Maggie Gyllenhaal, Alba Rohrwacher and Nicolas Maupas wore #Prada# while attending the 83rd Venice International Film Festival. #MaggieGyllenhaal# wore a black silk gabardine apron dress and blue poplin bodice embellished with teardrop embroidery and silver micro jet beads, while attending the Closing Ceremony. #AlbaRohrwacher# wore a white Oxford cotton shirt and long black tech-satin pencil skirt, while attending the "Un Bon Petit Soldat" screening. #NicolasMaupas# wore a black wool suit paired with a black cotton shirt featuring pink cuffs and black leather shoes, while attending the Closing Ceremony. #PradaPeople# #VeniceFilmFestival#

[ Margin Notes ] They didn’t send an argument. They sent a note. At the 2026 Seoul Defense Dialogue, Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro was mid-sentence on gray-zone coercion and UNCLOS when a staffer handed him a slip of paper from a Chinese military attaché. Beijing’s position, in miniature: the 2016 arbitral award is “illegal, null and void.” It has “no binding force.” China “neither accepts nor recognizes” it. Teodoro did the one thing the note was not designed for. He read it aloud. Then he answered it, line by line. No binding force? Because you refuse to be bound by the law you signed. You do not recognize the ruling? Of course. You lost. He held the paper up to the room and called the stunt what it was: coercion wearing a name tag, bullying passed down the aisle, aggression that could not even wait for the question to finish. He said it trampled UNCLOS and insulted South Korea, the host, in the same cheap gesture. Then, in Filipino: show a little decency. Have a little shame. The hall applauded. This is hegemony as stationery. Not a case. Not a diplomat on the panel. A scrap of paper slipped to the speaker, as if the South China Sea were still an internal memo and the rest of Asia a secretary. A great power that cannot win in court tries to win by interrupting. A claim that cannot survive daylight tries to survive as a whisper. Teodoro said he would keep the note as a memento. He should. Empires usually leave monuments. This one left handwriting. When your map of the sea depends on pretending a tribunal never happened, sooner or later you have to write it down and hand it to the other man. Sometimes he reads it back. And the room claps. — Aric

[ Margin Notes ] The CCP’s so-called “preparations for war” are nothing more than a ploy to intimidate people, to threaten the outside world and conduct massive propaganda campaigns at home, all to maintain the legitimacy of its rule. End CCP.

[ Margin Notes ] Behold the glorious prosperity under the Chinese Communist Party! Skyscrapers pierce the clouds, high-speed trains streak across the land, and official figures proudly declare extreme poverty “eradicated.” In this socialist paradise, every citizen thrives in harmony and abundance, thanks to the wise leadership that has delivered unmatched flourishing to the masses. Yet stroll through the streets of Beiliu in Guangxi and witness the true miracle. Three children dig through garbage piles for their next meal, having gone four days without real food. One limps on a leg crippled by his own father’s beatings. No parents, no protection, no safety net, just discarded scraps while the Party boasts of “common prosperity.” How magnificent: gleaming cities for the elite, while rural children eat refuse in the shadows. The surveillance state captures every face, yet somehow misses these starving kids. Censors erase the videos, statistics airbrush the hunger, and the narrative of eternal success rolls on. This is the real achievement, not eliminating poverty, but perfecting the art of making it invisible. Hail the CCP’s grand flourishing, where the people’s suffering is the foundation of the Party’s shining image. — Aric

