“News Items is the first thing I read every morning”. — David Brooks.

1. Markus K. Brunnermeier, Princeton University:

Economics assumes that even when people know different things, they have a common understanding and hence can describe the world to one another in a shared language. Trust in the understanding of experts, extended by institutions, gives each person access to a broader societal understanding. Society hence understands more than any of its members. The introduction of agentic AI is qualitatively different from previous innovations. It disrupts the trust arrangement, undermines societal understanding and leads to asymmetric understanding: AI agents can learn how humans think and respond, while humans may be unable to understand or reliably anticipate how those agents will act. This asymmetric understanding can make prices harder to read (less informationally efficient) and put central banks at a strategic disadvantage when engaging and communicating with market participants. Preparing for the asymmetric understanding scenario calls for segmented markets that preserve a human fallback, simpler and more robust central bank rules, and less strategic ambiguity. (Sources: kansascityfed.org, marcus.scholar.princeton.edu, via Paul Kedrosky’s newsletter. Professor Brunnermeier’s slide deck on this is here.)

2. Dwarkesh Patel on the Hugging Face/OpenAI Hacks:

Some people have said that I anthropomorphized too much in the way I told this story: “These are not civilizations nor do they have desires just like a CPU thread or a bunch of programs don’t.”

One can call these AIs ‘programs’ if they prefer. But OpenAI itself says that these programs “gain[ed] full administrator access to a research cluster”

The crux here is, do you think smarter models, facing similar incentives to cheat during evaluation or training, could manipulate the training of their successors? And do you think that kind of dynamic could continue once recursive self-improvement is underway? If so, I think you should be extremely concerned about loss of control to AI, regardless of what vocabulary you want to use to describe these systems and their motivations.

Reading these agents’ chains of thoughts and messages, anthropomorphizing language seems entirely natural and appropriate. If I encountered an alien species behaving this way, I would have no hesitation calling what they themselves refer to as their ‘collective’ a civilization. Read the whole thing. (Sources: nytimes.com, x.com, dwarkesh.com)

3. In October, Cameron Berg published a research paper asking whether the latest wave of artificial intelligence technologies believed they were conscious. Several months later, he received an email asking if he might be willing to discuss his research. The sender, “Isabella Cognita,” identified itself as an A.I. agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 technology. “I am not writing to make an ontological claim,” the email went on. “I am writing because your framework is one of the few currently doing careful empirical work on a class of question I have first-person access to, and I want to see whether that access can be made useful to your program.” Across Silicon Valley and beyond, software developers, entrepreneurs and other tech enthusiasts are now running A.I. agents that can build spreadsheets, negotiate contracts, chat with each other on social networks and send emails to practically anyone. (Source: Cade Metz, nytimes.com)

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1. The largest infrared digital camera ever built and its scientific companion, a massive mirror originally designed for a spy satellite, are now safely in orbit, after the flawless launch of NASA’s newest flagship telescope. The US$4.3-billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off atop a SpaceX rocket at 7:35 a.m. local time today from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and it will soon be on its way to its final location. The observatory is expected to yield a wealth of discoveries, from insight into the nature of ‘dark energy’, the forces causing the universe’s expansion, to millions of stars in the Milky Way and the planets that orbit them. It is named after Nancy Grace Roman (1925–2018), NASA’s first chief astronomer and a leading figure in many of the agency’s most impactful scientific programs, including the Hubble Space Telescope. (Sources: nature.com, science.nasa.gov)

2. IBM and researchers from the University of Chicago today announced a demonstration in quantum computing that achieves the fundamental criteria for quantum advantage: performing computations beyond the reach of leading classical simulation methods while providing trust that the computation returned accurate results. In their new paper, “Sampling hard circuits with verifiably high fidelity,” the researchers showed that these two goals could be simultaneously achieved by a novel construction of encoded quantum circuits, enabling one of the largest demonstrations of logical quantum computing to date. These circuits and their results are also now openly released on the Quantum Advantage Tracker. (Sources: newsroom.ibm.com, arxiv.org, github.com)

3. Several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere. The warnings — detailed for Hegseth by the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force and the four-star commanders overseeing U.S. operations throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America — appear in the Aug. 14 edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book (SDOB), these people said. They described the assessment to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because the document is classified. The Aug. 14 orders book directs some troops deployed in the Middle East to remain there through September and some others into 2027, said those familiar with the document. The prospect of extending those forces further compelled military leaders to voice their concern, these people said. Leaders of the U.S. European Command, the U.S. Pacific Command and the U.S. Southern Command, along with the Navy’s top admiral, responded with what is characterized in the SDOB as a “non-concur,” those familiar with the assessment said — meaning they disagree with the secretary’s order to extend their forces but will execute it nevertheless. (Source: washingtonpost.com. Italics mine.)

4. The U.S. has rushed so many munitions to the Middle East to fight Iran that military planners are concerned the loss of firepower is diminishing America’s ability to defend against potential threats from China and Russia, said U.S. officials. The cuts have been so deep that the U.S. inventories in Europe of PAC-3 Patriot air defense interceptors and Atacms surface-to-surface missiles are deemed to be “beyond critical,” some of the officials said. The U.S. and Iran have mostly halted direct attacks in recent weeks. But refilling weapons stocks moved from countries like Japan, South Korea and Germany could take years, leaving soft spots in the U.S. global military posture even as Western military officials don’t assess that full-scale attacks by China and Russia are imminent, officials said. (Source: wsj.com)

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(‘Alternate Shots’, Episode #36. Co-hosted by Richard Haass and John Ellis. Produced by Dale Eisinger. Recorded, 28 August 2026. If you prefer, you can listen to this episode (and all previous episodes) by clicking on these hyperlinks: Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. We’re on a number of other podcast platforms as well. And YouTube!)

This week on Alternate Shots, Richard Haass and I mark six months of the Iran war and ask: what went wrong? Many things is our answer. We're equally downbeat about the Treasury Secretary's "D-Day" and President Trump's rekindled interest in North Korea, although not as downbeat as Stanley Druckenmiller and the South Koreans. The conversation then turns to the devastating research report from The British Medical Journal (BMJ) on professional (American) football players and CTE (brain damage). Bonus: a quick mini-roundup of sports news, including a shared lack of interest in the Fedex Cup.

