ITK Daily | September 29

Happy Thursday.

To be ITK, know this:

‘The indicators are not looking good.’ World Trade Organization chief latest to warn a global recession is on the way Fortune

+ A number of coinciding crises are slowing global economic growth and threatening to tip the world into a recession, the World Trade Organization chief warned on Tuesday, making it the latest global institution to issue a dark forecast for the world economy.

+ Earlier this month, the World Bank issued a study predicting a global recession as early as next year, citing slower economic growth and central banks around the world tightening their monetary policies to reduce inflation.

+ Okonjo-Iweala warned on Tuesday that rising food and energy prices due to the war in Ukraine were the main reason behind the WTO’s revised expectations.

Preparing for the long war: Amid the euphoria following recent Ukrainian battlefield victories, some commentators are cautiously optimistic that Ukraine could win the war by the spring. But Vladimir Putin’s latest moves suggest that Russia is settling in for a long war of attrition that will test European resolve. Mark Leonard

+ The other asymmetry is at the level of international support. Ukraine would have disappeared from the map many months ago had it not received billions of dollars of military supplies, intelligence support, and economic aid from Europe and the United States. By contrast, Russia has been at pains to attract any meaningful external support.

What the rightward shift means for Italy: Right-wing radical politician Giorgia Meloni appears poised to govern Italy with an absolute majority after Sunday's election. But the amount of leeway she has will depend on two partners who are unlikely to be easy to deal with: Matteo Salvini and Silvio Belusconi. Der Spiegel

+ The main question after her election victory is: How far will she go in carrying out her hostile agenda? Or will reality set in over the next few weeks, pushing the Meloni government to a reasonably moderate-conservative government program?

Truss learns the hard way that Britain isn’t America: Reaganism is a good idea, but Reaganism without the dollar isn’t. Janan Ganesh

+ The UK does not issue the world’s reserve currency. It does not have near-limitless demand for its sovereign debt.

+ Because the UK’s governing class can follow US politics as easily as their own, they get lost in it.

+ What doesn’t help is the freakish fact that Britain’s capital, where its elites live, is as big as any US city, despite the national population being a fifth of America’s.

+ You can see why, from a London angle, the two nations seem comparable.

+ People who can’t name a cabinet member in Paris or Berlin (where so much that affects Britain, from migrant flows to energy, is settled) will follow the US midterms in November.

+ The EU is a, perhaps the, regulatory superpower in the world. UK politicos find Iowa more diverting.

When asked about China, Australians tend to think of its government, not its people Pew

China is a soft power failure.

+ A public focus on China’s government – rather than its people – is consistent with other recent Pew Research Center findings about China, including in the United States.

+ Positive responses were more common among Australians ages 18 to 29 than those 60 and older. When it comes to the overall favorability of China, younger Australians also have more favorable views of China than older ones.

The cost of China’s information vacuum: Reduced access for foreign experts is making it even harder for governments to understand decision-making in Beijing. FT

+ Deprived of many of the insights and personal contacts that the expert community had developed, it is becoming even harder for governments to understand what is really going on in China, which is adding to the greater sense of unpredictability about Beijing’s decision-making.

+ “What people in DC really want to know is who is going to move up and who is going to move down, especially who is going to be the next premier who will make economic policy, but frankly we are reading the tea leaves,” says Wang Yuhua, a professor of government at Harvard University.

$456 billion: The value of US office buildings stand to lose due to lower tenant demand, according to a study by Columbia University and New York University.

Carlo Rovelli: ‘Science is not just about writing equations. It’s about reconceptualizing the world’: The physicist known for making complex ideas seem simple wants us to accept that certainty is often out of reach. FT

+ Schrodinger’s cat is alive or dead: we can only know which by looking, which itself determines the answer. Why this is true is unclear.

+ “Good philosophers have always listened to physics. Kant wouldn’t have been Kant without Newton just before; half of what Kant does is making sense of Newton. Vice versa, Einstein wouldn’t have been Einstein without Kant. Einstein read Kant and Kant’s ruminations about space and time were the main ingredient for him to write equations that predicted black holes.”

+ “Science is not just about writing equations and making predictions. It’s about reconceptualizing the world. If you think what happened with Copernicus, the way we tell the story is that he understood that the Earth is spinning around the sun. But can you prove that the Earth is not the centre of the universe? No, you couldn’t make an experiment. The point is that, if you change your conceptual structure, everything starts making much more sense.”

+ His particular contribution has been to loop quantum gravity theory, which posits that space itself is not continuous but granular and that the grains are woven together by loops.

+ It remains a theory.

+ At first you just see the forest, “you go on, and see that it’s different: there are trees. And then you go closer and you see the trunk, animals, insects. And then ever closer . . . You get layers and layers and layers of understanding . . . We accumulate knowledge.

Read this: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics - Carlo Rovelli Amazon

Inside John Fetterman’s brash social media campaign for the US Senate: Democrat candidate pours millions of dollars into punchy TikTok and Instagram strategy. FT

+ “It is fun, but this is also a deliberate strategy,” said Joe Calvello, Fetterman’s head of communications. “We have a creative team which is willing to take risks and do things other campaigns might not.”

