柳红 Hong LIU

Nike spent ten years trying to break the 2-hour marathon. They named a project after it. They built special shoes. They paid the greatest marathoner alive to chase it. Yesterday, a Kenyan runner finally did it in 1:59:30, wearing Adidas. Sabastian Sawe used to be a pacemaker. A pacemaker is the kind of runner you hire to set the speed for the first few miles of a race and then drop out before the finish. In January 2022, Sawe got booked to do exactly that at a half-marathon in Spain. He'd never raced more than three miles in his life. He stayed in for the full 13 and won the whole thing. Adidas signed him not long after. Four years later, he became the first human ever to run an official marathon under 2 hours. Nike, meanwhile, started this whole project in 2016 with a public goal called "Breaking2." They paid for the shoes, the pacemakers, the science labs, and Eliud Kipchoge himself. Kipchoge ran 1:59:40 in Vienna in 2019, but the event was a closed-course exhibition with rotating pacemakers and a pace car projecting a green laser line onto the road. The sport's governing body never recognized it as a real race. It didn't count. Then Nike's running business cratered. Digital sales fell 26% in one quarter. Their share of footwear sold at Dick's Sporting Goods went from 39% to 32% in five months. On Running grew from $330 million to $1.8 billion between 2020 and 2025. Hoka nearly quadrupled. Roger Federer left Nike for On. Nike's board fired the CEO in October 2024. Adidas spent the same period building a better shoe. The new Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 took three years to develop. It weighs 97 grams, about 3.4 ounces, lighter than a deck of cards. A Wall Street Journal-cited study found that wearing a shoe 3.5 ounces lighter saves a runner around 57 seconds across a marathon. Sawe beat the third-place finisher by 58 seconds. Adidas also did something Nike never did for Kipchoge. They wrote a $50,000 check to the official anti-doping body for track and field, asking it to test Sawe more aggressively than any other runner alive. He got tested 25 times in the two months before last year's Berlin Marathon, and Adidas signed up to fund this for the length of his contract. The logic: the moment Sawe ran a marathon this fast, the world was going to ask if he cheated, especially after his countrywoman Ruth Chepngetich got a 3-year doping ban in 2025. Adidas got out ahead of it. The shoe retails at $500 and is barely available. Adidas's Adizero shoes won half of all major marathon races in 2024. Yesterday in London, four of the top five finishers wore the same Adidas shoe. Yomif Kejelcha crossed the line 11 seconds after Sawe and also broke 2 hours. The top three runners all beat the previous world record. Nike's only response was an Instagram post. Three sentences long: "The clock has been reset. There is no finish line." That was their entire public reaction to losing a 10-year moonshot to their biggest rival.

Last month, the Committee finally acknowledged that ideas, not capital, made the modern world. They gave the prize to Philippe Aghion, a French theorist, and two empirical scientists, the Canadian Peter Howitt, and my dear friend, the Dutch-Israeli-American Joel Mokyr. Hurrah! My latest column for @folha

編者按：對於捷克的「七七憲章」（1977）運動，中國知識界的關注多集中在哈威爾等公開人物，對於「七七憲章」運動更詳細的歷史過程和歷史細節，卻鮮為所知，包括在這個運動中起了巨大作用的捷克前共產黨人和捷共前高層。東歐異議思想研究學者崔衛平在一次閱讀中，偶然發現一篇關於捷共前高層茲德涅克·姆林納日（Zdeněk Mlynář, 1930-1997）的文章，發現他竟然也是「布拉格之春」改革設計師和《七七憲章》重要締造者之一。於是從姆林納日（1930-1997）的思想和活動入手，崔衛平詳細考察了其在「七七憲章」運動前後的活動與貢獻，並以此澄清中國知識分子對憲章的誤解：憲章非頂層設計或制度替代，而是中立對話工具，淡化意識形態。而姆林納日經歷象徵從黨內改革到持不同政見轉變，這不僅豐富了「七七憲章」運動的脈絡，也顯示了社會主義反對派在東歐異議中的深層作用。 本文原載《香港：離散與連結（思想52）》，《思想》雜誌和崔衛平教授授權轉發。 崔衛平 | 《七七憲章》與社會主義反對派 open.substack.com/pub/boston…

Der gute Kompromiss ist lebenswichtig für unsere Demokratie. Er bildet das Fundament unserer liberalen Demokratie. Er ist die Grundlage dafür, dass unser Miteinander überhaupt erst funktionierten kann. Denn niemand ist im alleinigen Besitz der Weisheit. 1️⃣