Category: English

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By David R. King, Higdon Professor of Management, Florida State University

When it comes to major U.S. industries, three tends to be the magic number.

Historically, auto manufacturing was long dominated by Chrysler, Ford and General Motors – the so-called “Big Three,” which at one point controlled over 60% of the U.S. auto market. A dominant trio shows up elsewhere, too, in everything from the U.S. defense market – think Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrup Grumman – to cellphone service providers (AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon). The same goes for the U.S. airline industry in which American, Delta and United fly higher than the rest.

The rule of three also applies to what Americans watch; the glory days of television was dominated by three giants: ABC, CBS and NBC.

Now, in the digital age, we are rapidly moving to a “Big Three” dominating streaming services: Netflix, Amazon and Disney.

The latest step in that process is Netflix’s plan to acquire Warner Bros. for US$72 billion. If approved, the move would solidify Netflix as the dominant streaming platform.

When streams converge

Starting life as a mail DVD subscription service, Netflix moved into streaming movies and TV shows in 2007, becoming a first-mover into the sphere.

Being an early adopter as viewing went from cable and legacy to online and streaming gave Netflix an advantages in also developing support technology and using subscriber data to create new content.

The subsequent impact was Netflix became a market leader, with quarterly profits now far exceeding its competitors, which often report losses.

Today, even without the Warner Bros. acquisition, Netflix has a dominant global base of over 300 million subscribers. Amazon Prime comes second with roughly 220 million subscribers, and Disney – which includes both Disney+ and Hulu – is third, with roughly 196 million subscribers. This means that between them, these three companies already control over 60% of the streaming market.

Netflix’s lead would only be reinforced by the proposed deal with Warner Bros., as it would add ownership of Warner subsidiary HBO Max, which is currently the fourth-biggest streamer in the U.S. with a combined 128 million subscribers. While some of them will overlap, Netflix is likely to still gain subscribers and better retain them with a broader selection of content.

Netflix’s move to acquire Warner Bros. also follows prior entertainment industry consolidation, driven by a desire to control content to retain streaming service subscribers.

In 2019, Disney acquired 21st Century Fox for $71.3 billion. Three years later, Amazon acquired Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for $8.5 billion.

Should the Netflix deal go through, it would continue this trend of streaming consolidation. It would also leave a clear gap at the top between the emerging Big Three and other services, such as Paramount+ with 79 million subscribers and Apple TV+, which has around 45 million. Paramount+ was also a rival bidder for Warner Bros., and while it is protesting Netflix’s deal for Warner Bros., it likely will need to pursue other options to remain relevant in streaming.

Why industries come in threes

But why do industries converge to a handful of companies?

As an expert on mergers, I know the answer comes down to market forces relating to competition, which tends to drive consolidation of an industry into three to five firms.

From a customer perspective, there is a need for multiple options. Having more than one option avoids monopolistic practices that can see prices fixed at a higher rate. Competition between more than one big player is also a strong incentive for additional innovation to improve a product or service.

For these reasons, governments – in the U.S. and over 100 other countries – have antitrust laws and practices to avoid any industry displaying limited competition.

However, as industries become more stable, growth tends to slow and remaining businesses are forced to compete over a largely fixed market. This can separate companies into industry leaders and laggards. While leaders enjoy greater stability and predictable profits, laggards struggle to remain profitable.

Lagging companies often combine to increase their market share and reduce costs.

The result is that consolidating industries quite often land on three main players as a source of stability – one or two risks falling into the pitfalls of monopolies and duopolies, while many more than three to five can struggle to be profitable in mature industries.

What’s ahead for the laggards

The long-term viability of companies outside the “Big Three” streamers is in doubt, as the main players get bigger and smaller companies are unable to offer as much content.

A temporary solution for smaller streamers to gain subscribers is to offer teaser rates that later increase for people that forget to cancel until companies take more permanent steps. But lagging services will also face increased pressure to exit streaming by licensing content to the leading streaming services, cease operations or sell their services and content.

Additionally, companies outside the Big Three could be tempted to acquire smaller services in an attempt to maintain market share.

There are already rumors that Paramount, which was a competing bidder for Warner Bros., may seek to acquire Starz or create a joint venture with Universal, which owns Peacock.

