WSJ: “In the hypercompetitive world of fast food, Matthews is Taco Bell’s chief food innovation officer and the master of a strategy so tricky to pull off that it has snarled up operations at rivals. She churns out, year after year, new items like cheese shells as limited time offers, or LTOs. Chains need LTOs to keep their drive-through menu boards and apps popping with new items to keep customers coming back. The holy grail is a viral sensation online, and millions of dollars in sales.”
NYTimes: “…The world order, built and led by the United States, is under threat from China, which aims to usurp America’s rightful place atop it. There’s a phrase that encapsulates the theory: the Thucydides trap, referring to the violent clash that comes when a rising power challenges the ruling hegemon. In Thucydides’ time, it was Athens that successfully challenged the pre-eminence of Sparta. But it is a pattern that has played out repeatedly through history, with the ambition and aggression of the challenger almost always ending in bloodshed.”
FT: “[Tim] Cook’s tenure, which began four years after the launch of the iPhone, has been bounded by the smartphone era. Even though worldwide sales of smartphones peaked almost a decade ago, nothing new has come along to disturb the device’s centrality in consumer technology. Cook has played his hand well, building and reinforcing an empire around the iPhone with services and new gadgets such as AirPods and the Watch. But impregnability isn’t assured. His successor will need to show that they can both co-opt AI to reinforce what Cook built while also harnessing its disruptive potential to ride the next consumer tech wave.”
Gordon Wood: “The United States isn’t a nation like other nations, and it never has been. There is no American ethnicity to back up the state, and there was no such distinctive ethnicity even in 1776, when the U.S. was created. Many European countries—Germany, for example—were nations before they became states. Most European states were created out of a prior sense of a common ethnicity or language. Some of them, like the Czech Republic, were created in the 20th century and are newer than the 249-year-old U.S. Yet all are undergirded by peoples that had a pre-existing sense of their own distinctiveness, their own nationhood. In the U.S. the process was reversed. Americans created a state before they were a nation, and much of American history has been an effort to define that nationhood.”
