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AI searched 100 million possibilities and found a cheaper way to 3D-print a NASA rocket alloy
Researchers used AI to search through more than 100 million possible settings for 3D-printing a high-performance NASA alloy. After only 40 experiments, the system identified six successful configurations, including one that worked at a record-low 500 watts. That could allow GRCop-42, currently difficult and expensive to print, to be made with much more widely available equipment.
Some Scientists Have ‘Magic Hands’ in the Lab. This A.I. Is Learning Why.
Even the most adept researchers may not know exactly what they do to get successful results. An A.I. model is trying to figure it out by watching every move.
Developer highlights philosophy, successful projects in North Texas
Monte Anderson, a nationally recognized developer, speaker and educator, encouraged area developers to be creative with underused neighborhood developments instead of tearing them down as available land becomes scarce. Anderson...
MTSU education in PR helps student build successful business before graduation
For Beckham Scott, the classroom and the business have become closely connected.
Luxury home builder turns social media following into multimillion-dollar business
Construction influencer Tyler Farrell joins 'Fox & Friends First' to share how he built a successful second career and social media following by showcasing his custom home building projects and craft.
TryHard Joins Forces with EHang and SKYTEK to Advance Next-Generation Drone Entertainment in Japan
Collaboration brings together TryHard’s large-scale entertainment capabilities, EHang’s advanced drone technology and SKYTEK’s local expertise to present a successful record-setting 4,000-drone light show, which unlock new aerial entertainment opportunities across JapanOSAKA, Japan, Aug. 25, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- TryHard Holdings Limited (“TryHard” or the “Company”) (Nasdaq: THH), a lifestyle entertainment platform in Japan, today announced a strategic collaboration bringing together SBI MUSI
‘Worst Fan Base in Sports’ — Ex-NFL DT Chews Out Deion Sanders ‘Cult’ for ‘Nasty Agendas’ As Browns Bench Shedeur Sanders
Breiden Fehoko believes Shedeur Sanders can still develop into a successful NFL quarterback. His problem is with the loudest section of the fan base surrounding him.
CCTA programs need a strategic C-suite case to drive growth and efficiency
Advocates say the shift to CCTA can translate into a broader financial impacts, with some cath labs potentially seeing margin increases of as much as 40%.
Climate Model Benchmarking: Building Trust and Advancing Science
A critical look at how well climate models work, how to successfully use them, and the anticipated challenges for their next-generation development.
A spatially programmable microfluidic chip for multi-stage particle and cell separation
A programmable microfluidic device developed at Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan, combines deterministic lateral displacement, a microfluidic technique that is used to separate particles according to their size, with temperature-responsive polymer micropillars to dynamically change the separation conditions along a single channel. Using this device, the researchers successfully separated multiple particle populations. Additionally, they efficiently isolated viable cancer cells, white blood cells, and red blood cells from diluted whole blood.
Eastlake science students make district history
Three Eastlake High School students made Sweetwater Union High School District history this year when they became the first students from the district to qualify for the International Science and Engineering Fair, an international competition that brings together some of the top high school researchers from around the world. Ronald Wyatt, Giles Del Priore and Ihan Sung advanced to the competition after successful runs at regional and state science fairs. Sung went a step further, placing fourth in the chemistry category at ISEF. The students were recognized on Aug. 10 during a Sweetwater Union High School District board meeting at the district office in Chula Vista.For Wyatt and Del Priore, recent Eastlake graduates, the journey began with a shared concern about dementia and the challenges faced by families caring for loved ones with memory impairment. Their engineering project, “Design and Evaluation of a Behaviorally Grounded Caregiver-Governed AI Companion for Individuals with Memory Impairment,” earned the Sweepstakes Award at the Sweetwater District STEM Fair and first place in its division at the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair. The project explored whether Artificial Intelligence could provide companionship and support while helping reduce stress for people with dementia and their caregivers. “Our inspiration came from personal experience. Both of us have seen family members and loved ones affected by dementia, and we’ve witnessed how overwhelming the caregiving process can be,” Wyatt said. Del Priore said the students also wanted to address the high cost of third-party health care services while creating something that could potentially help their own families as well as people elsewhere. The students developed an AI system designed with safeguards intended to prevent misinformation reinforcement, emotional escalation and unsafe responses. In 240 controlled trials involving memory, identity, agitation and neutral scenarios, they said the system consistently prevented harmful incorrect reinforcement while using context-aware silence, de-escalation and caregiver verification. The project required the students to combine Artificial Intelligence, psychology, neuroscience and human-computer interaction. For Del Priore, one of the biggest technical challenges was getting the AI companion to communicate verbally with a patient. Hardware limitations required the students to collaborate with multiple Python libraries for speech-to-text and text-to-speech functions while keeping the cost of the companion low. “For us, the biggest challenge was translating complex behavioral and cognitive care principles into a functioning AI system,” Wyatt said.Qualifying for ISEF was a milestone that student expected. The international competition proved to be another milestone. “Competing at ISEF was an incredible experience and unlike anything we’ve ever done before,” Del Priore said. “Being surrounded by some of the most talented young researchers from around the world was both inspiring and motivating.” He said the experience stood out because of the emphasis on collaboration, innovation and scientific discovery. “The most memorable part was seeing how people from completely different backgrounds and disciplines approached solving real-world problems with creativity and passion,” he said. The students also credited teachers and mentors who supported their work. Del Priore said his sophomore-year AP Physics teacher, Dr. Price, was particularly influential. “Through all of my personal and academic struggles, Dr. Price always believed in me,” Del Priore said. “All of his faith in me really molded me into the person I am today and helped create my love for science even through tough times.” Wyatt is continuing his education at UC Santa Cruz, where he plans to study biomolecular engineering and bioinformatics, with an interest in research involving Artificial Intelligence, biology and health care. Del Priore plans to double major in chemistry and accounting. Sung, a rising Eastlake senior, qualified for ISEF after winning first place in the Engineering: Energy, Materials & Transport category at the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair and first place in chemistry at the California Science and Engineering Fair. His project, “Renewable Ammonia Electrochemical Synthesis by Glow Discharge with an Iron-Based Catalyst,” involved a device he designed and engineered to produce renewable ammonia, with potential applications in fertilizer production and energy storage. Sung became interested in the project after considering the relationship between food insecurity and fertilizer costs. His system uses plasma to break apart nitrogen molecules so they can interact with hydrogen and form ammonia. At ISEF, Sung competed against more than 1,700 students from 65 countries and earned fourth place in chemistry. “I am proud to become one of te first students in the district to qualify for ISEF because this milestone can inspire others in the district to attain similar goals,” Sung said.
WHO RUNS MARYLAND POLITICS NOW?