+ Instead of holding large rallies and events, Fetterman has captured attention mainly through his punchy social media messaging, much of which has taken direct aim at his opponent.

Ron DeSantis: The making and remaking (and remaking) of a MAGA heir: The Florida governor is the Fox-loving, lib-owning successor-in-waiting to Donald Trump’s cult of personality. But for all DeSantis’s bona fides and rocketing national profile, doubts about his own persona (“calculated,” “aloof,” “cold-blooded”) persist. Is it any wonder he and the former president are already locked in a 2024 cold war? Vanity Fair

+ He offered cursory praise for Mastriano and then uncorked a grievance-fueled stump speech that sounded like it had been written by AI plugged into Fox News.

+ In DeSantis’s telling, the honest people of Florida were besieged by a vast array of liberal scourges: big tech, IRS agents, George Soros, the Biden administration, the corporate media, illegal immigrants, Anthony Fauci, police defunders, Disney, China, communism, cancel culture, critical race theory, and woke gender ideology.

+ Only Ron DeSantis was brave enough to confront these malign forces.

+ “I’ll tell you this. The state of Florida is where woke goes to die!”

+ DeSantis made more than 200 appearances since 2017 on Fox News.

+ "His first question was always, ‘How will that play on Fox?’"

+ DeSantis’s political power flows from the fact that he is equally popular with the donor class and a GOP base that has otherwise shown utmost fealty to Trump.

+ He’s Trump “without the insanity and the tweets at three in the morning,” one top GOP donor told me.

+ “When you work for Ron, he makes you feel like you’re just lucky to be there.”

+ “He’s missing the sociability gene.”

+ Can he lead the Trump cult of personality with no personality?

+ “DeSantis is like Andrew Cuomo. He ruled by fear. He kept everyone off-balance. But the moment he slipped, he’d made many, many enemies. Ron has made a lot of enemies.”

The most common words people always misspell on Google, visualized Digg

+ "separate"

+ "zucchini"

+ "questionnaire"

If you want to diet, I’m afraid you really do need one weird rule Rory Sutherland

+ As the world’s religions have known for thousands of years, abstinence is far easier than the continuous exercise of self-restraint.

+ As the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran suggests, humans may not have free will but they do have free won’t.

+ Notice that almost all religious laws are absolute: no food is half kosher; it is or it isn’t.

+ During the second world war, experts needed to decide whom to train as RAF fighter pilots... they used two simple questions: 1) Have you ever owned a motorcycle? 2) Do you own one now? The ideal recruits were those who answered 1) Yes and 2) No. They wanted people who had been brave enough to ride a motorbike but were sane enough to abandon the habit.

The 100 best clothing stores in the world: Whether you go for the pants, to sip a matcha, or just to soak up some rarefied ambience, these 100 stores from around the world demand a visit. GQ

The $25,000 rookie dinner has NFL players divided: Young athletes are expected to treat their veteran teammates to an exorbitant meal. Is it a form of team bonding — or hazing by another name? NYT

+ The NFL is the highest-grossing professional sports league in the United States, with estimated revenues of $11 billion in 2021. Yet its players — who enter the league in their early 20s and become six- or seven-figure earners overnight — make less than many professional male athletes in other sports.

+ They are not guaranteed contracts, and the average length of their careers is just short of three years, according to the NFL Players Association.

+ A 2015 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that more than 15 percent of NFL players had declared bankruptcy within 12 years of leaving the profession.

+ “It speaks to a general culture of football, which treats young players as imminently disposable. There is always another coming, someone will always want your job, so you need to get along and go along and do what you are told, or you will be out of here in a second.”

‘Hello, I am Eric.’ An interview with Cantona The Athletic

+ Now 56 years old, Cantona has been retired from football for 25 years, the iconic collar coming down in the summer of 1997 when the man Manchester United supporters had crowned their King suddenly quit professional football at the age of 30.

+ In English football, he retains prophet-like status.

+ Looking FC launched in January and runs four-day tours of cities including Manchester, Liverpool, Lisbon, Madrid, Milan, Buenos Aires and Casablanca, partially designed by Cantona, in which supporters meet local fan groups, tour stadiums, sample the culture of the place and attend a match.

Guardian: El Tráfico: LAFC and LA Galaxy eye MLS attendance mark at Rose Bowl in 2023

+ LAFC and LA Galaxy to stage derby at the 90,888-capacity stadium

+ Rose Bowl hosted the 1994 World Cup final between Brazil and Italy

Stone skipping is a lost art. Kurt Steiner wants the world to find it. Meet an amazing man who has dedicated his entire adult life to stone skipping, sacrificing everything to produce world-record throws that defy the laws of physics. To hear him tell it, he has no choice. Outside

+ Kurt Steiner is the world’s greatest stone skipper. Over the past 22 years, he has won 17 tournaments in the United States and Europe, generating ESPN coverage and a documentary film.

+ In September 2013, he threw a rock that skipped so many times it defied science.

+ Today’s professional stone-throwing world is divided into two disciplines on either side of the Atlantic. British tournaments measure distance, not skip count.

+ To find rocks, Kurt combs the lake for about an hour, appraising the stones like a diamond merchant.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc

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