Today is my first day covering the Chinese economy for @WSJ based in Singapore. Email me @ katrina.northrop@wsj.com to get coffee or with story ideas!

June 13, 1916 - 110 years ago today: Goldie Horton was the first woman to earn a PhD from @UTAustin, the second awarded on the campus. Her carefully handwritten dissertation - “Functions of limited variation and Lebesque integrals” - can still be found in the UT Libraries.

Modern history frames the American Founders' hypocrisy on slavery as the ultimate proof that their ideals were a lie. But Coleman Hughes argues the exact opposite. Writing "all men are created equal" while owning slaves wasn't America's fatal flaw. To be a hypocrite, you first have to state a moral standard. Most historical empires avoided this problem entirely. Hughes notes that Ottoman sultans could simply point to texts legalizing slavery. No clash of values meant no internal pressure to change. America put itself in a moral corner. By putting equality on paper, the Founders gave abolitionists a weapon. They created a cognitive dissonance that eventually forced a resolution. This defines the current debate over American history. The 1619 Project looks at the founding hypocrisy and declares the system structurally condemned. Martin Luther King Jr. looked at the exact same hypocrisy and saw a promissory note waiting to be cashed. You cannot hold a society accountable to a standard that does not exist. The founding ideals did not excuse the system. They gave future generations the exact leverage needed to break it. Source: @JTLonsdale @coldxman

Elden Ring owner's extra lives are running out breakingviews.com/columns/co…

The Texas Quote of the Day is a collection of quotes by the great Mike Leach, former football coach at Texas Tech: "Golf’s pretty much for people that don’t swear effectively enough or need practice at it, and so there are people that need golf. I don’t think I do." ****** "I do have a Viking axe by the bed if I need to whack someone. My wife bought me a Viking axe. The axe side curls down so you can grab the adversary around the neck and you can use it to climb walls, as a grappling hook.” ***** “I ought to have Mike's Pirate School. The freshmen, all they get is the bandanna. When you're a senior, you get the sword and skull and crossbones. For homework, we'll work pirate maneuvers and stuff like that.” ***** "Growing up in Wyoming, I can tell you that If a pinecone war breaks out you have no choice but to engage in it. There are no neutral countries in pinecone wars." ***** "If you're calling 50% run plays and 50% pass plays, you're 50% stupid." ***** "First advice — elope! Just eliminate all the family input aggravation, change of constant, change of course that exists with planning weddings, and the anxiety and the pressure that almost drives people to divorce before they even start." ***** "They’d start talking about evolution, like if you don’t use a certain part of your body, as time evolves over century upon century, in natural selection, that part of the body disappears and even that animal might disappear. I’m genuinely fearful that, on our team, if me and the other coaches don’t get them right, that about a generation from now our receivers' kids and their grandkids won’t have hands. Because from a lack of use those hands just disappear. Maybe they’ll be like this (Leach does raptor hands at the podium), like those dinosaur hands like this. And you’ve got like a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which is clearly really good at eating things, with big ol’ jaws and all that stuff, certainly athletic and can run. But those hands are like this (gestures again).” ***** ""Well eggs create life, so you could argue this is the most important game there is." --- Mike Leach, explaining how important the egg bowl game (between Mississippi State and Ol' Miss) is. ***** "There's 3 tigers in the SEC. Well, that's what makes it a tough conference." ---- Mike Leach, as part of an exploration as to who would win in an SEC mascot brawl ***** "First of all, what kind of mystical powers does a sun devil have? We've got to consider that. I'm going to say the wildcat's out. The Trojan, does he have a horse or is he on foot? Does he have a bow and arrow or just his sword? The bruin is definitely formidable. Another bear up there at Cal. The tree... I imagine that tree is going to get chopped down unless we're going to go with the bird and then someone might get pecked or something, I don't know. And then the duck. The duck might lose interest and fly away and get out of there which may be good advice under the circumstances. The husky, no chance. The beaver? Well, we'll see how long that beaver can hold his breath. The Ute? Again, we're back to: is he on horseback? Does he have a bow and arrow? Did he trade for a rifle? I mean, because if that Ute's got a rifle, there's some definite problems. You know, you'd have to get one of those Harry Potter activists to read up on how you kill a sun devil because there's a lot of outside stuff there. Just as far as a beast alone, a buffalo is going to be pretty hard to tangle with. I mean, a buffalo is utterly outstanding. Butch (the Washington State mascot) is going to have to be clear minded and crafty. I mean, Butch will find a way, there's no question. The cougar will find a way ---- clear minded and crafty, a combination of stay out of harm's way and attack when you get your chances or your openings." ---- Mike Leach, exploring who would win in a Pac-12 mascot brawl