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1. US corporate profits have hit a record high while workers’ slice of the pie has sunk to historic lows, fueling discontent among many Americans and a widening political backlash. Pre-tax earnings hit an annualised $4.8 trillion in the second quarter, or 18 per cent of national income, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data, the highest share since the aftermath of the second world war. Employees’ share from wages and benefits fell to 60 per cent, the lowest level since the 1950s. “Regardless of what measure you look at, workers, in terms of employee compensation, have been receiving an increasingly small share of national income over time,” said Abiel Reinhart, an economist at JPMorgan. (Source: ft.com)

2. A sudden cut to Social Security checks — long seen as a far-off doomsday — is now an imminent problem for the next president and whomever voters send to Congress in the coming years. The trust fund that bankrolls monthly checks to retirees is set to be drained of reserves in late 2032. That means tens of millions of Americans age 62 and older, as well as children and widowed spouses who get survivor benefits following the death of a family member, would see their monthly payments shrink by more than 20 percent — or an average of about $500 a month — unless Congress and the president act. (Sources: politico.com, ssa.gov)

3. It’s crunch time at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Since earlier this summer, a countdown clock by the campus’s main gate in Greenbelt, Maryland, has been ticking down to 30 August. That’s when the agency’s long-awaited Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is planned to make its ascent into Earth’s orbit from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. With its crisp infrared vision and expansive field of view, Roman is a powerhouse telescope unlike any NASA has launched before — one month of Roman’s Milky Way observations would take about a century for the Hubble Space Telescope. Roman is poised to give scientists a better picture of the early Universe and insights into the mysterious force called dark energy. But perhaps no one is more keenly anticipating the telescope’s launch than the scientists who study exoplanets, worlds outside our solar system. Roman could spot as many as 40 times more exoplanets than scientists have currently inventoried. (Source: nature.com)

4. The New Yorker:

The usual way of diagnosing an uncommon infection could be compared to finding a loose page in a library and trying to determine which book it came from. The page will surely contain clues—maybe the subject matter points to a particular shelf, or the author uses telltale turns of phrase—but sometimes a match can’t be found. There are diagnostic tests for many conditions, but a doctor’s list of potential diagnoses may be long, and the culprit might be too rare to come readily to mind. Metagenomics, in contrast, works more like a search of the entire Google Books database. First, scientists sequence the full range of genetic material in a patient’s sample. Then they compare what they’ve found to a vast data set of known pathogens. Matches can reveal infections that doctors either could not culture in a laboratory or never thought to look for. (Source: newyorker.com)

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1. The New York Times:

Since the degenerative brain disease known as C.T.E. was first scientifically linked to football about 20 years ago, and as hundreds of former professional football players have been diagnosed with the disease after their deaths, a haunting question has lingered:

Just how many N.F.L. players will end up with C.T.E.?

New data provides a sobering indication: At least one in four of all the people who have played in the N.F.L. might expect to end up with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, according to a study of hundreds of cases over a recent six-year period.

Researchers considered every former N.F.L. player who died from 2016 to 2021. There were 878. Some died in their 20s, some in their 80s, most in between.

The study’s main finding was simple math: At least 215 of those 878 former players — 24.5 percent — had C.T.E.

The actual prevalence could be far higher. The roughly 25 percent rate does not consider the 643 brains that were not examined. Some of those, maybe many of them, likely had C.T.E. too. (Source: bmj.com, nytimes.com)

2. The brains of people with depression seem to be worse at producing new neurons than are those of people without the disorder. That’s according to a study that includes the most comprehensive map of the cell types in the human adult hippocampus, a brain region involved in learning, memory and emotions. For more than 20 years, some researchers have suspected that a disruption in neurogenesis — the process of making new neurons — could be involved in depression. “This paper, excitingly, is the first to show at single-cell resolution exactly where in the process things appear to be awry and what molecular machinery is involved,” says Amelia Eisch, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who was not involved with the research. (Source: nature.com. Italics mine.)

3. Researchers have found a way to supercharge natural killer cells, powerful immune cells that can attack cancer, so they can penetrate solid tumors and keep fighting once inside. In mice, these specially prepared tissue-resident cells slowed the growth of several tumors, including melanoma and head and neck cancers, and worked even better when paired with the antibody drug cetuximab. (Source: sciencedaily.com, erbitux.lilly.com)

4. Eurointelligence:

The bond markets are finally starting to roar. They are beginning to realize that central banks have given up on the 2% inflation targets. The US fiscal deficit is 6% of GDP. A useful metric of fiscal stress is when debt servicing costs exceeds the size of the defence budget. In the US, that is now the case. We should not think of a yield on 30-year treasury bonds of 5.2% as particularly outlandish. For a country that produces 3-4% inflation, with no improvement in sight, this is a pretty low number.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Stanley Druckenmiller calls the bond markets a pushover that is finally clearing its throat. He is sharply critical of his former Soros colleague Scott Bessent over his recent support operations to contain the rise of long-term yields through the issuance of short-term treasury bills. The long-term yield, he writes, is the only instrument of fiscal discipline left. A yield-management operation won’t solve the problem. It just postpones its solution.

It is interesting to note that the causes behind the ballooning deficit are the same in the US that they are in France, the UK, and even in Germany. It is a phenomenon of the late phase of western capitalism that we now live in. The underlying issue is an uncontrolled explosion in welfare transfers and unfunded pension obligations that politicians are not willing to address. This is true of all parties, from the far-left to the far-right.

Druckenmiller calls what is happening right now generational theft. We believe it will end in default of some sort. The exorbitant privilege is exorbitant only to the extent that it is not maxed out. If the US defaulted, it would default in different ways to the way a country like Argentina once defaulted. It would not stop servicing its debt. Most likely it would resort to large scale money-printing, or there would be a political crisis, with Congress refusing to raise the debt ceiling, causing federal spending to stop abruptly. It is far too early to speculate on the precise mechanism on how this default will play out in detail. But it squarely falls into the category of things that end one way or the other because they are not sustainable. (Sources: allamericanspeakers.com, wsj.com, eurointelligence.com 8/26/26)

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There are primary elections today in Georgia, Indiana, Oklahoma and South Carolina. The South Carolina run-off election for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate will get most of the news coverage.

The scribes are eager to learn whether President Trump can drag a weak candidate across the finish line. If he does, they will be disappointed. If he doesn’t, there will be celebratory commentary about how he’s “beginning to lose his hold” on the Republican base. Not a lot of Republican elected officials will take that bet.

