Crypto fighting champions

At a lower Manhattan Church Street Boxing Gym in the US, the ring is occupied by traders buying and selling cryptocurrencies — bitcoin, ether, even Pengu, a penguin-themed memecoin. The prize: $10,000 in cash and an ornate Japanese katana. This is the frontier of esports-style live trading competitions, a high-octane subculture that feels like an underground rave. Here, trading is reimagined as a sport, complete with play-by-play commentators dissecting every tick of the digital-assets market. Eight players each start with $25,000 of paper money and battle through three 30-minute rounds of trading. Rankings are decided by profits and losses, with the weakest half eliminated in each round. Drones buzz above. A feisty audience watches from the balcony or nearby monitors, where the action—and their prediction bets on it—flashes on the screens. Live trading spectacles like this have exploded in popularity, evolving from local underground meetups to high-production events around the world.

(Adapted from “He’s A VC Partner By Day, Crypto Fighting Champ By Night,” by Vicky Ge Huang, published on May 13, 2026, by the Wall Street Journal)?

Claude vs ChatGPT

Anthropic is emerging as the presumptive front-runner in the race for artificial-intelligence supremacy, with faster growth and fundraising that could soon yield a higher valuation than rival OpenAI. Anthropic has received investment offers in recent months valuing it at more than $900 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. That would more than double the company’s current valuation and surpass OpenAI’s for the first time. Earlier this year, OpenAI raised $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation. Recently released data by finance startup Ramp said more of its customers used Anthropic’s models than OpenAI’s for the first time, with 34.4pc using Anthropic versus 32.3pc using OpenAI. Adoption of Anthropic’s Claude tools jumped 3.8pc from March to April, while OpenAI adoption fell 2.9pc, according to the data. Ramp analyses the spend of approximately 50,000 customers to track AI adoption trends. OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot still maintains a sizable lead over Anthropic’s Claude in overall users.

(Adapted from “Anthropic Was Behind. Now It’s the AI Boom’s Front-Runner,” by Kate Clark, published on May 13, 2026, by the Wall Street Journal)

Waitlisted hopes

The University of California, Berkeley had almost 6,500 students on its wait list last year. It ended up admitting none of them. The only thing harder than getting into college, it seems, is getting off the wait list. At some schools, the wait list is far more selective than the college’s overall acceptance rate. A tough reality for thousands of wait-listed students, still holding out hope of getting into their dream schools. Schools often turn to the wait list to fill very specific gaps in their class. The school might want to fill a niche-major seat, or be seeking full-pay students, said Arkesh Patel, chief operating officer of admissions consultant Crimson Education. The wait list is also used as a “soft no” or a “pat on the back” to maintain relationships with counsellors at feeder schools, the college’s donors and legacy families, consultants said.

(Adapted from “The Only Thing Harder Than Getting Into College Is Getting Off The Wait List,” by Roshan Fernandez, published on May 10, 2026, by the Wall Street Journal)?

Fewer A’s at Harvard

It’s about to get harder to earn an A at Harvard. The faculty voted to approve a cap on the number of A’s per course, part of the undergraduate college’s years long effort to curb grade inflation. Administrators and many faculty members argued that the A-cap would challenge students to invest more in coursework by restoring grades as meaningful indicators of academic performance. They say it protects the value of students’ degrees by preserving Harvard’s reputation. The cap, which applies to the undergraduate college, limits the number of A’s per course to 20pc. Joshua Greene, a member of the committee behind the grade proposal, compared the current status quo to a marketplace where professors use A’s as currency to buy effort and engagement from students — but professors are also free to print as much money as they want. “You need to have a limit on how much currency you can print up, right?” said Mr Greene, also a psychology professor at Harvard.

(Adapted from “Harvard Votes To Cap A’s in Effort To Curb Grade Inflation,” by Roshan Fernandez, published on May 20, 2026, by the Wall Street Journal)

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, May 25th, 2026