WSJ: “Mr. [Harvey] Mansfield sees in America a “paradox”: The U.S. is both a young, brash nation and the world’s oldest continuous democracy. “We’re a country that needs to renew itself every four years, or find out who should run it,” he says. “It has, within itself, a youth and a maturity. We change our president, which means the entire government, more or less.” America is “an exemplar of something important, which is a successful republic. But it needs to be continually refreshed, as Machiavelli said all regimes need to be.” Mr. Mansfield says America is “exceptional because it accepts the truth of that claim.” We always itch to “go back to our beginnings and see what it was that first made us excited and fresh, and made us seek to be an example to the world.” That can become “a form of bullying,” in which Americans “demand that other peoples do what we advise. And what we advise may not necessarily be for their good, but mainly for ours.” By the same token, “great claims are imputed to us by others, and our failure to live up to them is taken as corruption.””
NYTimes: “Z.ai is on the cutting edge of a wave of powerful but inexpensive A.I. from China that is challenging the lock that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have had on the industry. Six of the models now on the A.I. leaderboard were developed in China. Z.ai’s new model, GLM-5.2, arrived just as U.S. businesses realized that they had to find ways to cut down on how much they were spending on A.I. It also landed when executives in Silicon Valley were becoming worried that the Trump administration was leaning toward regulating the technology.”
FT: “America’s attractions run deep. It has the best pool of entrepreneurs and US businesses account for just over half of the world’s value creation, or profits in excess of the cost of capital. America also has what Scott Bessent, its Treasury secretary, called this week, the world’s “deepest, most dynamic markets”. Since 2009, its banks, asset managers and traders have grown more dominant globally, and funnel savings into its markets. Citadel Securities, which executes a third of share trading in the US market, says activity is “astronomical”. Larry Fink, the boss of BlackRock, the largest asset manager, had called US capital markets a “juggernaut”.”
The Generalist: “Not every founder was ostracized quite as totally as [Henry] Luce. Culture, class, geography, and even his manner of speaking conspired to separate him from his peers. But the experience of being an outsider, of being profoundly out of place, is the most common trait observed from studying the formations of great entrepreneurs. It is also among the most acute, contributing to a desire to prove one’s relative worth and breeding a sense of specialness, even if reflected through a dark mirror. Perhaps every adolescent feels some moment of difference; this is the beginning of selfhood. But not everyone experiences it quite like this.”
