Arvind’s Newsletter

1.Israel and Hamas agree Gaza ceasefire

Israel and Hamas have agreed to a deal to halt the war in Gaza and free the remaining hostages, raising hopes of an end to the bloodiest round of fighting in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’s history.

The multiphase agreement comes days before Donald Trump takes office as US president. Trump’s warning that there would be “all hell to pay” if the hostages were not released before his inauguration on Monday helped inject renewed momentum into the long-stalled talks.

2.A decades-long commodities “supercycle” may be concluding as a result of slowing growth in China. 

The construction and manufacturing boom since 2000 in what is now the world’s second-largest economy drove surging demand for iron ore and steel, but use of those goods is shrinking, and China’s oil demand may fall soon, too.

“That engine is over,” the appropriately named Chinese executive Steele Li told the Financial Times. This supercycle has been declared over in the past — the FT itself said so in 200 8, but with China’s economy languishing, it may indeed be ending.

3.Cambridge Five Confessions

Britain's intelligence agency MI5 released a trove of declassified documents yesterday, revealing new insights into the notorious Cambridge Five Soviet spy ring. The files show Queen Elizabeth II was not informed for nearly a decade that Anthony Blunt, her long-serving royal art adviser, had confessed to being a Russian spy in 1964, in an effort to avoid adding to her worries. 

More than 100 documents were released, including partial confessions from other members of the spy ring, such as Kim Philiby, one of the most successful double agents in British intelligence history, and John Cairncross, the "fifth man" who played a crucial role in passing sensitive information to the Soviets during World War II.

Additionally, the documents contained surveillance advice for new MI5 recruits—such as avoiding the use of fake hair, carrying spare change for public transportation, and being prepared with a convincing cover story.

4.Even Harvard M.B.A.s are struggling to land jobs

The difficult recruiting environment is a new reality, said Kristen Fitzpatrick, who oversees career development and alumni relations for HBS.

Landing a professional job in the U.S. has become so tough that even Harvard Business School says its M.B.A.s can’t solely rely on the university’s name to open doors anymore.

Twenty-three percent of job-seeking Harvard M.B.A.s who graduated last spring were still looking for work three months after leaving campus. That share is up from 20% the prior year, during a cooling white-collar labor market; the figure was 10% in 2022, according to the school.

“We’re not immune to the difficulties of the job market," said Kristen Fitzpatrick, who oversees career development and alumni relations for HBS. “Going to Harvard is not going to be a differentiator. You have to have the skills."

Harvard isn’t the only elite business school where recent grads seem to be stumbling on their way into the job market. More than a dozen top-tier M.B.A. programs, including those at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and New York University’s Stern School of Business, had worse job-placement outcomes last year than any other in recent memory.

5.US sales of physical books rose in 2024 after three years of decline.

Industry figures showed that 782.7 million print books were sold last year, up 1% on 2023 although still nearly 40 million down from the peak of 2021. Growth was driven by fiction, especially fantasy, while adult nonfiction, the biggest category, fell slightly.

Print editions have been challenged by both ebooks and audiobooks: The latter are growing rapidly and hit $2bn in sales in 2024. But physical media in general are seeing a revival, with sales of vinyl, CDs, and DVDs all increasing in recent years, thanks to nostalgia and consumers’ desires to unambiguously own, rather than lease, content.

6.ChatGPT Will Soon Be Able to Remind You to Walk the Dog

OpenAI plans to roll out an early version of a new ChatGPT feature that lets users schedule simple tasks to be completed later, as the startup works to turn its popular chatbot into a more dynamic digital assistant that competes with the likes of Amazon’s Alexa.

The feature, announced on Tuesday, will let users ask ChatGPT to draft a kid-friendly joke around bedtime at 8 p.m. or simply share a reminder to walk the dog every morning at 8 a.m. The chatbot will then send a written notification, such as an alert from the ChatGPT mobile app, at the appointed time.

Two years after OpenAI released ChatGPT, the product now has more than 300 million weekly active users who turn to it for writing emails, spitting out song lyrics and searching the web. With the scheduling option, OpenAI is vying to make ChatGPT more useful throughout the day by adding functionality similar to what has long been offered by digital assistants like Google’s Assistant, Apple Inc.’s Siri and Alexa.

7.How L&T completely muffed up a valuable teachable moment; Indrajeet Gupta, Founding Fuel

Around the world, CEOs, even the smartest of the lot, are known to occasionally suffer from a foot-in-the-mouth disease. Yet there are playbooks in place on how to deal with such crises–something that L&T has chosen to ignore.

There will be no newsletter over next few days as I am travelling . Newsletter will be next back on Jan 24