| Plus: Trump copies Xi's playbook | |
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| Welcome to the weekend! American Eagle is facing a PR fracas after its ads touted which blonde-haired, blue-eyed actress for having “great jeans”? Find out with this week’s Pointed quiz. There’s never a PR fracas when it comes to the Weekend audio playlist, available in the Bloomberg app. We’ve got four great stories, including the saga of a CIA spy and a treatise on teaching your kids poker. Don’t miss Sunday’s Forecast, in which we look at the (lack of) evidence around AI eating US jobs. For full access to Bloomberg.com, subscribe! | |
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| Back in 2020, more than 100,000 Indians packed into a cricket stadium to welcome US President Donald Trump, who in a 27-minute speech characterized India as a necessary foil to nations that “seek power through coercion, intimidation and aggression” (cough cough, China). Fast forward five years, and Trump is hitting India with a 50% tariff that embodies the very coercion he once railed against. The result is a rapid breakdown of decades of US-India diplomacy, and a strategic and moral victory for Chinese President Xi Jinping. Trump isn’t just taking a page from Xi’s playbook, Daniel Ten Kate writes: He’s penning the next chapter. | |
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| Where Beijing has shown it can hurt the US by cutting off critical exports, India has far less leverage, making it an easier target for Trump. In a way, that’s the kind of calculus Nargis Nehan wishes were happening in Afghanistan, where she served as minister for Mining and Petroleum before leaving the country in the wake of the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. Now a women’s right advocate in exile, Nargis tells Mishal Husain that the international community is neglecting to use its own leverage to engage the Taliban productively, which is emboldening the group to curtail women’s ability to learn, travel, speak and live safely. | |
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| There are thorny questions baked into Nehan’s frustration: Do you try to change the Taliban through engagement, or do you isolate them? Which path will history vindicate? Gray Chang, a former CIA spy now living in Idaho, knows this tension well. As a nuclear engineer working on Taiwan’s covert weapons program in the 1980s, he fed information to the Americans that helped them shut the program down. Some see Chang as a traitor who thwarted Taiwan’s defenses against China. But as the world enters a more dangerous nuclear era, others hail Chang as a hero who helped avert potential catastrophe, Timothy McLaughlin writes. | |
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| In geopolitics, making decisions with incomplete information is unavoidable. In poker, it’s the whole point. You rarely know if you have the best hand, and yet must decide to bet, check, call, raise or fold. If you have the best hand and fold, you lose. If you have the worst hand and bluff well enough, you win. But those mechanics get complicated, which is why Matt Levine decided to teach his children to play using a single card. There’s one round of betting, then everyone shows their card and the highest card wins. It’s no Texas hold’em, but it does teach the game’s dynamics — and makes a family poker night with young kids possible. | |
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Economic statisticians. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ recent announcement that 248,000 fewer people had been in work in May and June than previously reported woke the public up to growing issues with the quality of economic data. -
Business consiglieres. Dig into Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s 75% approval rating and you’ll soon find Altagracia Gómez Sierra. The heir to a corn-flour fortune has become Sheinbaum’s bridge to the private sector. -
Vintage car restorers. Do you have the patience to recreate the uneven paint pattern on a Porsche 904? It’s not the most lucrative gig, but classic-car restoration is seeing years-long wait lists and a disappearing labor force.  Photographer: Frank Frances Studio/2025 | |
Seeing Green | | “It could all blow up. But I have to keep pushing to make it work.” | | Drew Horn CEO of GreenMet | | Donald Trump is eager to deploy America’s financial and technological muscle to secure access to Greenland’s natural resources and best China on trade. That’s where GreenMet comes in. The company arranges minerals deals between the US government and the private sector — and Horn hopes to profit from Trump’s marriage of foreign policy and US commerce. | | |
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| What we’re wondering: What went wrong at Samsung? The tech giant was the world’s leading memory chip maker, but was recently surpassed by rival SK Hynix. Is it too late for South Korea’s biggest company to get back in the AI race? What we’re reading: Disney Adults. Author A.J. Wolfe, a Disney adult herself, mounts a robust defense of the people who put the brand at the core of their identity — even if it has made them “the most hated group on the internet.” What we keep saying: There is no “Trump doctrine.” Some presidents are synonymous with their foreign policy. Eisenhower’s containment. Kennedy’s missile crisis. But Trump’s personal foreign policy defies description. What we’re eating: Paul Robeson tomatoes (named for the singer and political activist). Heirloom tomatoes have long been the variety of choice for chefs, but the expense of growing them is opening the door to varietal competition. | |
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