NYTimes: “Started in 2017, Yudhveer Akhada is a residential wrestling academy for girls, run by a family of competitive wrestlers in Sonipat, a semi-urban industrial town in Haryana, a province in northern India bordering Delhi. Currently it hosts 45 trainees who, on arrival, are typically between 10 and 15 and are expected to stay until they are 20, immersing themselves in the burgeoning community of girls who wrestle. Every student who enters the academy has the same goal: to win an Olympic medal for India.”
NYTimes: “The simplest sign of a smoothly running gastrointestinal tract is also the most boring one: Your gut should chug along quietly and with little complaint. Eating or drinking should not cause more than occasional bloating or discomfort, and you should have regular, well-formed bowel movements every one to three days that pass without much straining, said Dr. Folasade May, a gastroenterologist and associate professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at U.C.L.A. If you regularly have discomfort or pain from symptoms like acid reflux, bloating, constipation or diarrhea, that could be a sign that your gut is not working optimally, Dr. May said. And it may be worth thinking about whether simple tweaks to your diet and other lifestyle factors would help.”
Brad DeLong: “There is a difference between the growth rate of wealth and what that growth rate of wealth means. You only go from having no indoor plumbing and no public health — and so having half your babies die before the age of five — to one in which infant mortality is extremely low and a genuine astonishing tragedy once. You only go from spending two hours a day, at least, thinking about how hungry you are and how it really would be nice to have more calories right now to not having to think about that once. You only go from having your children so malnourished that the adult heights of the boys are 5 foot 3, to adult heights of 5 foot 9 or so, on average — you only do that once. We did that, and we did that mostly in the 50 years after 1870, at least for the global north. We’re doing equal things in terms of how much we’re making since, but with possible exceptions after 2006 slowdown.”
FT on how AI can help us build imagination machines: “Ideally, we want machines to make up stuff that is reliable, not just plausible, and to extend the range of human insight. Can we use machine learning models to generate truly novel ideas in hard areas, including mathematics and science, and enrich human creativity? It is beginning to look that way…Robot learning models can tackle three barriers to human creativity: boredom, shame and vision.”
WSJ: “India has made some impressive strides. In recent years, numerous new expressways have been built or are under construction. From 2014 to 2019, national highway kilometers expanded by 45%. Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014, the number of airports has doubled and the total of rural roads has increased 85%. Electricity plant capacity has risen 66% and blackouts have become much less frequent…New infrastructure, regulatory reforms and digitization buttress its strength…But the lack of a stronger response to reform might also signal how much more work India has to do. The pandemic set back education for children, many young Indians aren’t finding jobs, and inflation and budget deficits are still high. It remains a hard place to do business; infrastructure still takes too long to build, held up by such factors as land acquisition.”