Apple shows no immediate plan of discontinuing Apple TV+, but that may be due to the company’s high profitability and an overall cash flow that limits pressures to end its streaming service.

Still, if the Netflix-Warner Bros. deal completes, it will likely increase the valuation of other lagging streaming services due to increased scarcity of valuable content and subscribers. This is due to competitive limits that restrict the Big Three from getting bigger, making the combination of smaller streaming services more valuable.

This is reinforced by shareholders expecting similar or greater premiums from prior deals, driving the need to pay higher prices for the fewer remaining available assets.

The cost to consumers

So what does this all mean for consumers?

I believe that in general, consumers will largely not be impacted when it comes to the overall cost of entertainment, as inflationary pressures for food and housing limit available income for streaming services.

But where they access content will continue to shift away from cable television and movie theaters.

Greater stability in the streaming industry through consolidation into a Big Three model only confirms the decline in traditional cable.

Netflix’s rationale in acquiring Warner Bros. is likely to enable it to offer streaming at a lower price than the combined price of separate subscriptions, but more than Netflix alone.

This could be achieved through additional subscription tiers for Netflix subscribers wanting to add HBO Max content. Beyond competition with other members of the “Big Three,” another reason why Netflix is unlikely to raise prices significantly is that it will likely commit to not doing so in order to get the merger approved.

Netflix’s goal is to ensure it remains consumer’s first choice for streaming TV and films. So while streaming is fast becoming a Big Three industry, Netflix’s plan is to remain at the top of the triangle.

David R. King does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Netflix-Warner deal would drive streaming market further down the road of ‘Big 3’ domination – https://theconversation.com/netflix-warner-deal-would-drive-streaming-market-further-down-the-road-of-big-3-domination-271466

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Stylianos Syropoulos, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Arizona State University

Obituaries preserve what families most want remembered about the people they cherish most. Across time, they also reveal the values each era chose to honor.

In a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we analyzed 38 million obituaries of Americans published from 1998 to 2024. We identified the values families most often highlight, and how those values shift across generations, regions and major historical events.

Specifically, working with psychologists Liane Young and Thomas Mazzuchi, we examined the language used on Legacy.com, an online platform where families often post obituaries and share memories of loved ones.

During their lifetime, most people tend to be guided by a small set of broad values like caring for others, honoring tradition, keeping loved ones safe and seeking personal growth. To understand how these values showed up in remembrance, we used text-analysis tools built on curated lists of everyday words people use when talking about those themes.

By analyzing the words that appeared again and again in memorials, we could see which values communities chose to emphasize when looking back on the lives of their loved ones, and how those patterns changed over time. Because the dataset included 38 million obituaries, the analysis ran on a supercomputer.

Across nearly 30 years of obituaries, words related to the value “tradition” appeared most often – many tributes described religious participation and enduring customs. Words related to the value “benevolence” – caring for the welfare of others – were also consistently prominent. In fact, tradition and benevolence formed the dominant value profile across the dataset: They appeared in more than 70% of the obituaries. By contrast, words related to values like “achievement” and “power” appeared far less often.

Historical events did leave a mark. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the language families used to remember loved ones shifted compared with the period just before the attacks – and those shifts persisted for at least a year. Words related to the value “security” – including terms like “surviving,” “health” and “order” – showed up less often. At the same time, families used more language related to values like “benevolence” and “tradition.” Terms like “caring,” “loyal” and “service” showed up more often. These changes were especially strong in New York, where the attacks had the most direct impact.

COVID-19, however, produced the most dramatic shifts. Beginning in March 2020, benevolence-related language – including terms like “love,” “sympathy” and “family” – declined sharply, and hasn’t been the same since. Tradition-related language – terms like “service,” “faith” and “heritage” – initially declined as well, then rose above baseline levels during later stages of the pandemic.

These changes show that collective disruptions impact the moral vocabulary families use when commemorating loved ones. They shift what it means to have lived a good life.

We also saw differences that reflect stereotypes about gender and age. Obituaries for men contained more language linked to achievement, conformity and power. Meanwhile, obituaries for women contained more language associated with benevolence and enjoying life’s pleasures.

