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December return for Van Rensburg
BRISTOL Bears boss Pat Lam says England centre Benhard Janse van Rensburg will return to match action in December to give him sufficient time to recover after suffering two serious head injuries in the space of three months. The 29-year-old, below, was stretchered off after being knocked unconscious trying to tackle Henry Pollock in the […] The post December return for Van Rensburg appeared first on The Rugby Paper .
Top Kennedy Center official urged closure due to financial problems, not poor conditions, lawyers argue
Eighteen months after President Donald Trump stepped in to remake the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in his image, a top official worried about the Washington institution’s hemorrhaging finances urged for it to be shut down, according to court documents filed on behalf of the Ohio congresswoman seeking to stop the center from being shuttered.
Business Owners Have a Window. Most Aren't Ready to Use It. by Tully Ryan
I spend my working life on both sides of a business sale. As an M&A advisor based in Wilmington, I help lower middle market owners across North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia sell what they've built. As the founder and CEO of IQExit, I work with the bankers, wealth advisors, CPAs and attorneys who sit beside those owners for years before a sale ever comes up. From both seats, I keep seeing the same thing. The market is ready for our owners. Too many of our owners aren't ready for the market. Start with our own backyard. Wilmington's metro area added more than 12,000 residents between July 2024 and July 2025, a 2.6% jump that ranked seventh in the country. It also posted the highest job growth rate of any metro in North Carolina. I see the same pattern in the growth markets I work in across the Southeast. New residents mean new customers and new workers. They also mean new buyers: people who moved here from corporate jobs and want to own something, private equity groups looking for add-ons in HVAC, electrical, landscaping and other trade services, and younger entrepreneurs who would rather buy a running business than start one from scratch. The ownership numbers are hard to ignore. About half of North Carolina's small businesses have an owner who is 55 or older, and roughly 85% of those owners have no succession plan, according to the North Carolina Employee Ownership Center. Nationally, more than half of Baby Boomer business owners have no documented transition plan. That isn't a crisis yet. It's a timing problem. A lot of businesses will change hands over the next decade, and the prepared ones will get the better buyers and the better terms. Buyers have money and they're using it. But an active market doesn't mean a fast one. The IBBA's latest Market Pulse survey found that Main Street deals took six to 10 months from engagement to close in the second quarter, and lower middle market deals took 11 to 12 months. That clock starts after the owner decides to sell. In my experience, the real preparation has to start years before. Two clocks, two playbooks When I sit down with an owner or their advisor, my first question isn't “What's it worth?” It's “When?” The answer puts the owner in one of two groups. If the owner wants out within 24 months, we're in execution mode. There's no time to rebuild the business. The work is cleaning up what a buyer will test: three years of financials that tie to the tax returns, an add-back schedule you can prove, customer and vendor contracts in writing, a lease that can be assigned, and a price the market will actually pay. The goal is certainty to close. If the exit is two to five years away, the owner has something worth more than time. They have choices. That window is where most value gets built, and most owners waste it by waiting. What kills deals In the lower middle market, deals rarely die over the headline price. They die in diligence, or they get retraded late in the process. I see the same causes again and again. The owner is the business. If every key customer relationship runs through the owner's cell phone, a buyer sees risk and a lender sees more of it. The books don't hold up. Buyers spot weak accounting fast. Statements that get revised mid-process, a revolving door in the bookkeeper's chair, revenue tracked on a side spreadsheet, and margins that slip while sales climb with no clear reason all make a buyer nervous. So does an owner who pushes back when asked for documents. And plenty of private owners run personal expenses through the company. Add-backs are normal. Add-backs you can't document turn into a lower offer. The real estate isn't sorted out. Many owners hold their building in a separate LLC. That's fine, but the lease terms or the property sale should be settled before a buyer shows up, not halfway through diligence. Revenue sits in too few hands. Picture a contractor with 40% of its work coming from one builder, or a service company running on handshake deals. Buyers will still look, but the terms shift toward more seller financing, an earnout, or less cash at closing. Owners and advisors: if your exit is three to five years out • Get a baseline now. Find out where the business really stands today: what a buyer would pay, who that buyer is likely to be, and which gaps would hurt you in diligence. You can't fix what you haven't measured, and the answer is often different from what the owner expects. • Make yourself less necessary. Spend the next few years building a manager or small team that can run daily operations and own customer relationships. Put handshake deals into written contracts. A business that runs without its owner is worth more and is far easier to finance. • Clean the books for three straight years. Buyers and lenders look back at least three years. Separate personal expenses, keep the financials tied to the tax returns, track every add-back as you go, and settle the real estate plan early. A word to CPAs CPAs often see a sale coming before anyone else, and you're usually the most trusted voice an owner has. Year-end meetings are the right time to start this conversation. Here's what I'd ask every CPA to do this season with business owner clients over 55: • Ask the timing question. “Do you see yourself owning this business in five years? If not, who takes it over?” Write down the answer and bring it up again at next year's meeting. • Run a proof of cash and review revenue recognition. Make sure the cash in the bank ties to the revenue on the books. Pay close attention to contractors with work in progress and to companies selling memberships or service plans. These issues are easy to fix with years of lead time and painful to fix a month before closing. • Pair the tax return with an exit readiness review. Invite clients to complete IQExit's Exit Readiness Intelligence (ERI) process as part of year-end planning. It gives you and the client a shared picture of readiness gaps and an indicative value range, and the results come back to you as the advisor. That turns a tax meeting into a planning relationship, and it puts you in position to bring in tax and M&A help early, when choices like purchase price allocation can still save the client real money. Changing the conversation For bankers, wealth advisors and attorneys, the hard part is raising the subject without seeming to nudge a client toward the door. I understand that. Nobody wants to tell a 60-year-old owner it's time to sell. So don't. Ask a different question: “If a buyer called tomorrow, what would they find?” That's a planning question, not a pitch, and it's useful whether the exit is two years out or 15. It's the question we built IQExit to help advisors answer. Whether you're in Wilmington, Raleigh, Charleston, Richmond or anywhere else, owners have a real opening right now. The buyers are out there and so is the capital. The owners who come out ahead will be the ones who start getting ready before they're ready to sell.
Herzog honors JFNA fund that provided $240m. in loans to Israeli businesses
JFNA established the Israel Small Business Loan Fund in the months following October 7, 2023, as part of its Israel Emergency Campaign, which ultimately raised more than $900m. A Jewish Federations of...
Herzog honors JFNA fund that provided $240m. in loans to Israeli businesses
JFNA established the Israel Small Business Loan Fund in the months following October 7, 2023, as part of its Israel Emergency Campaign, which ultimately raised more than $900m.
Tim McGraw finally addresses ongoing rumor about Taylor Swift's wedding
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's wedding may have been in July, but Tim McGraw is now clarifying whether he performed after months of speculation. "I didn’t perform at her wedding.
Is American Electric Power Still The Business You Bought?
For questions about this article or underlying research, email help@trefis.com. Most people who own American Electric Power (AEP) bought a steady electric utility for its dividend, which came to 2.9% of the company's market value over the last twelve months.
NANCY GUTHRIE | After 9 months, investigators turn to Florida scientists for new DNA leads
Arizona investigators working on the Nancy Guthrie case are continuing DNA testing with laboratory partners, according to authorities.
NANCY GUTHRIE | After 9 months, investigators turn to Florida scientists for new DNA leads
Arizona investigators working on the Nancy Guthrie case are continuing DNA testing with laboratory partners, according to authorities.
