See NY Times: The Sudden Death of a Man Who Told Chinese Kids How to Succeed The influencer Zhang Xuefeng was known for no-nonsense, some said cynical, advice about how to win in China’s educational rat race. He died at 41. NYTimes Link … Mr. Zhang was known for dispensing ruthlessly blunt advice about how to maximize a student’s chances at success. The liberal arts? Only good for service jobs, he declared. Finance? Don’t bother unless your family has connections. ...

Jazz and the symphony hall don’t always sit comfortably together — not everyone can be Gershwin, who moved between both worlds as though no wall existed between them. So here’s a Gershwin appreciation blog. He’s my favourite target when I retail therapy in record stores. A Good Pianist A lot of composers are good pianists themselves, and Gershwin was a compulsive performer. At parties, he’d plant himself at the piano and hold court, spinning out variations on his show-tunes deep into the night. Society celebrities and starry-eyed flappers drap around his piano in Manhattan apartments during Prohibition, cocktails in hand whether they were supposed to be or not. Just as easily, though, it could be Ravel and Prokofiev leaning in across a Parisian salon, or Alban Berg listening intently in Vienna. ...

Friday night at the CSO — sans Muti, plus bourbon Maestro Muti had taken the regulars off to Wheaton for the evening, leaving Symphony Center to do something rather brave, or rather reckless, depending on your temperament: host jazz on a Friday night. While sensible Chicagoans were settling into barstools and letting bebop wash over them with a proper Old Fashioned in hand, we — a friend visiting from New York and I — decided to experience the best Chicago has to offer. Jazz, yes. But jazz in that hall. ...

The Tchaikovsky The evening opens with Muti’s enthusiastic reading of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3, the Polish. Composed just two years before Swan Lake, this is Tchaikovsky when he was still happy — and you can tell, for better and for worse. The first movement trades in repetitive phrases that offer neither beauty nor direction, recalling Beethoven at his most obstinate. The second movement is light, pleasant enough, but slightly boring. By the third, though, the real Tchaikovsky emerges — the music swells suddenly into those lush, layered strings we know from the Nutcracker Pas de Deux, and you hear the toolkit of a composer finding his voice. The fourth movement is scherzo for scherzo’s sake: beats land off the beat with mischievous intent, and if this were written for ballet dancers, they might have better anticipated what Swan Lake had in store. A trombone solo arrives unannounced and entirely without pretense, somewhat too straightforward. ...

Spring comes, Canada geese come over: Canada Goose are naturally migrant birds. But sometimes they become year long resident and live on our sandwich breads… They’re technically not any similar to owls. Canada Goose are very loud. Canada Goose down jackets in concert halls are even louder than 10 Steinway grand pianos. Nevertheless, as they are flying over Chicago, it’s about time to play this music ...

When demand substantially exceeds supply and the seller won’t set a market-clearing price, chaos follows. China In China, ticket scalpers are called 黄牛 (HuangNiu). As one Red Note user put it — speaking for all of us — Why are HuangNiu so powerful in China? — “The moment tickets go on sale they vanish, and then HuangNiu list them on secondhand platforms at a markup.” The reality is more nuanced. For pop concerts and sporting events, tickets are sold to real-ID users and admission is strictly real-ID verified. But event organizers sometimes collude with HuangNiu, reserving PR allocations and profiting from their resale. So when fans feel like tickets sell out instantly, it’s mostly a story of overwhelming demand rather than scalper wizardry. ...

WSJ Opinion: The Economics of Regulating AI by Roland Fryer, March 20: (One of) the key challenges of AI regulation is asymmetric information. Regulators can’t observe firms’ true risk profiles or day-to-day behavior. Current AI rules (IL’s disclosure mandate, NY’s RAISE Act, EU AI Act) collapse into uniform compliance burdens that generate paperwork but zero information revelation. Worse, they create perverse, distorted incentives — as Fryer notes after IL’s ban on discriminatory AI used in hiring, firms are scrapping hiring algorithms that outperformed human judgment on meritocratic outcomes because the legal exposure under vague, overbroad statutes isn’t worth it. The regulation meant to reduce discrimination is increasing it. ...

An earlier speech by JiangXiaojuan at THU. She knows economic and knows what’s actually going on. It’s genuinely good reasoning and insightful ideas: On Gov-Market Boundary in the Digital Era Core Argument Digital and AI technologies have empowered governments to collect granular information and enforce accountability much better. However, the same technologies have equally empowered markets and civil society as free market to function better. Therefore, the question of whether the digital era justifies expanding government’s role has no predetermined answer, and the traditional binary of “government vs. market” should give way to a more nuance multi-stakeholder cooperative governance model. ...

This is JiangXiaojuan’s March 2026 speech at Southwest University of Political Science & Law, Chongqing. She is a professor at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (also where she got her economic PhD), and former deputy secretary-general of the Chinese state council. AI for Good: What Is Good, How to Achieve It, Who Should Act? Core argument International consensus on AI ethics principles (safety, fairness, transparency, etc.) is strong but vague on implementation. Jiang proposes a social-science framework defining three dimensions of “good”—rationality, utility, and social consensus—each with concrete metrics, responsible actors, and enforcement mechanisms. ...

I cannot help but feel a little jealous of CSO patrons from 2010 to 2023. The Muti years is a golden chapter in the orchestra’s history, crowned by performances that critics and audiences alike placed among the finest of their time. His recording of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem with the CSO and Chorus even carried home two Grammy Awards in 2011. The maestro returned in March 2026 for a three-night program filled with to Italian opera treats. Something special was about to happen. ...