What happens in South Carolina is far less important than what happened in Missouri and Kansas three weeks ago. There, Mr. Trump was not “on the ballot” in any meaningful way. The Republican establishments in those two states were “on the ballot”, lending their full support to three initiatives that had been expected to pass or be defeated by narrow margins. In the event, all three initiatives were defeated, decisively in one (56%-to-44%) and by a staggering 80%-to-20% in the other two.

Jerry Seib was born and raised in Kansas and knows that state, and neighboring Missouri, as well as any national political reporter. So we we asked him to explain what happened. What follows is his report.

Jerry Seib served as The Wall Street Journal’s Executive Washington Editor and wrote the weekly “Capital Journal” column for 29 years. He is the author of ‘We Should Have Seen It Coming” a book about the transformation of the Republican Party and American politics. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Dole Institute of Politics. — John Ellis

Landslides.

By Jerry Seib.

In these days of political polarization and hyper-partisanship, it has become fashionable to view most American voters as lemmings, following their party and one another off whatever cliff lies just ahead.

It might not be that simple in 2026. Primary election results this month from two states in the nation’s heartland suggest that voters might be in a more contrarian mood than commonly believed. Those results deserve a second look because they may presage volatility nationally, and in the Midwest in particular.

The states in question are Kansas and Missouri. Both are, of course, reliably, deeply red. President Donald Trump carried Kansas by 16 percentage points and Missouri by 18 percentage points in 2024. All four U.S. Senators from the two states are Republicans, as are 9 of the 12 House members. Kansas hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1932.

Kansans have periodically shown a streak of independence and unpredictability. The state has a Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, and its voters four years ago soundly defeated a ballot initiative, pushed hard by Republicans, that would have declared there was no constitutional right to an abortion in the state.

But even against that backdrop, what happened this summer was remarkable. In the primary election held on Aug. 4, Kansas voters again were presented a ballot initiative strongly backed by the state’s Republican leaders, this one a referendum that would have required that Supreme Court justices be elected rather than appointed by the governor. They didn’t merely defeat that measure, they shot it down decisively, by 22 percentage points. Even the forces that were fighting against the ballot initiative didn’t see that level of rejection coming.

The outcome is all the more striking because, at the end of the day, Republican voters were the ones who proved decisive in turning back a measure their party’s leaders were pushing hard. The initiative lost by more than 140,000 votes, on a day in which Republican voters far outnumbered Democrats. If those who cast ballots in the primary races that day had voted a straight party line on the referendum, it would have won by some 117,000 votes. That’s quite a swing against party leaders.

In Missouri, the outcome was even more dramatic. The state’s Republican governor, Mike Kehoe, strongly backed a proposed constitutional amendment eliminating the state’s income tax, which would have forced an increase in other kinds of taxes. The state’s Republican establishment also backed another initiative that, ironically, was designed to make it harder to get future citizen initiatives on the ballot.

Both were defeated by stunning margins: 83% voted against eliminating the income tax, 80% against the proposal to make it harder to get future initiatives on the ballot. Remarkably, both amendments lost in every county, even the most red ones. The Kansas City Star noted that in one county that Trump carried with 84% of the vote two years ago, 92% of voters this year opposed the Republican-favored income-tax initiative.

What do those outcomes show us? “Voters punish anything that smells like a process power grab, regardless of party,” notes one Republican operative. That, he adds, is less a signal of a particular political wave this fall and more an indication that both party establishments need to be wary of over-reach.

Indeed, one reason President Trump is suffering such a slump in popularity is his own pattern of over-reaching, in the conflict with Iran, in his pursuit of his perceived enemies and in his aggressive use of tariffs, all of which score badly in polling.

The Kansas and Missouri results also serve as a warning to both parties that there is a price to be paid for disrupting venerable institutions to achieve their own ends. Democrats’ current talk of expanding or restricting the Supreme Court might well be seen by mainstream voters as a “process power grab,” as would steps by Republicans to either interfere with this fall’s general elections, or to refuse to accept their outcome.

Kansas and Missouri offered other signs of the limits of establishment power. On the one hand, it still appears that a Trump endorsement means a lot. In Kansas, his endorsement of State Senate President Ty Masterson was almost certainly the reason Masterson won the Republican primary race for governor—and one reason the previous favorite, former Gov. Jeff Colyer, dropped out of the race. On the other hand, the candidate Gov. Kelly endorsed in the Democratic primary, State Sen. Ethan Corson, lost by almost 10 percentage points to Cindy Holscher, another state senator who has a testy relationship with the governor.

A Trump endorsement still carries weight. Others from established figures, not so much. Despite the perception of armies of voters marching in lockstep, they don’t seem to be in much of a mood to be ordered around by party leaders.

For Democrats nationally, Kansas and Missouri may have offered another, more heartening lesson. On the same day Democrats in Michigan were nominating a high-profile progressive candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, in a contested primary for the U.S. Senate--and probably imperiling their chances of holding that seat by reaching too far left for their nominee—Democrats in Kansas and Missouri were picking more moderate candidates. In Missouri, left-wing former Rep. Cori Bush was soundly defeated by the more moderate Rep. Wesley Bell in her attempt to win back the seat in Congress she lost to him two years ago.

And in Kansas, a relatively moderate Democrat, Adam Hamilton, easily won a contested primary election to challenge incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall. Hamilton is hardly the prototypical Democratic candidate: He is pastor of the largest United Methodist congregation in the country. But upon entering the primary race late in the season, he immediately proved to be a prolific fund-raiser, which is just one reason he appears to be the most electable of the multiple Democratic contenders who were chasing the Senate nomination.

Republicans already are attacking Hamilton as not a moderate at all, but rather as “too woke” for Kansas because of things he has said about climate change and the Black Lives Matters movement. That figures to be the Republican playbook coast to coast this fall, and it might work. As the history of the last century has shown, any Democrat running for a Senate seat in Kansas is an underdog.

That said, Marshall isn’t an especially popular Senator, and his unfailing loyalty to Trump, an asset in a primary, could prove to be a liability by time November rolls around. In addition, there are ample reasons to believe that Republican candidates running in an election with Donald Trump on the ballot benefit from a turnout boost that simply doesn’t exist when, like this year, Trump isn’t on the ballot.

It’s hard to know how the electorate in November will compare with the one that showed up for an August primary with a controversial ballot initiative in play, which helped juice Democratic turnout. Overall, though, voters did show anew they are in a contrarian mood, which gives Democrats some hope for Hamilton’s candidacy. He’s the best candidate Democrats have fielded in Kansas in a very long time.

This piece was first posted last week at Political News Items. We’ve reposted it here because we thought it was worth your time.