America's Entrepreneurship Surge Continues: Nearly 5 Million Business Applications Filed Through September - Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council
New Census Bureau data highlight record entrepreneurial activity, changing business models, and the opportunity to help more startups launch, grow and succeed. By Karen Kerrigan – America’s entrepreneurial spirit continues unabated. According to the latest U.S. Census Bureau Business Formation Statistics, nearly 4.93 million business applications were filed during the first nine months of 2026, […]
Florida education chief defends science plan
Education Commissioner Henry Mack pushed back Tuesday against criticism that Florida is de-emphasizing evolution in its new plan for teaching science, insisting the state is still covering a subject he agreed was a bedrock of biological science.“Evolutionary biology and the theory of evolution is in the standards,” Mack said. But several parents and teachers who attended an evening forum on the state’s proposed science standards criticized the proposal by the Florida Department of Education, which Mack runs, specifically the handling of evolutionary science.Joshua Garrett, a teacher in Orange County Public Schools, said the state’s proposed standards “danced around” evolution.State standards are benchmarks for what students should learn in their classes kindergarten through 12th grade, guiding what lessons are taught, what subjects are in state-approved textbooks and what concepts are tested on state exams.Florida’s current science standards call evolution a “big idea” and “the fundamental concept underlying all of biology.”The proposed ones barely mention evolution — a scientific theory explaining change in living species over time from natural selection that has been a cornerstone of biology for more than a century. The term “evolution,” in fact, is never defined in the new high school life sciences standards, though the concepts are sprinkled across several units.The education department has made revisions to its proposal, officials said, but it was not immediately clear at the Tuesday forum, held at Lake Buena Vista High School in southwest Orange County, what those changes were.Mack interjected during Garrett’s comments asking him where specifically he wanted the state to mention evolution more prominently. Then he said, “Consider it done.”Mack also asked Garrett to join the state’s faculty committee on the standards.The state released the new standards in September, and several experts quickly criticized them, saying they lacked depth and skirted around both evolution and climate change, important topics for Florida students to learn.The state has since hosted a “listening tour,” including a virtual forum and two other in-person meetings in Walton and Hillsborough counties. Tuesday’s meeting drew a small crowd of about 30 people, six of whom spoke.Mack described the state’s public forums as a chance for “myth busting” and to make clear Florida’s position.He wants to students to learn “above ideology,” he said, and added that evolution isn’t settled science. TNCMS.AdManager.render({region: 'fixed-big-ad-middle-asset', slot: 1, fold: "span"}); “I want to cultivate skeptics in the healthy sense of that term. As a result of these standards, students should not be walking away convinced of anything other than the rigor of the scientific method,” Mack said.The new standards would replace the current set, adopted after a monthslong, statewide fight over the inclusion of evolution as a required subject of study. Those who opposed the 2008 standards argued creationism, or the biblical story that God created all living things, should be taught alongside evolution.Thomas Simon, a Winter Park parent, compared Florida adopting the new standards to Nazi Germany ignoring the findings of Jewish scientists — which in part lost them World War II.“If this board could explicitly name communism in the history standards last year — because words matter — you must explicitly name the foundations of modern medicine, agriculture, and energy,” Simon said.Florida last year adopted new standards that require students learn about the “dangers and evil of communism.”Teri O’Connor, an elementary science teacher in Orange County, urged Mack to curtail the total number of standards, as they list more than 1,000 benchmarks teachers are to cover during their classes.“It’s only 180 days of school. That right there is an issue, especially if you want to dive in. If we need to teach the rigor of it and to critically think about each one, that’s difficult,” she said.Kathleen Murray, who spoke on behalf of the conservative political group Citizens Defending Freedom, said she was in “strong support” of the proposed standards. Science should teach children how to think, not what to think, she said.“When teaching the origins of life and the universe, the curriculum owes it to the Florida students to be honest about the limits of what scientific models can actually prove,” Murray said.State education officials said they’d received about 1,800 comments on the benchmarks, and they have updated them based on that criticism.With Tuesday the state’s final scheduled public forum, Mack said his biggest takeaway was that the standards needed to be more explicit about teaching students how to evaluate scientific studies and evidence and how to understand the scientific method.“We might have to do a better job of helping students question more as a result of these standards,” he said.In his original statement when the standards were announced in September, Mack wrote in a social media post that “science begins in wonder, not in ideology,” and “the classical tradition taught that nature is intelligible because it is ordered — that the book of creation can be read by reason.”Some read that to mean he was trying to interject religion into public school education. 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Millersville alumna stars in \'Boop!\' Broadway tour, which stops in Philly next month [Q&A]
Actor Ashley Calderon dressed as Betty Boop for Halloween just months before she auditioned for a role in the Broadway tour based on the famed cartoon.
“Disastrous Tenure” “Conference is Cooked Now”: CFB Fans React as Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark Reportedly Set to Leave Conference Ahead of 2027 Season
The Big 12, which has been under the leadership of commissioner Brett Yormark since August 2022, is set to undergo a major change in the coming months. According to ESPN insider Pete Thamel, Yormark is expected to leave his current position in favor of a role outside of college sports.
Hortonville reopens Main Street, hopes to help businesses who lost traffic due from HWY 15
Hortonville reopened Main Street after three months of renovations, the first since 1958.
Top Oregon health official skipped report warning long-term seclusions had become common at state hospital
A state investigation found the official had not reviewed a consultant’s report that flagged the problem months before a patient died after 7 months in a seclusion room.
The Galaxy S27 Ultra chipset saga continues, here's the latest twist
Europe might finally have its answer. Which chipset the Galaxy S27 Ultra will use has turned into quite the saga over the past few months. Back in July,...
Prince George’s Council approves financing, community impact fund for Sphere entertainment venue
The Prince George’s County Council approved financing Tuesday for the proposed Sphere entertainment venue at National Harbor, advancing the project after months of debate over public investment, worker protections, and benefits for surrounding communities.
Dayton Daily News: Premier Health is Wright State’s first jersey patch sponsor
Three months after revealing plans it would seek a jersey patch sponsorship, Wright State University announced a deal with Premier Health on Thursday, Oct. 29. “Premier Health has stood alongside Wright State Athletics for years and this partnership is a … Continue reading →
Easton business owner sentenced in $171,000 Maryland tax fraud
An Easton business owner was sentenced to 18 months in jail after admitting to falsifying sales records for jet skis, dirt bikes and trailers to avoid paying more than $170,000 in Maryland excise taxes, the state attorney general’s…
Federal financial assistance now available to businesses impacted by BWCAW closures and wildfires
Several months after closures in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and surrounding wildfire impacts disrupted businesses across northeastern Minnesota, some are still dealing with the summer’s financial fallout. This week, Cook County officials announced that small businesses and nonprofit organizations that experienced financial impacts can now access federal financial assistance through the U.S. Small...
Android 17 is on 1% of devices after four months, Android 16 on over 25%
Google has updated its Android distribution numbers with the latest update showing that Android 17 is on just 1% of...
BBVA Channels €120 Billion Into Sustainable Business in the First Nine Months of 2026, Up 27 Percent Year-over-Year
BBVA reaches €120 billion in sustainable business through September, recording 27% year-on-year growth.
The politics of war
Israel went to the polls last Tuesday and it is the turn of the United States next Tuesday. The differences in the two elections are self-evident. Compared with the US, which has favourable geography and does everything at scale, Israel is tiny and part of an unstable region. For its elections, it has adopted an almost pure form of proportional representation based on lists. This encourages multiple parties and can make it almost impossible to form a government, as we can now see. The US system is complex in its own way but discourages third parties. Yet for all the differences in size, geography, and political systems, the fates of the two countries are closely connected. Israel has come to depend on the US to sustain its military strength, and over the past few tumultuous years that dependence has created resentment in the United States. The Biden administration was punished for appearing to give Netanyahu a blank check after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, and not holding Israel back as it employed ruthless tactics in Gaza. Because of the treatment of Palestinians, American views of Israel have grown progressively more negative over the past few years. Only a third now support the Israeli government. While on the left, this is largely because of how Israeli forces have operated in Gaza and, more recently, how the settler movement has behaved in the West Bank, for the American right the issue has been about how Benjamin Netanyahu persuaded Donald Trump to forget his wariness about more Middle Eastern wars and agree to a joint attack on Iran, which has gone badly wrong. The Palestine question was not a big issue for the two large Jewish blocs in last Tuesday’s election. Both supported a tough response to Hamas after October 2023 and neither accepts a two-state solution. It was, however, the threat posed by the ethno-nationalist policies of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the two extreme members of Netanyahu’s coalition, and their tolerance, even encouragement, of settler violence, that brought out the Arab voters. (In principle this should strengthen their position though to turn into real power would require the ‘Change Bloc’ overcoming their opposition to involving Arab parties. The alternatives are a National Unity government, defection from the Change Bloc to Netanyahu, or deadlock and another round of elections in the new year.) There was also broad support for the war against Iran among the Jewish parties. The difficulty here is that the objectives behind the war have yet to be met, and that continuing with military operations depends on the United States. In this way the two elections have come together at a crucial moment. If Netanyahu hoped that a victory over Iran would help him retain his majority, cementing his legacy as an Israeli war leader, it did not work out that way. Trump also expected a great victory about which he could boast. He promised at most the end of a hateful and aggressive regime, with a record of hostility to both the United States and Israel, or at least the elimination of Iran’s military capabilities and the end of its nuclear programme. Eight months on, there is not much to boast about; vital objectives remain elusive: the Iranian regime is even more hardline than before; the international economy is barely coping with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz; and Saudi Arabia is struggling with an unwanted conflict with the Yemeni Houthis. For all these reasons, the Iran War has been a dark cloud hanging over both elections. Yet the issue has been approached in different ways. Netanyahu sought to push the issue before the election while Trump has been more cautious. Trump’s essential claim is that there is nothing to worry about and he’s still working out what final steps need to be taken to provide a definitive conclusion to the conflict. Netanyahu’s final pitch was that there was lots to worry about. He focused on Israel’s dire security situation, with the Iran War unfinished and the prospect of imminent economic isolation because of international sanctions. For him it is imperative to defeat Iran decisively, and without delay. Why this different response to the same war? Part of the answer lies in how public opinion in the two countries responded to the war. In this post, I show how this came about. We await the outcome of the US midterms but know the result, at least in terms of the share of the vote if not yet the shape of the new government, of the Israeli election. With the elections out of the way Netanyahu is pressing for another round in the war. Trump is less sure. I conclude with thoughts on the importance of how he decides.
