John McDermott:

Physics suggests that pulling into a residential driveway at 50 miles per hour from a state highway is a bad idea. About one-eight of the Chevy makes it on to Magnolia. It soon joins the majority of the car hurtling towards the bottom of a ditch, propelled by the combined forces of spin, gravity and incompetence.

This is not ideal. I’m in a corpse of an automobile six feet below a gravel path. The engine sounds like a helicopter scything through a migratory flock of sparrows. Fox News confirms that Mitt Romney has begun speaking. Redemption was an adroit turn away.

Fortunately, this is Iowa. A pick-up truck pulls over next to the ditch. “Did you mean to do that?” asks the driver, throwing doubt on America’s trouble with sarcasm. I explain that I am collateral damage in Mr Romney’s war on punctuality. “That’s a lot of trouble to get yourself in for politics,” he says.

Ryan Tate:

But where other global fashion brands like Zara and H&M zig, Uniqlo zags. Where the other guys focus on winning at the old game of fashion, churning an array of styles through their stores ever more rapidly, Yanai is acting more like a tech executive, nurturing long development cycles in which clothes and advanced materials are carefully iterated. Uniqlo partners with high-tech suppliers like carbon-fiber-maker Toray and cuts 10-year deals with Chinese manufacturers. The model draws as much on Intel and Toyota as Gap.

This approach has made Uniqlo one of the world’s most successful retailers, gaining fast on rivals like Gap and H&M. It has also won the company admiration among apparel executives, who are as impressed by the company’s approach to business as style mavens are by Uniqlo’s collaboration with designers like Jil Sanders. If Uniqlo fulfills its big ambitions, it will have moved technology closer to the center of fashion and helped spread Silicon Valley’s management ethos into the global apparel trade.

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The Lone Sailor.

David Wise:

The six CIA officers were sweating. It was almost noon on a June day in the Middle Eastern capital, already in the 90s outside and even hotter inside the black sedan where the five men and one woman sat jammed in together. Sat and waited.

They had flown in two days earlier for this mission: to break into the embassy of a South Asian country, steal that country’s secret codes and get out without leaving a trace. During months of planning, they had been assured by the local CIA station that the building would be empty at this hour except for one person—a member of the embassy’s diplomatic staff working secretly for the agency.

But suddenly the driver’s hand-held radio crackled with a voice-encrypted warning: “Maintain position. Do not approach target.” It was the local CIA station, relaying a warning from the agency’s spy inside: a cleaning lady had arrived.

Peter Coy:

The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any wealthy nation, with about 2.3 million people behind bars at any given moment. (That’s 730 out of 100,000, vs. just 154 for England and Wales.) There are more people in U.S. prisons than are in the country’s active-duty military. That much is well known. What’s less known is that people who are incarcerated are excluded from most surveys by U.S. statistical agencies. Since young, black men are disproportionately likely to be in jail or prison, the exclusion of penal institutions from the statistics makes the jobs situation of young, black men look better than it really is.

That’s the point of a new book, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, by Becky Pettit, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington. Pettit spoke on Thursday in a telephone press conference.

Dan McCrum:

Bill Gross has compared the US government’s reliance on debt financing to a “crystal meth” addict, in the latest in a series of dire warnings from one of the most influential investors in the bond market.

“The US, in fact, is a serial offender, an addict whose habit extends beyond weed or cocaine and who frequently pleasures itself with budgetary crystal meth”, said Mr Gross, who manages the $273bn Total Return bond fund for Pimco.

Investors sound alarm on UK’s RPI reform
In an investment outlook that began with a discussion of the 69-year old investor’s lack of long-term memory, Mr Gross returned again to a theme that he has visited over the last decade: unsustainable US spending.

God’s Handiwork

Richard Evans:

FOR LIBERALS AND leftists in Germany, Berlin has always represented the dark side of German history. As capital of the military state of Prussia, it became the grandiose center and symbol of the Reich founded by Bismarck in 1871—culturally stuffy, conservative, dull, backward, dominated by civil servants and soldiers. No wonder that when liberals and Social Democrats established a democratic Republic after the overthrow of the Kaiser, they avoided the Prussian capital. They sought to distance themselves from Berlin by holding the Constituent Assembly in the provincial town of Weimar, forever associated with the name of Goethe and Schiller, Germany’s greatest poets and writers. Weimar was, of course, far from the revolutionary turbulence and street-fighting raging across the capital in the early months of 1919, but it also provided distance from a past that the creators of the new Germany wanted to reject.

Maxwell Wessell:

Big companies are really bad at innovation because they’re designed to be bad at innovation.

Take a story plucked from the pages of Gerber’s history. In 1974, the company’s growth potential was waning. In order to grow profitability and fight margin pressure, Gerber executives turned towards a market they hadn’t successfully penetrated for decades: adult food.

Luckily for a company adept in sourcing and processing vegetables and fruits, tens of millions of busy Americans were spending more time at work and fewer hours in front of the stove. Gerber’s team knew if they could develop a quick, healthy meal for adults, they had an avenue into meaningful growth.

When Gerber launched its product targeted towards this opportunity, it flopped disastrously. It’s no surprise: Instead of developing a novel line of food suited to the needs of busy Americans with distinct branding and its own distribution strategy, Gerber slapped a new label — excitingly named “Gerber Singles” — on existing pureed products and shipped them out for placement in a different aisle.

Needless to say, working Americans weren’t busting down the doors at Safeway to pick up the latest, greatest flavor of Gerber Singles carrots. In three months, the product was pulled from all grocers and returned to the company.

Jesselyn Raddack:

The past 72 hours has held one of the strangest disharmonic convergence of free speech events I have ever seen.

(1) On Tuesday, President Obama flourished his pretty rhetoric on free speech to the United Nations (UN):

Those in power have to resist the temptation to crack down on dissidents.(2) A day later, the Sydney Morning Herald published U.S. Air Force documents classifying Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange as “enemies of the state,” an action in sharp contrast to Obama’s rhetoric about the importance of protecting dissent in a democracy.