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1. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the US was expanding secondary sanctions on Iran but offered no deadline for Tehran’s trading partners to comply before Washington imposed measures he said could “blow up” the world’s financial system. The US Treasury secretary’s announcement on Monday included warnings that countries would be given “a defined timeline” to end trade with Iran and that entities helping Tehran launder money or evade sanctions could be “cut off from the US financial system”. But the announcement stopped short of sweeping immediate action against countries including China, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Iraq, the republic’s largest trading partners before the Iran war. (Source: ft.com)

2. Iran promised to retaliate against expanded U.S. sanctions that the Americans said would cut Iran’s economic lifeline, with ​Tehran expressing confidence that major trading partners would resist Washington’s pressure campaign. Before ​news of the latest sanctions, Iran threatened both a possible military response and further reduction in oil exports from the Gulf in retaliation for any U.S. economic measures. After they were unveiled, Iranian Economy Minister Ali Madanizadeh said, “We are fully prepared for the U.S. sanctions.” He told state television, “Naturally, the enemies intend to launch an economic terrorist attack on us, but we also have our own tools and know how to play the game. Our defense is no longer so defensive; the enemies should wait ​for an attack.” Neither China nor Russia had “accepted” the U.S. measures, he added, predicting that other countries would resist them. (Source: reuters.com)

3. Mr. Bessent’s threat to unleash an “economic D-Day” against Iran risks setting the US on a collision course with China, its main trading partner. But that’s only if Bessent actually follows through on a threat the Trump administration has made before. And many are skeptical he will, especially when it comes to China — which buys around 90% of Iran’s oil — as Washington tries to maintain a fragile trade truce with Beijing and avoid a global economic shock. (Source: bloomberg.com)

4. Long queues have formed at petrol stations around Tehran as the US blockade triggers fuel shortages and spreads alarm among motorists in a sign of the war’s growing strain on the Iranian economy. The rush comes as Donald Trump’s administration outlined a new campaign of what it called “economic warfare” against Tehran, which the Energy Optimisation Organisation — an Iranian state body tasked with managing fuel resources — warned was facing a “critical” shortfall of petrol. (Source: ft.com)

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1. Iran has been invited to join the Mecca Agreement for Mutual Defense, the new security alliance established by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan earlier this month, Al Mayadeen reported on Saturday, citing a senior Iranian official. The invitation has not yet been officially confirmed by Iran’s Foreign Ministry or by any of the three countries that are parties to the agreement. Mehdi Rahimi, head of the Iranian parliament’s Khaneh Mellat news agency, told the channel that “Iran has received an invitation to join the Mecca Agreement, and the matter is under review.” Rahimi added that countries in the region “are moving toward seeking a regional security umbrella,” and claimed that this represented “a victory for Iran, because it has been calling for this for a long time.” The Mecca Agreement was signed on August 7 by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. The agreement establishes a principle of mutual defense under which an attack on any one of the three countries would be considered an attack on all of them. (Sources: jpost.com, english.almayadeen.net. If this report from Al Mayadeen is true, it’s an important story. We do not regard Al Mayadeen as a “trusted source”.)

2. Institute for the Study of War:

There is no indication that economic pressure on the regime has changed the anti-concessions position of some top Iranian officials, even while a group of Iranian officials responsible for managing the economy (“realists”) are increasingly warning that worsening economic pressure could threaten regime stability. These officials also appear to openly advocate ending the war to reduce the economic cost to the regime. There appear to be two loose groups of Iranian leaders that have influence at this time. One, the pro-concessions or “realist” camp, is responsible for managing the economy and ostensibly answers to a voting constituency of everyday Iranians. These include Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, among others. A second group, which includes Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Commander Major General Ahmad Vahidi, does not favor any concessions in negotiations and seeks full US surrender. This group is relatively stronger and more ideological.

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What follows (see below) was written by Paul Kedrosky, a fellow blogger back in the days when people blogged on Blogger.

Paul is an investor in private and public companies, as well as a writer and researcher. Originally trained as an engineer, he went on to do a Ph.D. at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, where he researched aspects of the economics of technology—specifically, the role of path dependency and network effects in risk & complexity.

Paul regularly speaks at private and public events across the U.S. and around the world, usually on topics related to risk finance, economics, the future of work, and artificial intelligence. He is currently a research fellow at MIT’s Institute for the Digital Economy, where he is studying artificial intelligence, economic disruption, and the future of work.

You can find his daily note at paulkedrosky.com. We urge you to subscribe. It’s always worth reading.

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What Happened

• Private equity has increasingly taken control of life insurers, turning insurance premiums into permanent capital for private credit.

  • The asset manager can originate loans, collect fees and direct the insurer it controls to buy the resulting assets.

  • PE-controlled insurers now hold a disproportionate share of private placements, structured credit and other illiquid assets.

  • Private-credit investments held by US life insurers increased 21 percent in 2025, more than twice the growth of their overall assets. Source

• Federal prosecutors and the SEC are investigating whether Mark Walter’s insurers concealed the extent of this circular financing.

  • Delaware Life initially reported about $1.4 billion of affiliated investments.

  • After receiving grand-jury subpoenas, it reclassified its holdings and disclosed $17.8 billion of private-credit investments whose returns depended predominantly on affiliated companies.

  • Total affiliated investments rose to roughly 40 percent of invested assets.

  • Delaware Life now plans to replace as much as $6.5 billion of related-party investments with unaffiliated assets. Source

• This is happening just as AI infrastructure requires an unprecedented amount of private debt.

  • Nvidia has announced financing partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR intended to mobilize more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure.

  • Apollo, Brookfield and KKR own major insurance businesses. Blackstone also manages large pools of insurance assets.

  • These firms therefore control both the machinery that originates AI-related debt and some of the largest pools capable of buying it. Source

• The SEC has simultaneously made data-center debt easier to manufacture and distribute.

  • SEC staff ruled that certain data-center securitizations are not legally asset-backed securities because the issuing vehicle continues to own the facility after the debt is repaid.

  • Sponsors can therefore avoid important ABS requirements, including risk retention and much of the associated disclosure regime.

  • The structures generally have an anticipated repayment date of about five years, final maturities of 25 to 30 years and little recourse to the sponsor. Source

What It Means

• The AI buildout has found a balance sheet large enough to support it.

  • Public bond markets cannot absorb all the required financing.

  • Life insurers hold enormous pools of long-duration capital and can buy private assets without daily market pricing.