The Bolsonaro clan is still strong in Brazilian politics despite Flávio's defeat and flight to US
SAO PAULO (AP) — Defeated presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro this week left Brazil for the United States, following the steps of his father, Brazil's former President Jair Bolsonaro, who spent several months in Florida after his 2022 election defeat, and his younger brother Eduardo, who move...
New Everett law on illicit massage businesses shuts down 19 locations in 4 months
EVERETT – A total of 19 massage business have closed down or been condemned after the city passed a tougher […]
Como Park Zoo euthanizes Skeeter the giraffe, a favorite of visitors and zookeepers
Zoo officials said Skeeter was “an unforgettable combination of engaging, stubborn, gentle, and mischievous.” In recent months, the zoo said, arthritis limited his mobility and made it difficult for him to rest comfortably.
Everett pushes to close suspected illegal massage businesses amid trafficking concerns
Everett officials say a months-long push to crack down on suspected illicit massage businesses has led to multiple closures, citations and condemnations, with m
NASA’s Voyager 1 Conserves Power, Resolves Brief Communications Pause
NASA’s Voyager team is celebrating two recent developments with the Voyager 1 spacecraft: In September, they successfully completed a months-long effort to
Japan's science minister visits Kyoto Fusioneering to back fusion energy industrialization push
Japan's science and technology minister paid his first visit to a fusion energy development site on October 22, 2026 — less than two months after taking office.
Virgin Galactic unveils new rocket plane to restart space tourism
Tustin-based Virgin Galactic moved its first six-passenger Delta-class ship to New Mexico for months of testing, hoping to revive space tourism after retiring its previous plane in 2024.
A golden age of science is coming
It’s almost hard to remember, but just a few years ago, a lot of very smart people thought that science was in terminal decline. Respected researchers were writing papers with titles like “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time”, and “Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science”. In 1996, science writer John Horgan even published a book called The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age. The fundamental idea was that the Universe only has so many insights to discover, and that we’ve picked the low-hanging fruit. It was the idea that Joseph-Louis Lagrange expressed when he said that “we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish.” As the big ideas and the simple ideas get mined out, we’re forced to throw ever more brains at the mysteries of nature just to keep scientific progress going at a fraction of its old pace: It looked like science was hitting a wall. Then along came AI. It’s far too early to tell how much AI will eventually speed up the growth of total factor productivity. But already we can see signs of a speedup in science. Anthropic Founder Jack Clark assembled some of the hopeful data points in a recent lecture: [ Dror Poleg@drorpoleg "If you pick different parts of science, you see the same pattern show up: Progress is accelerating, and it has started to accelerate in the last two years." Jack Clark @jackclarkSF I’m speaking at the IMF in an hour about the singularity and why I believe it has begun and the choices we'll need to make. Watch live here: https://t.co/Hj9HzcXx5h 6:08 PM · Oct 18, 2026 · 21.2K Views 2 Replies · 10 Reposts · 123 Likes ](https://x.com/drorpoleg/status/2111882070376980529) Anthropic is accelerating its investment into drug discovery, and is already announcing some impressive preliminary results: [ BioTender@Junioryu136689 BREAKING: Anthropic unveils early results from six Claude-powered drug development collaborations. • 70% shorter CAR-T signaling domain • ~35,000 antibody designs • >10× tighter antibody binding • 89% less batch-record review time Still largely preclinical. Anthropic @AnthropicAI Over the past few months, Anthropic scientists have engaged in deep research partnerships with six organizations developing new medicines. We've also begun drug discovery efforts of our own. In doing so, we’ve learned much more about how Claude can support the many stages of 9:43 PM · Oct 27, 2026 · 11.2K Views 3 Replies · 24 Reposts · 205 Likes ](https://x.com/Junioryu136689/status/2115197821150495150) Claude also appears to be enabling rapid progress toward a treatment for food allergies. OpenAI, meanwhile, announced a possible breakthrough treatment for neurodegenerative disease. Meanwhile, Google Cloud Chief Scientist Pushmeet Kohli has a list of recent scientific advances that have been enabled by its new Gemini model, including breakthroughs in nuclear fusion reactor design, rare disease research, and quantum computing: [ Pushmeet Kohli@pushmeet Gemini 4 Argon is a step change in model performance. In recent weeks, it has had a transformative impact on the Science projects in our team at @GoogleDeepMind and our external collaborators, and helped make a number of remarkable advances across scientific disciplines. 🧵👇 4:47 PM · Oct 13, 2026 · 36.5K Views 8 Replies · 41 Reposts · 497 Likes ](https://x.com/pushmeet/status/2110049807385702623) But as cool as these stories sound, they’re just very minor, preliminary efforts. There are a number of reasons to think that AI is going to propel us into a golden age of scientific discovery. That age might not last forever — AI might still run into diminishing returns eventually. But the next few decades are probably going to be an absolutely amazing time for human science. The number of “effective researchers” is no longer limited The most important input into science is scientists themselves. Until this year, that meant human brains — talented, highly trained human brains. The number of trained human brains could be increased by sending more people to grad school, but only to a point — the smartest people tend to be sent into the hardest research fields first, and if you 10x the number of researchers, the average quality will go down. This constraint was already starting to bite, as Ekerdt and Wu argued in 2024: We argue that a substantial portion of the downward historical trend in U.S. research productivity is a composition effect resulting from self-selection in researcher ability and the dramatic expansion of the research sector…[W]e find that this composition effect has lowered average researcher ability by between 37% and 53%[.] And of course, low fertility was making the problem worse, because fewer children meant fewer people who were able to become future scientists. AI just blows up this constraint completely. If an AI agent can function as an autonomous researcher, there’s no constraint on the number of researchers in the world — you can just build more of them, by building more computer chips and data centers that enable the running of more AI agents. Whether or not massive hordes of agents can collaborate to solve individual problems much faster, increasing the number of agents allows them to tackle many different research questions in parallel. What’s more, these AI “researchers” can be trained incredibly quickly compared to human beings. A human scientist takes decades to train, and more years to reach the frontier of their research field by diligent reading and conversation. This is the “burden of knowledge”, and it’s commonly believed to be one reason ideas have been getting harder to find — by the time human scientists can get up to speed, they’re often so old that their ideas are no longer novel. AI just annihilates this constraint — it can assimilate the entire literature and reach the frontier of research extremely quickly, and it can also tell human scientists where the frontier lies without forcing them to discover that for themselves. It can also pivot to new research directions more easily than humans can. And there’s also a self-reinforcing economic cycle here. Because scientific advances enable higher GDP, they enable more resources to be invested into the creation of yet more electronic “scientists”. Now that doesn’t mean the amount of scientific research goes to infinity — there may still be some essential bottleneck task that human researchers are still needed to perform. There are some indications that AI’s progress on open-ended conceptual research tasks is slower than in other dimensions, and it may be that humans are still needed to provide some of this long-term conceptual thinking. I’d bet against this being true for much longer, but it might be true for a long time. Even in this most “pessimistic” case, though, the amount of effective capital that scientists can use to leverage their work just went up by a lot. AI eliminates the theory bottleneck Science proceeds by an iterative process of theory and experiment. The theory part of that cycle is typically short, but non-trivial — it took a couple of years after the blackbody radiation spectrum was observed for Max Planck to come up with the quantum hypothesis to explain it, and decades longer before quantum theory as we now know it was created. It took about a year for Watson and Crick to figure out the shape of DNA after the requisite data was gathered. AI will basically eliminate the theory bottleneck entirely — or at least shorten the turnaround time between experiment and theory by an order of magnitude. AI is an absolute beast at math. Recently, an OpenAI model solved some of the most important open problems in computer science, math, and theoretical physics, and no one even batted an eyebrow