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Despite economic worries, Russian River Valley businesses report significant rise in summer visitors
Across the Russian River valley, many business owners told The Press Democrat it’s been a great summer, beating early concerns about declining tasting room and tourism-related foot traffic.
Navy meets with USS Abraham Lincoln families over mental health worries
Navy leadership has reportedly met with the family members of sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier over worries that the ongoing Middle East deployment will lead to worsening men…
Hendersonville hospital celebrates opening of Adolescent Behavioral Health Center
WLOS News 13 provides local news, weather forecasts, traffic updates, notices of events and items of interest in the community, sports and entertainment programming for Asheville, NC and nearby towns and communities in Western North Carolina and the Upstate of South Carolina, including the counties of Buncombe, Henderson, Rutherford, Haywood, Polk, Transylvania, McDowell, Mitchell, Madison, Yancey, Jackson, Swain, Macon, Graham, Spartanburg, Greenville, Anderson, Union, Pickens, Oconee, Laurens, Greenwood, Abbeville and also Biltmore Forest, Woodfin, Leicester, Black Mountain, Montreat, Arden, Weaverville, Hendersonville, Etowah, Flat Rock, Mills River, Waynesville, Maggie Valley, Canton, Clyde, Franklin, Cullowhee, Sylva, Cherokee, Marion, Old Fort, Forest City, Lake Lure, Bat Cave, Spindale, Spruce Pine, Bakersville, Burnsville, Tryon, Columbus, Marshall, Mars Hill, Brevard, Bryson City, Cashiers, Greer, Landrum, Clemson, Gaffney, and Easley.
7 best fantasy football punishments before drafting in 2026
Fantasy football is mostly about winning, but the losers also play an entertaining role.
Analysis | With Crowley atop their ticket, Wisconsin Democrats hope for a 2026 sweep
The party establishment is breathing a sign of relief that democratic socialist Francesca Hong, who led the pre-election polls by double-digits, will not be topping their ticket.
LeBron James, 76ers Set for Emotional Home Opener Against Cavaliers
LeBron James will be facing the team that drafted him in his first game at Xfinity Mobile Arena. This will be a homecoming like no other.
Tennessee to execute Anthony Hines as attorneys raise concerns over health, execution team
Fox 17 provides local news, weather, sports, traffic and entertainment for Nashville and nearby towns and communities in Middle Tennessee, including Forest Hills, Brentwood, Franklin, Fairview, Dickson, Clarksville, White House, Greenbrier, Springfield, Gallatin, Hartsville, Lebanon, Mt Juliet, Smyrna, College Grove, Thompson’s Station, Centerville, Murfreesboro, Columbia, Lewisburg, Shelbyville, Manchester, McMinnville, Smithville, Sparta, Cookeville, Hohenwald, Waverly, Camden, Paris, Lafayette, Portland, and in Kentucky, Russelville, Bowling Green, Franklin, Alvaton, Scottsville, Hopkinsville, Glasgow.
Colorado laws around sports betting, social media search warrants take effect
Dozens of new laws passed during the legislative session this year go into effect in Colorado on Wednesday.
Veteran Malaysian MP quits Anwar’s party over ‘toxic politics’
Wong Chen, a three-term MP who had spent nearly 20 years in PKR, says he is joining Rafizi Ramli’s Bersama to ‘defend democracy’.
De'Zhaun Stribling Continues Turning Heads at 49ers Training Camp
The San Francisco 49ers took a lot of heat when they drafted wide receiver De'Zhaun Stribling in the second round of the 2026 draft. The consensus on Stribling was that he should be a third-or-fourth-round pick. Instead, the 49ers took the Ole Miss product in the second, and many immediately called it a reach.
Yankees release veteran reliever who pitched for Tigers last season
Rafael Montero appeared in 20 games for the Tigers in 2025.
NASA Swift Boost Spacecraft Prepares to Continue Mission
Katalyst Space uploaded a flight software update that reestablished attitude control of its LINK spacecraft, which is set to boost NASA’s Swift observatory.
We're lifting our price target on Cardinal Health after issuing rosy profit guidance
The quarter wasn't totally clean, but strong profitability matters the most.
Marketplace Spotlight: Sulfur Cube-Inspired
Minecraft Marketplace moves fast. With every week that goes by, incredible new add-ons, worlds, mini games, and mash-up packs join the plethora of DLC already roosting on the Marketplace like loveable little birds. You can download birds, right? And now, with the arrival of sulfur cubes, it seems that Marketplace creators are working even faster, harder, and creative-er. How else would you explain the smorgasbord of new sulfurous delights now available for your delectation? How else would you explain the fact that these add-ons and worlds transform Minecraft with sulfury sports, sulfury contests, and even sulfury weapons? You simply can't. So, it's time for this humble (yet heroic) Minecraft.net writer to jack in to the Marketplace matrix once again and report back on what he finds. Will he come away with first impressions of seven new pieces of DLC or just a severe case of sulfur-induced nausea? Spoiler: it's both.
AI Could Help Researchers Get Funding—But at What Cost?
Scientists who use AI to draft research proposals are earning more money, but their ideas may be less likely to move the field forward.
Mike McCarthy shares key update on Steelers rookie Max Iheanachor
Mike McCarthy provided an update on first-round draft pick Max Iheanachor as the Pittsburgh Steelers prepare for their preseason opener.
How Kyler Murray starting for Vikings impacts fantasy football drafts
Murray beat out J.J. McCarthy for the Vikings' starting quarterback job
Get your fantasy football edge with USA TODAY Sports Fantasy
Introducing USA TODAY Sports Fantasy, the premium tool for fantasy football managers.
Browns offseason once again proving GM Andrew Berry right
The Cleveland Browns 2026 NFL draft class has already shown flashes of being great. Another feather for GM Andrew Berry
Drafting your 2026 Notre Dame Football “MY BOYS”
Which Notre Dame Football players are YOUR BOYS out there for the boys?
HRS: "ICE - A Story of Love, Crime and Politics"
Hampton Roads Virginia and Northeastern North Carolina News, Weather, Traffic and Sports.