Older adults were often remembered more for valuing tradition. Younger adults, on the other hand, were often remembered more for valuing the welfare of all people and nature, and for being motivated to think and act independently. Value patterns in men’s obituaries shifted more across the lifespan than those in women’s. In other words, the values highlighted in younger and older men’s obituaries differed more from each other, while women’s value profiles stayed relatively consistent across age.

Why it matters

The most visited parts of print newspapers and online memorial sites, obituaries offer a window into what societies value at different points in time.

This study contributes to the broader scientific understanding of legacy. People often hold strong preferences about how they want to be remembered, but far less is known about how they actually are remembered, in part because large-scale evidence about real memorials is rare. Our analysis of millions of obituaries helps fill that gap.

What’s next

Obituaries allow researchers to trace cultural values across time, geography and social groups. Future work can examine differences across race and occupation, as well as across regions. It could also look to earlier periods using historical obituary archives, such as those preserved in older newspapers and local records.

Another direction is to examine whether highlighting how often kindness shows up in obituaries could inspire people to be more caring in daily life.

Understanding what endures in memory helps clarify what people consider meaningful; those values shape how they choose to live.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. What 38 million obituaries reveal about how Americans define a ‘life well lived’ – https://theconversation.com/what-38-million-obituaries-reveal-about-how-americans-define-a-life-well-lived-263880

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Samira Mehta, Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies & Jewish Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

There is a meme that circulates every holiday season, an image of a sign in a restaurant window. “The Chinese Restaurant Association of the United States would like to extend our thanks to the Jewish people,” it says. “We do not completely understand your dietary customs … but we are proud and grateful that your GOD insists you eat our food on Christmas.”

Is the sign real? Perhaps not; the fact-checking site Snopes found no evidence of the association even existing. But the joke’s popularity points to a tradition cherished by many American Jews – Chinese food on Christmas.

But why would Jews, who do not celebrate Christmas, have Christmas traditions?

Like many minority groups, Jews have always created ways of adapting to the societies in which they live, but whose culture they do not totally share. And one thing that means is a collection of Christmas traditions, varying by time and place. Many of them came up in interviews for my book “Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States.”

Old World festivities

Long before Jews came to the United States, some of them celebrated Christmas – participating in many of the cultural traditions, even as they avoided the religious part of the holiday.

According to Jordan Chad, author of “Christmas in Yiddish Tradition,” Jewish folklore about the holiday appears as early as the late 1300s. Plenty of Jewish communities in Europe spent Christmas Eve dancing and drinking, feasting and gambling – as many of their Christian neighbors did, when those neighbors were not in church.

Other scholars have argued that these traditions grew out of attempts to avoid studying Jewish religious texts on a Christian holiday. But Chad demonstrates that, over centuries, those customs came to celebrate the revelry of the season – though not the birth of Jesus.

Even in the 20th century, scholars such as Yaniv Feller have found, many middle- and upper-class German Jews embraced a secular Christmas, complete with a tree, a traditional dinner and presents. After all, some of those Christmas traditions stem less from religion than folk traditions and industrialization.

Given that long history, Jewish Christmas traditions are not necessarily a sign of Americanization.

That said, in the United States, Christmas is so culturally powerful – a day that almost everyone has off, and that the majority of Americans spend with their kith and kin – that many non-Christian immigrants celebrate it in a secular way, with family visits, Santa and a tree. They do not necessarily do the religious parts of the holiday, but they may well deck the halls. Certainly, my own Hindu relatives do.

And many Jews celebrate Christmas in some way because they are part of interfaith families – whether their own immediate family or extended relatives with whom they spend the day. Today, estimates place the American Jewish interfaith marriage rate as high as 50%.

Kosher-style Chinese

For plenty of contemporary Jews, however, it is profoundly important not to celebrate a secular version of Christmas. Starting in the 1970s, in fact, when American Jews were particularly worried about rising rates of interfaith marriage, many of the rabbis willing to perform ceremonies for Jewish-Christian couples made them promise to not have a Christmas tree. This happened despite the fact that, at the time, many American Jews did have Christmas trees in their homes.

Even if Jews do not want to deck the halls, though, many still have the day off. Meanwhile, their non-Jewish friends, families and co-workers are busy and much of the world is closed. And so many Jews have developed their own ways of marking the day.

