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...
It was Facebook that brought Jay Leno and David Letterman together for Sunday's Super Bowl commercial that also included Oprah Winfrey. Jay Leno says he and Letterman hadn't seen each other in 18 years. But, Leno jokes Letterman found him on Facebook, he made a friend request and Leno accepted. And, Leno says that's how he and Letterman "hooked up and watched the game. Letterman jokes he wants to "thank the actors who played Oprah and also Jay Leno. They did a tremendous job." Letterman has been at odds with Leno ever since Letterman was passed over as host of "The Tonight Show" when Johnny Carson left. An original post by Sociolatte