Joby Aviation to Scale Defense Business Through Acquisition of Resonant Sciences
Acquisition will significantly expand Joby’s defense business by adding a fast-growing company with established programs, classified capabilities and scaled manufacturing operations` Upon closing, Resonant will become Joby’s dedicated defense business, continuing its existing programs while expanding its portfolio to include Joby’s hybrid aircraft and autonomy technologies. Joby’s commercial aircraft business will remain focused on its electric air taxi initiatives Combination will create immediate opportunities to unite Joby’s dual-use aircraft, propulsion and autonomy technologies with Resonant’s radio frequency (RF), sensing and mission systems capabilities as well as its world-leading expertise in low-observability aircraft design Resonant delivered more than $100 million in trailing-twelve-month revenue, representing approximately 40% year-over-year growth, alongside strong adjusted EBITDA generation, driven primarily by long-cycle programs with the U.S. government, prime contractors and next generation defense technology programs
Bills may have uncovered another fifth-round draft gem
Rookie fifth-round pick Jalon Kilgore is making a strong push for a roster spot through his versatility and ball skills.
Archer Aviation Exec Says Boeing Deal Will ‘Significantly Change the Profile’ as $200 Million Insitu Business Joins Portfolio
Archer Aviation Inc.‘s (NYSE:ACHR) deal with Boeing Co. (NYSE:BA) could significantly reshape the electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) company. Insitu’s $200 Million Revenue Business During the company’s second-quarter earnings call on Monday, Archer’s Chief Financial Officer Priya Gupta hailed the company’s acquisition of unmanned aircraft systems manufacturer Insitu, as well as autonomous eVTOL maker Wisk Aero and SkyGrid in an all-stock deal. Read Also: Rocket Lab USA, Hims & Hers,
Trump secretly transferred planes in Turkey amid security concerns, reports say
President Donald Trump secretly flew out of Turkey last month on a smaller aircraft as part of an elaborate ruse prompted by an Iranian threat, according to news reports.
Surprising Lions linebacker Building Legitimate 53-Man Roster Case
The Detroit Lions added a bunch of new faces through free agency this offseason, including Joe Bachie. The veteran linebacker signed a one-year deal with the Lions after the draft in late April. Bachie spent the 2025 campaign in the AFC South, playing five games with the Colts before being placed on injured reserve with a foot injury and eventually being released with an injury settlement. Bachie landed on his feet with the Tennessee Titans but only served as a special teamer in Nashville.
Saber's newest game trailer takes a shot at Gearbox's CEO, if you look closely
The first hint that something might be up with the recent debut trailer for Saber Interactive’s Rideshare Stimulator is an unusual choice of words—aside from that second one in the game’s title. “Don’t take your passengers too seriously,” the trailer’s narrator says, as he describes this upcoming game. It a car game about the gig work of driving eccentric people to their destinations, a riff on Crazy Taxi. And then, he says: “When I think I’ve met the randiest of passengers, someone even stranger gets in.” “Randiest”? That suggests “randy,” which usually means having strong sexual desire. Yet none of the oddball backseat occupants featured in the trailer seem particularly lustful. One is an old man who considers his grandson a failure, another shares the theory that birds might control traffic lights, another says he’s banned from an aquarium. A little later, there’s a license plate, shown 63 seconds into the trailer, on the front of an SUV: USB DRV It’s a Texas plate. The symbol between those letters is a cog wheel. If you know, you know. That’s a reference to Texas-based Borderlands game development studio Gearbox Software (their logo features a cog wheel). More specifically, it’s a reference to Gearbox’s CEO Randy Pitchford, who in 2018 found himself explaining the nature of video he’d saved on a USB drive that was found at a Medieval Times restaurant before being returned to the studio: “It was ‘barely legal’ porn. This girl’s handle was ‘Only 18.’” The “girl” in the video had committed a solo sex act that Pitchford, an avid practitioner of magic, found remarkable. “I realized, this is not a sex worker…This is a fucking magician.” Back then, the USB drive was central to competing lawsuits against Gearbox by the studio’s former lawyer and by Gearbox against him. A settlement in late 2019 “exonerated” Pitchford, per the Hollywood Reporter. The USB story has resurfaced at times, now in a trailer from a company that not long ago was corporate brethren with Gearbox. Saber vs. Gearbox The head of Saber told Game File that the reference is payback. “The dig is because Randy took shots at Embracer in Borderlands 4,” Saber CEO Matt Karch told me when I asked him about the license plate. “Without Embracer, Randy is performing magic tricks at birthday parties for a living.” Having interviewed Karch during a cross-country flight in late 2024, I can confirm that Karch was unimpressed with Pitchford during their time both working in the Embracer group. I’d approached him not out of surprise that there was animosity but that it was manifesting publicly now. Gearbox was founded in 1999, worked on a port of Halo early on, and developed hit series such as the loot-based sci-fi shooter Borderlands before it was purchased by The Embracer Group in early 2021 for $363 million (with a possible earn-out of over $1 billion, if certain targets were hit by 2027). Saber was founded in 2001, worked on a remaster of Halo early on, had a big hit with zombie shooter World War Z and was purchased by Embracer in early 2020 for $150 million, with a potential earn-out of up to $375 million. For a few years, the Embracer group was a voracious acquirer of game studios. Then, as investment dried up, it choked. In March 2024, Embracer sold Saber to an investment company controlled by Saber CEO Matt Karch, and it sold Gearbox in an all-stock deal to long-time Borderlands publisher Take Two Interactive. Other studios were shut down. Hundreds of developers were laid off. Gearbox didn’t say much about their Embracer experience, nothing too direct, at least. In the summer 2024, Pitchford told reporter and occasional Game File contributor Nicole Carpenter that Borderlands 4’s story was in some way thematically connected to Gearbox’s experience at Embracer: “There’s this cultural and emotional shift in me, personally, and at the studio. What does it mean to trade some autonomy for organization?” When Borderlands 4 came out, there was something stranger: the matter of “Embracer’s Bluff,” a location in the game featuring an AI-powered toilet and a large trash dump, according to a detailed Kotaku account of the place. Gearbox never commented on it; Take Two never got back to me about it when I asked them last year. By contrast, since Saber exited Embracer, Karch has been one of Embracer’s biggest defenders, casting their management as well-meaning and supportive despite the layoffs and studio closures that resulted from their excessive expansion. Like others, Saber’s Karch saw Embracer’s as a shot. With Rideshare Stimulator’s trailer, he’s returned fire. “It’s amazing to me how fast people forget those who went above and beyond for them,” Karch told Game File. A rep for Gearbox did not comment by press time. Game File is a reader-supported publication. Your backing makes my reporting—including any coverage of trailer-based beefs—possible. Good news! I’m currently running Game File’s first big sale of 2026. You can get a one-year subscription for 23% off. Click here to take advantage of the limited-time offer. And thank you for your support! Item 2: In brief… 🚫 Wal-Mart has laid off the staff of Restart, a games media outlet launched in 2024, Aftermath reports. 