Category: Entrepreneurship

India’s Tata “Paid a Harsh Price” for Keeping Distance from Government

(p. A15) Mr. Raianu, a historian at the University of Maryland, is guilty of no hype when he titles his book “Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism.”

. . .

No other company has dominated the history of its national commerce and industry quite as much as the house of Tata in India, where it is one of the few major businesses still regarded as unstained by overt corruption. Although family-run for most of its existence—the stubborn Indian norm for merchants—the Tata company was from an early date “unusual” among India’s corporate groups (Mr. Raianu says) in employing professional executives and “talented nonrelatives.” The company also “kept its distance from the state” in both colonial and postcolonial times. It gave only lukewarm support to the Indian National Congress, which meant that the Tatas had few political chips to cash when the Congress party came to govern a free India. It paid a harsh price for this aloofness when Air India—the Tatas’ thriving aviation arm—was nationalized by Prime Minister Nehru in 1953.

. . .

The Parsi character of the company has, in many ways, helped it to transcend the mud pit of Indian business. The Parsis are a minuscule community, numbering around 57,000 Indians today. Practitioners of Zoroastrianism, they fled to India in the eighth century when Persia came under the sway of Islam. They embraced Western ways more readily than other Indians and, as a result, thrived under the British. Parsis, writes Mr. Raianu, “typified the religious minority exempt from ritual restrictions of caste and guild systems, much like European Jews.” And so they were more ready to look outward—to foreign opportunities—than the hidebound Indian business castes.

For the full review, see:

Tunku Varadarajan. “BOOKSHELF; From Homestead to Hegemony.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, July 14, 2021): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 13, 2021, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Tata’ Review: From Homestead to Hegemony.”)

The book under review is:

Raianu, Mircea. Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021.

Chinese Communists Arrest Many Uyghur Muslim Entrepreneurs

(p. A7) In the summer of 2018, Sadir Eli, a Uyghur businessman, was in high spirits. His real-estate firm was pulling in strong profits, and he told his daughter he would buy a house for her in Massachusetts.

Then, Mr. Eli was accused of being a separatist and disappeared into the black box of China’s prison system in the northwest Xinjiang region.

“He did not engage in politics,” said Maria Mohammad, who last heard from her husband in June 2018, shortly before he was detained. Instead, she believes, Mr. Eli was targeted in part because he was a rich businessman, giving him influence that the authorities viewed as a threat.

The Xinjiang government didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Eli’s fate brings to life an overlooked element of China’s suppression of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang: the arrests of elite Uyghur business owners whose wealth and commercial interests enabled them to act as a bridge between Chinese authorities and Uyghur civil society. Some scholars saw them as helping narrow the economic gap between China’s Han majority and Xinjiang’s mostly Muslim ethnic minorities—a disparity that has fueled tensions in the strategically vital but fractious northwestern region.

The predecessor of Chinese leader Xi Jinping had envisioned economic development as the “foundation to solving all problems” in Xinjiang, a view more or less held by Beijing for more than a decade. But under Mr. Xi’s drive for national unity and assimilation, Chinese authorities have changed tack, making security and social control the region’s top priorities.

. . .

Nearly one-fifth of 4,572 people tracked in a database of individuals who have disappeared into Xinjiang’s internment camps and prisons made their livings in private business, according to nonprofit Uyghur Hjelp. The research and advocacy group, which shared its data with The Wall Street Journal, compiled the information through interviews with relatives and friends.

For the full story, see:

Eva Xiao. “Crackdown Hits Uyghur Entrepreneurs.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, July 14, 2021): A7.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated July 13, 2021, and has the title “China Locks Up Uyghur Businessmen; ‘In Their Eyes, We Are All Guilty’.”)

California Regulators Banned Angela Marsden’s Customers from Eating Outside, but Allowed Next Door “Essential” TV Comedy Workers to Eat Outside


The news report above was posted to YouTube by ABC channel 7 in Los Angeles on Dec. 5, 2020.

(p. 4) For more than a week, tensions have flared between Los Angeles restaurant owners and politicians over the county’s ban on outdoor dining, which health officials say is necessary to slow the surging pandemic — and restaurateurs say is destroying their livelihoods.