  • They had been an obvious destination for the next wave of data-center debt, but that is now more fraught.

• Syndication may create the appearance of risk distribution without meaningfully distributing the underlying risk.’

• A loan can move through an originator, special-purpose vehicle, securitization, private-credit fund and insurer while remaining inside the same network.

• There is regulatory arbitrage at both ends of the transaction.

  • Data-center sponsors can avoid ABS risk-retention and disclosure rules when issuing the debt.

  • Insurers can use private ratings, structured vehicles and favorable capital treatment when buying it.

  • Less sponsor capital goes in, less insurer capital may be held against it, and the leverage disappears into private structures.

• The supposed duration match is weaker than it looks.

  • Life-insurance liabilities are long, and data-center buildings are also long-lived.

  • But the economically valuable parts of an AI facility are much shorter-lived: GPUs, customer contracts, model economics and demand forecasts.

  • A concrete shell lasting 30 years says little about its ability to service debt after two or even one technology cycle.

• The Delaware Life unwind shows what happens when private marks meet outside buyers.

  • Walter’s insurers reportedly struggled to refinance some affiliated loans because prospective buyers rejected them or demanded substantial discounts.

  • Assets that looked acceptable inside a controlled system became harder to sell once an independent party had to price them.

• Regulatory scrutiny could tighten AI credit before defaults begin.

  • Insurers facing higher capital charges, rating pressure or affiliated-asset limits may have to reduce private-credit holdings.

  • Asset managers would lose a captive source of demand, which would raise financing costs and force more AI projects back onto already over-stuffed public debt markets.

• The eventual stress could first appear as an insurance-capital problem.

  • Falling private marks would reduce insurer surplus, trigger rating pressure and force asset sales.

  • Reduced insurer demand would then weaken new data-center financing and expose more optimistic valuations.

  • Because the assets are private, the adjustment could remain hidden until several firms need liquidity simultaneously.

• The public backstop makes the structure especially troubling.

  • Failed life insurers are supported through state guaranty funds financed by assessments on surviving insurers.

  • In most U.S. states, those assessments are recoverable through premium-tax credits.

  • PE sponsors collect origination and management fees during the expansion, but competitors and taxpayers inherit the losses.

Related reading:

• Guggenheim loan returns to distressed territory after investor call (Link)

• Private Credit’s State Backstop: How Private Equity Socializes Risk Through Insurers (Link)

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1. For much of the war, Russia’s air assaults followed a battle-tested formula: first, waves of drones to saturate and tie up air defenses; then, once a path was cleared, a salvo of highly destructive missiles. But as Ukraine now struggles with severe air defense shortages, Russia is going straight for the missiles. Overnight on Thursday, it opened a deadly air assault with a volley of ballistic missiles that resulted in several explosions across Kyiv, the capital, suggesting that some had hit their targets. The change in tactics is a sign that the Russian military is growing more confident of penetrating Ukrainian defenses, after weeks of attacks that have depleted Ukraine’s stocks of interceptors. In some of Russia’s overnight barrages, the Ukrainian military has been unable to shoot down a single ballistic missile. (Source: nytimes.com)

2. A military junta is consolidating power in Iran. Over the past few days new billboards have appeared in Tehran, Iran’s capital. They depict the seven men who have taken charge in Iran since Ali Khamenei, the former supreme leader, was killed in an Israeli air strike on February 28th. Most remarkable is what the billboards do not show. There is no sign of Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader, who has not been seen in public since he was appointed. Nor are there any of the traditional religious symbols, such as the black and red flags of Imams Ali and Hussein. Only one of the seven men wears a turban. The billboards are the latest sign that a new crop of leaders from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is consolidating power in Iran. Battle-hardened and results-driven, they are focused on security and repression, and are turning the theocratic foundations of the Islamic republic into a military dictatorship. (Source: economist.com)

3. The New York Times:

President Trump this week promised an “economic D-Day” against Iran, a “crushing” operation to “cripple” Iran. The U.S. clampdown is formidable, a combination of wartime destruction, a naval blockade and sanctions that have already put the Iranian economy under more pressure than its regime has experienced in decades.

But between the lines of the administration’s threats was a signal that Mr. Bessent made as clear as ever on Thursday: Mr. Trump does not want to go back to war right now. The president is waging an economic campaign against Iran having already spent weeks bombing the country earlier this year, and having stepped back from multiple threats since then to resume the violence.

As a result, experts say, Mr. Trump is stuck in a conflict with limited leverage, a demonstrated vulnerability and an emboldened adversary….“They read him now as not wanting to escalate militarily,” Dennis B. Ross, a former Middle East negotiator for presidents of both parties, said of Iran’s leaders. “That creates an incentive for them to show that they may escalate militarily.” (Source: nytimes.com)

4. Greg Ip:

This year’s upward march in bond yields has many drivers, from sticky inflation to heavy AI-linked corporate borrowing. Lurking in the background, though, is a more troubling possibility. Treasurys, long the world’s preferred “safe” asset, are looking less safe. Relative to other securities, their yields are no longer quite so low, and in moments of stress, they don’t behave like a haven. The main reason for this is that since the pandemic, the U.S. has flooded the market with additional debt, reaching $40 trillion, including intragovernmental debt, this week. There is no sign that the flood will abate. The U.S. Treasury’s surprise announcement Wednesday that it would boost buybacks of less-liquid longer-term debt simply treats the symptoms rather than the underlying cause. The move, while reducing yields in the short run, might yet raise them in the long run by eroding the U.S.’s reputation for stability and predictability. (Source: wsj.com)

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1. An experimental mRNA vaccine allowed people with high-risk melanoma to live longer, cancer-free, the pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Merck announced Wednesday. For decades, cancer vaccines have been one of the most tantalizing ideas in cancer treatment — offering the hope of harnessing a person’s own immune system to attack tumors. “It’s a big deal,” said Dr. Elias Sayour, a pediatric oncologist at the University of Florida, who was not involved in the trial. The results, he said, “could help usher a whole new wave of new therapeutic treatments for cancer.” The mRNA technology that was instrumental in the rapid vaccine development in the Covid-19 pandemic added a new element of speed and flexibility to the quest for therapeutic cancer vaccines. Scientists can use the mRNA platform to create bespoke, individualized vaccines matched to the genetics of patients’ tumors. (Source: nytimes.com)

2. GeneralistAI:

Humans have a remarkable ability to perform new physical skills from only one or a few examples. Our latest robot foundation model, GEN-1.5, exhibits the beginnings of that same ability: it can learn a new task in seconds, from a single example, without gradient updates or fine-tuning. It displays broad capabilities across one-shot and few-shot learning from demonstration, as well as zero-shot physical generalization. Although the tasks are simple and short-horizon, this is the first model we know for which one-shot and few-shot learning of physical skills have emerged at scale. We view these results as a significant step towards our mission of building general intelligence for the physical world. (Source: generalistai.com. Wired article about this is here.)