ByThe Maryland Wire The Machine Didn’t Die — It Broke Apart Mike Miller is gone. Steny Hoyer is retiring. The two men who helped define Maryland political power for generations are disappearing from the map. Nobody has inherited all of what they controlled. Instead, Maryland power has fractured among Wes Moore, legislative leaders, county organizations, federal figures and a new generation fighting to connect the pieces. By The Maryland Wire For decades, there were two names in Maryland politics that required almost no explanation. Mike Miller. Steny Hoyer. You didn’t necessarily have to agree with them. You didn’t even have to like them. But everyone understood something: Not social-media power. Not cable-news power. Not the temporary power that comes from one big election. They possessed political infrastructure. Relationships. Institutional memory. Donors. Staff. Allies. County leaders. Lobbyists. Legislators. Operatives. And the ability to connect people who needed something with people capable of delivering it. Today one is gone. The other is preparing to leave Congress after more than four decades. And Maryland faces a question it hasn’t had to answer in generations: The answer may be: Nobody. At least not the way Miller once did. Maryland’s old machine wasn’t inherited by one person. It fragmented. And now several ambitious political networks are competing to assemble the pieces. Miller presided over the Maryland Senate for 33 years, becoming one of the longest-serving legislative leaders in American history. He stepped down as Senate president in 2019 and died in January 2021. (Behavioral and Social Sciences) But Miller’s real power wasn’t the title printed on his door. It was the accumulation of relationships behind it. Miller came from Maryland’s old Democratic organization and developed into an extraordinarily adaptable political operator, retaining authority even as the Senate around him became younger and more liberal. (The Washington Post) He understood something fundamental: politics is information. Who wants what? Who owes whom? Which senator needs help? Which county executive wants something in the budget? Which committee chairman can move a bill? Which lobbyist represents which client? Which candidate should receive support today because that candidate could be a senator ten years from now? Miller knew the answers because he’d spent decades collecting them. Miller’s influence wasn’t confined to elected officials. Former Miller aides became prominent Annapolis lobbyists. Maryland Matters noted figures such as Joseph Bryce and Timothy Perry among the high-profile lobbyists who had once served as top Miller aides. (Maryland Matters) That was one of Miller’s greatest political achievements. He didn’t merely accumulate power around himself. He produced alumni. Staffers became lobbyists. Legislators became committee chairs. Allies became power brokers. And decades of relationships reinforced one another. By the end, Mike Miller wasn’t simply a person. He was an ecosystem. Hoyer’s network was different. Miller’s power was rooted in Annapolis. Hoyer connected Maryland to Washington. He served in the Maryland Senate before winning election to Congress in 1981 and ultimately became one of the longest-serving members of the U.S. House and a longtime No. 2 in House Democratic leadership. In January 2026, Hoyer announced that he would retire rather than seek another term. (The Washington Post) His influence stretched through: Prince George’s County, Southern Maryland, Congress, federal agencies, donors, campaign organizations, and generations of Democratic candidates. And Hoyer had something machine builders value enormously: a succession network. That became obvious almost immediately. When Hoyer announced his retirement, Maryland’s 5th Congressional District exploded with candidates. Twenty-four Democrats entered the race. But when the votes were counted, the winner was Adrian Boafo, Hoyer’s former campaign manager. Boafo wasn’t running without establishment help. He was endorsed by Hoyer. He was endorsed by Governor Wes Moore. And he ultimately won the Democratic nomination. (AP News) In his victory speech, Boafo described the result as voters deciding it was time to “pass the torch to a new generation of leaders.” (AP News) That phrase captures the transition perfectly. Hoyer’s seat isn’t simply being vacated. Parts of his network are being transferred. But they aren’t being transferred to another Steny Hoyer. They’re being absorbed into a newer political constellation. And standing prominently inside that constellation is Wes Moore. If someone forces you to name the single person sitting nearest the center of Maryland Democratic politics today, the answer is Governor Wes Moore. The 2026 Democratic gubernatorial primary underscored the scale of his position. Moore won renomination overwhelmingly, receiving roughly 88% of the Democratic primary vote. (WBAL-TV) But raw votes tell only part of the story. Look at the party infrastructure. The Maryland Democratic Party says Steuart Pittman ran for state party chairman in 2025 “at the suggestion of Governor Wes Moore.” Pittman took office that July. (The Maryland Democratic Party) That’s important. Governors traditionally influence their state parties. But party leadership plus fundraising, endorsements, executive appointments and national relationships creates the beginning of something bigger: a political network that could survive the governor’s term. Moore also played a role in the Hoyer succession by backing Boafo. That’s how political organizations reproduce themselves. You support tomorrow’s politician today. And that’s the distinction that matters. Moore has enormous statewide visibility. Miller had decades of accumulated legislative control. Moore can endorse candidates. Miller could influence the environment in which legislators lived every day. Committee assignments. Leadership positions. Legislative priorities. Relationships that had been accumulating since before many current lawmakers entered politics. Moore may have a larger national profile than Miller ever possessed. But he doesn’t possess Miller’s half-century of Annapolis memory. Nobody does. Which is why the modern Maryland political structure looks less like a pyramid and more like several power centers connected by overlapping relationships. One of those centers belongs to Senate President Bill Ferguson. Ferguson controls an institution no governor can simply command. The Senate. Maryland’s official 2026 legislative records identify Ferguson as Senate President. (Maryland General Assembly) That means influence over: committee structure, Senate leadership, legislative priorities, confirmations, and negotiations with the House and governor. But Ferguson is not Mike Miller 2.0. Miller’s extraordinary longevity allowed him to become almost inseparable from the institution. Ferguson possesses the office. Miller possessed the office plus decades of political mythology and accumulated relationships. Those aren’t the same thing. The House now has its own new center of gravity. Official 2026 legislative records identify Joseline Peña-Melnyk as Speaker of the House of Delegates, alongside Ferguson as Senate President. (Maryland General Assembly) That makes the current Maryland governing triangle: Executive power. Senate power. House power. None fully controls the others. And that fact alone demonstrates how different modern Maryland is from the Miller era. The governor proposes. The legislature disposes. Committee leaders negotiate. County interests intervene. And political coalitions shift issue by issue. That’s not one machine. That’s a networked power structure. Then there’s U.S. Senator Angela Alsobrooks. Her significance isn’t that she is the new Hoyer. She isn’t. Hoyer spent decades constructing his network. Alsobrooks brings something different: Prince George’s County roots, a statewide electoral organization, a United States Senate platform, and relationships with national Democratic leaders. That makes her a critical bridge between Maryland and Washington at precisely the moment Hoyer leaves. Hoyer’s retirement therefore doesn’t necessarily weaken Prince George’s influence. It changes who carries it. Prince George’s itself is undergoing a dramatic generational transition. Official 2026 results show Aisha Braveboy winning the Democratic County Executive primary with 87,944 votes and 73.31% of the vote. (Maryland State Board of Elections) That’s political infrastructure. Prince George’s is one of Maryland’s central Democratic vote engines. A county executive with that level of primary support gains: appointments, budget influence, organizational relationships, donor access, and a platform for cultivating the next generation of political leadership. Braveboy therefore isn’t merely another person on the Maryland power map. She controls a place from which a political organization can be built. Boafo is particularly interesting because he sits almost perfectly at the intersection between the old and new worlds. He worked for Hoyer. Hoyer endorsed him. Moore endorsed him. Then Boafo beat an enormous Democratic field for Hoyer’s seat. (AP News) That doesn’t make him powerful on Hoyer’s scale. He’s just beginning. But it illustrates how power actually transfers: not through a ceremonial handoff, but through endorsements, donors, staff, relationships, and voter confidence. Boafo may become Hoyer’s congressional successor. He will not automatically inherit Hoyer’s 40-plus years of political capital. That part has to be rebuilt. This is the part that often gets overlooked. When a machine breaks apart, power doesn’t only move upward. Some people’s relationships become less valuable. Former Miller aides still know Annapolis. Former Miller allies still possess institutional memory. Veteran lobbyists don’t forget how legislation works. But something fundamental disappeared when Miller did: the common center. The person capable of connecting all of them instantly was gone. That changes the value of a political network. Imagine knowing everybody in Annapolis. Useful. Now imagine the person who introduced many of those people, appointed committee chairs, influenced Senate priorities and understood decades of relationships is simultaneously Senate President. Much more useful. Remove that person and the individual relationships remain. But the system becomes decentralized. First: Bill Ferguson. The Senate’s institutional relationships now run through his leadership rather than Miller’s. Second: the House leadership. With the Miller-Busch generation gone, today’s House leaders are building their own committee chairs, alliances and relationships. Third: Wes Moore. Moore became governor after Miller was gone. That distinction matters. Earlier governors had to operate with Miller sitting across State Circle. Moore entered office during a generational reset. Instead of negotiating with the old machine, he has the opportunity to help build the next network. Fourth: Angela Alsobrooks and the emerging Prince George’s generation. Hoyer is leaving. Miller is gone. The county’s political leadership now belongs to another generation. Fifth: politicians who were outside the old Miller organization. When someone dominates an institution for 33 years, inevitably some politicians develop within that organization and others outside it. Miller’s departure created room for people who may never have risen as quickly under the old structure. That’s the biggest point. If Mike Miller’s power had simply transferred to Bill Ferguson, Maryland would still have a machine. If Hoyer’s influence simply transferred to Boafo, Maryland would still have a machine. If every county leader simply took orders from Moore, Maryland would have a machine. None of those things happened. Instead: Moore controls the statewide executive platform. Ferguson controls the Senate. Peña-Melnyk controls the House. Alsobrooks has statewide and federal reach. Braveboy has Prince George’s executive power. Pittman leads the state Democratic Party after Moore encouraged him to seek the role. (The Maryland Democratic Party) Boafo represents the beginning of the post-Hoyer congressional generation. And Baltimore, Montgomery County, organized labor, donors and other county organizations maintain their own centers of influence. That’s not one machine. If you want to understand where Maryland power is moving, don’t simply watch office titles. Watch endorsements. Who does Moore support? Who does Alsobrooks support? Who gets Ferguson’s allies? Who gets House leadership? Who gets Hoyer’s blessing? Who gets labor? Who gets major donors? And most importantly: That is where the new Maryland network becomes visible. The Boafo race was a textbook example. Hoyer’s successor didn’t emerge randomly from 24 candidates. He