cookies as well! These types of activities allow students to see the science standards they are learning come to life in the real world and engage with the content in new ways. Beyond that, they serve as a foundation for encouraging and growing scientific inquiry. Later in the school year, students will use the scientific method they are learning to complete science projects that require real research and the ability to explain and answer questions about their process and results. At the school-level competitive Science Fair last year, 41 Partnership students earned a place in the 2026 regional Science Fair held at MSU. From there, 14 advanced to the State Science Fair conducted at Northeast Mississippi Community College in April.

Aug 1 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • starkvillesd.com

‘Premium entertainment lounge’ proposed for 100 Block of W. Yosemite Ave.

The Manteca Planning Commission will consider a conditional use permit for a “premium entertainment lounge” in downtown when they meet Thursday at 6 p.m.

Aug 1 • 5:26 AM EDT • Entertainment • mantecabulletin.com

UNCW Business School Students Travel to Prague for Real-Life Consulting Experience by Robert Burrus

This article was contributed by Kestrel Smoot, International Programs Coordinator for UNCW’s Cameron School of Business. During the most recent spring semester, 33 upper-level finance and marketing students from the UNCW’s Cameron School of Business traveled to Prague, Czechia, to participate in an intensive international consulting project. Unlike traditional study-abroad programs, the Prague consultancy project focuses on real client engagement. Each year’s project is entirely new, designed through collaboration between faculty and industry partners to identify a current business challenge that students will address. This year, students worked with MAMS-Champi, a Czech non-alcoholic beverage company that is seeking to expand into other global markets. Throughout the first half of the semester, students attend class at UNCW and prepare for their time abroad by conducting preliminary research, developing analytical frameworks, and organizing themselves into specialized teams responsible for tasks such as marketing strategy, industry analysis, consumer segmentation, and competitive evaluation. The course emphasizes independence and teamwork, requiring students to take ownership of their work, manage deadlines, and collaborate across functional groups. Additionally, faculty serve as advisors, allowing students to navigate the complexities of the project much as they would in a professional consulting environment. Once in Prague, students met with company leadership, toured facilities, and refined their recommendations based on real-time feedback. The in-person component is widely regarded as the most transformative aspect of the program because students must synthesize weeks of work into a cohesive presentation and deliver it to the client, demonstrating professionalism, strategic thinking, and adaptability. Beyond the consulting work, students participated in cultural and educational activities that broadened their understanding of global business environments. They explored Prague’s historic districts, learned about Czech culture, and engaged with local professionals. These experiences helped students understand how economic, regulatory, and social factors shape market opportunities. The Prague consultancy project stands as a defining example of the Cameron School of Business’s commitment to experiential learning, consistently strengthening students’ confidence, enhancing their resumes, and serving as a focal point in job interviews. Employers recognize the value of the hands-on experience and transferable skills students gain, underscoring the program’s role in preparing industry-ready graduates for today’s fast-moving business landscape.

Jul 31 • 8:00 PM EDT • Business • wilmingtonbiz.com

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Jul 31 • 2:56 PM EDT • Entertainment • crainscleveland.com

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Jul 31 • 6:00 AM EDT • Health • usnews.com

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Jul 30 • 11:11 PM EDT • Health • sonomacounty.gov

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Jul 30 • 10:07 PM EDT • Entertainment • finance.yahoo.com

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Jul 30 • 4:40 PM EDT • Science • triblive.com

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Jul 30 • 12:24 PM EDT • Business • cnn.com

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Jul 30 • 12:11 PM EDT • Health • ldi.upenn.edu

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Jul 30 • 4:49 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

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Business journalism studies took her to the White House | UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media

