| Plus: A talk with Trump’s trade hawk | |
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| Welcome to the weekend! In a modern twist on Pascal’s Wager, Polymarket spent much of 2025 assigning just a 3% chance that a certain figure would return by the end of the year. Who was it? (Hint: He did not return.) Find out with this week’s Pointed quiz. One figure who returns every week: Mishal Husain. Tune into the latest episode of The Mishal Husain Show for a conversation with Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro. Train your brain with today’s Alphadots puzzle, and don’t miss tomorrow’s Forecast on the Polymarket Venezuela payout saga. For unlimited access to Bloomberg.com, please subscribe. | |
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| As the US Supreme Court reconvenes, a ruling may be imminent in one of its most consequential recent cases: whether Donald Trump’s use of emergency powers to levy tariffs is legal. A loss could force the government to refund companies billions in tariffs already paid — and deal a blow to Peter Navarro, a key architect of the president’s trade policy. In a Weekend Interview with Mishal Husain, Navarro says China’s rise changed his thinking on protectionism, and insists there has been “no softening” toward Beijing. | |
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| Navarro is confident his trade policies will benefit the US economy. But last June, the Department of Agriculture stripped analysis from a trade report that would have run counter to the Trump administration’s messaging. It’s one example of how the White House is suspending data collection and obscuring findings on topics it deems “woke” — or politically inconvenient. The resulting blind spots are eroding America’s reputation as the gold standard for statistical agencies, Molly Smith writes. | |
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| If data informs decision-making, artificial intelligence raises a harder question: What kind of system is doing the deciding? Is AI a mind — something that thinks — or a market, aggregating vast amounts of human input into outputs that merely look like judgment? A growing school of thought treats AI less as intelligence and more as a “social technology,” Walter Frick writes, akin to a printing press or a bureaucracy. These systems are powerful not because they reason, but because they reorganize how information flows. | |
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| Plenty of critics argue that AI isn’t intelligent — but if learning through culture is humans’ secret sauce, then new ways of producing and sharing culture still have real impact. In music, the algorithmic push toward sameness is already meeting resistance: Local sounds are gaining traction, Tiffany Ap writes. Artists like Bad Bunny, Rosalía and Chinese rapper Skai Isyourgod — who mixes Memphis-style rap with Mandarin, Cantonese and Hakka rhymes — are breaking through by doubling down on identity. | |
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| Copenhagen
At the Greenlandic House community center, politics hangs in the silences. Newspapers from Nuuk track US policy and old Danish scandals, while a magazine shows Greenlanders protesting Donald Trump, whose recent remarks about the US assuming control of the island are reviving debates about its future. Few Greenlanders there want to see Greenland join the US, but anger toward Denmark has some questioning whether closer ties to Washington are unavoidable.  Photographer: Kristian Tuxen Ladegaard Berg/SOPA Images/LightRocke/Getty Images Kyoto
Behind the wooden doors of a traditional inn, proprietor Hiroya Shimizu is scrambling. His 15-room property has been booked solid for months, but staffing shortages are making it hard to maintain standards. Shimizu says employees want to work longer hours, but his hands are tied by overtime limits meant to curb Japan’s once-punishing work culture. Now Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has ordered a review, pitching overtime reform as a way to give businesses more flexibility and ease labor shortages in a shrinking population.  Illustration: Seo-Young Kwon for Bloomberg | |
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| The “brittle” strongman is a myth. The idea that strongman rule is inherently self-defeating is fast becoming an excuse for liberal complacency, as authoritarian leaders exploit the very dysfunctions democracies keep hoping will save them. The US sphere of influence is bigger than it looks. Washington’s seizure of Venezuela’s leader doesn’t mark a retreat into neat spheres of influence — it signals to China and Russia that no great power has carte blanche in its own backyard. | |
Playing the Game | | “Games wake us up to a life of play; metrics drive us down into grueling optimization.” | | C. Thi Nguyen The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game | | A new book argues that games offer meditative joy and meaning precisely because they resist optimization — and that our growing reliance on metrics, from rankings to scores, is flattening how we value our lives and judge ourselves. | | |
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