had ties to the outgoing incumbent and support from the governor. The old network and the emerging one overlapped. And voters chose him. (AP News) Moore may ultimately become the most important person in determining whether Maryland develops another durable statewide political organization. But the test isn’t whether Moore himself remains popular. The test is what happens to the people he supports. Which delegates become senators? Which senators become committee chairs? Which county officials become executives? Which staffers become candidates? Which appointees become statewide leaders? Who gets his donor network? Who gets his political advisers? Who eventually gets his endorsement when Maryland faces a post-Moore gubernatorial succession fight? That’s how we’ll know whether Moore was merely a successful governor— or the founder of another generation of Maryland power. There’s another category worth watching: politicians who came from Miller’s Maryland but remain active in the new one. Dereck Davis is one. Anthony Brown is another. Veteran legislators and former officials throughout the state still possess old relationships that newer politicians don’t. These people can function as bridges. That’s important because political systems rarely reset completely. The new machine usually grows partly from pieces of the old one. Donors don’t disappear. Lobbyists don’t disappear. Operatives don’t disappear. Institutional memory doesn’t disappear. They find new centers of gravity. If you want one name: His overwhelming 2026 Democratic renomination, executive authority, national profile and influence within the Maryland Democratic Party make that difficult to dispute. (WBAL-TV) But saying Moore “runs Maryland” the way Miller once ran the Senate would oversimplify the reality. Maryland power today looks more like this: WES MOORE Statewide organization.Appointments.Fundraising.Executive government.National Democratic relationships. BILL FERGUSON The Senate.Committees.Confirmations.Legislative leverage. JOSELINE PEÑA-MELNYK The House.Committee leadership.Budget and legislative leverage. ANGELA ALSOBROOKS Statewide electoral organization.Federal platform.Prince George’s relationships.National Democratic connections. AISHA BRAVEBOY Prince George’s executive organization.County government.A major Democratic vote base. THE POST-HOYER GENERATION Boafo and the emerging political class that will have to rebuild Hoyer’s Washington-Maryland network rather than simply inherit it. It did something more interesting. Mike Miller’s influence was too personal, too old and too deeply rooted in his own relationships to be inherited whole. Hoyer’s network is too extensive and too intertwined with decades of congressional politics to fit neatly inside one successor. So the pieces are moving. Toward Moore. Toward Ferguson. Toward Peña-Melnyk. Toward Alsobrooks. Toward Braveboy. Toward younger candidates and new county organizations. And toward veteran political survivors who understand both eras. That’s the next chapter of Maryland politics. The person who eventually connects: Annapolis, Prince George’s, Montgomery County, Baltimore, labor, business, donors, the Maryland Democratic Party, and the congressional delegation will possess something Maryland hasn’t truly seen since Miller’s heyday. Not merely another elected official. And maybe that’s why searching for “the next Mike Miller” is the wrong exercise. There may never be another one. The more important question is: Miller spent half a century becoming that person. Hoyer spent decades becoming another version of it. Maryland’s current political leaders are still competing for the privilege. And until somebody actually connects all those pieces, the most accurate answer to the question “Who runs Maryland?” may be the most fascinating one of all: No one does. Not anymore. But there are plenty of people trying. Sources University of Maryland and Maryland Matters — Miller’s 33-year Senate presidency and political legacy. (Behavioral and Social Sciences) Washington Post historical reporting — Miller’s rise from Maryland machine politics and ability to retain power as the Senate evolved. (The Washington Post) Maryland Matters — former top Miller aides who moved into Annapolis lobbying and the changing Senate power structure. (Maryland Matters) Washington Post and Reuters — Hoyer’s January 2026 retirement announcement after more than four decades in Congress and his long Democratic leadership career. (The Washington Post) Associated Press — Adrian Boafo’s 2026 victory in the Democratic primary to succeed Hoyer, including Hoyer and Moore’s support and Boafo’s “pass the torch” remarks. (AP News) Maryland Democratic Party — Steuart Pittman’s official biography stating that he sought the state chairmanship at Moore’s suggestion. (The Maryland Democratic Party) Maryland General Assembly — official 2026 records identifying Bill Ferguson as Senate President and Joseline Peña-Melnyk as Speaker. (Maryland General Assembly) Maryland State Board of Elections — official 2026 Prince George’s County results showing Aisha Braveboy’s dominant County Executive primary victory. (Maryland State Board of Elections) 2026 election reporting — Moore’s overwhelming Democratic gubernatorial primary victory. (WBAL-TV)
Adrienne Adams discusses campaign work, relationship with Gov. Hochul
If successful, Adrienne Adams would become New York's first Black female lieutenant governor.
Memphis Depay: champion still hungry for more at Corinthians
Memphis Depay is already one of the most successful foreign players in Corinthians’ recent history, but the star is still hungry for more trophies.Discover the new PUMA Ultra 7, Memphis Depay’s bo...
Mackenzie Dern Reacts to Successful UFC 330 Title Defense
UFC women’s strawweight champion Mackenzie Dern reacted to her first successful title defense against Gillian Robertson at UFC 330.Dern won a unanimous decision as she used her grappling advantage to control Robertson on the mat for large durations of their UFC 330 co-main event. She also outstruck her opponent when the fight took place on […] The post Mackenzie Dern Reacts to Successful UFC 330 Title Defense appeared first on HEAVY.
Vicente Luque Releases Statement After UFC 330 Defeat
Longtime UFC fighter Vicente Luque released a statement following a unanimous decision defeat to Tresean Gore at UFC 330.Luque was outpointed by three rounds by the younger, faster, and more powerful Gore as he lost a unanimous decision in his second fight at middleweight, following a successful debut in the weight class earlier this year […] The post Vicente Luque Releases Statement After UFC 330 Defeat appeared first on HEAVY.
From Kickapoo basketball star to viral sports videographer
Kickapoo graduate Vincent Mhire has transitioned from basketball player to successful videographer, choosing to pursue his media career over playing college basketball.
How important is Community Shield to a team's season?
Premier League champions Arsenal take on FA Cup winners Manchester City in Sunday's Community Shield - but would winning suggest a successful season ahead?
Crestwood students excel at PA Junior Academy of Science
The Pennsylvania Junior Academy of Science held its annual state meeting May 17-19 at Penn State Main Campus, State College. The Crestwood Secondary Campus was well represented and its participating STEM students were quite successful, with…
‘My form of Zionism’: Jerusalem nonprofit helps new olim build businesses in Israel
MATI Jerusalem gives new immigrants the guidance, tools, and confidence they need to launch successful businesses and keep them growing.
World’s first superconducting quantum heat engine could help unlock massive quantum computers
A tiny superconducting engine has successfully converted heat near absolute zero into useful work, demonstrating the first cyclic quantum heat engine of its kind. Future versions could operate autonomously inside quantum computers, potentially eliminating huge numbers of costly, noise-producing microwave cables.
NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens Achieves Major Milestone with Successful Completion of First Stereotactic Radiosurgery
Queens, NY – NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens today announced the successful completion of its first Stereotactic Radiosurgery (SRS), marking a significant
Microsoft kills off unsuccessful AI features while merging its separate Copilot apps
Microsoft is simplifying Copilot by combining its consumer and business apps, and dropping AI-generated podcasts, Group Chats, Deep Research, and its Mico character.
How CFOs Keep The Business Running While They Rebuild Finance
Finance transformation cannot stop the monthly close. Learn why sequencing, governance, and control are essential to successful change.
Jayden Daniels Takes Legal Action Against Louisiana State
The Louisiana State Tigers are one of the most successful football programs in the nation.LSU is one of few other programs that have yielded multiple Heisman Trophy victors. Unfortunately, it appears as if they find themselves on less-than-ideal terms with one of the winners.ESPN obtained a copy of a letter sent by Jayden Daniels‘ legal […] The post Jayden Daniels Takes Legal Action Against Louisiana State appeared first on HEAVY.
Landstuhl Regional Medical Center Team Prepares Joint US Military Medical Personnel for Global Health Engagements
The Landstuhl Regional Medical Center Directorate of Global Health Engagements, in collaboration with cadre from the Uniformed Services University (USU), National Institute for Defense Health Cooperation (NIDHC), and U.S. Africa Command (USAFRICOM), successfully conducted a Fundamentals of Global Health Engagements (FOGHE) course at the Ramstein Air Base Aug. 3-7.
Weird Science: Flush with data, North Carolina sewage is exposing community nutrition and food insecurity
A newly published study has successfully demonstrated that analyzing residual plant and animal DNA in municipal wastewater can deliver accurate, real-time population nutrition data. Researchers say this breakthrough could fundamentally change how public health officials monitor dietary habits, food insecurity, and economic health.
Factors that make radiologists less likely to be fooled by large language models
Successful radiologist-LLM collaboration depends on confidence in the AI model, along with the reader possessing key clinical expertise, according to new research.
Today’s clicks can reveal tomorrow’s breakthroughs
The trail of likes, shares and downloads we leave across the internet could help predict successful innovations years in advance.
Battlefield 6 Player Successfully Refunds Game After 470 Hours of Game Time Due to Game Modes Being Removed by Devs
One Battlefield 6 player managed to successfully issue a refund for the game, and this is despite pouring in 470 hours of playtime.
Report: Samsung is increasing the Galaxy Z Fold8 production target for this year by 1 million units
The new wide format foldable has already proven to be more successful than even Samsung had hoped. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 has proven to be more...
Trump announces staff secretary Will Scharf, who helped secure ballroom approval, will be his new White House counsel
Democrats have vowed to pursue investigations into Trump and his administration if they are successful in November.
AB Science announces today the successful completion of capital increases of a total gross amount of EUR 14.2 million
PRESS RELEASE AB SCIENCE ANNOUNCES THE SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF A EUR 14.2 MILLION PRIVATE PLACEMENT, PRIMARILY SUSBCRIBED BY LONG TERM INVESTOR AB...
Leaving NYC showed me how different successful families can look
Moving from New York City to Wichita, Kansas, helped change my perspective on successful families and on how culture impacts how we grow up.
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.
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
After Michigan Loss, AIPAC Weighs a Second Effort to Defeat El-Sayed
The pro-Israel organization spent $32 million in an unsuccessful effort to defeat Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. It might try again in the general election.
Veteran Financier Nimi Natan Advises That You Should Never Fund a Business You Don’t Understand
After spending years operating businesses as well as financing them, the President & CEO of Gulf Coast Small Business Lending has learned that some of the most important signs whether a business will be successful in the long term are found in people, operations, customer relationships, and the day
‘Pokémon Pokopia’ 2.0 Patch Notes: An Enormous, Welcome Update
Here are the patch notes for the 'Pokemon Pokopia' 2.0 update, the largest for the game since its highly successful launch.