🟥 A GTA VI preview is on the way, at last, via an “extended look” that will premiere, unusually, on Netflix at 3pm ET on August 27, then officially go live elsewhere six hours later. Last week, Game File noted that Take Two label Rockstar Games is overdue for showing off GTA VI, based on the timing of the initial hands-off previews of GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2. During a call with investors, Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said pre-orders for GTA VI were “unprecedented and astonishing,” but added the company can’t predict how many of those pre-orders represent bonus sales vs. sales that otherwise would have been made at launch. During the same call, Zelnick was noticeably bullish on the future of playing games over streaming cloud connections (predicting wider adoption in three or so years). He sounded unbothered by Sony’s plans to stop making discs for new games (he said the business is 90% digital already and predicted that there could still be limited edition physical editions of games “in the same way there’s still vinyl in the recorded music business.”) 👀 Take Two wrote off $43 million in their spring quarter after deciding “not to proceed with further development of an unannounced title in its pipeline from a third-party developer.” 🤔 Some rare age-demographics from a big publisher: Capcom recently told investors that “users in their 20s account for approximately half of the users of both Pragamata and Resident Evil Requiem.” Item 3: The week ahead Tuesday, August 11 Game releases: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered (Switch 2; already out for PC, PS5, Xbox) continues the Bethesda strategy of putting Elder Scrolls games on everything; Royalty Free-For-All is a Smash Bros.-style fighting game featuring public domain characters such as Mother Goose brawling with Oliver Twist in a stage based on the original Little Shop of Horrors movie. Wednesday, August 12 Game release: Pro Jank Footy (PC, console) is an arcade-style Australian Rules Football game with increasingly ridiculous rules, the more you play (I enjoyed the Steam demo) Thursday, August 13 Game release: Super Mario Sunshine (Switch 2, originally released in 2002 on the GameCube) is released for Switch 2’s Nintendo Switch Online service. This game is the black sheep of 3D Mario games. It’s the successor to the breakthrough Super Mario 64 and the rare Mario game built around a single (vacation resort) theme. Mario’s got a water-spraying backpack, a Yoshi pal and a lot of blue coins to collect.
Self-flying air taxis and drones: Boeing sells key aviation technology businesses to Archer
Boeing is selling Wisk, SkyGrid and Insitu to Archer in a major deal combining autonomous aircraft, drones, airspace technology and AI.
Wall Street Bets: DraftKings, Penn Entertainment, Inspired Entertainment, New York online sports betting
J.P. Morgan’s Dan Politzer examined the recent DraftKings’ earnings call on August 7: “DraftKings’ report itself was better than feared, as 2Q Adjusted EBITDA o
HRS: Epic Discount for tech and entertainment
Hampton Roads Virginia and Northeastern North Carolina News, Weather, Traffic and Sports.
HRS: "ICE - A Story of Love, Crime and Politics"
Hampton Roads Virginia and Northeastern North Carolina News, Weather, Traffic and Sports.
VOTE: Do you think biological males should be allowed to play women’s sports?
KBOI-TV CBS 2 covers news, sports, traffic, and weather in the Treasure Valley and Boise, Idaho and nearby communities, including Meridian, Nampa, Garden City, Caldwell, Kuna, Middleton, Eagle, Mountain Home, Star, Melba, Payette, Weiser, Horseshoe Bend, Idaho City, Marsing, Homedale, Parma, New Plymouth, Murphy, Fruitland, Emmett, Wilder, Notus, McCall, Cascade, Donnelly, Council, and Vale, Oregon, and Nyssa, Oregon, Ontario, Oregon.
Rangers linked to former 2nd overall pick in NHL Draft
The Rangers need to make this move happen.
Boeing to Sell 3 Autonomous Flight Subsidiaries
In exchange for the sale to Archer Aviation, which is developing a piloted electric aircraft, Boeing will receive a 16.5 percent stake in Archer.
3 Undrafted Free Agents with Best Chance to Make 49ers Roster
The San Francisco 49ers have one of the most talented rosters in the league. The roster is loaded with proven veterans like Christian McCaffrey, Mike Evans, and Nick Bosa, among many others. The 49ers signed many fewer undrafted free agents than other teams did, and the ones that they did sign have a tough path.
Dave Canales Provides Injury Update on Haynes King
The Carolina Panthers saw an interesting development in the Hall of Fame Game last Thursday. Undrafted free agent quarterback Haynes King took the team by storm. Not many gave King a chance to make the team, considering Kenny Pickett is in place as the backup, and the Panthers haven't liked to keep more than two quarterbacks in recent times.
Don Nelson was reason Steph Curry ended up on Warriors
Stephen Curry, if you remember, was no sure thing. Six teams passed on him in the draft. There were questions about his size. About his playmaking ability. About his ankles....
Former Bengals draft pick suspended by NFL
A former high-profile Bengals draft pick will start next season suspended.
Mourinho says he agreed to replace Ferguson at Man Utd
David Moyes succeeded Sir Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford in 2013 but things could have been so different, Jose Mourinho reveals in a new documentary.
PHOTOS: Metro Health offers back-to-school vaccines for Immunization Awareness Month
WOAI NBC News Channel 4 San Antonio provides local news, weather forecasts, traffic updates, investigations, and items of interest in the community, sports and entertainment programming for San Antonio and nearby towns and communities in South Central Texas, including Windcrest, Uvalde, Universal City, Somerset, Seguin, Schertz, San Marcos, Sabinal, Poth, Poteet, Pleasanton, Pearsall, New Braunfels, Live Oak, Kerrville, Hondo, Helotes, Goliad, Fredericksburg, Floresville, Eagle Pass, Devine, Del Rio, Cuero, Crystal City, Converse, Cibolo, Castroville, Carrizo Springs, Boerne, Bandera.
Businesses evacuated during gas leak in Virginia Beach
Hampton Roads Virginia and Northeastern North Carolina News, Weather, Traffic and Sports.
Undrafted Rookie Could have Inside Track to Making Patriots' Roster
Khalil Jacobs has Mike Vrabel fired up with his performance early in training camp.