"Jackie Robinson was our Neil Armstrong. His breaking of the colour barrier carried the same level of euphoria that we saw collectively as a Nation when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. That's the kind of impact that he had. And sometimes, lost in the tremendous social adversity that Jackie would have to shoulder, is that he was also carrying the hopes and aspirations of 21 million black folks who were counting on him to succeed. He cannot fail. And as you know, baseball at its crux is a game of failure. But he cannot fail, because if the first guy fails, there is no second guy, who knows how much longer it may have been before another Black player would have gotten an opportunity to play in the major leagues? It could have been another 10, 15, 20 years or more. If It's 20 years later, think about all the legendary major league stars we would have missed. We'd have missed Willie Mays. We'd have missed Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks, Roy Campanella. We'd have missed Roberto Clemente, Bob Gibson. Can you imagine our sport without those great stars?" Bob Kendrick. President, Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. 'These stories should never be lost to time' "Jackie Robinson" Art by LeRoy Neiman.

.@UTAustin's newly renovated Battle Hall, though only the lower floors have reopened. Now the Architecture and Planning Library, Battle opened in 1911 as UT's first library building and set the Mediterranean Renaissance style for much of campus. 📸: Reddit user theshotta22

Happy VE day to those who celebrate. All gave some, some gave all.

VE DAY 81 Today is the anniversary of Victory in Europe, a time to reflect that day of 81 years ago and all those lost. The war was not yet over, for those in the Far East and those here who worked on, not yet able to return to their families. Lest we forget.

Miss Hoover is a bad teacher who hates her students and drinks on the job. There are no good teachers on The Simpsons because they've all been worn down from working long years at a public school that's chronically underfunded. That's the joke.

Devastating news for Japan’s innumerable natto-eating grandfathers

Bob and me agree that they will always be the Chaparrals to us😁

⚡️What is emerging is the collapse of the old urban elite bargain. For decades, New York ran on an unspoken pact: capital accepted punishment because the city conferred power. High taxes, brutal costs, political hostility, congestion, disorder, regulatory pain. The exchange still worked because New York gave access to the center of gravity. Deals, law firms, media, finance, culture, status, elite labor, philanthropic prestige, institutional validation. That pact is breaking. The new political class still wants the fruits of capital, but no longer wants to honor the status of the people who create it. It wants the tower, the jobs, the taxes, the donations, the office demand, the civic subsidy, the global prestige, then wants the builder to stand there and be morally indicted after delivering it. That is the deep contradiction. A city can extract from capital when capital believes the city is indispensable. A city can insult capital when alternatives are weak. A city can tolerate dysfunction when proximity remains mandatory. New York’s danger is that all three conditions are weakening at once. Capital is more mobile. Work is more distributed. Financial elites have alternatives. Florida is no longer a retirement punchline. Texas is no longer a provincial sideshow. Miami, Palm Beach, Dallas, Austin, Nashville, and global private networks now offer enough infrastructure for wealth to keep compounding without begging New York for permission. That changes the psychology. The old New York premium was: suffer here because the center is here. The emerging question is: why suffer here if the center can move? That is the part the political class does not understand. Prestige used to be New York’s moat. Now prestige is becoming portable. Capital can build its own rooms, its own conferences, its own private networks, its own schools, its own philanthropic channels, its own media, its own political machines. Once capital no longer needs the city to certify its status, the city loses its deepest leverage. The Griffin fight is a symbol of that transition. He represents a type of actor who should be treated as strategic infrastructure by any city that wants to remain dominant. A builder of institutions. A buyer of land. A creator of high-value jobs. A source of tax flow. A donor. A signal to other capital that the city still matters. If the city’s response is contempt, the message to other capital is clean: come build here and become prey. Deep deep down, this is the emergence of jurisdictional sovereignty inside America. The wealthy and productive are no longer merely choosing neighborhoods. They are choosing regimes. One regime offers prestige plus extraction plus moral hostility. Another offers lower taxes, friendlier politics, more space, and fewer rituals of humiliation. The old coastal model assumed talent and capital were captive. The new map proves they are not. That is why this matters beyond New York. This is the same pattern showing up everywhere: high-status legacy institutions still believe they own the future because they owned the past. Universities, media, cities, agencies, credential systems, old financial centers. They keep charging the old premium after the monopoly has weakened. That is how incumbents decay. They mistake inherited gravity for permanent gravity. The emerging structure is harsher: capital will increasingly route around contempt. Talent will increasingly route around decay. Builders will increasingly choose places that treat them as assets rather than tribute animals. Legacy cities will still matter, but their monopoly on ambition is cracking. The real truth is that New York is not fighting one billionaire. New York is testing whether a city can despise its own engine and still remain the center of the world.

