WSJ: “Magic: The Gathering has long been Hasbro’s biggest brand. But lately, it has found a new gear, notching growth that has surprised Wall Street—and pushed Hasbro’s chief executive to rhapsodize to investors about its scale. The surge in popularity for Magic couldn’t have come at a better time for Hasbro, which also makes Monopoly games, Nerf guns and G.I. Joe action figures. Sales of traditional toys have been under pressure for years, driven by declining birthrates and a shift toward videogames and online games. Sales of dolls are down 36% from 2021 to 2025, according to data from intelligence firm Circana. Toddler and preschool toys are down 15% over the same period. But games and puzzles—the segment that includes Magic—have boomed during that time frame, up 36%. Those types of toys attract an audience that is typically older, increasingly including adults, and more likely to make repeat purchases.”
Shankkar Aiyar: “Students are the isotopes of the body politic. Like the radioactive tracers doctors use, students perform the diagnostic function for society and regimes. The malignancy lights up. They have no baggage, no stake in the settled order, no incentive to lie about the condition of the State. Isotopes are also the variants that split and set off the chain reaction. Their grievances are leading indicators: the leaked paper today is the jobless quarter tomorrow. And they impose an impossible dilemma on power. The cause of the anger is a crisis of systemic credibility. Count the instruments of the State that have let down the youth: exams that cannot certify merit, the paradox of unemployment and unfilled posts, courts with seemingly no time for grievances, programmes for internships and jobs that under-deliver, and fast-track courts with a slow-track record.”
SaaStr: “Point solutions that don’t keep up can now be bypassed in the AI era. Not all SaaS. Not the hard stuff. Not deep platforms with real data moats, real integrations, real workflow lock-in, real compliance complexity. Those are still firmly in 90/10 territory. Buy, almost always. We’re not about to vibe code a replacement for Salesforce or Snowflake. The 90/10 rule is alive and well there. But for point solutions that have stopped evolving (single-purpose tools doing one job, often priced $200 to $2,000/month), the buy-vs-build math has shifted. Not flipped. Shifted.”
FT: “The four big hyperscalers have ploughed more than $1tn into capital investments since their race to dominate AI began three and a half years ago, as America’s largest tech groups bet their future on the technology. Combined capital spending by Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta from the beginning of the AI boom in 2023 to the end of June hit $1.1tn, according to earnings reports from the four companies in the past two weeks. The massive expenditure is a mark of both the scale of their AI ambitions and the speed with which the US tech giants have turned from capital-light businesses into huge investors in physical infrastructure.”