Grants Boost New Waynesboro Businesses
Heading into Waynesboro on Route 250 past the Rockfish Gap entrance of Shenandoah National Park and the Blue Ridge Tunnel’s western portal, signs of an entrepreneurial wave are easy to spot. The Virginia Metalcrafters Marketplace, a cavernous industrial space where metalworkers forged iron and brass products for more than a century before sitting vacant for
Who's Next? TCU's Best Bet to Restart Its NBA Pipeline
After a rare draft drought, Xavier Edmonds and Gavin Sykes headline a new wave of Horned Frogs aiming to impress scouts and restore TCU’s professional pipeline.
Meet the MV250, Beta Technologies' autonomous military aircraft
Beta Technologies unveiled the MV250, an autonomous, hybrid-electric aircraft that can carry cargo for militaries, at the Farnborough Airshow.
Minecraft's Latest Update Is Now Live, Here Are The Full Patch Notes
Gameplay improvements, Switch fixes and more
Spanish teen Jodar ousts eighth seed Lehecka at Montreal
Spanish teen Rafael Jodar defeated Czech eighth seed Jiri Lehecka 6-3, 6-3 on Saturday to reach the quarter-finals of the ATP Montreal Masters.Jodar will play for a semi-final berth against French 18th seed Arthur Fils, who defeated Britain's Cameron Norrie 6-2, 7-6 (10/8).
Can Sam Roush Become the Chicago Bears' TE2 This Season?
One of the biggest strengths of the Chicago Bears is tight end right now. You have Colston Loveland at the top, who’s the clear TE1. With Loveland being drafted 10th overall in the 2025 NFL Draft and having 713 yards in his rookie season, there’s not much debate for the starting spot.
Ravens waive rookie CB Matthew McDoom to add Jamon Johnson
The Baltimore Ravens waived undrafted rookie cornerback Matthew McDoom, creating a spot on the training camp roster for inside linebacker Jamon Johnson. McDoom spent his first three collegiate seasons at Coastal Carolina before transferring to Cincinnati for his senior year, finishing his career wit
5 dead, 4 hospitalized in Louisiana from flesh-eating bacteria outbreak: health officials
WCHS ABC 8 provides local news, weather forecasts, traffic updates, notices of events and items of interest in the community, sports and entertainment programming for Charleston and nearby towns and communities in the Tri-State area, including Huntington, Dunbar, Marmet, Montgomery, Nitro, South Charleston, St. Albans, Cedar Grove, Chesapeake, Clendenin, East Bank, Glasgow, Pratt, Cross Lanes, Elkview, Pinch, Sissonville, Big Chimney, Cabin Creek, Chelyan, Davis Creek, Institute, Jefferson, Loudendale, Mink Shoals, Pocatalico, Quick, Quincy, Rand, Buffalo, Eleanor, Hurricane, Nitro, Poca, Winfield, Culloden, Fraziers Bottom, Hometown, Red House, Scott Depot, Teays Valley, Danville, Madison, Hamlin, Logan, Chapmanville, Man, Delbarton, Kermit, Gilbert, Matewan, Williamson, Summersville, Richwood, Flatwoods, Gassaway, Sutton, Spencer, Ravenswood, Ripley, Mason, Point Pleasant, Ashland, Pikeville, Ironton, Portsmouth, Gallipolis, and Athens.
Division Street Bridge painting project with varying impacts on west Mount Vernon businesses
About two months after the painting of the Division Street Bridge in Mount Vernon began and traffic was limited to westbound only, the project’s impacts on businesses have varied.
Former Seahawks Tight End Claimed off Waivers by the Steelers
The Seattle Seahawks added undrafted fullback Brock Lampe on August 6, making them perhaps the only NFL franchise to have not one but three fullbacks on their 90-man training camp roster. In doing so, the Seahawks simultaneously waived undrafted tight end Lance Mason from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. However, things are not to dispair for […] The post Former Seahawks Tight End Claimed off Waivers by the Steelers appeared first on HEAVY.
Worrying Warning Given To Maple Leafs Despite Offseason Moves
Among the busiest teams in the NHL so far this offseason have been the Toronto Maple Leafs, who not only made monumental changes to their roster, but to their front office and coaching staff.The Leafs, who missed the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the first time in a decade, lucked out by winning the NHL Draft […] The post Worrying Warning Given To Maple Leafs Despite Offseason Moves appeared first on HEAVY.
Every SMU player drafted by the Golden State Warriors
Let's take a look at every player who has been drafted by the Warriors out of SMU.
National Grid's BioBus brings science lab to Albany's Lincoln Park
WRGB CBS 6 provides local news, weather forecasts, traffic updates, notices of events and items of interest in the community, sports and entertainment programming for Albany, New York and nearby towns and communities in the Capital City area, including Cohoes, Watervliet, Colonie, Bethlehem, Guilderland, New Scotland, Coeymans, Green Island, Knox, Berne, Westerlo, Rensselaerville, Colonie, Menands, Green Island, Ravena, Altamont, Voorheesville.
Pacific Grove business creates clothing inspired by Navy secretary's 'witchcraft' comments
A Pacific Grove business has created a clothing collection inspired by acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao's viral comments about "a lot of witchcraft" in the area.
3 Biggest Rookie Surprises So Far at 49ers Training Camp
The San Francisco 49ers have a veteran-laden, talented roster. As a result, it's a bit harder for rookies to make their mark. For example, the 49ers signed far fewer undrafted free agents than most teams did.
NASA successfully gives Voyager 2 another year of life
Engineers employed a 'Big Bang' maneuver to keep the power flowing on the 49-year-old spacecraft.
Black Wealth Crawl promotion designed to support independent businesses
Customers are encouraged to shop at participating Black-owned businesses from Aug. 28 to Sept. 7, when purchases qualify shoppers for the chance to win $150 gift cards and other raffle prizes.
NASA’s IMAP Mission Releases New Data From 7 Science Instruments
Science data from NASA’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) mission is now available. After its successful launch on Sept. 24, 2025, IMAP’s
Shatema Threadcraft Receives the 2026 Victoria Schuck Award for "The Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian" -
The Victoria Schuck Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best book published on women and politics. Citation from the Award Committee: The committee found Shatema Threadcraft’s The Labors of Resurrection: [...]
Blackstone's AGS Health files updated draft papers for $500 million India IPO
Blackstone-owned AGS Health on Friday filed updated draft papers for a 48-billion-rupee ($504 million) initial public offering in India, nearly two months after securing the markets regulator's approval for a listing.