I love love love when reporters walk up to the chalkboard, draw a circle around the big thing nobody's pointed out yet, and everyone gasps. This is exactly that. Classic of the genre: reuters.com/business/autos-t…

You may be pleased to learn that kids playing in street beneath the spray of a busted water main--their peals of joyous laughter ringing out like springtime birdsong--is just as wonderful and life-affirming in Hong Kong as it is everywhere else

Warren Buffett, in his first sit-down since stepping down as Berkshire CEO, gave the cleanest indictment of legalized gambling in a decade. He called it a tax cut for the wealthy. The math proves him exactly right. Americans wagered $165 billion at legal sportsbooks in 2025. They lost $16 billion of that. FanDuel pulled $6 billion of the losses. DraftKings pulled $5.3 billion. Every state with legal mobile sports betting collected a tax on the bettor side. New York alone took in over $1.2 billion in 2025 sports betting tax revenue. Layer the lottery on top. State lotteries generate over $90 billion a year. The bottom half of income earners account for roughly 70% of total spend. The average lottery player makes $38,000. A household earning $20,000 spends three times more on tickets than one earning $30,000. The implicit tax rate, meaning whatever the state keeps after prizes, runs 30 to 50% depending on the game. No other revenue source in America has that base and that rate. The structural design is the engine. A single straight sports bet carries a hold of 4 to 5%. A four-leg parlay carries a hold above 30%. FanDuel and DraftKings spent five years rebuilding their apps to make parlays the default product. FanDuel's blended hold rate hit 11.4% in 2025, up from roughly 7% in 2022. The product got worse for the customer and the customer wagered more anyway. Now look at the substitution. Nine US states have no state income tax. Seven of those nine run state lotteries. Seven of those nine have legalized sports betting. The states most committed to never taxing wealth are the same states running the largest extraction machines on people who cannot afford to lose. Read it as policy. Here is what Buffett is actually pointing at. The state needs revenue. It can raise income tax on the top decile, or it can run a lottery plus a sports betting tax. The second option raises the money from the people who can least afford it. The first option becomes politically optional. New York's $1.2 billion in 2025 sports betting tax is $1.2 billion the state did not have to ask of someone earning $5 million. DraftKings and FanDuel sell a privatized collection mechanism for a regressive tax that the state never has to defend at the ballot box again. Voters approve legalization once. Collection runs forever. The state takes a cut. The wealthy get a quieter top bracket. The bettor's cut shrinks every quarter as the parlay menu gets pushed harder. The function of a government, Buffett said, is not to play its people for suckers. Thirty-nine state governments now do.

Ian Fleming creó a James Bond. Tambien era un vividor profesional. Su rutina diaria es algo de lo que todos podemos aprender🧵:

Study of the Heads of Two Old Men, by Philippe de Champaigne, 17th c, 📸 by @adampantozzi

Happy San Jacinto day to those who celebrate!