because that sort of triumph is becoming increasingly commonplace. One of those solutions was a proof that the Standard Model of Particle Physics could be mathematically well-defined — a problem that human theorists had so far been unable to tackle. Not all research relies equally on theory, but understanding novel experimental results almost always involves some important component of either mathematical or spatial reasoning. That part of the task has now been made much, much faster. And on top of that, science is now open to a greater number of humans who aren’t naturally good at theorizing. AI can read the whole literature Much of the work of human scientists involves reading and understanding endless amounts of papers and going to endless conferences and seminars. The purpose of that work is to understand the existing scientific literature. Understanding the literature allows scientists to do the following things: Come up with new ideas for hypotheses to test Avoid doing research that someone else has already done Synthesize approaches from different areas or fields AI can reduce this effort to almost zero. Consider this excerpt from OpenAI’s blog post about their new research into neurodegenerative disease: The team divided the analysis among thousands of AI agents powered by GPT‑Rosalind, an approach we call distributed biological reasoning. The agents examined a whole-brain CRISPR atlas…a dataset showing how gene disruptions affect different types of cells across the mouse brain. Each agent investigated a gene disruption, analyzed cellular responses, searched scientific literature, and proposed explanations for the results. Their reports were combined into a reasoning atlas linking genes, cellular effects, relevant publications, and possible biological mechanisms. The research team estimated that comparable human analysis and literature review, conducted one perturbation at a time, would take months to a year. The agents reproduced findings from human analyses while uncovering additional leads. Their assessments of novelty and scientific value also aligned with judgments from blinded human experts. These findings help prioritize further experiments needed to test the proposed biological mechanisms. Some of these insights point to new leads for understanding brain disease. [emphasis mine] This is one case in which parallel work by a large number of agents really does make a huge difference: [ Haider.@haider1 this is actually insane openai deployed thousands of GPT-Rosalind agents to analyze millions of mouse brain cells in 32 minutes, work that could take human researchers months to a year also the agents uncovered new leads for brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's OpenAI @OpenAI GPT-Rosalind surfaced a new lead for drug discovery: could restoring cholesterol transport protect neurons from degeneration? DCTN1 is a gene linked to Perry syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disorder. In mouse-brain data, disrupting it increased expression of genes involved in 2:41 PM · Oct 21, 2026 · 51.5K Views 26 Replies · 95 Reposts · 1.26K Likes ](https://x.com/haider1/status/2112917197903540516) Not only does instantaneous literature review vastly speed up the research process, but it allows AI to make novel conceptual leaps from combining approaches from wildly different fields of research. AI regularly does this in math research, combining results, approaches, and theorems from far-flung places that no human mathematician would have thought to combine. It can do it in science, too. Much of scientific innovation, historically, has been “recombinant” innovation — scientists applying insights from one field to another. With AI, essentially all research is now cross-disciplinary — AI can read not just the literature on a particular subject, but the literature on a million other subjects that might have produced useful techniques or insights for the problem at hand. Superscience So far, all of the factors I’ve listed are ways that AI can speed up science as it’s already done. I’ve basically described how AI can send gigantic hordes of superhumanly fast, superhumanly well-read, superhumanly mathematically gifted researchers to re-accelerate scientific discovery. But it’s also possible that AI will enable types of discovery — and ways of understanding the natural world — that no network of humans, no matter how large or how brilliant it was or how long it had to work, would ever be able to discover. In a post back in July, I wrote about how that might work: What if there are lots of…aspects of the Universe that [are] too complex to understand in terms of simple laws, but not so complex that they just dissolve into unknowable chaos? It’s possible that we can reliably control these complex phenomena with AI, even if we never reduce them to the kind of principles that we can teach a grad student in a textbook… Another way of saying this is that there may be laws of the universe that humans can’t understand but AI can. I call these “cloud laws” — causal regularities that can be exploited by technology, but which are too diffuse and complex for an individual human being to either intuit or communicate… Perhaps social sciences like economics, sociology, and political science obey similarly complex regularities, and AI can help us find them. Perhaps there are physical processes — plasma, or topological materials, or aerial turbulence, etc. — that obey cloud laws instead of chaos?… [H]uman collaboration is bottlenecked — it’s limited by our ability to intuit patterns at an individual level, and to communicate these patterns from one individual to another. AI, being a computer, just doesn’t have this sort of limitation; it can work with vast, diffuse patterns without having to break them into pieces or simplify them in order to compress them into the tiny pipelines of person-to-person explanation… If much of the Universe turns out to be ruled by cloud laws, we could be on the precipice of a scientific renaissance. In order to discover cloud laws, AI will need huge amounts of data about the natural world. AI figured out human speech by assimilating essentially all of the text humans have ever written. If it’s going to figure out hidden patterns in biology, neuroscience, materials science, etc., it’s going to need similarly massive amounts of data from physical instruments. That data will be far, far more than humans — individually or collectively — would be able to parse, label, characterize, or model. But AI was built to do this. If scientists simply build huge arrays of sensors to measure complex phenomena like the brain, the cell, the economy, etc., they may be able to feed this flood of data to AI directly and bypass human cognitive intermediation entirely. AI would then learn about the world directly, and it might learn things that humans never could. This “superscience”, if you want to call it that, would actually go beyond the kind of science humans have done heretofore. Many of the technologies it yielded would be beyond human comprehension — indistinguishable from magic. But to the AIs, they would make perfect scientific sense. In any case, it seems clear that the scientific slowdown that threatened human progress will now be delayed — at least for a while. Unless humans have somehow found most of the actual exploitable regularities in our Universe, we’re about to enter a new golden age of science. Subscribe Share
Global Health & WASH
The US National Institutes of Health reopened its center and program-project machinery in force. NIGMS is funding Collaborative Program Grants for interdisciplinary teams, NIAID opened both its Immune Tolerance Network and a next-generation R&D call, the NCI runs its Carcinogen Hazard Assessment Monographs program, the National Library of Medicine is funding institutional training in biomedical AI and data science, and NIH reopened its Centers for AIDS Research. The tell: these pay for standing centers and multi-year consortia at institutions with an existing funded research base, not one-off projects, so the fit is an established US research institution, not a single investigator. Disease-specific foundations are again funding the researcher, not just the research. The Parkinson’s Foundation opened its Paul Oreffice Innovations in Care Award and the National Ataxia Foundation its Research Seed Money Grant. The tell, the same one we flagged last cycle, is a named early-career or seed award that builds a pipeline of scientists committed to one condition, so what wins is a researcher willing to specialize. The post-USAID global-health money is routing through a State Department program statement and multilateral innovation funds. The US Department of State’s Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy opened its Advancing Global Health Annual Program Statement, Grand Challenges Canada opened Nexa Lighthouse for climate and health innovation in Asia and the Pacific at USD $250,000 to $2,000,000, and CEPI opened a rolling call on vaccine-manufacturing analytics. The tell: the largest health money this cycle sits in a standing program statement and in staged innovation vehicles, not in a single bilateral grant. Total Estimated Funding Pool: ~$35.4M across discrete grants. (Separately, large national-formula envelopes not counted in this total: U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy (GHSD).) This post is for paid subscribers. This helps support the time and effort it takes to curate and organize these opportunities. Subscribe To keep this accessible to everyone who needs it, we’re happy to offer pay what you can rates. You can find more details here. New opportunities: Paul Oreffice Innovations in Care Award, Parkinson’s Foundation. *New!