The story by UNC Hussman alumni Brennan Doherty ’19 and video by John Roberts ’16 (M.A.) was originally published on unc.edu. This story is part of a four-part series on Carolina alumni working in Washington, D.C. Soon after her 2015 graduation from UNC-Chapel Hill, Megan Cassella was an intern for the Reuters news agency, eagerly awaiting and prepping for a special assignment. “Every now and then they needed an intern to run over to the White House last minute,” Cassella said. “You have to send your information the night before, so I started proactively sending my information to the White House every single night to be able to go the next day if they ever needed an intern.” Since then, she’s made many return trips to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in a career that’s included roles at Reuters, Politico, Barron’s and now CNBC, where she works as an on-air Washington correspondent. A longtime newswriter, Cassella made the move to TV in 2024, appearing on broadcasts multiple times daily to report on the biggest political and business stories. But the keys to doing a good job — knowing how to research, asking insightful questions, building relationships and explaining complex topics to a broad audience — remain the same. Did you know: Outside of the state of North Carolina, the Washington region is home to the largest concentration of Tar Heel alumni in the country. Cassella’s time as a Tar Heel was crucial in sharpening those skills, both in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and through roles at student-run publications like The Daily Tar Heel. She excelled in Carolina’s business journalism program with former professor Chris Roush, which led to an internship at The Charlotte Observer and helped Cassella find her journalistic niche. A data journalism course with Associate Professor Ryan Thornburg taught her how to find stories in numbers, and former professor Paul O’Connor’s reporting class took Cassella to the North Carolina Capitol weekly, where she gained invaluable experience interviewing politicians. “Those hands-on experiences that Carolina gave me really kept my interest and have really benefited me since I’ve been up here in D.C.,” said Cassella. “I have UNC to thank for the fact that I even went into business journalism in the first place.” Megan Cassella ’15 “You’ve got to thrive on adrenaline in this job. You’ve got to do well with last-minute changes, with running by the seat of your pants.” Megan Cassella ’15 ‘There’s nothing else like it’ In recent months, Cassella has reported live from the G7 Summit in Geneva, covered the latest developments in the U.S.-Iran war and followed changes to trade policy, including tariffs. “Anything in this realm that influences Wall Street, I’ll be covering,” Cassella said. Her working hours are long and variable. After waking up, Cassella immediately checks her phone to see what news broke overnight. By 8:15 a.m., she usually learns which newscasts she’ll be on, and then she heads to the newsroom, White House or wherever her assignment is. “We want you in the 9 a.m. show and the 11, and then the 3 o’clock show wants you, too,” Cassella said, referring to a hypothetical day. If Cassella gets an exclusive or major news breaks, she might be told, “We want that on TV right now.” Within five minutes, she’d be expected to get to the camera, figure out what to say and deliver the news to a live audience. “It’s exciting. It’s nerve-wracking,” Cassella said. “But there’s nothing else like it.” A well-rounded education Cassella grew up in Maryland, the youngest of four kids. Her oldest brother, Brian Cassella ’05, attended Carolina, became a photojournalist and recently won a Pulitzer Prize. She remembers visiting campus as a young child and loving it. “I just always wanted to go,” she said, and that desire grew when she, like her brother, gravitated toward journalism. But it wasn’t just the journalism school that drew Cassella to Carolina. “It was also the whole liberal arts curriculum,” she said. “Even though I always wanted to be a journalist, I got to college, and I sort of felt I had to think about other things. I had to explore my options and see if that’s what I really wanted.” Did you know: In April UNC-Chapel Hill opened its Carolina in the Capital office in Washington. She combined her journalism schooling with a global studies major and a history minor. That broad range of academic experiences in Chapel Hill molded her, preparing Cassella for a career that’s taken her to the highest levels of political journalism and inside the Oval Office. “When you sit back and remember you’re actually sitting inside the White House and asking questions of the president, it’s a cool feeling,” Cassella said. “No matter who is in office, no matter what administration or party, it’s a privilege to be there.” Megan Cassella on… Being a Tar Heel in Washington: I run into Tar Heels all the time. My husband’s a Tar Heel. We actually met here in Washington, not at Carolina, even though we were the same class. Probably most of our friends are still Tar Heels. Even up here in D.C., we all get together for games and March Madness. And through work, there’s Tar Heels all over the place. It’s often used as a connection. Favorite Franklin Street spot: When we go back, our first stop is always IP3. That’s more my husband’s doing than mine. In college, I was a huge Spanky’s fan. Felt like it was a classic spot. May it rest in peace. Advice to journalism students: Reps, reps, reps! Nothing beats the experience you’ll gain by simply starting to do the work — asking the questions, reporting and writing the stories, doing the TV hits. When you can, go places in person. Talk to more people than you think you’ll need. Read as much as you can, from different sources and on different topics. If you’re not sure how to start your story, that usually means you need more reporting. When you’re not sure, ask.

Jul 29 • 10:39 AM EDT • Business • hussman.unc.edu

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Jul 29 • 7:24 AM EDT • Business • mtu.edu

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Jul 29 • 7:00 AM EDT • Sports • newsroom.clevelandclinic.org

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Jul 29 • 4:55 AM EDT • Technology • techpowerup.com