[ Marginalia ] Two Hundred and Thirty-Seven. Her name in the file is Mei. Not her name, the one they gave her afterward, so she could be spoken about without being found. At four she was behind in language, in writing, in drawing. Her crayon houses had no doors. The doctors put a word on it that fewer than two hundred and thirty-seven people in the world have ever been given. A gene called CHD3, misspelled by one letter in the earliest draft of her brain. Two hundred and thirty-six others, somewhere, in rooms her parents would never enter. That was the number they held on to. A number is a kind of company. Jason kept the medical records in a folder on his desktop. He opened it more often than he needed to. In the WeChat group, forty parents, all of them awake at two in the morning, all of them typing, a name surfaced in 2023 the way a name surfaces in a city: from someone who knew someone. Shanghai. Xinhua Hospital. A laboratory that had made mice with his daughter's exact mistake inside them. He wrote the email at night. He attached everything: the scans, the reports, the sentence saying he was willing and able to bear the costs. Then he sat there, the way you sit after posting a letter you can't take back. Thirteen minutes. He has counted those thirteen minutes many times since. He has divided them, turned them over, held them up to the light. In thirteen minutes a man can boil water. In thirteen minutes a man on the other side of a country can read a child's whole life and decide what to do with it. Later Jason would understand what the speed meant, that the answer had been waiting long before the question. That somewhere a laboratory had been standing at a window for two years, watching the road, waiting for a father to walk up it carrying a folder and a checkbook. They paid. First for the mice. Then for the monkeys. Then one hundred and thirty thousand dollars into a researcher's personal account, the way you'd pay a man to fix a roof. Here is what nobody said out loud in the consent conversation, though everything else was said, carefully, at length: the worst case is that she dies. They spoke of risks the way a hotel speaks of the weather. The dose went in through the spinal fluid, adenovirus, thousands of times a vaccine's load, because you cannot edit one cell when what you need is a million. Twenty-seven years ago in Arizona there was an eighteen-year-old named Jesse Gelsinger, and on the fourth day his organs stopped, one after another, and the whole world was supposed to have learned something. Somebody did learn something. They learned where the reviews are looser. Because there are two doors in that country. One goes through the drug regulators. The other, for research the hospital calls non-commercial, curiosity's own door, goes through a committee down the hall. The committee that approved Mei never read the primate safety report. This is not an oversight. Oversights get corrected. A door that stays open for thirty years is not a door somebody forgot to close. Mei was not dying. That is the part her mother cannot put down. She was six, she was behind in drawing, she was not dying. A year after she died, the paper came out in Nature. Beautiful mice. Beautiful monkeys. A breakthrough. What had been quietly removed: the human data, and the line thanking a family in the acknowledgments. Their daughter had been edited out of the sentence that thanked them for her. So they went and asked for the paper to be pulled. Not for her. For the parents reading it that morning, in forty group chats, at two in the morning, thinking: there's hope now. Two hundred and thirty-seven, minus one. Nobody has updated the number. Nobody was ever going to. — Aric

Maggie Haberman says foreign leaders use Natalie Harp as a backchannel to Trump when official routes fail. Trump reportedly says she loves him as much as his wife and children and “will never leave.” This is not merely strange. It is a national security vulnerability.

Marginal macro policy is moving from the Fed to the Treasury. Treasury's new buyback program will use bills to buy off-the-run long-end bonds. "If that sounds like a different variation of QE, it's because it is."

Maggie Simpson from Rail Freight Group discusses how attending Multimodal allows them to discuss with people the benefits of rail freight from being resilient and high performance to a low carbon transport option. Watch the full video at #Multimodal26#

[ Margin Notes ] The U.S. Navy is rebuilding its undersea war plan around one theater: the Taiwan Strait. Nineteen planned Virginia-class attack submarines will be converted into guided-missile boats, each fitted with an 84-foot Virginia Payload Module that lifts their launch tubes from 12 to 40, enough to rain Tomahawks and hypersonic weapons from inside the First Island Chain. Aimed at the PLA? The logic cuts straight at the People's Liberation Army. Stealthy SSGNs that slip past China's anti-access net could blind the radars and command nodes steering Beijing's missiles, neutralizing the very advantage the PLA spent two decades building around Taiwan. The clock now runs against Beijing. Every Virginia that enters the water, the first by 2029, nineteen by 2038, plants forty more tubes off China's coast that the PLA cannot see, cannot track, and cannot answer in time. Xi Jinping's window for Taiwan is closing, and Washington is welding it shut. — Aric