* *Closing soon!* The Parkinson’s Foundation created the Paul Oreffice Innovations in Care Award to fund clinicians rethinking how people with Parkinson’s disease receive care. The Foundation is using pilot funding to move promising ideas into testable projects, backing work across four lanes: strengthening community clinician capability, redesigning care models, building patient-centered technologies, and defining the minimum clinical datasets that make better standards possible. It wants hypothesis-driven, clinically grounded projects that can generate evidence strong enough to attract further funding. By opening the door to clinicians at every career stage and strongly preferring projects that involve people with Parkinson’s in their design, the Foundation signals that it values practical, patient-shaped innovation over prestige. The strongest fits are US-licensed clinicians with a focus on Parkinson’s and an institutional home for applied care research. Geographies: united states. Who can apply: Clinicians of all career stages, from fellows to established faculty, who are licensed to care for patients in the United States and have a significant focus on Parkinson’s disease. Physicians must have completed a neurology residency (or justify how their training pathway benefits people with PD); allied health professionals must hold an advanced degree, typically a PhD. Fellows, those in mentored positions, and those within two years of starting an independent position require a mentor and a mentor support letter. The sponsoring institution’s grants office is the authorized recipient and funds are disbursed to the institution. Funding amount: Maximum of $200,000 over two years; up to three awards. Targeted Sectors / SDGs: Health; Innovation; Science & Technology. Deadline: November 1, 2026. Learn more and apply here. Design and Deliver the Next EIT Health Bootcamps, EIT Health. *New!* *Closing soon!* EIT Health is opening its call for consortia to design and deliver the next generation of its health start-up bootcamps, funding the curriculum, masterclasses, mentoring, and investor engagement that turn early health ventures into fundable companies. The organization is using these learning paths to strengthen Europe’s health innovation pipeline across digital health evidence, deep tech and AI commercialization, cross-border investment, and patient access. What EIT Health wants to back is not a single course but durable delivery capacity built by partners who span industry, education, and research. Requiring multi-country consortia and a revenue-sharing stake in the programs signals that EIT Health expects these bootcamps to outlast the grant. The strongest fits are established training providers, universities, and industry partners with proven reach into health entrepreneurs. Geographies: Europe. Who can apply: Consortia only (individuals cannot apply), comprising a minimum of two and a maximum of five independent legal entities. Partners must cover at least two sides of the Knowledge Triangle (industry, education, research), including at least one industry organisation, and at least two entities must be legally established in different Horizon Europe countries. Funding amount: Foundational Learning Path: up to EUR €112,000; Thematic Learning Paths: up to EUR €124,500 per path (up to four thematic projects); up to EUR €610,000 total EIT Health funding available under the call. Targeted Sectors / SDGs: Health; Innovation; Science & Technology; Economic Development & Livelihoods. Deadline: November 2, 2026. Learn more and apply here. Technology Transfer Offices & Entrepreneurship Support Call (Beyond the Lab: From Research to Venture), EIT Health. *New!* *Closing soon!* EIT Health is opening its Technology Transfer Offices and Entrepreneurship Support Call to fund consortia that will deliver the Beyond the Lab: From Research to Venture program for healthcare researchers. EIT Health is using the grant to build local capacity for turning laboratory science into incorporated start-ups, paying experienced technology transfer offices and entrepreneurship support providers to run masterclasses, structured mentoring, and a closing Pitch Day across two cohorts. It wants to back organizations that can walk researchers from discovery to company formation, not just teach theory. Requiring two transfer offices plus one venture-building provider signals that EIT Health values proven commercialization experience alongside academic reach. The strongest fits are European research-commercialization teams with a track record of moving health innovations toward investable ventures. Geographies: Europe. Who can apply: A consortium of two Technology Transfer Offices (representing higher education institutions or research organisations) and one Entrepreneurship Support Provider with demonstrated experience in venture building and start-up support. Applicants may apply for more than one learning path where they can demonstrate the required expertise and capacity for each. Funding amount: Up to EUR €77,000 in 2027 and up to EUR €77,000 in 2028 (up to EUR €154,000 total per consortium over two years). Targeted Sectors / SDGs: Health; Innovation; Science & Technology; Economic Development & Livelihoods. Deadline: November 2, 2026. Learn more and apply here. EIT Health RIS Country Representatives Call (2027-2028), EIT Health. *New!* *Closing soon!* EIT Health is seeking organizations to serve as Country Representatives across eleven Regional Innovation Scheme countries in central and eastern Europe for the 2027 to 2028 period. The money funds a national anchor in each country, an organization that maps the local health innovation ecosystem, connects startups and researchers to EIT Health programs, and builds the stakeholder relationships that let health ventures grow. EIT Health is backing local capacity rather than individual projects, which is why it accepts both single organizations and national consortia that span education, research, and industry. The requirement for co-financing signals that it wants representatives already embedded in their national systems. The strongest fits are established ecosystem builders with deep ties to health innovation stakeholders in one eligible country. Geographies: Croatia; Czech Republic; Estonia; Greece; Hungary; Latvia; Malta; Romania; Serbia; Slovenia; Turkey. Who can apply: Registered legal entities established in one of the eligible EIT RIS countries. Single organisations or national consortia may apply. Consortia must include at least two sides of the Knowledge Triangle (education, research and industry), and all consortium partners must be established in the same eligible country. Suitable applicants have demonstrated experience in healthcare innovation ecosystem development, innovation support and entrepreneurship, start-up acceleration, technology transfer, research and higher education, business support, and stakeholder engagement, with strong links to national innovation stakeholders. Funding amount: Up to EUR €182,000 per Country Representative (maximum funding per project); total call budget up to EUR €1,274,500; EIT Health funds up to 60% of total eligible project costs. Targeted Sectors / SDGs: Health; Innovation; Science & Technology; Economic Development & Livelihoods. Deadline: November 2, 2026. Learn more and apply here. Architects of Trust: Community-Driven Demand Creation for New TB Vaccines, Treatment Action Group (TAG). *New!* *Closing soon!* Treatment Action Group, with funding from Wellcome, is opening its Architects of Trust call to help communities prepare for the new tuberculosis vaccines now moving through late-stage trials. The money backs civil society and community-based organizations to raise awareness, surface local questions and concerns, and press policymakers toward equitable national rollout. By pairing each grantee with an advocacy mentor and running a strategy workshop alongside the Global TB Vaccine Forum, Treatment Action Group is building a durable advocacy bench rather than funding one-off outreach. The two-stage design, starting with a short expression of interest, signals that fit and community rootedness matter more than polished proposals. The strongest fits are locally trusted groups with real TB, immunization, or health advocacy experience and a committed project lead. Geographies: Brazil; Ethiopia; India; Indonesia; Kenya; Malawi; Mozambique; Nigeria; Peru; Philippines; South Africa; Tanzania; Vietnam; Zambia. Who can apply: National, subnational, or regional civil society organizations (CSOs) or community-based organizations based in one of the 14 eligible countries or in Eastern Europe/Central Asia regional networks, with experience in TB, immunization, or other health advocacy and in community engagement or policy advocacy; well integrated into stakeholder networks with membership or affiliation to other CSO or community networks; naming a dedicated project lead (’architect of trust’) who can attend the April 2027 Zaragoza forum in person; and holding (or committing to adopt) organizational policies on safeguarding (bullying, harassment, abuse, and harm), equity, diversity and inclusion, and legal compliance, research practice and governance. Funding amount: Grants of up to US$45,000 will be awarded to 8 CSO partners across 14 high-TB-burden countries plus regional networks in Eastern Europe and Central Asia; each grant funds 12 months of work. Targeted Sectors / SDGs: Health; Governance; Policy & Advocacy. Deadline: November 4, 2026. Learn more and apply here.
