WSJ: “Modern life is digital. Adults need to help young people navigate the costs and benefits, not launch bans and hope for the best.”
Peggy Noonan: “Among those who think about foreign affairs and world history, the great story of the past dozen years or so has been the collapse of the postwar international order that created systems and ways of operating whose dynamics and assumptions were clear, predictable, and kept an enduring peace. You can say the fall began when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 or Ukraine in 2022. Take your pick, it’s over. “
Barton Swaim: “I’m on the Tufts campus to attend Mr. [Eitan] Hersh’s class on American conservatism…Tufts is an elite Northeastern institution whose faculty, administration and stated values tend heavily leftward. Among students, Mr. Hersh estimates, the ratio is “probably 20 to 1, left to right.”…Mr. Hersh’s aim is simple: expose students to the postwar right’s ideas on politics and policy. The class isn’t a chronological history of the conservative movement but a topic-based survey of the arguments and controversies that have preoccupied the American right, in all its divergent manifestations, over the past 75 years. One class, according to the syllabus, deals with “capitalism and regulation,” with assigned readings by Milton Friedman, Richard Epstein and Marco Rubio, among others. Another addresses “judicial conservatism,” with readings by Antonin Scalia and Adrian Vermeule.”
NYTimes: “In “Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves,” Alison Wood Brooks mines years of data from her studies at Harvard Business School, where she has dissected parole hearings, speed dates, sales calls and friendly chats to discern the keys to effective communication. These she has distilled into a handy mnemonic: Topics, Asking, Levity and Kindness. (“Asking” may spoil the parallelism, but had she gone with “Questions” they would’ve had to call the book “Tqlk.”) Essentially, if you plan a few things to chat about in advance, and you aim some thoughtful, well-timed questions at your conversation partner, and you’re funny, and you’re nice, then the data says you’re a smooth operator.”
FT: “The more unsettling phrase of the moment, though, should be kaizen — the Japanese concept of “continuous improvement” which once struck nervous awe into US corporate hearts and which China, one way or another, now looks to have quietly mastered. Partly by hiring Japanese kaizen masters undervalued in their own economy. Kaizen first properly entered the international business lexicon in the 1980s, when American and European companies needed to understand why Japanese companies were beating them — in terms of both price and quality — on cars, consumer electronics and semiconductors. It suited both sides to identify the differentiator as a patient, distinctly Japanese, betterment of product and process. The practical effects of kaizen were remarkable: they were among the prime reasons that Japan’s economy became huge in the 1970s and 80s, and why so many of its companies retain global competitiveness in a formidable range of manufacturing fields.”