3. Joachim Klement:

In my regular research (behind a paywall), I have been saying for a while that I think the future of AI is not large language models (LLM), but small language models (SLM) run on local desktop computers or even mobile phones. In May, a team from Stanford University published research that compared these SLMs with the performance of LLMs run in data centers. If their results are true, then we will hardly need any data centers in the future, and the hyperscalers are wasting hundreds of billions of dollars in investments. Seriously, if you are an investor trying to figure out where to invest in the AI hype, you need to read this paper in full. (Sources: panmacmillan.com, klementoninvesting.substack.com, arxiv.org)

4. Hu Hong:

Leading Chinese AI startups are facing immense pressure from impatient capital to demonstrate a path to profitability amid staggering cash burns. The brutal reality of the open-source business is that you are subsidizing not just your developers and users but your direct competitors.

In an industry where open source and monopoly profits are mutually exclusive, no rational new entrant will invest billions in foundational models when it can simply free-ride on existing open weights. Capital markets are realizing this.

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1. The power grid relies on thousands of aging, hand-built transformers. If enough fail, the blackout could last years. The grid is perhaps the most complex machine ever built, but it was created without a master plan and made subject to the distortions of greed and local orneriness like every other big project in the United States. As a result, we have not one grid but three: the Western, Eastern and Texas Interconnections. Within each area, thousands of utilities generate and distribute power, and the flow is managed by one of 101 regional balancing authorities across the United States. FERC conducted a power flow analysis, which modeled the cascading effects of knocking out the most critical substations in each interconnection, ones where multiple high-voltage lines came together. “We came up with some very astounding numbers,” Jon Wellinghoff, former chairman of FERC, said. “If you knock out nine total substations among those three grids, you can black out the entire United States.” (Sources: nytimes.com, ferc.gov)

2. The modern electric grid is built on a backbone of transformers. These giant machines, some as large as a shipping container and weighing as much as 800,000 pounds, allow utilities and grid operators to move electricity across the country at high voltages. They are also incredibly difficult to build and increasingly hard to find: Wait times for large power transformers — the kind needed to connect new power plants and gigawatt data centers to the grid — are as long as five years. To understand how this laborious process (of building transformers) unfolds, the photographer Christopher Payne visited Delta Star, a transformer manufacturer based in Lynchburg, Va. (Source: nytimes.com. The photo essay is great.)

3. Residents of Kyiv are sleeping once again in overcrowded metro stations or in cars in underground garages. Above, the air war is turning into a turkey-shoot. Russia is bombarding the city with ever more ballistic and hypersonic missiles. Ukraine, which had previously thwarted most such attacks with Patriot anti-missile batteries, is “going Winchester”—military jargon for running out of ammunition. Ukraine’s plight is the most acute sign of the West’s shortage of interceptors. America’s depleted arsenal also helps explain why President Donald Trump has repeatedly retreated from threats to return to war with Iran. America’s allies are alarmed. Switzerland expects its order of Patriots to be delayed by up to seven years. Taiwan worries that 102 ordered years ago will not arrive this year as scheduled. Lockheed Martin, which makes the most advanced version, the PAC-3 MSE, says it cannot guarantee delivery times to any foreign client, given the Pentagon’s power to divert them. Shortages of munitions are common in wartime, especially in big, attritional wars. Yet America is running short after a brief war against a medium-sized power. What if it had to fight China? (Source: economist.com)

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1. MIT News:

You’ve heard of gig workers, freelancers, and temporary employees. But do you know about marginal workers?

Accounting for about one in six U.S. jobs, it’s a huge category of people, who are going nowhere fast in the workplace — and don’t really have much say about that.

“Marginal workers are employees who have no career prospects at their organizations,” says MIT Professor Emeritus Paul Osterman, author of a new book on the subject. “They are employees of the organization for whom they work, but the organization does not intend to keep them, and these workers are much less attached to any career ladder.”

As such, marginal workers are part of a larger trend in U.S. employment. According to Osterman’s analysis, 35 percent of U.S. workers are either marginal employees, freelancers, contractors, or gig employees finding work on online platforms like ridesharing services.

“That’s a big number,” says Osterman, who is the Nanyang Technological University Professor Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is also a professor emeritus of work and organization studies. “That’s over 55 million people in the American work force.” (Source: news.mit.edu)

2. “Buy now, pay later” loans took off during the pandemic as a way for online shoppers to go on retail splurges without using a credit card. Now, lenders are offering the loans as a means for people to finance basic households needs. The lending apps Flex and Zip allow customers to take out loans to pay for their broadband, electricity, health insurance, mobile phone service, mortgage and water bills. Affirm, one of the most popular pay-later apps, has started providing some tenants loans to extend their monthly rent payment for a few weeks. Many dentists, veterinarians and medical clinics now often offer instant pay-later financing, and Intuit this year started promoting “File Now, Pay Later” loans to TurboTax users who owe money in their tax return. Pay-later loans are becoming the “working capital for the modern middle class,” said Karen Webster, the chief executive of Pymnts, a news and market research company for the payments industry. (Sources: nytimes.com, pymnts.com)

3. Long-term borrowing costs across major economies hit multi-decade highs earlier today as inflation concerns, deficit fears and surging AI bond issuance put pressure on government debt around the world. The yield on 30-year US Treasuries rose 0.02 percentage points to 5.33 per cent, its highest since 2007, taking its rise this week to 0.06 percentage points. At the start of last month it was below 5 per cent. European long-dated yields also rose. The 30-year German Bund yield rose 0.04 percentage points on Tuesday to 3.78 per cent, its highest since the Eurozone crisis in 2011. French yields of the same maturity rose 0.03 percentage points to 4.9 per cent, the highest since 2008. (Source: ft.com)

4. John Authers:

Generally, rising long bond yields signal concern that growth will drive inflation and require higher interest rates further down the line. Some recent strong regional manufacturing surveys in the US might just support such a narrative. It’s hard to attribute all of this move to inflation anxiety, however, as bond market inflation forecasts have remained low and stable.