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Mid-Columbia Ballet prepares for 50th anniversary of "The Nutcracker"
RICHLAND, WA. — For 50 years, the Mid-Columbia Ballet has brought the holiday classic The Nutcracker to audiences in the Tri-Cities. This year, the organization is celebrating that milestone with 144 dancers, new costumes and months of preparation to bring the beloved production to life. The annual performance is a major undertaking for the dancers, instructors and volunteers who work behind the scenes to make the show possible. Rehearsals span 13 weeks, with dancers practicing four days a week for multiple hours at a time.This year’s production will feature new costumes for the Waltz of the Flowers, including a sequence with as many as 25 dancers on stage at once. The show also brings together performers across generations, including adults who have been part of the production for more than 20 years. For Artistic Director Debra Rogo, the preparation begins long before the curtains open.Rogo has been involved with the Mid-Columbia Ballet for 40 years and says planning for The Nutcracker takes place throughout the year. While organizing a production of this size requires significant time and effort, she says watching young dancers grow and develop a passion for ballet makes it all worthwhile. “It’s why I do this,” Rogo said. “It is overwhelming ina good way. To be able to share into their lives and watch them develop a love of this art form and the hard work … it makes me very proud.”Rogo’s decades of involvement reflect the lasting impact the production has had on the local dance community. For many performers, The Nutcracker is more than a seasonal performance. It is an opportunity to build skills, create relationships and become part of a tradition that continues year after year.While the dancers spend weeks rehearsing their routines, a large team of volunteers works behind the scenes to support the production.More than 100 volunteers are involved this year, helping make the performance possible. Their contributions reflect the range of people who come together to support the arts in the Tri-Cities.Randy Haven, a longtime volunteer, says the sense of community is one of the things that makes the experience so special.“The people that you hear volunteering, it’s incredible,” Haven said. He described seeing people from different backgrounds working together backstage, from employees at Hanford to parents raising large families.Haven says that shared commitment creates a family-like atmosphere among the people involved in the production. For Rebecca and Torrie, the Mid-Columbia Ballet has been part of their lives since childhood. Both began dancing with the organization at age seven and have since returned as teachers, helping introduce the next generation to the art form.Their connection to the ballet has continued into their adult lives, creating an opportunity to share their love of dance with younger performers.Torrie now has three daughters performing in The Nutcracker, giving her the chance to watch them experience a tradition that was also part of her own childhood.Being able to see her daughters participate in the production has made the experience especially meaningful, she said.Although audiences can see productions of The Nutcracker in major cities such as New York and Seattle, those involved with the Mid-Columbia Ballet say the local performance offers something distinctive.The community atmosphere allows audiences to experience the production while supporting local performers and the people who dedicate their time to the arts.Rebecca says experiencing a live performance alongside other people is particularly meaningful in a world where so much time is spent looking at screens.She believes live art gives people an opportunity to connect with one another through a shared experience.The ballet’s production also gives local dancers the chance to perform for their community while continuing a tradition that has been part of the Tri-Cities for five decades. When to see ‘The Nutcracker’ in RichlandThe Mid-Columbia Ballet will present its 50th-anniversary production of The Nutcracker Dec. 10 through Dec. 13 in Richland.Tickets go on sale Nov. 1. Audiences can look forward to seeing 144 dancers, new costumes and the work of more than 100 volunteers come together for the holiday production.COPYRIGHT 2026 BY APPLE VALLEY NEWS NOW. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED.
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ESMO: Roche touts ‘convincing’ phase 3 KRAS data after win over rivals
Roche has shed more light on its investigational KRAS G12C inhibitor's phase 3 victory over Amgen’s Lumakras and Bristol Myers Squibb’s Krazati. The open-label Krascendo 1 trial enrolled 338 people with previously treated KRAS G12C-mutated non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Patients who had already received a KRAS G12C inhibitor or pan-KRAS/RAS inhibitor were excluded from the trial. Participants received either divarasib once daily, Lumakras once daily or Krazati twice daily. Roche announced back in July that divarasib had demonstrated statistically significant improvements in progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS), meeting the trial’s primary and key secondary endpoints. But the Swiss pharma had been holding back the detailed data until now. At the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress in Madrid, Roche revealed that median OS for the 167 patients who received divarasib was 17.7 months, compared to 12 months for the 171 patients who received Lumakras or Krazati. The benefit was similarly clear when it came to median PFS, which stood at 9.8 months versus 5.7 months, respectively. A total of 44% of patients receiving divarasib were alive without disease progression at one year, compared to 24% of the control group, according to Roche’s presentation. It was a similar story for the objective response rate, which came in at 58% for divarasib versus 32% for the control group, while median duration of response was 11.9 months versus 6.9 months. Stefan Frings, M.D., Ph.D., deputy chief medical officer at Roche Pharma, told Fierce that the data made for a “very comprehensive, strong package, which should be convincing to health authorities.” “It’s an important advance for patients with lung cancer,” Frings said in an interview at a Madrid hotel during the conference. “It's a second-line setting, and patients who receive divarasib benefit compared to the current first-generation KRAS G12C inhibitors by having far longer overall survival,” he continued. “They live longer. They have better progression-free survival, better response rates, and with a safety profile which is—if [anything]—even better,” he said. According to Roche, 4.8% of patients receiving divarasib discontinued treatment due to treatment-related adverse events, compared to 11.7% in the control group. Serious treatment-related adverse events were also less common with divarasib, at 7.8% versus 15.2%. Roche’s confidence in divarasib had been building even before this phase 3 success. The candidate had already shown better potency and selectivity than the incumbent KRAS G12C inhibitors Krazati and Lumakras in preclinical tests. After cross-trial comparisons suggested that the edge translated into better clinical outcomes, Roche axed a study comparing divarasib to the chemotherapy docetaxel and went toe-to-toe with Lumakras and Krazati. “We designed the drug on purpose with higher potency and better selectivity,” Frings explained. “So, based on preclinical models, we clearly knew it would be superior to the first generation.” “It’s honestly not so frequent that pharma companies go head-to-head,” he added. “But if you want to make a point, if you want to convince payers, prescribers and patients … then a head-to-head win is rather rewarding.” While Amgen and BMS reached the regulatory finish line first for KRAS G12C-mutated, locally advanced or metastatic NSCLC in 2021 and 2022, respectively, they have struggled to capitalize on their head start. Krazati brought in $55 million for BMS in the second quarter, while Lumakras delivered $111 million to Amgen. For its part, Roche is aiming for peak divarasib sales of 1 billion to 2 billion Swiss francs ($1.2 billion to $2.5 billion), according to Frings. The Big Pharma is currently recruiting patients into a phase 3 trial comparing divarasib plus Keytruda against Keytruda plus chemotherapy in previously untreated advanced or metastatic nonsquamous KRAS G12C-mutated NSCLC. Roche has previously suggested that sales in metastatic disease would account for most of the forecast. Frings was tight-lipped on the exact timeline for a regulatory filing but said the Swiss pharma is “certainly keen to get this to as many patients as possible around the world.” Roche has more RAS drugs coming up behind divarasib. The pharma has already launched phase 1 trials of a pan-RAS inhibitor called RG6505 and a KRAS G12D inhibitor dubbed RG6620 in solid tumors. Roche’s partner Chugai Pharmaceutical is also testing a pan-KRAS inhibitor called AUBE00. Roche has made a “deliberate effort” to test a range of RAS drugs, Frings said. “If you have many rare mutations and you are scrambling to find sufficient patients, a pan-RAS inhibitor makes a lot of sense,” he explained.