Visit Jersey Shore Farmers Markets for Local Produce, Entertainment
A network of Jersey Shore farmers markets continues to unfold throughout the summer. Multiple towns host weekly events showcasing fresh produce, baked goods, crafts, and family-friendly entertainment. The Philadelphia Inquirer offers…
Eagles GM Howie Roseman Compares Struggling Rookie to All-Pro
Howie Roseman’s latest draft class isn’t looking great to start the 2026 NFL training camp sessions for the Philadelphia Eagles. After spending high-end picks on Makai Lemon and Eli Stowers, both rookies have had their fair share of struggles throughout the first week of camp. The former started off with a quiet run before going […] The post Eagles GM Howie Roseman Compares Struggling Rookie to All-Pro appeared first on HEAVY.
Cowboys rookie defensive back Caleb Downs is living up to expectations
Expectations are high for Dallas Cowboys rookie defensive back Caleb Downs, the No. 11 overall draft pick who is being counted on to help overhaul their defense.
Minecraft Switch 2 Edition Coming This Autumn, Featuring Vibrant Visuals
But how much will it cost for owners of the original Switch edition?
Caltrans I-580 Truck Ban Study Finds Modest Health Gains, Major Traffic Shifts
Trucks haven’t been allowed to drive on Interstate 580 since the 1950s. Caltrans is now exploring the impact of lifting the ban.
Austin Booker Gives Praise to Bears Rookie Defensive Tackle
It's tough to argue that there's a more exciting late-round rookie on the Chicago Bears roster than Jordan van den Berg. Despite being drafted in the 6th round, van den Berg had some great moments at Georgia Tech, but his best trait is the elite athleticism he provides. When looking at the Relative Athletic Score of van den Berg, he has a perfect score of 10.
Ranking every position group on the Ravens’ 2026 roster
The Baltimore Ravens filled out their roster this offseason with a number of notable additions in the draft and free agency. Now, with the 2026 season fast approaching next month, position groups will be finalized across training camp and preseason action over the next few weeks. Which of the team’s position groups are the strongest? […]
Localized immunomodulation with cytokine-producing cells to mitigate foreign body responses in rodents and a nonhuman primate
Encapsulated IL-10–producing cells locally suppress fibrosis and extend graft function in rodent models and a nonhuman primate.
White House drafting order on vaccines, autism despite pollsters’ warnings
The effort underscores President Donald Trump’s determination to elevate vaccine policy even as a federal judge has halted Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s sweeping vaccine overhaul.
Struggling Eagles Draft Pick Addresses ‘Mental’ Challenges
Struggling Philadelphia Eagles rookie tight end Eli Stowers addressed the "mental" challenges holding him back in training camp. The post Struggling Eagles Draft Pick Addresses ‘Mental’ Challenges appeared first on HEAVY.
Draft: Arts & Entertainment Agenda, Aug. 6 to 13
Trumpeter Randy Brecker performs at the Paul JAS Center, Aug. 7 Virtuoso trumpeter and composer Randy Brecker will perform two jazz shows Aug. 7 at the Paul JAS Center, 422 E. Cooper Ave. The early...
OpenAI and four rivals just agreed on one standard for AI agents
OpenAI, Amazon, Microsoft, Cursor and Vercel launched Agent Plugins, an open standard letting an agent extension run across ChatGPT, Copilot and more.
Jamey Eisenberg builds a Championship-caliber roster in the FLEX league draft that stands the test of time
Jamey Eisenberg breaks down his FLEX draft with full results and recap.
Rankings Risers & Fallers: Fantasy Football breakout Jonathon Brooks racing up rank lists and draft boards
Jonathon Brooks leads the latest Fantasy football training camp risers
Traffic information for Buffalo Bills Return of the Blue and Red practice
The Erie County Sheriff's Office wants you to be ready for traffic in Orchard Park this weekend.
Iran says it's in final stages of draft agreement with Oman on Strait of Hormuz
The agreement is likely to be contingent on the U.S. lifting its blockade on Iran’s ports
US Stand Up for Science movement expands to Europe
A grassroots movement by scientists in the US pushing back against threats to academic freedom is setting up a Swiss outpost to take the movement global. Stand Up for Science started in February 2025 to protest against politically-motivated grant cancellations by the Trump administration. Since then, it has organised numerous rallies by scientists and turned into a broader campaigning organisation, supporting “pro-science” political candidates and attempting to impeach Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the health and human services secretary the group accuses of advancing “quack” science. Now, Stand Up for Science is establishing a Swiss office to take some of its campaigning beyond the US, and its leader is urging European academics to organise similar pro-science groups in case they face similar threats in Europe. There will likely be “spillover” to Europe from what the Trump administration is attempting in the US, said Colette Delawalla, chief executive of Stand Up for Science, who last month returned from a tour of Europe. “Are we going to see a Trump-style scientific [. . .] take over in the same way?” she asked.Delawalla, who is doing a PhD in clinical psychology, said she was driven to help found the organisation after the Trump administration started cancelling health research grants in politically taboo topics, such as transgender people, diversity and HIV, in early 2025. Since then, the administration has introduced several other measures that infringe academic and institutional autonomy.It threatened to cut Harvard University’s federal funding unless the university accepted a “critical mass” of new faculty and students to create “viewpoint diversity.” And this year, it proposed explosive new rules that would allow political appointees at research funders to screen grants to make sure they “advance the president's policy priorities.”US scientists have been at times stunned by the volume of announcements, and the country’s researchers were relatively unprepared. “We sit in front of the fire hose every day,” said Delawalla. For this reason, European scientists need to prepare now for similar assaults. “If you've got a little bit of extra time to start thinking through, and making those preparations and building community and solidarity,” then European researchers will “start five steps ahead of where we were.” She plans to return to Paris in September to share experiences with concerned French academics. Is Le Pen the same?During her European tour, Delawalla said that French academics were beginning to worry about a National Rally (RN) victory in presidential elections next year. She said there were “chilling similarities” between Trump and Marine Le Pen, the RN’s likely candidate. However, so far, the RN hasn’t proposed anything nearly as radical as the Trump administration has carried out. Its current manifesto is all but silent on university and research policy. Le Pen’s 2022 manifesto bemoaned a lack of French R&D spending, including in fundamental research, and promised to modernise labs and strip away grant bureaucracy. The party’s 2024 European election manifesto explicitly supported the Erasmus+ student exchange programme, scientific exchange and joint European technology projects. However, a Le Pen victory next year could see France drastically cut its contribution to the EU, which would hit the budget for science and innovation. Meanwhile, more restrictive immigration policies could hit university recruitment of faculty and students. Climate science denial?As heatwaves and wildfires have ravaged France, the RN has sought to distance itself from previous comments casting doubt on climate science.In the UK, the radical-right party Reform UK, now second in the polls, denied climate research in a draft of its 2024 election manifesto, but its leader, Nigel Farage, then appeared to quietly U-turn and said he was “not arguing the science.” By contrast, Trump has repeatedly and explicitly denied climate change science, in 2025 calling it “the greatest con job.” Like the RN, Reform UK has been light on research and university policy. However, it did say in its 2024 manifesto