The Chinese food tradition is particularly famous. In fact, during Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s 2010 confirmation hearings, when Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham asked her where she had been on Christmas Day, she responded, “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”

The first written mention of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas Day comes from 1935, when, according to The New York Times, a man named Eng Shee Chuck brought chow mein and toys to a New Jersey Jewish orphanage.

His generosity was probably not why Jews started going to Chinese restaurants on Christmas; it is more likely that they were already doing so. The two communities lived cheek by jowl in many American cities, where immigrants of different sorts ended up in the same neighborhoods. And Chinese food contains little dairy, meaning it rarely violated Jewish dietary laws against mixing milk and meat.

Most Chinese cuisines do use pork and shrimp, which is forbidden by kosher laws. But many Jewish customers were happy to make an exception, especially if the forbidden food was tucked in a dumpling or otherwise out of sight – at least outside their own homes.

As new research by New York University graduate student Shiyong Lu demonstrates, Chinese restaurants were also eager to cater to American Jews: They wanted to develop white, American clientele, and here were some right in their neighborhoods.

As restaurant owners learned that Jews often eschewed pork, some began to offer traditional dishes with chicken instead – allowing more observant Jews to eat “kosher style,” without eating explicitly forbidden food. Today, there is wide variation in Jewish dietary practices, making Chinese food even more accessible for most Jews.

By the end of the 20th century, “Chinese food and a movie” had become the trope of Jewish Christmas. Because most Chinese immigrants were not Christian, their restaurants are often open on Dec. 25. And indeed, they are often filled with Jews.

Movies, volunteering and more

The same tends to be true for movie theaters. In 2012, I saw “Les Misérables” on Christmas Day in a theater that seemed to be a who’s who of the Atlanta Jewish community. In fact, the movies and the Chinese food are often paired, whether out on the town or at home, streaming with take out.

Jewish museums are often open and are another popular destination in cities that have them. And some Jews use Christmas Day for travel. At least in eras past, plane tickets were notably cheaper than the days around the holiday.

Another Jewish Christmas tradition is simply to go to work, so as to let Christian colleagues have the day off. Many Jewish doctors and nurses are on call, or staff the emergency room or the intensive care unit, so that their colleagues can be home.

Still other Jews perform charitable deeds on Christmas: They staff soup kitchens and food banks, bring holiday cheer to nursing homes and hospital patients, or deliver gifts to children in shelters.

Living in a culture that largely closes down each Dec. 25, many Jews have found ways of making meaning in the day – be that sharing family time over beef and broccoli, followed by a holiday blockbuster, or working to make sure that more of their colleagues can have a family day. And those, too, are Christmas traditions.

Samira Mehta receives funding from the Henry Luce Foundation.

– ref. Merry Jewish Christmas: How Chinese food and the movies became a time-honored tradition for American Jews – https://theconversation.com/merry-jewish-christmas-how-chinese-food-and-the-movies-became-a-time-honored-tradition-for-american-jews-270131

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Monika Piotrowska, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University at Albany, State University of New York

In a Maryland operating room one day in November 2025, doctors made medical history by transplanting a genetically modified pig kidney into a living patient. The kidney had been engineered to mimic human tissue and was grown in a pig, as an alternative to waiting around for a human organ donor who might never come. For decades, this idea lived at the edge of science fiction. Now it’s on the table, literally.

The patient is one of six taking part in the first clinical trial of pig-to-human kidney transplants. The goal: to see whether gene-edited pig kidneys can safely replace failing human ones.

A decade ago, scientists were chasing a different solution. Instead of editing the genes of pigs to make their organs human-friendly, they tried to grow human organs – made entirely of human cells – inside pigs. But in 2015 the National Institutes of Health paused funding for that work to consider its ethical risks. The pause remains today.

As a bioethicist and philosopher who has spent years studying the ethics of using organs grown in animals – including serving on an NIH-funded national working group examining oversight for research on human-animal chimeras – I was perplexed by the decision. The ban assumed the danger was making pigs too human. Yet regulators now seem comfortable making humans a little more pig.

Why is it considered ethical to put pig organs in humans but not to grow human organs in pigs?

Urgent need drives xenotransplantation

It’s easy to overlook the desperation driving these experiments. More than 100,000 Americans are waiting for organ transplants. Demand overwhelms supply, and thousands die each year before one becomes available.