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(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.) Well, I had a simple article planned for this week. Called “Whoa, I Missed It!”, I’d take a gander at a few important-but-under-the-radar stories I didn’t cover while I wrote about all things “Skydance. (Formerly known as “the saga of Netflix trying to buy Warner Bros., but not Discovery, then Paramount-Skydance bought all of Warner Bros. Discovery”.) Alas, that article will have to wait. Netflix made news. Ironically, my “Whoa, I Missed It!” article would have mostly been about “content” strategy decisions, which is also what today’s article is about. But instead of the entire industry, this article will only cover Netflix’s decision to upend their film and TV content teams. Just that! So that’s the full topic of the day. I’m going to tackle the issue in the opposite direction of the way “stuff” flows: uphill. We’ll start at film, then move onto TV, and then onto the CEOs themselves, and the strategy questions that still remain. But we start with the numbers driving this. Let’s dive in. Subscribe Most Important Story of the Week - Netflix Upends Their Corporate Hierarchy I’ve got a lot of thoughts, but we’ll start with the most common response to yesterday’s article. Let’s Talk Stock Price More than one person, responding to what I published two days ago, pointed out that, well, actually, the thing driving Netflix’s actions is this: In short, stock price! Even if Netflix isn’t obsessed with their own share price—they probably are, but, for the record, my strategic advice to every CEO is to absolutely ignore stock prices, which will, ironically, probably help the stock price long-term—most everyone thinks they are. By the way, I prefer market capitalization to stock prices, because it’s a more apples-to-apples way to compare companies: But there’s an even better way to look at it, and it kinda casts some doubt on the entire push here: price-to-earnings. I have a long list of articles that I wish I had written, and chief among them is an article titled, “Am I Still a Netflix ‘Bear’?” meaning someone who thinks Netflix’s stock is overvalued. As of last summer, Netflix had solved their biggest problem—which for me (circa 2019) was the lack of free cash flow—but their stock was CRAZY overvalued. That’s this chart here: Why did Netflix’s stock price increase to a price-to-earnings ratio of 50 last summer? What financial metric changed so quickly? Nothing. Given that, historically, mature entertainment companies average 10 to 20, with 16 being the average, that increase made little sense. Netflix’s stock swoon these last eight or so months wasn’t irrational; the stock price rise last year was. So if you want a really hot Netflix take, here it is: Netflix’s stock price has been going down because the financial industry recovered its senses, not because of any strategic mistake. Yes, that would imply that cleaning house may have been a mistake. That’s why the charts yesterday are so important, because they show that Netflix did have a strategic problem (a lack of hits) and that’s what they moved to address. (One could also argue the industry drastically overrated Netflix’s growth prospects, but that’s a financial industry problem, not a Netflix strategy problem per se. Some growth estimates are just crazy. *cough* AI *cough*) Now, the last time Netflix’s stock price crashed—circa 2022—it gave them an opening. I’d argue Netflix insiders knew they needed to expand post-COVID-19 crisis, adding advertising, cracking down on password sharing, and dabbling in sports. But if they had done that when their stock price was high, it would give folks a reason to second guess their strategy. (Arguably, last year, when Netflix pursued the Warner Bros. merger, it gave the industry a chance to review their business.) Instead, after the 2022 fall, they had the opening to make strategic changes. We may see Netflix pivot again following this latest slide. For example, the “binge versus weekly” conversation is alive and well again. Same for expanding into theaters even more. And adding both linear channels and streaming bundles. And maybe more either social, user-generated, vertical, or creator content. But the first shift came with who is making the content calls. A Message from Our Sponsor Last winter Pulp Fiction was on Netflix. For those same 90 days, it was also free, with ads, on Pluto TV and the Roku Channel. That is not a glitch, and it is not rare. The title has run on 20 different US streaming services since 2019, across 80 separate windows, and for more than 600 of those days it sat on a paid subscription service and a free ad-supported one at the same time. Almost nobody can see this, because when a title leaves a service, the record that it was ever there tends to leave with it. Reelgood keeps that record, dated to the day rather than the month: 4MM+ movie, show and episode titles across 300+ services globally, with timestamped arrivals, departures and moves across SVOD, AVOD, TVOD and vMVPD. Licensing teams price against every prior window. Rights teams check what a licensee actually delivered, and when. Pick a title you think you know: data.reelgood.com/title-availability Film - Dan Lin Want to know why I don’t opine on individual film or TV executives, especially new hires? Dan Lin. As I always caution, it’s really, really, really tough to predict which executives will succeed in new roles and which won’t. The successful head of co-production/finance partner, Rideback, Lin was considered for the head of DC Studios job before taking the job as the head of Netflix. By all accounts at the time, this was a smart hire. (That’s my read of the news coverage anyways.) But now that Netflix has fired Dan Lin, we got a slew of news stories about how he was doing a terrible job. In sports media, Bryan Curtis, new Substack writer/podcaster from The Ringer, calls this the “now you tell us” story, when you only hear the bad news after a star athlete leaves a sports team. In this case, now they tell us that Dan Lin was bad with talent after he got kicked out the door. So was Dan Lin a flop? It’s actually tough to say. While film moves faster than TV, even two years isn’t really enough time to evaluate a person’s output. The new head hasn’t really taken control. As Emily Horgan noted, it takes much longer than two years to produce animated films, so yeah, it’s definitely too early to judge in that domain. As for live-action films, I just published an article by Brandon Katz called “Netflix’s Summer of Bummer”, but I’d point out Netflix had a bad summer two years ago too. Arguably, their best summer came from KPop Demon Hunters last year and Happy Gilmore 2, the latter of which I saw credited to Lin. Then, the stories came out that Dan Lin clashed with talent, both Ben Affleck and Greta Gerwig, classic “now they tell us” factoids to explain his firing. This may have been true, but also should have been expected given that he was given the mandate to bring budgets back in check, especially after Rebel Moon. So if he made folks upset, well, that’s what he was hired to do! But also, he was described as “well-liked” at his hiring! In that case, I’m a bit sympathetic to Lin, since he may have been undercut by senior leadership, as often happens. Basically, a CEO hires a subordinate to be their “bad cop” and keep budgets in check, but then when talent complains, the CEO ends up undercutting them. That’s how I think you end up with a Narnia movie as expensive as any of the other flops, along with a film executive the town no longer likes. As a result, I think that Netflix is now executing a classic “hire the opposite” move by hiring Peter Rice. This phrase comes from my experience following football and basketball coaching decisions, where teams generally hire the opposite of who they just had. If you have an offense-minded head coach, hire the defensive guy. Or in college football, if you have a strong recruiter, then you pivot to an “X’s and Os” type of guy. Or in pro basketball, if you have a very analytically minded coach, you hire the player-friendly guy. I see that here. After dropping Scott Stuber—arguably a talent-friendly executive with lax budget control—Netflix hired the business guy to keep costs in check. Now Netflix is pivoting back to Peter Rice and presumably a more talent-friendly regime. (Disney, by the way, has done this twice: hiring business guys to succeed talent-friendly Bob Iger. It didn’t work out last time.) When it comes to Peter Rice…we’ll see! Maybe he works out, but maybe he doesn’t. I’d actually say the biggest problem is that Netflix still hasn’t solved its “IP Problem”, in that they don’t own much IP, so they just have a lower hit rate. The new executive won’t solve that. (Though buying Lionsgate would help.) Share “Content” - Bela Bajaria I almost published yesterday’s article after this column, but ended up flipping the order, because it told the story so well. So if you want the data for why Netflix is looking at TV to fix their problems, it’s in that article, this graph in particular: I know I just wrote that it’s often hard to judge executives, but Bajaria ran TV for six years and film for three and a half more. That’s more than enough to judge hit rates, and Netflix needs more hits. That’s the story. Since 2023, Netflix hasn’t had as many hit shows as it used to, and many of its previous power house TV shows have ended their runs (Stranger Things most of all). Also, many shows from 2020 to 2022 probably pre-dated Bajaria’s tenure. (That said, one thing may have been outside of Bajaria’s control, which I explain below.) Let’s lump some content strategy thoughts about Netflix and TV into one place: We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… Why I partially blame Squid Game for Netflix’s latest troubles… What is “the football trap”... Why it might not be the TV shows or films’ fault at all… What change I don’t think Netflix will make... How Bela Bajaria evolved Netflix’s TV strategy in smart ways… Whose departure likely submarined Bajaria’s final few years… One sneaky explanation for Netflix’s content struggles... And a whole lot more... ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support.