that universities should suffer “heavy financial penalties” for allowing “political bias or cancel culture” on campus, building on laws brought in by a previous Conservative government. Ahead of September state elections in Saxony-Anhalt in Germany, the poll-leading Alternative for Germany has proposed abolishing gender studies and postcolonial studies, and promised money for “critical” climate research and studies of Islam. Starts with rhetoricEven if European radical right parties aren’t currently planning the draconian policy measures of the Trump administration, Delawalla said that academics should not be complacent, and fight even small funding restrictions or anti-science talk from the start. “It starts off with sowing distrust about institutions,” she said. “It starts off with these small things, and then all of a sudden it's there.” There are other, more established science and university advocacy groups in the US aside from Stand Up for Science. But the group stands out because of Delawalla’s refusal to attempt to appear politically bipartisan or conciliatory. “I firmly believe that the US is experiencing fascism,” she said. “We’re not trying to win over the super Maga people,” she said, “and we never have been.” The lesson of the US is that even if universities or other institutions capitulate to government demands, this doesn’t save them from cuts and restrictions. “It doesn’t matter what people do,” she said. Global “pseudoscience”Another aim of Stand Up for Science’s push into Europe is to better coordinate a campaign to protect people in poorer countries from what the group describes as “pseudoscientific exploitation,” trials outside the US used to build a case against things like vaccines. Earlier this year, the group sent an investigator to Guinea-Bissau to investigate a controversial, Danish-run Hepatitis B vaccine project funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The study would have withheld a proven vaccine from newborns, Stand Up for Science argued in a briefing it presented to Congress, risking their health. Significantly, the research group based in Guinea-Bissau, known as Bandim, focuses on the “non-specific effects” of vaccines: impacts on health beyond preventing the target disease. Related articlesEuropean researchers sound the alarm that Trump rule changes will hit cooperationData corner: which fields of health science is the US curbing? The US ‘golden age’ science strategy: what Europeans need to know The suspicion is that the study was funded as part of an attempt to shop around for results that could help build a case against vaccines in the US, said Delawalla. “This is just code for vaccines cause autism,” she said.Bandim has put out a rebuttal of Stand Up for Science’s criticisms, arguing its work has uncovered a number of vaccine side effects, both positive and negative, which need to be taken into account in public health. However, Congressional Democrats took up the Stand Up for Science cause, and in February, Guinea-Bissau said it had permanently halted the study. WatchdogBut for Delawalla, this is not the end of the fight. Kennedy has made a number of health claims that scientists think lack evidence, such as the idea that seed oils cause inflammation, for example. Delawalla worries that more studies could be launched in poorer countries to fish around for evidence to support this agenda. Stand Up for Science is talking to African science organisations to create a kind of “watchdog” to scrutinise any further trials. “Outsourcing the investigation to some of the most vulnerable children in the world who are desperate [. . .] is fundamentally wrong,” she said.
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Chartbook 464 The"China squeeze" - the politics of development counterfactuals.
There are three types of China shock discourse. Each has a distinct temporal register. China shock 1.0 was a phrase coined by US academics in the 2010s to retrospectively summarize the impact on particular US labour markets, which they identified through painstaking empirical investigation. China shock 2.0 on everyone’s lips in Europe in the mid 2020s is an alarm raised by trans-Atlantic policy thinkers warning of a coming disaster which they project onto Europe’s ailing car industry. The third type of China shock discourse - commonly known as the “China squeeze” launched most recently by Indian economists Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian in the pages of Foreign Affairs - mobilizes a different, more speculative temporal register: the counterfactual realm of alternate history. The China squeeze argument asks not what has happened, or what is going to happen, but what might have been. Specifically, what options for economic development might have been open to Global South economies like India or the economies of sub-Saharan Africa, had it not been for China’s spectacular industrialization since the late 1990s and the persistent competitiveness of China’s manufacture in low-skilled segments. Chatterjee and Subramanian’s argument is that whilst China has built a powerful position in electrical machinery and other high-skill manufacturing, which is now delivering China Shock 2.0, it also continues to run a trade surplus in low-skill, labour-intensive manufacturing. This surplus is large and has remained largely unchanged in fifteen years. Indeed, in the 2010s, in trade with low-income countries, China’s surplus rapidly increased. On their reading, this squeezes low-income producers in low-skill sectors in which they “should” be able to compete. Source: “China’s Mercantilist Squeeze on Developing Countries” Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian. Peterson Institute for International Economics 26-7 May 2026 Chatterjee and Subramanian’s wording is telling: (emphasis mine) The canonical trajectory of economic development in the post-World War II period is for countries to transition from agriculture to manufacturing, first in low-skilled manufacturing and then later on to high-skill manufacturing (Herrendorf, Rogerson, and Valentinyi 2013). At the global level, this implies that high-income countries (HICs) that once specialized in low-skilled activities cede manufacturing export space to poorer countries that come along to occupy that space. In 1965, advanced economies accounted for about 60 percent of global value-added exports in four key low-skilled manufacturing sectors, i.e., apparel, leather, textiles, and footwear. Over time this share declined and began to be occupied first by the East Asian tigers and, beginning in the late 1990s, by China. Today China accounts for about 50 percent of the global market. The question is whether China, with its rising prosperity, is continuing to behave like its richer counterparts and ceding export space to poorer followers or to behave unlike them and continuing to occupy space. In terms of the conceptual maneuvers it performs, of the three China shock discourses, the “China squeeze” argument is by far the most ambitious. After all, it bases its critique of China on a counterfactual imagining of the world. Like any counterfactual argument, to construct this alternative reality it must rely on a heuristic model. To make their argument Chatterjee and Subramanian mobilize two key claims. The first reference point is the actual history of rich-country industrialization, what they refer to as the “canonical path”. The idea is that countries transition from agriculture to light industry and low-skilled manufacturing and from there up the value chain. To make this useful as a standard of comparison and a means to construct a normative standard, they adjust sectoral export shares for two factors: 1. the underlying level of economic development of the exporting country, as measured by national income and 2. the degree to which the sector in question is internationalized. The idea being that for a high income country to have a high export share in low-skill sectors is anomalous and even more so if that particular product is highly internationalized and thus suitable for being “conceded” to lower-income competitors. Where should this process end? Here Chatterjee and Subramanian introduce their second benchmark. Their normative idea of a global development path is one in which, in due course, low-skill manufacturing exports are distributed