Joe Brady Explains Why His Relationship With Josh Allen Works
Bills head coach Joe Brady says honesty, trust, and accountability are the foundation of his successful working relationship with Josh Allen.
Sitting up straight may improve your mood and decision-making
A simple change in posture may subtly affect how people feel and make decisions. Participants who sat upright reported greater feelings of pride and took more successful risks in a virtual balloon game than those who hunched over. Most did not realize researchers had influenced their posture, helping rule out the possibility that they were merely responding to expectations. The results suggest workplace ergonomics could influence more than physical comfort.
Chartbook 464 The"China squeeze" - the politics of development counterfactuals.
There are three types of China shock discourse. Each has a distinct temporal register. China shock 1.0 was a phrase coined by US academics in the 2010s to retrospectively summarize the impact on particular US labour markets, which they identified through painstaking empirical investigation. China shock 2.0 on everyone’s lips in Europe in the mid 2020s is an alarm raised by trans-Atlantic policy thinkers warning of a coming disaster which they project onto Europe’s ailing car industry. The third type of China shock discourse - commonly known as the “China squeeze” launched most recently by Indian economists Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian in the pages of Foreign Affairs - mobilizes a different, more speculative temporal register: the counterfactual realm of alternate history. The China squeeze argument asks not what has happened, or what is going to happen, but what might have been. Specifically, what options for economic development might have been open to Global South economies like India or the economies of sub-Saharan Africa, had it not been for China’s spectacular industrialization since the late 1990s and the persistent competitiveness of China’s manufacture in low-skilled segments. Chatterjee and Subramanian’s argument is that whilst China has built a powerful position in electrical machinery and other high-skill manufacturing, which is now delivering China Shock 2.0, it also continues to run a trade surplus in low-skill, labour-intensive manufacturing. This surplus is large and has remained largely unchanged in fifteen years. Indeed, in the 2010s, in trade with low-income countries, China’s surplus rapidly increased. On their reading, this squeezes low-income producers in low-skill sectors in which they “should” be able to compete. Source: “China’s Mercantilist Squeeze on Developing Countries” Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian. Peterson Institute for International Economics 26-7 May 2026 Chatterjee and Subramanian’s wording is telling: (emphasis mine) The canonical trajectory of economic development in the post-World War II period is for countries to transition from agriculture to manufacturing, first in low-skilled manufacturing and then later on to high-skill manufacturing (Herrendorf, Rogerson, and Valentinyi 2013). At the global level, this implies that high-income countries (HICs) that once specialized in low-skilled activities cede manufacturing export space to poorer countries that come along to occupy that space. In 1965, advanced economies accounted for about 60 percent of global value-added exports in four key low-skilled manufacturing sectors, i.e., apparel, leather, textiles, and footwear. Over time this share declined and began to be occupied first by the East Asian tigers and, beginning in the late 1990s, by China. Today China accounts for about 50 percent of the global market. The question is whether China, with its rising prosperity, is continuing to behave like its richer counterparts and ceding export space to poorer followers or to behave unlike them and continuing to occupy space. In terms of the conceptual maneuvers it performs, of the three China shock discourses, the “China squeeze” argument is by far the most ambitious. After all, it bases its critique of China on a counterfactual imagining of the world. Like any counterfactual argument, to construct this alternative reality it must rely on a heuristic model. To make their argument Chatterjee and Subramanian mobilize two key claims. The first reference point is the actual history of rich-country industrialization, what they refer to as the “canonical path”. The idea is that countries transition from agriculture to light industry and low-skilled manufacturing and from there up the value chain. To make this useful as a standard of comparison and a means to construct a normative standard, they adjust sectoral export shares for two factors: 1. the underlying level of economic development of the exporting country, as measured by national income and 2. the degree to which the sector in question is internationalized. The idea being that for a high income country to have a high export share in low-skill sectors is anomalous and even more so if that particular product is highly internationalized and thus suitable for being “conceded” to lower-income competitors. Where should this process end? Here Chatterjee and Subramanian introduce their second benchmark. Their normative idea of a global development path is one in which, in due course, low-skill manufacturing exports are distributed in proportion to a country’s share in the global labour force. They imagine, in other words, a world of proportional, polycentric global development without much national specialization in low-skill manufacturing. A useful benchmark is that, in labor-intensive manufacturing sectors, a country’s share of world exports should be broadly commensurate with its share of the world’s low-skilled labor endowment. … In the Heckscher-Ohlin model, this would be true if value added per worker and export propensities, i.e., fraction of output that is exported, are the same across countries. It is this pleasant liberal vista of orderly global development, progressing towards a general distribution of low-skilled manufacturing against which they judge reality and conclude that the low-income countries are suffering a “China squeeze”. China is not exiting low-skill sectors fast enough Allowing for its gdp level and the degree of globalization, China’s share of low-skill manufacturing exports is far higher than it “should” be. Relative to population, its low-skill share of exports is far too high. That in turn yields the conclusion that huge numbers of jobs - the authors suggest tens of millions - are being hoarded by China. For the four sectors captured in figure 4, this excess in value-added exports is $110 billion in 2022. For all low-skilled sectors overall captured in appendix figure D.1, excess value-added exports amount to $365 billion. The crowding out of LMIC exports by China is therefore substantial. Both these claims have in common that they are strong structuralisms. The first is that development paths ought to resemble each other. The second is that broadly speaking as far as low-skilled manufacturing is concerned, all countries are alike. If the world currently diverges from the distribution of trade implied by these assumptions, if China is not following the advanced economy path and has huge exports, this must be the result of “policy”, which the authors then put in question as illegitimate or unfair. Thus the naturalistic construction of a canonical path leading to a “level” distribution of low-skilled manufacturing reveals itself to be a polemical tool. From the point of view of China shock polemics, this discourse is no doubt welcome. But as an account of economic history, it must surely be regarded as nothing short of bamboozling. Development paths do not follow a regular, natural sequence. As David Fishman put it aptly, “development is not a queue”. They are always and everywhere, through and through political. Development is not so much a process, as a project. Each such project is more or less well adjusted to its context. As Gerschenkron taught uneven and combined development implies differentiation rather than simple imitation on a single parth. It may be true that Europe and the US exited relatively early from low-skill work. But clearly technology has changed. As C&S themselves point out, China no longer enjoys a low wage environment. Do they really believe that such huge differences can be accounted for either by industrial policy, which as they admit does not operate powerfully in low-skill sectors, or by exchange rate manipulation? What is overwhelmingly dominant in explaining the persistence of “low-skill” manufacturing in China are surely the network effects of complex supply chains. Indeed the label of “low-skill” may miss the point. The degree of globalization which Chatterjee and Subramanian decide to conjure away in their model of the development path - to allow for the fact that Europe and American textiles exporters did not enjoy just-in-time logistics in the 1950s - obscures the point that the networks through which Chinese factories supply the world are themselves key parts of the low-skill industrialization project. China isn’t knocking out 1970s style “cheap”. It has redefined the entire product cycle. C&S’s casual reference to “T-shirts” is telling. In today’s “fast fashion”, there is weight on both terms. Fashion and fast. China’s success in delivering on both at unprecedentedly high speed and at unprecedentedly low cost, isn’t a low-skill operation at all. If we see development trajectories not as the serial repetition of the same, but as distinctive, crafted projects that cumulate in complex agglomerations of skill, technology and labor, then this explains why the assumption that low-skilled manufacturing should follow the distribution of population flies in the face of all experience. As countless cases attest, low-wage, low-income developed economies are not by themselves the makings of a competitive production base. As Leon Liao puts it quite fairly: “International trade has never been allocated according to population. A country’s population gives it no natural claim to an equivalent share of global exports." And the remarkable fact is that Subramanian alone and with co-authors has long been making this point, not to pillory China, as is the case of the tendentious _Foreign Affair_s and Peterson pieces, but to highlight the great counterpart to China’s industrial success, namely India’s relative failure. The much-quoted Foreign Affairs piece showed low-skill export shares only for China, not for India. If you put both countries in the picture as Chaterjee and Subramanian have done on other occasions, the picture looks like this. China is far above the line, but India, almost as large in terms of population, is no less anomalous, just in the opposite direction. As far as global populations are concerned, and the imagining of tens of millions of “squeezed” jobs, it is this Sino-Indian pair that account for a huge share of the action. What this graph reveals is not China’s cheating, but India’s “greatest development failure”, at least this is the argument made Arvind Subramanian, this time in co-authorship with Devesh Kapur, in their major book, A Sixth of Humanity. Independent India’s Development Odyssey which appeared with Oxford University Press earlier this year. In this highly critical work on India’s development, China is repeatedly evoked, not to criticize but as a benchmark against which to illuminate what India’s political economy has not delivered i.e. large-scale formal employment for hundreds of millions of citizens. Kapur and