For America’s 250th birthday, Tim Hirschel-Burns listed 25 times the United States has been a force for good in the world. I agree with most of this - particularly the US’ place as a creedal nation.
To quote Ronald Reagan, “you can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
There is a paper that finds the median married Indian woman leaves the house for only 30 minutes a day. There have been some methodological criticisms of this paper, but another paper finds that only 16% of the people on the streets of Mumbai are women. I don’t really have witty commentary on this; life is more than household production.
Daniel Yu writes about the migration hump - and how people who would most benefit from migrating for work can’t afford to do so.
Niko McCarty has a reading list to understand Chinese biotech. I know very little about Chinese biotech, but can endorse many of the books listed.
It is likely that 20,000 Europeans died because of the recent heat wave. Seems bad.1
I love Kazakhstan so much. According to the constitution, you can only be president for one seven-year term. The current president would like to run again. So the constitutional court ruled that this rule applies once per constitution, and Kazakhstan just passed a new constitution. So Tokayev is all good to run again.2
Note that the US has largely broken the temperature-mortality link.
I checked before making this joke that Kazakhstan is visa-free for Americans, because I would like to go someday and autocrats tend to be touchy about that kind of thing.