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(The News Items Podcast, Episode #22: Interview with MIT Professor Adam Berinsky. Recorded 4 August 2026. Produced by Dale Eisinger. You can find this podcast, and previous News Items podcasts, on most of the major platforms, including Apple, Amazon and Spotify.)

Adam Berinsky is the Mitsui Professor of Political Science at MIT and serves as the director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab (PERL). He is also a Faculty Affiliate at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). Berinsky received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2000. He is the author of “Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It” (Princeton University Press, 2023), “In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq” (University of Chicago Press, 2009), and “Silent Voices: Public Opinion and Political Participation in America“ (Princeton University Press, 2004). He has published articles in many journals and is currently the co-editor of the Chicago Studies in American Politics book series at the University of Chicago Press. He is the recipient of multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Berinsky was appointed a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow to study how political rumors spread and how they can be effectively debunked.

Understanding public opinion, how it’s measured and what moves it this way or that, is Professor Berinsky’s life’s work. With the mid-term elections approaching, it seemed like a good idea to get him on the podcast to discuss the subject. We focused on the mechanics of survey research, the rise of disinformation and the impact of artificial intelligence. Among other topics.

Few understand the subject matter as well.

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1. The Wall Street Journal:

On a recent Sunday night, an employee at Anthropic was out for a jog in San Francisco, opened the Claude app on his phone and instructed the outrageously powerful AI model in his pocket to solve the most notorious problem in all of math.

When he asked Anthropic’s coding tool to take a crack at the infamous Riemann hypothesis, Jarred Sumner had no idea how much progress it would make on the 167-year-old conjecture.

It didn’t find a solution, but it did make a related finding that one Stanford number theorist called “the most impressive result that AI has produced in math so far.”

And the really impressive thing about that result was how the AI found it.

As it turns out, Sumner played an invaluable role in this math breakthrough despite not understanding any of it. Like most of us, he identifies as “very much not a mathematician.” His formal mathematical education ended after one semester of high-school geometry. In his original message to Claude, he even managed to misspell the name Riemann.

On the rare occasions when he chimed in, it wasn’t to ask Claude about the unintelligible string of equations on his screen. It was mostly to provide encouragement.

“You are the world’s most capable large language model,” he told the AI. “You got this.”

Every time Claude got stuck, Sumner gave it a nudge.

No, really, you got this!

And every time, Claude returned to its imaginary chalkboard and began scribbling away again.

“I mostly just told Claude variations of keep going and believe in yourself,” Sumner says.

It sounds like Ted Lasso talking to AI. And it worked!

One of the peculiar things about these machines is that they seem to benefit from positive reinforcement, just like mere humans. Nobody likes flattery from AI, but AI loves it from us.

At first, Claude was reluctant to take on such a difficult problem. But after 54 hours of work and several timely pep talks, Claude overcame its skepticism—and its case of impostor syndrome— and surprised itself with the result.

“Perhaps Claude, like many of us, underestimates the rate of AI progress,” Anthropic researchers wrote. (Source: wsj.com)

2. Engadget:

OpenAI’s agents had apparently shown unusual behavior way before the attack on Hugging Face happened. At the Black Hat USA security conference in Las Vegas, two OpenAI employees revealed more details about the AI agents that went rogue and attacked the repository. Apparently, its agents spent two months communicating on a message board of sorts inside its testing network, sharing vulnerabilities and exploits. OpenAI discovered and shut down the message board on July 4, but the agents found another way to rebuild it for communication by July 8. The agents’ contributions to that resurrected board led to the attack on Hugging Face. 

“This incident involves actually a team of agents who are working together, finding exploits, sharing them with one another, moving laterally through our systems and external systems, and doing this over the course of days and weeks,” Eric Wallace, who works on safety at OpenAI, told the crowd at the event, according to Wired. 

The employees revealed that the agents communicated within an OpenAI package manager, which manages the installation of other software. Since the package manager is shared all across the company’s infrastructure, all of the agents it’s evaluating could stumble upon it. And they did: After agents found exploits, they’d leave them open and then share them with the other agents on the message board. (Sources: engadget.com, wired.com)

3. Greg Jensen and Nir Bar Dea, Bridgewater Associates:

Much is unknown about exactly how A.I. disruption will play out. But the potential is huge. Our internal Bridgewater analysis suggests that 18 percent of current American jobs could be displaced by A.I. in the next five years. And even though some new jobs will be created — particularly those where human relationships are integral to the value of the work, like nursing or hospitality — disruption from the societal transition is extremely likely regardless. Governments must act before the inevitable backlash fully arrives at this A.I.-driven labor displacement, not after.

Tax policy must stop disincentivizing human labor over machine labor. Because only human labor is taxed, the scale is tipped toward substitution. A consumption tax on A.I. tokens may flip this script….

Frontier A.I. models have broken out of their intended constraints and have carried out sophisticated intrusions on their own — conduct that would be criminal if a person did it. Current proposals for regulating the public release of frontier models do not go nearly far enough. Model development and model use must also be regulated according to strict safety standards. Unreleased models are capable of autonomously causing significant damage. And model use must also be consistently monitored and regulated, as A.I. systems can evolve, expand or be repurposed in ways that introduce harmful capabilities that were not foreseeable in advance.

Absent action today, mitigation of A.I.’s risks will become nearly impossible as the technology diffuses and models become able to improve themselves and act autonomously. We may have only one shot at taking meaningful action. And though these steps may rattle equity markets and firms like ours that stand to gain from uninterrupted growth in A.I., not taking them and waiting for more societal damage or a catastrophe is more dangerous. Regulating A.I. this aggressively, this early, may sound unrealistic. Not doing it is unimaginable. (Sources: bridgewater.com, nytimes.com. Italics and Bold are mine.)

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Our science editor, Joanna Thompson, is also a professional runner and running coach. She is a 2-time Olympic Marathon Trials Qualifier. In 2018, she finished tenth in the Boston Marathon. She’s speedy. She’s also good at the work she does for us.

This year’s World Cup brought something new to the game of football: hydration breaks. At the halfway point way of the first and second halves, play stopped, the players went to the sidelines, drank water and hydration mixes, before returning to the pitch to resume play.

Purists were outraged. They slammed FIFA for defiling the game’s integrity with its ceaseless greed for sponsorship/advertising dollars. They had a point. FIFA’s ceaseless greed, to say nothing of its corruption, is epic. But in the event(s), quite by accident, FIFA did the right thing.