in proportion to a country’s share in the global labour force. They imagine, in other words, a world of proportional, polycentric global development without much national specialization in low-skill manufacturing. A useful benchmark is that, in labor-intensive manufacturing sectors, a country’s share of world exports should be broadly commensurate with its share of the world’s low-skilled labor endowment. … In the Heckscher-Ohlin model, this would be true if value added per worker and export propensities, i.e., fraction of output that is exported, are the same across countries. It is this pleasant liberal vista of orderly global development, progressing towards a general distribution of low-skilled manufacturing against which they judge reality and conclude that the low-income countries are suffering a “China squeeze”. China is not exiting low-skill sectors fast enough Allowing for its gdp level and the degree of globalization, China’s share of low-skill manufacturing exports is far higher than it “should” be. Relative to population, its low-skill share of exports is far too high. That in turn yields the conclusion that huge numbers of jobs - the authors suggest tens of millions - are being hoarded by China. For the four sectors captured in figure 4, this excess in value-added exports is $110 billion in 2022. For all low-skilled sectors overall captured in appendix figure D.1, excess value-added exports amount to $365 billion. The crowding out of LMIC exports by China is therefore substantial. Both these claims have in common that they are strong structuralisms. The first is that development paths ought to resemble each other. The second is that broadly speaking as far as low-skilled manufacturing is concerned, all countries are alike. If the world currently diverges from the distribution of trade implied by these assumptions, if China is not following the advanced economy path and has huge exports, this must be the result of “policy”, which the authors then put in question as illegitimate or unfair. Thus the naturalistic construction of a canonical path leading to a “level” distribution of low-skilled manufacturing reveals itself to be a polemical tool. From the point of view of China shock polemics, this discourse is no doubt welcome. But as an account of economic history, it must surely be regarded as nothing short of bamboozling. Development paths do not follow a regular, natural sequence. As David Fishman put it aptly, “development is not a queue”. They are always and everywhere, through and through political. Development is not so much a process, as a project. Each such project is more or less well adjusted to its context. As Gerschenkron taught uneven and combined development implies differentiation rather than simple imitation on a single parth. It may be true that Europe and the US exited relatively early from low-skill work. But clearly technology has changed. As C&S themselves point out, China no longer enjoys a low wage environment. Do they really believe that such huge differences can be accounted for either by industrial policy, which as they admit does not operate powerfully in low-skill sectors, or by exchange rate manipulation? What is overwhelmingly dominant in explaining the persistence of “low-skill” manufacturing in China are surely the network effects of complex supply chains. Indeed the label of “low-skill” may miss the point. The degree of globalization which Chatterjee and Subramanian decide to conjure away in their model of the development path - to allow for the fact that Europe and American textiles exporters did not enjoy just-in-time logistics in the 1950s - obscures the point that the networks through which Chinese factories supply the world are themselves key parts of the low-skill industrialization project. China isn’t knocking out 1970s style “cheap”. It has redefined the entire product cycle. C&S’s casual reference to “T-shirts” is telling. In today’s “fast fashion”, there is weight on both terms. Fashion and fast. China’s success in delivering on both at unprecedentedly high speed and at unprecedentedly low cost, isn’t a low-skill operation at all. If we see development trajectories not as the serial repetition of the same, but as distinctive, crafted projects that cumulate in complex agglomerations of skill, technology and labor, then this explains why the assumption that low-skilled manufacturing should follow the distribution of population flies in the face of all experience. As countless cases attest, low-wage, low-income developed economies are not by themselves the makings of a competitive production base. As Leon Liao puts it quite fairly: “International trade has never been allocated according to population. A country’s population gives it no natural claim to an equivalent share of global exports." And the remarkable fact is that Subramanian alone and with co-authors has long been making this point, not to pillory China, as is the case of the tendentious _Foreign Affair_s and Peterson pieces, but to highlight the great counterpart to China’s industrial success, namely India’s relative failure. The much-quoted Foreign Affairs piece showed low-skill export shares only for China, not for India. If you put both countries in the picture as Chaterjee and Subramanian have done on other occasions, the picture looks like this. China is far above the line, but India, almost as large in terms of population, is no less anomalous, just in the opposite direction. As far as global populations are concerned, and the imagining of tens of millions of “squeezed” jobs, it is this Sino-Indian pair that account for a huge share of the action. What this graph reveals is not China’s cheating, but India’s “greatest development failure”, at least this is the argument made Arvind Subramanian, this time in co-authorship with Devesh Kapur, in their major book, A Sixth of Humanity. Independent India’s Development Odyssey which appeared with Oxford University Press earlier this year. In this highly critical work on India’s development, China is repeatedly evoked, not to criticize but as a benchmark against which to illuminate what India’s political economy has not delivered i.e. large-scale formal employment for hundreds of millions of citizens. Kapur and Subramanian leave no doubt, if you want to understand why China, not India was the main driver of manufacturing globalization from the 1980s, don’t look to slots opening up in the division of labour thanks to the liberal mindedness of advanced economies, look to the contrasting political economy of the Maoist PRC and India’s post-independence political economy. As Kapur and Subramian note: The great divergence between China and India did not begin in 1978 with the Deng reforms—it was well underway by then. In one of the great ironies of modern history, the conditions created by Maoism turned out to be a great launching pad for industrial globalization. As the comparison of India and China in 1980 makes clear, to imagine manufacturing would be equally distributed when populations are so differently endowed in terms of educational and nutritional is fanciful. Here is the data from Kapur and Subramanian, data which I explored back at the very beginning of Chartbook. As Kapur and Subramanian insist, the striking fact is that even as India’s growth accelerated from the 1980s, structural change has not. Formal employment in India lags woefully behind. Why? As Kapur and Subramanian note, the path-dependent impact of India’s poor early start was devastating. The list of factors they mention is long and weighty: We argue for a new five-fold explanation applicable at different stages of Indian history: in the initial stages, the legacy of two key pre-1980s policies, the neglect of agriculture and the strangling of the domestic private sector, were critical. The failure of broad-based agricultural growth militated against rural industrialization, which would have been devoted to satisfying local needs that would have necessarily been labour intensive. Then, when the boom came after 1980, the thicket of regulation and broader labour protections that were legislated prematurely in a nascent democracy, underpinned by a deep ideological aversion to private capital in general and big capital specifically, became a barrier to attaining the size that would be necessary to compete globally. Similarly, the