For decades, scientists have looked across species for help – from baboon hearts in the 1960s to genetically altered pigs today. The challenge has always been the immune system. The body treats cells it does not recognize as part of itself as invaders. As a result, it destroys them.

A recent case underscores this fragility. A man in New Hampshire received a gene-edited pig kidney in January 2025. Nine months later, it had to be removed because its function was declining. While this partial success gave scientists hope, it was also a reminder that rejection remains a central problem for transplanting organs across species, also known as xenotransplantation.

Researchers are attempting to work around transplant rejection by creating an organ the human body might tolerate, inserting a few human genes and deleting some pig ones. Still, recipients of these gene-edited pig organs need powerful drugs to suppress the immune system both during and long after the transplant procedure, and even this may not prevent rejection. Even human-to-human transplants require lifelong immunosuppressants.

That’s why another approach – growing organs from a patient’s own cells – looked promising. This involved disabling the genes that let pig embryos form a kidney and injecting human stem cells into the embryo to fill the gap where a kidney would be. As a result, the pig embryo would grow a kidney genetically matched to a future patient, theoretically eliminating the risk of rejection.

Although simple in concept, the execution is technically complex because human and pig cells develop at different speeds. Even so, five years prior to the NIH ban, researchers had already done something similar by growing a mouse pancreas inside a rat.

Cross-species organ growth was not a fantasy – it was a working proof of concept.

Ethics of creating organs in other species

The worries motivating the NIH ban in 2015 on inserting human stem cells into animal embryos did not come from concerns about scientific failure but rather from moral confusion.

Policymakers feared that human cells might spread through the animal’s body – even into its brain – and in so doing blur the line between human and animal. The NIH warned of possible “alterations of the animal’s cognitive state.” The Animal Legal Defense Fund, an animal advocacy organization, argued that if such chimeras gained humanlike awareness, they should be treated as human research subjects.

The worry centers on the possibility that an animal’s moral status – that is, the degree to which an entity’s interests matter morally and the level of protection it is owed – might change. Higher moral status requires better treatment because it comes with vulnerability to greater forms of harm.

Think of the harm caused by poking an animal that’s sentient compared to the harm caused by poking an animal that’s self-conscious. A sentient animal – that is, one capable of experiencing sensations such as pain or pleasure – would sense the pain and try to avoid it. In contrast, an animal that’s self-conscious – that is, one capable of reflecting on having those experiences – would not only sense the pain but grasp that it is itself the subject of that pain. The latter kind of harm is deeper, involving not just sensation but awareness.

Thus, the NIH’s concern is that if human cells migrate into an animal’s brain, they might introduce new forms of experience and suffering, thereby elevating its moral status.

The flawed logic of the NIH ban

However, the reasoning behind the NIH’s ban is faulty. If certain cognitive capacities, such as self-consciousness, conferred higher moral status, then it follows that regulators would be equally concerned about inserting dolphin or primate cells into pigs as they are about inserting human cells. They are not.

In practice, the moral circle of beings whose interests matter is drawn not around self-consciousness but around species membership. Regulators protect all humans from harmful research because they are human, not because of their specific cognitive capacities such as the ability to feel pain, use language or engage in abstract reasoning. In fact, many people lack such capacities. Moral concern flows from that relationship, not from having a particular form of awareness. No research goal can justify violating the most basic interests of human beings.

If a pig embryo infused with human cells truly became something close enough to count as a member of the human species, then current research regulations would dictate it’s owed human-level regard. But the mere presence of human cells doesn’t make pigs humans.

The pigs engineered for kidney transplants already carry human genes, but they aren’t called half-human beings. When a person donates a kidney, the recipient doesn’t become part of the donor’s family. Yet current research policies treat a pig with a human kidney as if it might.

There may be good reasons to object to using animals as living organ factories, including welfare concerns. But the rationale behind the NIH ban that human cells could make pigs too human rests on a misunderstanding of what gives beings – and human beings in particular – moral standing.

Monika Piotrowska does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Putting pig organs in people is OK in the US, but growing human organs in pigs is not – why is that? – https://theconversation.com/putting-pig-organs-in-people-is-ok-in-the-us-but-growing-human-organs-in-pigs-is-not-why-is-that-270562