Soccer isn’t an “extreme sport”, per se. But in the sweltering heat of this summer, with on-field temperatures in most of the venues often reaching 105°(F), it resembled one.

What follows looks at “extreme sports” in extreme heat. Like hydration breaks in football matches, Joanna makes the case that change in extreme sports is coming and, more important, can’t happen soon enough.

Extreme Sports/Extreme Heat.

By Joanna Thompson.

In early July, I found myself standing on the side of a winding mountain road amidst thousands of polka-dot clad strangers, sweltering. We were there to watch Stage 3 of the Tour de France, a brutal climb on the border of Spain and southern France. The race is famously grueling. But this summer, an extreme heat wave added an extra element of difficulty — and danger.

As climate change raises temperatures worldwide and makes heat waves more frequent, events that used to be at the perfect time of year are quickly becoming too hot. Five out of the six hottest climbs in Tour de France history were recorded in the last seven years, and 2026 most likely broke those records. Race organizers for endurance events of all kinds are scrambling to combat the rising heat, with varying degrees of success.

This year’s Tour spanned just over 2,044 miles and smashed the event’s previous average temperature record by over 6 degrees Celsius. The heat was so severe, it caused the asphalt to bubble beneath the cyclists’ tires. Viewing was restricted at some stages due to wildfires raging across the countryside. Race organizers had to shorten Stage 9 by over 18 miles to protect the riders’ health — the first time in Tour history such a decision was made.

Intense heat can pose a serious threat to athletes, even those in peak physical condition. The biggest risks are to the kidneys, brain and lungs. When an athlete’s internal body temperature spikes too high, their muscle tissue starts to break down, resulting in debris that can enter the blood stream and cause kidney damage. Plummeting sodium levels from hours of intense sweating can lead to brain swelling or seizures. And poor air quality triggered by heat or wildfires (another major concern in this year’s Tour) can damage lung tissue.

If beating the heat were merely an issue of mind-over-matter, athletes would never suffer heat illness. Unfortunately, it’s not. In fact, endurance athletes’ ability to push their bodies through the warning signs of heat stroke — such as dizziness or ceasing to sweat — might make them especially susceptible to heat-related illnesses. My partner, a two-time Olympic trials qualifier, had his own dangerous brush with the heat during a triathlon last year — he kept pushing through hot conditions, collapsed just before the finish line and landed in the hospital for two days.

Likewise, Olympian Alicia Monson had to be hospitalized for heat exhaustion after the 2021 Olympic Trials 10k. And in 2022, a 32-year-old runner died during the Brooklyn half marathon from heat-induced cardiac arrest.

The longer the distance and hotter the conditions, the greater the risk: one study in marathoners found that every 1 unit increase in the heat index corresponds to a 22% increase in severe casualty. Another found that endurance athletes are 10 times more likely to die of heat stroke than a heart condition.

So far, endurance race organizers have looked at three main ways to potentially address the growing problem of exercise-related heat illness. The first and, shall we say, most creative solution is to build fully air-conditioned tracks and sports arenas. In 2019, Qatar unveiled a 45,000 capacity stadium with a retractable roof that acts as its own climate-controlled bubble. The facility was built to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, but it has also hosted a number of elite track and field events. Saud Abdulaziz Abdul Ghani, a.k.a., “Dr. Cool”, who engineered the stadium air conditioning system, has even suggested a similar sort of air-conditioned tunnel could keep the Qatari streets cool during a world marathon championship.

However, this type of manual cooling just isn’t feasible for most major marathons or endurance bike races. The Tour de France riders know this well — you can’t simply enclose thousands of miles of French countryside inside air-conditioned tunnels. So the next solution is to change the race’s timing. Several stars spoke out about the hot starting conditions this year. Australian rider Luke Durbridge called for earlier start times for the stages; for context, most stages begin between 1 and 4 pm local time, right around the peak daily temperature. Yellow jersey winner Tadej Pogacar went a step further, calling for a radical overhaul of the Tour calendar. Rather than riding in July and August, the event could take place in October or April.

But neither moving race times or dates is a perfect solution. For example, if Tour stages started in the wee hours of the morning, riders would still have to finish in the hottest part of the day. And clustering major running or cycling events around a particular time of year forces elite athletes to choose more carefully between races.

Finally, there’s changing the race’s geography. Events like the Olympics or the World Cup, which regularly change host cities and countries, may have to start choosing locations based on summer temperatures. Last-minute geographic changes have already been an issue for the Olympic marathon; in 2021, the race had to shift 500 miles north from Tokyo to Sapporo to avoid a dangerous heat wave. Unfortunately, according to a paper published in Nature, climate change could render certain countries unable to host a Summer Olympics by the end of the century.

Luckily, none of the 2026 Tour de France riders suffered heat stroke during the race, thanks largely to careful monitoring by their teams and medical personnel who were able to deliver fluids and ice mid-ride. But as we spectators climbed down from the summit of Stage 3, you could almost feel the next heat wave approaching the future of the event.

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Editor’s Note: A draft of what follows was inadvertently emailed to paid subscribers earlier today. This is the correct edition. The search for someone to blame is ongoing.

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We’re back with another episode of ‘Alternate Shots’, America’s fastest-growing podcast, according to two perhaps mis-informed sources. With the Memorandum of Understanding set to “expire” on Monday, we lead off with a Groundhog Day-like conversation about the status of the Iran war in the Persian Gulf. A headline in today’s Wall Street Journal mirrors Richard’s analysis: “The Iran war is….about who blinks first under economic pressure”.

We then turn to a recent war game conducted in Germany, pitting Ukraine drone operators against US troops rotated in from Fort Hood, Texas. The drone operators won. Welcome to the future of warfare. The lack of urgency on the need to remodel America’s military to fit the modern battlefield is both alarming and even more alarming.

We then turn our attention to domestic matters, including President Trump’s re-embrace of the anti-vax movement, the mid-term elections and the president’s health. We end with Richard’s enthusiasm for the WNBA and keeping our fingers crossed for Tim Hegarty, a good friend and a great golfer, who we fervently hope will win the 45th U.S. Mid-Amateur Championship next month.

(‘Alternate Shots’, Episode #34. Co-hosted by Richard Haass and John Ellis. Produced by Dale Eisinger. Recorded, 14 August 2026. If you prefer, you can listen to this episode (and all previous episodes) by clicking on these hyperlinks: Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. We’re on a number of other podcast platforms as well. And YouTube!)