Today, the University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra plays our December Concert. We did Tchaikovsky 5th Symphony, and premiered Daniel Pesca’s Piano Concerto Up North. I played the Piccolo. For contemporary piece like Up North, there’s no melody so you can only count beats. It’s a very very stressful position to be in — because for a piccolo, there’s hardly cues from other instruments and I’m on my own. And after all, piccolo is a difficult instrument. It’s easy to make mistakes, and everyone hears it. ...

I was at the 2025 opening night of Joffrey Ballet’s The Nutcracker. OMG, right Christopher Wheeldon’s kaleidoscopic reimagining of The Nutcracker relocates the story to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. The production shows off the iron-and-steam industrial charm of turn-of-the-century Chicago while blending Wheeldon’s contemporary choreographic vitality with the structure of classical ballet. What struck me most was how cohesive the narrative felt. Like Ballet often struggles with storytelling (sleeping beauty, I’m talking about you). This Nutcracker version builds Clara’s dream into a gently unfolding vision of family, yearning, and possibility. The Joffrey dancers carried it with luminous technique and an unforced theatricality that made even the fantastical moments feel grounded. ...

Professor Roughgarden came to University of Chicago! Day 1: Shill-Proof Auctions The paper Shill-Proof Auctions (https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2404.00475) was presented the first day Professor Roughgarden introduced shill bidding from a broad angle. Reconsider the basic premise of the credibility of a mechanism. For instance, in a sealed-bid second-price auction, how can a bidder verify that they are truly paying the second-highest bid given that it’s a sealed bid auction in the first place? One credibility concern in auction is shill bidding, where the mechanism designer (the auctioneer) injects fake bids. ...

Professor Kevin Murphy’s last lecture (of the fall 2025 quarter Price Theory I course). Professor Murphy teaches with a sharp, lightning-fast intellect that channels the timeless, foundational wisdom of the great economic thinkers. Problem No. 1: Nudge Problem No. 2: Why platforms running two sided market often charge the supply side Coming next: details and intepretations.

Costly Persuasion with Posterior-Separable Costs In the costly persuasion model, there is a cost $c(E)$ for experiment $E$. Assume it’s posterior separable: $$ c(E)=\mathbb E_{\mu\sim\langle E\mid\mu_0\rangle}[k(\mu)], $$ The sender chooses not only what information to reveal but also how much information to acquire. The entire problem collapses back into the familiar concavification framework: the sender’s interim value becomes $$ \hat v(\mu)=\mathbb E_\mu[v(a^*(\mu),\omega)]-k(\mu), $$ and optimal persuasion reduces to choosing a distribution of posteriors with mean $\mu_0$ to maximize its expectation. ...

Another vivid example of “in the worst case, what (tf) would happen if xxx information is leaked?” ICLR is one of the most important computer science conferences. They do double-blind peer review on OpenReview. OpenReview makes all paper submissions and reviews public (e.g. anyone can view and make public comment on it, like Twitter). Reviewers goes under anonymous encrypted alias. Around Nov 11, a bug was found in OpenReview that you can query the anonymous encrypted alias of reviewers and get the true reviewer identity. Consider the openness of OpenReview, technically, everything was under the daylight from Nov 11 to Nov 27 (when at Thankgiving morning, the officials learnt and fixed the bug). ...

There’s a weird little hierarchy in classical music where “pleasant” is treated like a dirty word. The sweeter and more singable the piece, the faster some people rush to dismiss it as shallow. Waltz of the Flowers gets this treatment all the time: overplayed, overrated, “too syrupy.” The audacity! Tchaikovsky crafted every bar with care, every note is perfection. The orchestration is rich and luminous, structure is classic, and the melody is unforgettable without ever feeling cheap. ...

Perhaps the most unserious divertissement among the collection: “The last dance of Clara’s banquet tells the story of Mother Gigogne and her children, who appear from beneath her vast hoop skirt. The music is vibrant and at moments clownish in this fairytale number.” (Warner Classics)

Technically, the 2nd act of Nutcracker takes place in the candy kingdom. Marzipan is a kind of dessert. However, the original French name for the dance, Mirlitons, is an older term for a simple reed or pipe flute, similar to a kazoo. Huh. Puns. As I said, timeless. The high-pitched trill of the orchestral flutes float up to the stage and seemingly fuel our steps, which are as colorful, bright & perky as our costumes. Tutus & Tea ...

Tchaikovsky’s music is so iconic that the dance ‘Trepak’ is always associated with the piece. Cause technically, Trepak is a fast, energetic folk dance that originated in Ukraine and Southern Russia, known for its male dancers performing athletic moves like leg-flinging. It is widely recognized as the “Russian Dance” from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker. The name comes from the Ukrainian word for the dance, tropak. Good old memory from Tugan Sokhiev with Munich Philharmonic in Shanghai 2024: the momentum, the rhythm, the chill of sitting at the choral seat for an encore of full spirit! ...