reforms after 1991, while wide-ranging, did not quite encompass non-tradeable inputs critical to manufacturing, namely, land, logistics infrastructure and power. A combination of low investment (logistics infrastructure), regulation (land) and the continued monopoly supply by state governments (power), combined with residual socialism, kept costs at 75–100 per cent above efficient supply. These factors were compounded on the supply side by the government, which dominated the formal labour market and established exorbitantly high wages at the lower end of the skill spectrum. This made their employment in the labour-intensive sector by the private sector less attractive. Finally, when the services sector and its exports boomed, wages soared even further via a Dutch Disease effect: one successful tradeable sector killed and cannibalized another less-skilled tradable sector, namely, manufacturing. Thus, scarcity-inducing policies of the planning era, precocious democracy and a Gandhian aversion to size; inefficient, monopolistic supply of critical non-tradable inputs; the behemoth of government; and super-successful skill-intensive services successively undermined India’s unskilled labour employment opportunities. The employment failure seems to have been over-determined. … Less quantifiable but no less important are some of the sociological factors that have undermined manufacturing and factory jobs. Take the impact of the success of the IT sector—located in urban areas with better working conditions, such as air-conditioned offices, good schools for children and attractive entertainment options. It became a more attractive place for engineering and management graduates to flock to. … Consider manufacturing and female employment. Indian society makes it difficult for women to work, reflected in India’s unusually low female labour force participation (elaborated in Chapter XIII). Indian society, in particular the routine harassment of women in public spaces, makes it even more difficult for them to travel long distances to take up work.37 Combined with onerous regulations on creating hostels and dormitories for women—which, in turn, prevents multiple shifts of operation—factories need to be located in areas with a large female labour pool. While firms can take apparel plants to female labour or bring them to the plants by building large-scale dormitories, this raises costs. If there was a case for subsidies to encourage labour-intensive manufacturing, housing subsidies to build dormitories for women workers would be a good place to start. All of this meant, that when opportunities did open up, in part thanks to adjustments in China, India was in no position to take advantage. Here is the account of the 2020s from Kapur and Subramanian. It stands in dizzying contrast to the one-sided, “China squeeze” argument delivered in the Peterson and Foreign Affairs pieces: In 2022, for example, India’s share of global exports in clothing (the canonical labour-intensive sector) was 3.1 per cent compared to 32 per cent for China. This is extremely disappointing because China started vacating export space in this sector after the Global Financial Crisis as its wages started rising; it then vacated further space in the aftermath of geopolitical developments that led investors to seek alternative investment locations. Between its peak and today, China lost about 7.5 percentage points of global export share (worth about $43 billion in 2022); over this period, India’s export share remained stagnant at 3 per cent, while that of Vietnam and Bangladesh rose by 3.5 to 4 percentage points. China’s loss did not translate into any gain for India in terms of low-skill exports and employment. Put differently, when the conditions for dynamism and prosperity were established after 1991, and even more tantalizingly when the global export opportunities opened up, it was as if India was a high-wage economy and only skilled labour could benefit from the dynamism. It had converted its physically abundant unskilled workforce into an economically expensive resource, penalizing its use. It is not my mission here to argue for or against Kapur and Subramanian’s interpretation of India’s development trajectory. The point in this context is simply that the “China squeeze” such as it is can only be understood, in relation to the heavy burden of domestic constraints that Kapur and Subramanian so unsparingly enumerate. I am concentrating here on India because it is the great counterpart to China and the unspoken reference point of the “China squeeze” discourse. But the point is more general. Can anyone with a straight face suggest that the main problems afflicting the development of South Africa or Nigeria, the great centers of mass underemployment in sub-saharan Africa, are cheap competition from China driven by Beijing’s industrial policy and an undervalued RMB? Likewise, is the main problem of the American working-class the threat of Chinese competition or the manifest crisis of social reproduction in the United States itself? The point here, as in the discourse around China shock 2.0 in Europe, is to insist that we should not normalize the world and pathologize China, without actually investigating what is going on in America’s industrial wastelands, the German car industry, or India’s lopsided labour market. One-sided pathologization should be understood for what it is, a polemical gesture. Concepts like China shock and China squeeze are, what Reinhart Koselleck, following Carl Schmitt, would have described as “asymmetrische Kampfbegriffe”, or “asymmetrical counter-concepts” or “asymmetrical combat concepts”. If the function of arguments like the “China squeeze” is to alert elites in the rest of the world of the need to rejuvenate and energize their development projects, so be it. But let us see the resulting discourses as the mobilizing interventions that they are. Interestingly, a significant slice of China’s public sphere - the so-called industrial party - have been obsessed for the last twenty years with precisely these questions of counterfactual economic history. Since the mid 2000s, a massive online discourse developed around an alternative history in which Chinese techno-patriots were asked to imagine how they would proceed if they had the possibility of traveling back in time to transport modern technology into the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) thus averting the “great divergence” of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a fantasy of course, but also a goad. The point was not directed at Westerners. The alternate history is dramatically nationalist, but few n the West had even heard of it until recently. The adherents of the industrial party are not liberal moralists. They don’t project natural ladders of international development and ask why others don’t cede space. They take the Realpolitik of global economic development for granted. Their pointe was directed against fellow Chinese. The rallying cry of the alternative narrative was this: Now that we are beginning to gain steam and push forward on our national development path, now that we are breaking out of the inferior position assigned to us even in the early years following WTO accession, do not lose yourself in humanistic imaginings about better futures. In the spirit of Deng, they called on China to embrace the hard truth of development. Perhaps one might of the Industrial Party as a cultural trend born out of desire for symbolic revenge against those who had inflicted the century of humiliation. In terms of the various temporalities of the “China shock” - retrospective, prospective and counterfactual - one might think of the Industrial Policy discourse as truly speculative, conjuring up the China shock that never was. Or perhaps one might better think of it as imagining a world in which a powerful China was no shock at all, but simply a defining fact of modern history. I love putting out Chartbook. I am particularly pleased that it goes out for free to thousands of subscribers around the world. But, writing this newsletter takes a lot of work. If you are enjoying it and would like to support the project, sign up for one of the subscription options here. It is the equivalent of a fancy cup of coffee per month! Subscribe
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