On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Today is Jorge Luis Borges's 112th Birthday and is being honored with a Google Doodle. He was an was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. It was at the age of 9 that Jorge Luis Borges translated 'The Happy Prince' by Oscar Wilde into Spanish. His most famous books, Ficciones and The Aleph, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, animals, fictional writers, religion and God. The Google Doodle shows him standing on top of a complex of buildings looking through complex imagery from which is carved out the Google logo. much like his stories and thoughts. Scholars also have suggested that Borges's progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. Knowing his background helps to understand the doodle better and it must be said that a lot of thought and understanding has gone into this Google Doodle. He never won the Nobel prize but he is remembered and now known but a lot more people thanks to the doodle.
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