Subramanian leave no doubt, if you want to understand why China, not India was the main driver of manufacturing globalization from the 1980s, don’t look to slots opening up in the division of labour thanks to the liberal mindedness of advanced economies, look to the contrasting political economy of the Maoist PRC and India’s post-independence political economy. As Kapur and Subramian note: The great divergence between China and India did not begin in 1978 with the Deng reforms—it was well underway by then. In one of the great ironies of modern history, the conditions created by Maoism turned out to be a great launching pad for industrial globalization. As the comparison of India and China in 1980 makes clear, to imagine manufacturing would be equally distributed when populations are so differently endowed in terms of educational and nutritional is fanciful. Here is the data from Kapur and Subramanian, data which I explored back at the very beginning of Chartbook. As Kapur and Subramanian insist, the striking fact is that even as India’s growth accelerated from the 1980s, structural change has not. Formal employment in India lags woefully behind. Why? As Kapur and Subramanian note, the path-dependent impact of India’s poor early start was devastating. The list of factors they mention is long and weighty: We argue for a new five-fold explanation applicable at different stages of Indian history: in the initial stages, the legacy of two key pre-1980s policies, the neglect of agriculture and the strangling of the domestic private sector, were critical. The failure of broad-based agricultural growth militated against rural industrialization, which would have been devoted to satisfying local needs that would have necessarily been labour intensive. Then, when the boom came after 1980, the thicket of regulation and broader labour protections that were legislated prematurely in a nascent democracy, underpinned by a deep ideological aversion to private capital in general and big capital specifically, became a barrier to attaining the size that would be necessary to compete globally. Similarly, the reforms after 1991, while wide-ranging, did not quite encompass non-tradeable inputs critical to manufacturing, namely, land, logistics infrastructure and power. A combination of low investment (logistics infrastructure), regulation (land) and the continued monopoly supply by state governments (power), combined with residual socialism, kept costs at 75–100 per cent above efficient supply. These factors were compounded on the supply side by the government, which dominated the formal labour market and established exorbitantly high wages at the lower end of the skill spectrum. This made their employment in the labour-intensive sector by the private sector less attractive. Finally, when the services sector and its exports boomed, wages soared even further via a Dutch Disease effect: one successful tradeable sector killed and cannibalized another less-skilled tradable sector, namely, manufacturing. Thus, scarcity-inducing policies of the planning era, precocious democracy and a Gandhian aversion to size; inefficient, monopolistic supply of critical non-tradable inputs; the behemoth of government; and super-successful skill-intensive services successively undermined India’s unskilled labour employment opportunities. The employment failure seems to have been over-determined. … Less quantifiable but no less important are some of the sociological factors that have undermined manufacturing and factory jobs. Take the impact of the success of the IT sector—located in urban areas with better working conditions, such as air-conditioned offices, good schools for children and attractive entertainment options. It became a more attractive place for engineering and management graduates to flock to. … Consider manufacturing and female employment. Indian society makes it difficult for women to work, reflected in India’s unusually low female labour force participation (elaborated in Chapter XIII). Indian society, in particular the routine harassment of women in public spaces, makes it even more difficult for them to travel long distances to take up work.37 Combined with onerous regulations on creating hostels and dormitories for women—which, in turn, prevents multiple shifts of operation—factories need to be located in areas with a large female labour pool. While firms can take apparel plants to female labour or bring them to the plants by building large-scale dormitories, this raises costs. If there was a case for subsidies to encourage labour-intensive manufacturing, housing subsidies to build dormitories for women workers would be a good place to start. All of this meant, that when opportunities did open up, in part thanks to adjustments in China, India was in no position to take advantage. Here is the account of the 2020s from Kapur and Subramanian. It stands in dizzying contrast to the one-sided, “China squeeze” argument delivered in the Peterson and Foreign Affairs pieces: In 2022, for example, India’s share of global exports in clothing (the canonical labour-intensive sector) was 3.1 per cent compared to 32 per cent for China. This is extremely disappointing because China started vacating export space in this sector after the Global Financial Crisis as its wages started rising; it then vacated further space in the aftermath of geopolitical developments that led investors to seek alternative investment locations. Between its peak and today, China lost about 7.5 percentage points of global export share (worth about $43 billion in 2022); over this period, India’s export share remained stagnant at 3 per cent, while that of Vietnam and Bangladesh rose by 3.5 to 4 percentage points. China’s loss did not translate into any gain for India in terms of low-skill exports and employment. Put differently, when the conditions for dynamism and prosperity were established after 1991, and even more tantalizingly when the global export opportunities opened up, it was as if India was a high-wage economy and only skilled labour could benefit from the dynamism. It had converted its physically abundant unskilled workforce into an economically expensive resource, penalizing its use. It is not my mission here to argue for or against Kapur and Subramanian’s interpretation of India’s development trajectory. The point in this context is simply that the “China squeeze” such as it is can only be understood, in relation to the heavy burden of domestic constraints that Kapur and Subramanian so unsparingly enumerate. I am concentrating here on India because it is the great counterpart to China and the unspoken reference point of the “China squeeze” discourse. But the point is more general. Can anyone with a straight face suggest that the main problems afflicting the development of South Africa or Nigeria, the great centers of mass underemployment in sub-saharan Africa, are cheap competition from China driven by Beijing’s industrial policy and an undervalued RMB? Likewise, is the main problem of the American working-class the threat of Chinese competition or the manifest crisis of social reproduction in the United States itself? The point here, as in the discourse around China shock 2.0 in Europe, is to insist that we should not normalize the world and pathologize China, without actually investigating what is going on in America’s industrial wastelands, the German car industry, or India’s lopsided labour market. One-sided pathologization should be understood for what it is, a polemical gesture. Concepts like China shock and China squeeze are, what Reinhart Koselleck, following Carl Schmitt, would have described as “asymmetrische Kampfbegriffe”, or “asymmetrical counter-concepts” or “asymmetrical combat concepts”. If the function of arguments like the “China squeeze” is to alert elites in the rest of the world of the need to rejuvenate and energize their development projects, so be it. But let us see the resulting discourses as the mobilizing interventions that they are. Interestingly, a significant slice of China’s public sphere - the so-called industrial party - have been obsessed for the last twenty years with precisely these questions of counterfactual economic history. Since the mid 2000s, a massive online discourse developed around an alternative history in which Chinese techno-patriots were asked to imagine how they would proceed if they had the possibility of traveling back in time to transport modern technology into the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) thus averting the “great divergence” of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a fantasy of course, but also a goad. The point was not directed at Westerners. The alternate history is dramatically nationalist, but few n the West had even heard of it until recently. The adherents of the industrial party are not liberal moralists. They don’t project natural ladders of international development and ask why others don’t cede space. They take the Realpolitik of global economic development for granted. Their pointe was directed against fellow Chinese. The rallying cry of the alternative narrative was this: Now that we are beginning to gain steam and push forward on our national development path, now that we are breaking out of the inferior position assigned to us even in the early years following WTO accession, do not lose yourself in humanistic imaginings about better futures. In the spirit of Deng, they called on China to embrace the hard truth of development. Perhaps one might of the Industrial Party as a cultural trend born out of desire for symbolic revenge against those who had inflicted the century of humiliation. In terms of the various temporalities of the “China shock” - retrospective, prospective and counterfactual - one might think of the Industrial Policy discourse as truly speculative, conjuring up the China shock that never was. Or perhaps one might better think of it as imagining a world in which a powerful China was no shock at all, but simply a defining fact of modern history. I love putting out Chartbook. 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(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.) You probably remember egg prices spiking a few years ago. This led to a lot of debate between the pro-market/pro-competition/antitrust/Neo-Brandesian crowd and the center/center-right/center-left/abundance/libertarian crowd over the cause, whether it was the avian flu outbreak or whether industry consolidation led to price fixing, using avian flu as a convenient cover. Basel Musharbash wrote a whole investigation at BIG looking at it. Well, two years later, we have our answer: it was price fixing. The Justice Department found proof, via emails, of price fixing. Indeed, just the threat of an investigation brought prices down two years ago: I bring this up because at least half a dozen of my favorite political writers and pundits, who were skeptical about price fixing at the time, haven’t written any mea culpas on this issue. It’s really dispiriting and makes it much, much harder to trust their work on other issues. If you take a hard stand on an issue, then you get it wrong, you need to explain how and why you got it wrong. Or update your priors. This is how epistemological bubbles are formed! All of which is to say, it’s time for another installment of “What I Got Right, What I Got Wrong”. Last issue, I mostly focused on the “wrong” side of the equation, so today’s is a bit more balanced, but with one big mea culpa (though I still stand by my original concerns). Let’s dive right in! Subscribe CORRECTION: UFC Didn’t Release Subscriber Data (But Seems to Have Bragged About It Internally) In my analysis of the viewership of UFC Freedom 250, I wrote... “Paramount has also released datecdotes bragging about their subscriber numbers. Earlier this year, they claimed that the first UFC fight on Paramount+ brought in 1 million subscribers.” Well, that datecdote did not come from a PR rep, but from great reporting from James Faris at Business Insider. The actual quote was this: “Paramount’s flagship streaming service generated about a million new subscribers on the day of its first-ever UFC event, Paramount product chief Dane Glasgow told employees in a town hall on Tuesday morning, three staffers who attended the meeting told Business Insider.