FT: “A furry elf doll has turned a Chinese group into one of the world’s most valuable toy companies, triggering in-store fights, driving nearly $2bn in annual sales and signalling the rare globalisation of a Chinese consumer brand. Labubu, an ugly-but-cute figurine sold by Beijing-based Pop Mart, has exploded in popularity over the past year. Scuffles have broken out in stores over the palm-sized plush toys, some of which go for triple their retail price in secondary markets…Labubu is one of the few Chinese consumer brands to gain global recognition, with Pop Mart’s $40bn market capitalisation now more than twice that of US groups Hasbro and Mattel combined.”
NYTimes: “Geography is one of the things that sets apart modern humans. Our closest living relatives — chimpanzees and bonobos — are confined to a belt of Central African forests. But humans have spread across every continent, even remote islands. Our species can thrive not only in forests, but in grasslands, swamps, deserts and just about every other ecosystem dry land has to offer. In a study published [recently], scientists pinpoint the origin of our extraordinary adaptability: Africa, about 70,000 years ago. That’s when modern humans learned to thrive in more extreme habitats. We’ve been expanding our range ever since. The finding could help resolve a paradox that has puzzled researchers for years.”
New Yorker: “For many people, A.I. may be bringing the age of traditional text to an end…Today, the nature of reading has shifted. Plenty of people still enjoy traditional books and periodicals, and there are even readers for whom the networked age has enabled a kind of hyper-literacy; for them, a smartphone is a library in their pocket. For others, however, the old-fashioned, ideal sort of reading—intense, extended, beginning-to-end encounters with carefully crafted texts—has become almost anachronistic. These readers might start a book on an e-reader and then continue it on the go, via audio narration. Or they might forgo books entirely, spending evenings browsing Apple News and Substack before drifting down Reddit’s lazy river. There’s something both diffuse and concentrated about reading now; it involves a lot of random words flowing across a screen, while the lurking presence of YouTube, Fortnite, Netflix, and the like insures that, once we’ve begun to read, we must continually choose not to stop.”
FT: “What we believe about the world depends on which ideas we are open-minded enough to entertain. Providing all the detail and balance in the world is useless when you are faced with a reader or viewer who greets all of it with a selective memory and a lopsided scepticism. A curious and open-minded media ecosystem is undoubtedly important, but so too are curious and open-minded citizens.”
Mint: “Ever since the launch of ChatGPT, there’s been no shortage of soul-searching among Big Tech firms as to why they didn’t get there first. How could it be that the pioneering work was done outside of their campuses by individuals and companies with relative pennies compared with their R&D budgets? The reason, as evidenced by these hirings and investments, is the very nature of bigness. Now that the Big Tech companies are mature businesses, never has their inability to move quickly and take risks been more apparent…Startups have always had an upper hand in this way, for sure, but the low barrier to entry for those with bright AI ideas means it has never been easier to attract attention. But then what? Founders are finding themselves staring at unfathomably large data centre costs to scale their businesses. When a hyperscaler like Meta comes knocking, it can look like the only sensible way forward.”
