Legal research duopoly, Langerian vs. Kabat-Zinn mindfulness, ASML's EUV monopoly, Panama Canal economics, Zhu Rongji's 1999 MIT visit, Buffett's Squanderville parable, talent engineering, and Haussmann's Paris.
Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
Two companies charge lawyers hundreds of dollars per search to access what should belong to all of us: the law itself. Tom Blakely traces how we got here, from West Publishing's 19th-century page-numbering monopoly (yes, they copyrighted page numbers) to a merger spree that left only LexisNexis and Westlaw standing. The 1991 Feist decision stripped away West's IP moat, but instead of opening the floodgates to competition, it triggered consolidation — Reed Elsevier grabbed Lexis, Thomson scooped up West and every smaller rival in sight, and now two giants gatekeep public domain court opinions behind paywalls that would make Google blush. Today, case law remains locked behind a duopoly charging rents on democracy's instruction manual.
Can mindfulness help you overcome your cognitive biases?
Ellen Langer's mindfulness is about noticing novelty, spotting three new things in a familiar room, while Jon Kabat-Zinn's is about sitting still and letting go. The difference matters because cognitive biases don't all come from the same place: loss aversion is driven by emotion (which yields to acceptance and nonreactivity), while confirmation bias is driven by tunnel vision (which yields to active noticing). A video game designed to train intelligence analysts proved the Langerian approach works for perceptual biases, but it couldn't touch loss aversion, because you can't notice your way out of feeling the sting of surrender. One form of mindfulness opens your eyes wider; the other teaches you to hold discomfort without flinching.
The $400 million machine powering the future of chipmaking
ASML's $400 million EUV machines are the choke point of the entire chip industry — a Dutch monopoly so total that even China, despite pouring billions into replicating the technology, can't crack it. The machines vaporize molten tin with lasers 50,000 times per second to generate extreme-ultraviolet light, focus it with mirrors polished to atomic precision, and pattern transistors eight nanometers wide in a vacuum. It took 16 years and $10 billion in R&D just to get the first version working, then ChatGPT arrived and demand exploded. Now ASML and TSMC form a duopoly controlling advanced chipmaking, which is why the US strong-armed the Netherlands into blocking sales to China and why startups like Substrate think there's an opening if they can build something cheaper, smaller, or just less concentrated in one country's hands.
Notes on Panama
A weeklong Panama trip yields one central puzzle: how does a country this small, rural, and uneven end up with a skyline rivaling Hong Kong and a per capita GDP higher than you'd guess? The canal explains some of it, but the author suspects much of the wealth is parked in inflated real estate schemes and offshore tax structures that never trickle down past Panama City's aging high-rises. The historical deep dive on the canal is worth it alone: 22,000 French workers dead from yellow fever and a Scottish colony that nearly bankrupted the entire country.
Transcript of Premier Zhu Rongji’s speech at MIT
In 1999, Premier Zhu Rongji stood at MIT and methodically dismantled the panic over China's trade surplus with a mix of self-deprecating humor and forensic precision. He walked through Stanford economist Lawrence Lau's corrections for Hong Kong transshipments and smuggling, then zeroed in on Nike shoes: $120 retail in the U.S., $20 factory gate in China, $2 to Chinese workers, $2 for a U.S.-patented cushion. China's self-sufficiency was already fiction, as most "Chinese" exports were assembly work for Taiwanese and Japanese firms offshoring labor costs, meaning America's deficit had simply migrated geographically, not grown.
Buffett on Trade Deficits
In 2003, Buffett broke his 72-year streak of avoiding foreign currencies because America's trade deficit had metastasized into something uglier: a slow-motion transfer of national wealth. His parable of Squanderville and Thriftville cuts through the macro fog. One island works extra hours, exports food, and gradually buys up all the land of its consumption-addicted neighbor, who ends up both indebted and renting what it used to own. The U.S. was hemorrhaging $500 billion a year in net asset transfers. Twenty years later, the deficit is triple what spooked him then, and the dollar hasn't collapsed, which either vindicates the skeptics or means we're still just kicking the can down Squanderville's increasingly mortgaged road. He has a solution however: Import Certificates.
What is talent and talent engineering - Two relatively new roles are emerging recently, "Talent" and "Talent engineering."
The industry keeps inventing new job titles without understanding what they mean. A "talent" person isn't a recruiter with better branding — they're someone with deep relationships across the ecosystem who attracts exceptional people through sheer magnetism and reputation. A "talent engineer" isn't a recruiter who learned Python; they're a real engineer, good enough to ship core product, who happens to love building people tools instead. Anyone qualified for the second role faces overwhelming pressure to do something that looks more prestigious, which is why the best hiring systems don't rely on one unicorn hire. Talent engineers build cultures where every engineer treats recruiting as part of the job, because the best recruiters will always be the founders and the technical staff themselves.
Haussmann's renovation of Paris
Napoleon III wanted Paris to look less like a medieval death trap and more like London, so he handed Baron Haussmann sledgehammers and blank checks. Between 1853 and 1870, Haussmann bulldozed entire neighborhoods where cholera killed 5% of residents per outbreak, replaced streets barely wide enough for a cart with boulevards you could march an army down (handy for suppressing the seven uprisings that had plagued the city since 1830), and gave Paris the street grid that still defines it today. The opposition was fierce enough to get him fired, but the work continued until 1927. What tourists now photograph as timeless Parisian beauty was actually a ruthless 19th-century demolition job.
Extras:
Radical reform of the Catholic Church, common ground in polarized America, China's homegrown foie gras, betting on weddings, voice AI to work anywhere, Trump's DoJ transformation, Josh Kushner, Wall Street's 1968 paperwork crisis, Morgan Stanley on ROIC and investing, trendy dessert joints, the manager dopamine problem, and how Chinese students experience America.