“ This wasn’t the biggest goof in the world; even Faris emphasized to me that this is more a “clarification” than a correction. Still, it sounds like, internally, the folks at Paramount were very happy about this result—and I’m guessing they were happy with this news getting out—even though the gains didn’t last through the quarter, dropping to 700K adds. RIGHT: MrBeast’s Struggles Continue... I’m very skeptical about MrBeast’s burgeoning media “empire” and, in particular, its $5 billion valuation, as I wrote earlier this year and last year. Sure enough, according to Business Insider, regarding its “booming” consumer products division_:_ “US sales volume grew 13% year-over-year in 2025, following a 33% leap the previous year, according to a presentation deck dated May 2026....A February 2025 investor deck viewed by Business Insider showed Feastables’ net revenue more than doubled in 2024 from 2023, to $215 million, and was forecast to grow 74% in 2025, to $375 million.” [Emphasis mine.] If you told investors that you projected 74% growth but delivered 13%,1 that’s not ideal. But it’s not just MrBeast. Logan Paul and KSI’s Prime had sales drop in half for their energy drinks. It’s one thing to build a successful entertainment company and an entirely different thing to succeed in the heavily-consolidated-but-also-very-competitive consumer packaged goods space! CPGs are dominated by a few firms with very wide moats compared to YouTube, which has few barriers to entry. These businesses require different skill sets and have completely different business environments. WRONG: Does the NBA Have an $8 Billion Bidder? Almost as soon as I published my article about the NBA’s finances, casting skepticism on NBA expansion, I saw this Front Office Sports headline: One group “claims to have already raised $8 billion” for the Vegas expansion team. I mean, wow. That’s just $2 billion less than what the Los Angeles Lakers were valued at when they were sold just last year. And they’re arguably the most popular team in the NBA. (Side note: the new owner is now under an investigation for fraud in how he went about financing the Lakers and the Dodgers purchases.) So much for the “dried up” language I used in that article. (This is why I usually stick to my “Entertainment Nuance Guy” tone in articles...) I went off old information—from April, when I read/heard about the NBA downplaying expansion efforts—instead of doing a quick double-check for new news. That said...if you read the article, the market for Seattle is “slow”, with just one reported bidder. So I wasn’t entirely off. This goof has annoyed me since I first published it, mainly because it undercut that article’s real point, which I stand by: NBA franchises are really overvalued right now. Now, I get why NBA teams are overvalued. When it comes to owning sports teams, it’s basically never wrong to assume that some rich person somewhere will care more about owning a team (or just being part of a group since they’re so expensive) than the actual financials. There are only so many teams to own, and opportunities to buy in preferred markets don’t come along very often. This explains why the teams sell for such high multiples (usually above a 10 to 12.5 revenue multiple, which is very high). You only need one person to overpay! Beyond the ultra-wealthy luxury good explanation, I worry NBA teams are becoming speculative assets. More and more private equity investors are buying into NBA teams. But the value, in owning a team, comes from selling it later, not any meaningful relationship to revenue or profit growth. In other words, the newer NBA owners are increasingly expecting someone later to buy their inflated asset. That’s not sound economics; that’s the “greater fool” theory at work.2 At some point, actually making money has to matter. Especially since revenue growth is now below the growth of the stock market. (And this matters because the NBA doesn’t have easy levers to pull to drastically lower their costs—half of their revenue has to go to players and then you actually have to run a team, including coaching, training, travel, media expenses, and more—or raise revenues aside from one-off expansions in America and overseas.) I just don’t see how investors make their money back buying NBA teams, except for selling at a higher price later on down the line. But if revenue/profit growth continues to slow, at some point, someone will be left holding the bag. RIGHT: Baseball and Basketball are about equally popular. Related to the above, I wanted to cite two quick pieces of evidence for one of my other theories: that the NBA and MLB are about as popular as each other, but the NBA gets much, much better media coverage. One YouGov survey has that fans prefer basketball to baseball by 52% to 48%, which I’m guessing is within the margin of error for that poll. That’s virtually even, meaning they’re about the same popularity. Over on NBC, a recent Red Sox-Yankees game averaged 4 million viewers, higher than Sunday Night Basketball’s average of 3.4 million on the same network. A Yankees-Dodgers game averaged 3.9 million two weeks ago. Not every game averages this much, but it shows you that baseball isn’t far off from basketball, depending on the matchup. Altogether, the NBA is just slightly more popular than baseball, but NBC is paying MLB a fraction of what they pay the NBA, a point I’ve made before. RIGHT: Angel, MUBI and Neon Updates... I’ve long been skeptical about many of Hollywood’s buzziest startups/smaller indie studios. It’s not that they don’t make great movies—films like Anora and Everything Everywhere All at Once are amazing—or that they’re not (rightfully) pushing the majors to make better films, but...they get a ton of hype, and that hype often doesn’t live up to the reality or difficulty in scaling up. Starting with MUBI, well, The Wall Street Journal wrote a feature on MUBI’s struggles last April, best summarized by the subheader “After Sequoia valued Mubi at $1 billion, a left-wing revolt sent the indie film company into a tailspin”. MUBI lost $7.3 million on $200 million in revenue in Q4 2025, but reportedly hit a record 1.7 million subscribers at the end of Q1. As for Neon, Department M purchased a “significant stake” in the company earlier this year. How much is that “stake” worth? According to Deadline, “No financial figures for the Neon-Department M deal were disclosed.” So...that’s not great! If it was a big valuation, we’d hear about. Also, I found this curious: “Both Neon and Department M already have separate partnerships with Qatar. The Qatar Film Committee has a slate deal in place with the former, and a biopic production pact with the latter.” Color me skeptical about much Middle Eastern investment dollars. See: LIV Golf. Finally, as for Angel (formerly Angel Studios), their stock very, very slightly popped last month after Young Washington ($20 million budget) which made $45 million in the US, but their stock is still way down from its opening. Smaller Updates RIGHT: The WGA should focus on antitrust concerns! I’ve been on this for years. Post-WGA/AMTPT deal in 2023, I wrote an article for the Ankler calling on the WGA to focus and organize against industry consolidation. Sure enough, the WGA filed a lawsuit against the Paramount-WBD merger, and people are organizing around this issue now. I wish this energy had coalesced earlier (specifically to lobby Washington much earlier), but better late than never! WRONG: Actually, the chip shortage might be due to market manipulation. In my last “Long Reads for the Long Summer” article, I shared an article about how LLMs are causing memory chip prices to spike, which will make all electronics more expensive. Well, turns out, three RAM manufacturers control 90% of the market, and now a private lawsuit accuses them of price-fixing. So yeah. WRONG/UPDATE: The Odyssey will hold! Two weeks ago, I wrote, “As of this moment, we haven’t had a super-blockbuster, though The Odyssey, Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday could all cross the $500 million mark. (At this point, The Odyssey would need a very strong hold to get there.)” Well, it’s safe to say it’s going to have that hold! It only dropped 30% in weekend two and IMAX screenings are sold out all month. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is also off to a great start. RIGHT: People are rushing to get shows out yearly. I’ve long been bullish on yearly, weekly-released shows, and Leslie Goldberg at The Ankler wrote about how many people in town are now listening. WRONG: Mark Carney reverses Canada’s stance on homegrown production. After writing about Canada installing domestic production quotas, Canada has backed off. WRONG: I don’t trust Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s online “views”. When I originally wrote about the latest Spider-Man film’s record-breaking trailer, I thought this was just YouTube views, but after watching this Corridor Crew video and doing more research, well, it’s all social views of the trailer globally. Really? That stat includes TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts views. Basically, I don’t trust it anymore. (This film will probably set record, but I trust the pre-sales data more.) RIGHT: Celebrity Production companies are still struggling. I’ve written about this for years, but the company that I didn’t track was Kevin Hart’s HartBeat, which was valued at $650 million but is struggling now and might just end soon, especially after Kevin Hart pulled his endorsement deals. And Bad Robot is moving to NYC. CORRECTION: SpongeBob is a “second run” title. In my 2025 recap article, I had _SpongeBob SquarePants_labelled as a “library” title, when it is still a “second run” show, with new episodes still coming out on Nickelodeon. CORRECTION: In my last “What I Got Right, What I Got Wrong” update, I offered a correction from Doug Creutz and misspelled TD Cowen. Thanks, Grammarly! 1 Though he could have increased prices to make up for the gap, he couldn’t have increased them that much. 2 There’s a theory, which I think that Daryl Morey created and Bill Simmons popularized, that, to be successful building your team, you only need a handful of bad GMs in the league to take advantage of. 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After Hobbes vs Rousseau: Politics must move beyond human nature