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Pope hope, that’s entertainment, and getting ahead in the CIA
Happy Friday friends, I want to start by just breathing for all of us a big long collective sigh of relief at the news this week that the pope’s doctors have basically blown the all clear for Leo’s health. Going from knowing nothing to him declaring to the world he needed surgery, to a cancer diagnosis, to bouncing out of the hospital in barely even days, to ringing the bell in less than two weeks is whiplash inducing. But in the best possible way. We are living in a world in which the Roman pontiff, by dint of history, biography and circumstance, is once more at the epicenter of global affairs. Not just conversations about religion, or Christian and post-Christian values, but the bleeding edge of the most pressing issues of human affairs. Think I am exaggerating a touch? Consider the images of the crowds who greeted Leo in Paris just weeks ago, and juxtapose them with the absolute photo negative scenes unfolding there recently. Ask yourself how many world leaders are talking about AI right now and directly citing the pope as they do so. Try to name a country who has had as many top-ranked diplomats in and out of both Russia and Ukraine in the last three years as the Vatican has in the last three months. It has been fascinating to watch Leo XIV emerge as not just a kind of pop culture reference point or totem to be cited (Francis was often name-checked this way) but as a kinetic force in global conversation. Given the state of things, we need global figures of gravitas and values, even better if they have real wisdom behind what they are saying. So news of Leo’s illness was, it seemed to me, a tremor with potentially Richter Scale implications. That not only has the worst not come to pass but instead we’ve had the best of outcomes announced is something to really be grateful for. Humanity, it seems to me, is entering one of its irregular but cyclical phases where the pace of change — technological, social, and geopolitical — outstrips the ability of previously settled norms and received wisdom to cope. Such periods – and I think the first decades of the last century were a similar such time – throw into question the viability of all kinds of institutions. And many of ours have been straining to breaking point for a few years now. The papacy has the power and the potential to be a steadying pole in all of this. That’s my hope, anyway. It’s a lot to freight the office with, though it is arguably its ultimate purpose from its founding, to be a steadying rock on which all that matters can be anchored. It’s also, of course, an intolerable weight of responsibility to place on a single man. But I am encouraged to have hope in – and for – Leo. The apostle whom he succeeds, after all, was famously unequal to some moments, failed some tests of faith, and resiled from taking the road which led ultimately to the circus on Vatican hill. Human frailty and limitations, of health, of character, of temper, can open us to Christ, whose strength is greatest in our weakness, so St. Paul learned. That gives me hope, and I am sure it consoles Leo, too. And so I will continue to pray for him. Because we need apostles of rock right now. Here’s the news. Subscribe The News The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued yesterday a new document “Venite ad me: Considerations on the Transmission of the Faith in an Epochal Change.” It’s not a short document, and it is at pains to stress this isn’t a doctrinal note from the dicastery, either. Rather, it brings together reflections on an important issue from the Church around the world. Some of it I actually found really rather powerful. It is, however, 25,000, which is a lot for a busy reader to get through on a weekday. So, you can read our busy reader’s summary right here. — News broke yesterday of an Oct. 22 meeting of U.S. bishops with President Donald Trump. The meeting was organized by an official at the Heritage Foundation, according to several sources close to the meeting. Video of several U.S. bishops praying in the Oval Office over President Trump was posted on social media Thursday afternoon, first by White House Communications Advisor Margo Martin, and then by the official twitter.com account of the Archdiocese of Denver. The meeting has drawn sharp criticism because of its proximity to the upcoming midterm Congressional elections, in which Democrats are widely expected to win control of the House of Representatives, while control of the Senate remains closely contested. Sources close to the bishops’ conference told The Pillar that some USCCB senior officials were surprised by the existence of the meeting when video of it first emerged online. And a source close to conference president Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City told The Pillar that the archbishop was “deeply frustrated” by the occasion of the meeting. An official conference spokesperson told The Pillar that the meeting was “not organized with or by the USCCB” and was “not affiliated with the conference.” You can read the whole story here. — The next National Eucharistic Congress will be held in Indianapolis in 2029, a return to the city that hosted the last gathering in 2024. You read it here first. By here, I don’t mean this newsletter, I mean at The Pillar. We broke the story this week. It’s a big deal, in as much as the last congress was a roaring success and the next installment has the potential to be a real focal point for evangelizing efforts in the coming years. Read all about it here. — As Pope Leo prepares for the longest trip of his pontificate, Church leaders in Uruguay say the pontiff will encounter a highly secularized culture, in a country with a very different Catholic history than many of its South American neighbors. The nation has not had a papal visit since 1988, and leaders who spoke with The Pillar say it has a dire need for evangelization, even amid the prospect of a small revival in faith. This is real reporting on the Church in the country, and frankly a story you simply are not going to be able to read anywhere else. Read the whole thing. — The Archdiocese of Detroit announced this week a plan that would see the vast majority of its parish priests reassigned next summer, amid a restructuring process expected to dramatically shrink the number of parishes in the archdiocese. Archbishop Edward Weisenburger said this week that the plan “asks much of our priests,” but is a “sacrifice they are making as brothers of one, unified presbyterate.” The thing is, as JD pointed out in an analysis yesterday, pastors of parishes have a legal right to stability in office, so the only way this kind of wholesale reassignment goes ahead is if all of the archdiocesan clergy agree to resign. That creates its own kind of legal issues, though, and re-raises longstanding questions about the effectiveness of canonical due process protections for priests when dealing with coercive exercises in authority. Read the whole thing here. — More than three months after the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued its decree declaring the excommunication of the leadership of the Society of St. Pius X, questions remain about the full effects of the society’s schism. Specifically, the DDF’s July claim that marriages witnessed and confessions heard by SSPX priests are now invalid remains contested — and it emerged this week it appears that the Vatican’s own legal experts don’t agree. You can read my whole analysis of the situation and what it means here. All I would add is that the DDF’s undeveloped, some would say unsubstantiated, claim about the invalidity of some SSPX sacraments came in their July Explanatory Note on the schismatic consecrations by the society that month. It touches directly on both papal acts of governance — indeed it purports to nullify them — and the most intimate pastoral encounters possible in a parish setting. If there is one aspect of the Francis-era style of governance I would like the curia to finally cut out, root and branch, it would be these attempts to try to effect extraordinarily sensitive legislative acts via a note. — At least a dozen French bishops have spoken out following an eruption of violence on the country’s streets Oct. 17. Not surprisingly, they unanimously condemned the violence, but the length and content of their interventions varied significantly. Several sought to distinguish between the actions of rioters and what they suggested were the legitimate concerns of peaceful young protesters. Many also evoked Pope Leo XIV’s Sept. 25-28 visit to France, suggesting it offered a powerful counter-image to the scenes of looting and destruction. A number of bishops also stressed their solidarity with law enforcement officials who struggled to contain the disorder, as well as the owners of the roughly 3,000 damaged or looted businesses. What’s the background to the nationwide unrest that the French media calls “les violences du 17 octobre”? And what exactly are the bishops saying? Read all about it here. — A Polish bishop called for the firm defense of unborn children as well as compassion for their mothers this week, as the lower house of Poland’s parliament passed two bills seeking to liberalize the country’s abortion laws. The bill on decriminalizing assistance in an abortion passed by 217 votes to 213, while the abortion in cases of fetal abnormality bill passed by 233 to 203, thanks to the government’s majority in the lower house. Both bills will now move to the Polish Senate, the upper house of parliament, where the ruling coalition has a larger majority. The fetal abnormality bill is symbolically significant because if it became law, it would effectively overturn a 2020 ruling by Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal that a 1993 law permitting abortion for a severe and irreversible disability or a life-threatening incurable disease was unconstitutional. Read the whole story here. Subscribe **[The St. Paul Center App | Bible Study On-The-Go Read and understand the Bible with St. Paul Center’s new app! With today’s leading Catholic Scripture scholars as your guides, the St. Paul Center app empowers you to read the Bible](https://stpaulcenter.com/app?utm_source=pillar&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=applaunch)** from the heart of the Church. Download the app for free at either the Apple or the Google app stores. https://stpaulcenter.com/app That’s entertainment I have written before about my deep and sincere reservations about the celebrity exorcist subculture which has taken root in American Catholicism. And, because I am very ill at ease with the entire thing, I try to keep a weather eye on the phenomenon without being drawn into the kind of online back-and-forth which these figures sometimes generate. Earlier this week, JD noted that one such celebrity exorcist type, Fr. Chad Ripperger, has undertaken, on the request of his bishop, a year’s fast from interviews and public speaking. I’m sure that will be salutary for him, if for no other reason than that receiving with docility requests from one’s rightful ecclesiastical superiors always comes with graces. Then a second thing happened this week which caught my eye. Apparently, another fixture in the celebrity exorcist world, Fr. Carlos Martins, has initiated a lawsuit against two lay men — apparently associates of Rippenger, though I am unclear in what way, exactly — for allegedly defaming him and his ministry on a podcast. It seems the suit was initiated nearly a year ago and is now pending. At issue, I read, is that the two men described Martins on a podcast as “not who he says he is” with regard to his exorcism ministry and that he “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” These statements Martins considers to be false and defamatory and, his suit claims, “directly affected the sale and reception of [his] The Exorcist Files book that was newly released at the time these episodes aired.” I don’t want to get too into the weeds of the details here, but a couple of things struck me about all this.
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