Since the great debate between Hobbes and Rousseau, our political theory has been organised around a single question: is human nature essentially good or essentially corrupt? Graham Harman, the philosopher behind object-oriented ontology, argues that this is simply the wrong question to be asking. The real forces governing our collective fate - climate change, artificial intelligence, geography, and pandemics - are non-human; therefore, questions about human nature are not the central ones. Instead, Harman proposes a politics reorganised around our relationship to non-human objects and environments, in which quasi-government institutions incentivise and deter actions with the aim of extending the survival of the human race. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This has become one of the most popular phrases among twenty-first-century intellectuals. Often misattributed to Fredric Jameson, it has been warmly embraced by such influential authors as Slavoj Žižek and the tragically departed Mark Fisher, and has fueled the notion that the major problem with the political Left is that it simply needs to become more speculative and creative. Naturally, this is never a bad idea in any human pursuit. But what if the political distinction between Left, Right, and Center itself results from a failure of imagination? SUGGESTED READING Hobbes vs Rousseau: are we inherently evil? By Robin Douglass This particular division has been with us only since the summer of 1789. During the simmering prelude to the French Revolution, it referred originally to the physical position in the National Assembly of radical figures on one side and loyal monarchists on the other. These positions are linked with two entirely different camps of modern political theory. On the Left we find a series of authors ranging from the moderate (Locke) to the supercharged (Rousseau) to the truly radical (Marx), all of them contending that exploitation of the many by the few justifies revolutionary overthrow of the existing order. On the Right they are countered by the likes of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Schmitt, a group of thinkers convinced that corrupt human nature can be tamed only by force. In the words of the Nazi supporter Schmitt: “One could test all theories of nature and state and political ideas according to their anthropology and classify these as to whether they consciously or unconsciously presuppose [humans] to be by nature evil or by nature good.” This is the division we continue to face today, even in the daily retail politics of Western democracies.___Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims.___The most refreshing feature of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity was their awareness that the forced choice between Rousseau and Hobbes (as they put it) is no longer sufficient. Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims. Far from being stationed “beyond good and evil,” we seem to be fully entangled with both. We are not naturally good or evil, Graeber and Wengrow contend, but naturally experimental and imaginative. They rest their case on the archaeological record, which seems to bear witness to numerous episodes of seasonally shifting governments and festivals, which vacillate in the same society (even in the same year) between the egalitarian and the dictatorial. Such praise of political experiment makes a good fit with the generally anarchist position defended by these authors. Yet it is also what I find most disappointing in their position. Although they are right that the forced choice between Hobbes and Rousseau falls short of what our new situation requires, the authors simply replace it with praise for the human being as a political tinkerer and performer. In other words, they give us just another theory of human nature, one that would not have been out of place in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. What other options might we have?___The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature… We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them___One fresh approach would be to treat politics within a broader framework than human nature, given that the polis does not exist in a vacuum filled exclusively with people. When Bruno Latour went to observe the baboons of Kenya with the San Diego anthropologist Shirley Strum, they jointly concluded that these primates were more socially interdependent than our own species. Each baboon is so reliant on the dynamics of the group that they find themselves locked into constant surveillance of their potentially dangerous peers. The group structure turns out to be inherently volatile. Humans, by contrast, are able to stabilize their societies to a large degree through the mediation of inanimate objects. Although one’s position in society may seem to fluctuate over time, considerable stability is produced through such items as apartment keys, wedding rings, and identification cards, all of them serving to secure us a place distinct from that of our fellows. The Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris has written at length about the crucial role of documents in establishing social relations, making him a hero among notaries in his country. Proper names and license plates cement our position amidst other humans, as do symbolic achievements such as graduation from a top university or distinguished wartime service with its various medals and ribbons. None of this is found among baboons, despite their closeness to us on the evolutionary tree: after all, we did share a common ancestor just 25 to 30 million years ago. SUGGESTED VIEWING The goodness paradox With Richard Wrangham The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature, whether understood in the manner of the Left or of the Right. We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them. But initially, it is true, we face non-human things primarily in the form of constraints. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to form a human civilization underwater, deep underground, atop Mount Everest, or in outer space. Human dependence on the non-social background takes on subtler form in discussions of political geography, especially unloved on the more idealistic Left. Consider the luckless position of Poland during World War II, sandwiched between Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other. By contrast, note the good fortune of the United States in not having a military peer positioned on any land border. Anglo-American geopolitics, since the writings of the American naval commander Alfred Thayer Mahan and the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, has been wedded to the notion that one or more liberal offshore naval powers should prevent any authoritarian “heartland” regime from gaining effective control of Eurasia. That remains the case whether the opponent is the impatient Napoleon, the swashbuckling German Kaiser, the villainous Hitler, the murderous Stalin, or the industrial juggernaut Chinese. In their current Foreign Affairs article “Heartland vs. Rimland,” Michael Beckley and Hal Brands analyze the current and coming state of the world on the basis of these same rather durable principles. In recent years a similar outlook has been embraced, in inverted form, by the Putin-loving Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, an icon of the Rightist intellectual underworld. For Dugin, the Anglo-Saxons are an evil force bent on destroying the spiritually superior people of the land: much like Athens in its failed war with Sparta, or Carthage in its eventual collapse against Rome. But the shared notion on both sides is that any strategy that fails to take geography into account is likely to end up as a defeated form of excessive optimism.___When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole.___More striking for us today than geography is the non-human object called climate, which threatens rimland and heartland equally. Even if we contend that humans are one hundred percent responsible for triggering the climate crisis, it remains non-human in the sense of being an independent force beyond our effective control. In a major work published just before his death in 2002, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, the American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted the tendency of evolutionary theorists to focus too closely on the fate of individuals in view of their successful or failed adaptation to circumstances. With climate change, however, we confront a force that goes well beyond the scope of any individual life. Whereas Richard Dawkins extended evolutionary questions downward from individuals to the sub-individual gene, Gould pushed it upward, speaking of entire species or clades as impacted by environmental change. The asteroid that struck the Yucatán 66 million years ago is only the most famous example of this sort. In the wake of that catastrophe, large animals needing abundant supplies of food were at a fatal disadvantage by contrast with the smaller birds and mammals of the planet. When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole. The effect is to shift our attention away from individual beings towards the survival of the group.In the United States in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked considerable backlash among those who asserted a nearly absolute degree of individual freedom. In California I encountered those who demanded that their businesses be allowed to reopen, that it was enough to cover their mouths but not their noses, or that they should have the right to enter any public area despite refusing vaccination. Yet public health is probably the clearest argument against libertarianism, which often merely asserts the autonomy of individuals against any claims of the commons. In normal times the individual is worth defending; under conditions that threaten the survival of part or all of our species, compulsion may be our only resort, as with perfectly reasonable blackouts and rations in wartime. To rebuild human society under the constraints of climate change will be one of the great challenges of the century to come, as will our improvised grappling with artificial intelligence. Such phenomena pose existential risks for humanity, and leave far less room for tolerance of individual brattiness. Cases are mounting of devastating wildfires caused by arson. Recently it was reported that there is even a website where one can bet on the location of coming wildfires, raising the specter of deliberate blazes set to collect on wagers. The death penalty has steadily lost support in a world where many stress the infinite value of human life. But if we focus instead on entire ecosystems, those who purposely burn the forests may begin to look worse than serial murderers.___The politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere.___So far I have spoken of force, authority, and punishment: measures sure to have greater appeal to those who identify with what we know as the Right. But other implications of the post-anthropocentric world are likely to have different backers. If non-human objects are seen as structuring political space, it stands to reason that they can no longer be introduced solely by the pace of technical breakthrough. Fields ranging from cybernetics to energy will demand increased politicization once they are reconceived not just as products of individual human investment, but as renovations of collective political geography. This need not involve world government, with its inherent risk of tyranny, but may involve quasi-governmental enforcers of prestige along the lines of a less corrupt FIFA or International Olympic Committee, punishing deviant states not with violence but with less tangible incentives.Politics will never lose its historic links with conflict and faction. But rather than factions aligned by differing theories of human nature, the politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere. This will prove just as incommensurable with the modern Left/Right spectrum as a globe is with a two-dimensional map.
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She Wanted to Teach Kids History. Her Idea Became a $700 Million Business
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The Science Behind the AI Panic Is Shakier Than You Think
A column by Sascha Lobo Is AI making us dumb? So asked DER SPIEGEL on its cover a while ago. After a few weeks of recovery and a therapeutic intervention with the help of my AI, I feel able to respond. That’s a bit unfair, of course; the article itself is more nuanced than the loud cover, the image of a schoolkid with dull prompt questions, or the subtitle: “AI is conquering the schools, and educators fear a disaster.” The short answer to “Is AI making us dumb?” is: no. The long answer is more interesting, and even carries a preliminary glimmer of the spectacular. Unfortunately, it requires a detour into the sphere of artificial intelligence, into the mogul-field terrain of technology assessment, the attention economy, and the destructive virus of cultural pessimism. Along with narrowing the scope to AI’s effects on education and work rather than on intelligence. Because the honest version of the question would be: Does AI help us learn and work, or not? Generative AI, which set off the still-ongoing hype with ChatGPT, has only existed in relevant distribution since late 2022, early 2023. For a technology-driven transformation of people and society, that is extremely short. For that reason alone, research is still in its infancy. And technology assessment is not a fast discipline anyway. Prominent voices from Elizabeth Eisenstein to RAND to Tom Wheeler say we still cannot conclusively judge the consequences of the printing press. Its invention is a mere 580 years back, and some scholars would rather not circulate assessments that might have to be retracted in two or three hundred years. We’re Going Through Growing Pains A phenomenon that already caused upheaval in social media research makes serious assessment of AI’s consequences even harder: the “moving target” problem of LLM-ology, as the linguist Sean Trott called it in 2025. AI develops so quickly and so unpredictably that researchers often end up studying snapshots of the past. There are concepts, from morphological analysis to anticipatory governance, for keeping research, planning, and regulation halfway meaningful anyway. But even with those, universally valid statements are rare. DER SPIEGEL - The German View is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe We should therefore treat findings about the interplay between humans and AI as far more procedural and situational. Unfortunately, this challenge comes at the worst possible time. We are going through growing pains: AI’s everyday impact has grown very large very fast, and with it the longing for guidance. Annoyingly, the body of solid knowledge has not exploded along with it. Experts cannot be moved to broad consensus on even banal statements about AI. Sascha Lobo, born in 1975, is an author and strategy consultant focusing on the internet and digital technologies. Together with Jule Lobo, he explores the debates of the day in the podcast “Feel the News – Was Deutschland bewegt” (”What Moves Germany”). Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says software developers are dying out. Bill Gates considers coders one of only three professions that will survive the AI tsunami. Top tech economists find virtually irrefutable arguments both for and against an AI bubble. The same naturally applies to the structurally youth-hostile debate over whether AI is good or bad for young people. The gap between the demand for insight and the supply of solid knowledge creates an orientation vacuum. This vacuum of AI cluelessness is filled, as the attention economy described by Georg Franck in 1998 would have it, with half-knowledge (funnily enough, often AI-generated), marketing, and self-marketing. After all, infinite money is at stake, along with academia’s best current shot at global fame. But this iridescent froth of interpretation operates more by the algorithmic principles of the digital public sphere than by seriously earned insight. That is why dramatized, fear-feeding claims about AI are so promising. It tempts parts of academia into distorted drivel, and parts of the media then sensationalize the published drivel once more. Was the Research Aimed at a Desired Result? How badly this can influence academia and public perception is demonstrated by one of the most-discussed studies on AI’s effects: “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” The MIT study by Nataliya Kosmyna also gets plenty of space in the SPIEGEL cover story. What was measured and interpreted: lower brain activity in people who write with AI assistance, compared to people who only google or write without any tools. As is common with preprints, the study has not yet been peer-reviewed, and it contains substantial weaknesses that experts have sharply criticized. The first round had 54 participants in three groups, the second only 18, who reportedly also came from MIT’s own orbit. There was no preregistration (committing in advance to what you want to find out with which data). In their analysis, Stanković et al. even discovered an opposite effect that the study does not further explain. Some measurement data has not (yet) been published. And the EEG analysis method used is considered too imprecise to support such far-reaching conclusions. The biggest criticism, though, is the suspicion of an activism-driven study. In an interview with Time, lead author Kosmyna said she published the study immediately, rather than after full peer review, because she feared politicians might otherwise decide to put ChatGPT in kindergartens. She considers that absolutely harmful. It is legitimate to hold such a view. It just seems unscientific to approach a study with it, and then to design the setup so that the chance of a fitting desired result remains as high as possible. Ideologies Collide It is not easy to separate genuine AI insights from studies that trivialize and weaken well-founded AI criticism. The same goes for the opposing, AI-enthusiastic narratives, because the pro-AI side works against it with billions in resources. Ideologies collide, fed by egos, PR strategies, moral posturing, and once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. Doomsday marketing makes the search even harder: AI companies can profit from warnings about the dangers of AI, whether through the notoriety of apocalypse narratives or because, in some target groups, danger translates into power. Some seemingly negative findings are therefore quite welcome in the AI industry. If you try to get at the findings presumably less influenced by interest groups, the picture in education seems relatively clear: AI can improve educational outcomes when the right AI is used the right way, namely pedagogically. Simply dumping an AI chatbot into a classroom, by contrast, accomplishes little. Huge surprise. But something else is also obvious: whether they are allowed to or not, kids use AI for school, which is why the controlled integration of AI tools into education is, in the medium term, entirely without alternative. In the world of work, the landscape of findings is more complex and requires more differentiation. A series of serious studies points to an AI effect that suits neither the alarmists, regulation fetishists, and AI opponents, nor the trillion-dollar corporations with their armada of paid scientists, PR professionals, and ecosystems: working with AI helps the inexperienced (at least for now) considerably more than it helps the pros, in certain fields of work, and provided they know how to use it correctly. Missing Domain Knowledge Among the experienced, the professionals, and the high flyers, by contrast, despite frequent time savings, partially negative effects and new problems are emerging. Take the jagged frontier problem: AI solves task A brilliantly and fails completely at task B, even though both look similar even to professionals. Or the verification-cost problem, in which AI’s greater productivity gets eaten up by the enormous effort of checking its output. Or the illusion of competence, because AI makes new domains seem easily penetrable, until you painfully discover that deep domain knowledge is missing. Taken as a whole, the effects of working with AI do lean positive. But the promise that AI works as a turbocharger for everyone and boosts practically everything simply refuses to materialize. The AI magic the world has been feeling since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022 has so far barely shown up in most companies’ numbers. The consulting firm McKinsey has coined a term for this, the “gen AI paradox,” and believes that work processes and corporate structures would have to be rebuilt quite fundamentally to realize AI’s benefits at scale. Reuters just reported that only 3.3 percent of Microsoft’s customers have subscribed to the AI package Copilot. That may be down to the product; in other areas we continue to see soaring successes and new AI triumphs. But after the first quarter of 2026, disillusionment is the word for all too many AI projects at traditional companies: because the promised revolution of AI agents has so far failed to arrive or been postponed, and because of the leveling effect that many of the studies cited here suggest. Against Inequality The societal effects, on the other hand, appear rather encouraging. Many previous technologies operated on the Matthew principle, named for the Gospel verse about giving to those who already have: they tended to reward the more competent and more privileged. AI, however, seems more often to have an equalizing effect once a threshold of access and education is crossed. Some anecdotal insights point in this direction, for example, how an unemployed man in Leipzig successfully defended himself in court in 2025 against fraud accusations from Germany’s federal employment agency — without a lawyer, armed only with ChatGPT. The AI made mistakes and cited invented court rulings, but in the end the man walked away unpunished. And a key capability of artificial intelligence is its capacity to learn: set up correctly and fed with data, it can keep getting better. It is a question of time, or more precisely of AI innovations and training data, until even free AI chatbots write better legal briefs than law graduates with perfect exam scores. Whether that will make anyone dumb is something the world’s press will surely inform us of in due time. Subscribe Leave a comment
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Science can serve dark as well as light
I’m not sure how many of you are watching “Star City,” Apple TV’s spin-off of its “For All Mankind” program (2019-present), but it’s one of the better sci-fi series I’ve seen in a while, with an impressively dark political message. (Some light spoilers below.) For the uninitiated, “For All Mankind” presented a slightly tweaked history of the U.S. space program in which it was the USSR that landed on the Moon first in 1969, and shortly thereafter put a woman cosmonaut on the lunar surface. This sparks an ongoing space race that, in the original series, yields a lot of benefits for humanity. President Nixon’s insistence on a female astronaut corps to compete with the Soviets boosts the feminist movement of the 1970s and the ERA passes. New fuels generated for the space program create clean and cheap energy around Earth. There are also some darker changes — the USSR is thriving well into the 2000s, there are terrorist counter-technology movements around the globe, laborers on Mars work in nightmarish conditions and organize strikes and riots, etc. the @smotus report is a reader-supported publication. To support this work, please become a paid subscriber. Subscribe That show offers glimpses into the subtle ways this Earth is different. Teddy Kennedy never went to Chappaquidick because he was racing back to Washington to deal with the space program crisis; he gets elected President in 1972. John Lennon survives his early 1980s shooting but Pope John Paul II does not. The Apple Newton succeeded. Pretty much the whole of season 4 is a setup for an Al Gore joke. Again, mostly, the vision that “For All Mankind” presents is a positive one, with technology advancing many human interests. “Star City” goes in a very different direction. This spin-off show is about the same set of events but from the Soviet perspective. As we meet them, the team of scientists and cosmonauts responsible for the lunar landing are still basking in their hero status, but their program is embedded deep in the Soviet security state of the late 1960s. Everyone’s apartment is bugged. Whole teams of clerical staff spend their days transcribing recordings of people’s lives. People in the program, including respected cosmonauts, are regularly arrested. An incredibly menacing Colonel Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin) forces confessions and tortures and kills, expressing little more than annoyance in the process. Meanwhile, the space program’s highly respected Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans) has a vision for the program that he knows the government will not approve. He insists that they need to think past the Moon to focus on colonizing the solar system, starting with Venus. (This is a rough parallel to the Americans’ pivot to Mars in the original show.) He essentially builds a secret space program within the space program, calculating that the government will embrace the mission after it has succeeded. (As an aside, I’m not sure why the Venus obsession, as a successful mission can’t produce the biggest public relations payoff: a cosmonaut standing on the surface holding the Soviet flag. Anyone standing on Venus would be immediately crushed by the 92-bar atmosphere and then cremated in the 900°F temperatures. But in a country with no free press perhaps the visual payoff was less valued.) But the overall vision is that the technological advances have only amplified the most fearsome aspects of the Soviet system. The state is paranoid (but not incorrect) about American spies and does monstrous things to protect its secrets. People are terrified to trust each other. Classic banality-of-evil figures order people to harm those they care about; those people comply rather than get shot. Others are forced into criminal behavior to protect loved ones. We’re reminded all the time these days of what happens when a government despises science. It manifests in the defunding of schools, the elevation of fossil fuels as the rest of the world pivots to solar, outbreaks of measles and diarrhea, etc. But “Star City” offers a vision of a bad government that likes science. It’s not encouraging. It’s not yet clear if there will be a season two of this show. But I strongly recommend season one. It’s both thoughtful and gripping. Share
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