The controversy came to a head on Saturday when a restaurant owner shared a video on social media showing tents, tables and chairs set up as a catering station for a film crew — just feet away from her eatery’s similar outdoor dining space, which has sat empty since the restriction went into effect late last month.

“Tell me that this is dangerous, but right next to me — as a slap in my face — that’s safe?” Angela Marsden, who owns the restaurant, Pineapple Hill Saloon & Grill, said as the video panned from her outdoor dining space to the film crew’s catering site.

Ms. Marsden had already organized a protest against the outdoor dining ban before discovering the film tents. On Saturday, she and others gathered outside County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl’s house, saying the government’s uneven application of the rules was crushing small businesses.

. . .

The catering site was for a crew filming “Good Girls,” a comedy television show that airs on NBC, according to Philip Sokoloski, a spokesman for FilmLA, which helps Los Angeles manage film permits. Mr. Sokoloski said the catering site and the film location nearby were both authorized under a permit issued by the city.

. . .

California has declared entertainment industry workers essential, and in Los Angeles County they must follow strict guidelines such as eating in staggered shifts or in an area large enough to stay six feet apart.

Ms. Marsden said in an interview that she saw two people eating without masks at the tables when she went to her restaurant on Friday to pick up paychecks for her employees and supplies for the protest.

. . .

She said she had worked hard to make her outdoor patio compliant with the previous guidelines for outdoor dining before it, too, was banned.

“You name it, we did it,” she said.

For the full story, see:

Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs. “Restaurant Owners See Cruel Disparity in Los Angeles’s Outdoor Dining Ban.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, December 6, 2020): 4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 4, 2021 [sic], and has the title “She Couldn’t Open for Outdoor Dining. The Film Crew Next Door Could.”)

Entrepreneurs Can Solve Problems Outside of Silicon Valley

(p. A15) Zionsville, Ind., a town of about 30,000, is a few hours south of Flint, Mich., by car. So when evidence emerged in 2014 that Flint’s water supply was dangerously contaminated, a Zionsville business executive, Megan Glover, began looking into ways to test the water coming from her own family’s tap. What she uncovered surprised her—not that the local supply was contaminated, but that a testing kit typically cost $3,000, an exorbitant amount most families in her neighborhood would never consider. So Ms. Glover did the most American thing possible: She researched the issue, developed a more affordable alternative, founded a company, sought out investors (my venture firm among them) and emerged as CEO of 120Water, a successful enterprise that now helps monitor the quality of the nation’s water supply. (Zionsville’s water turned out to be clean.)

The basic arc of Ms. Glover’s story—identifying a pain point, then creating a venture to provide a solution—is common in the nation’s premier tech hubs. That is largely because the talent and capital required to build a successful venture are widely available to entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, New York and Boston.

What makes Ms. Glover’s story remarkable is that she, like a burgeoning community of other tech entrepreneurs around the country, managed to build a successful venture without those ready-made advantages.

. . .

Entrepreneurs are innately curious, looking to bump into ideas and people that can unearth problems to solve and opportunities to seize. But founders are unlikely to stumble into problems in sectors to which they have no exposure. And that is why the geographic diffusion of tech will change the industry at its very core. It is much harder to understand what bedevils the lives of people living in, say, Fayetteville, Ark., if your life rarely exposes you to people living outside the social and commercial networks of places like San Francisco or Cambridge, Mass.

For the full commentary, see:

Steve Case. “Innovation Moves to Middle America.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, July 14, 2021): A17.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 13, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.)

Supply Chain Fragility During Pandemic Undermines “Just-in-Time” Business Dogma

(p. A1) TOKYO— Toyota Motor Corp. is stockpiling up to four months of some parts. Volkswagen AG is building six factories so it can get its own batteries. And, in shades of Henry Ford, Tesla Inc. is trying to lock up access to raw materials.

The hyperefficient auto supply chain symbolized by the words “just in time” is undergoing its biggest transformation in more than half a century, accelerated by the troubles car makers have suffered during the pandemic. After sudden swings in demand, freak weather and a series of accidents, they are reassessing their basic assumption that they could always get the parts they needed when they needed them.

“The just-in-time model is designed for supply-chain efficiencies and economies of scale,” said Ashwani Gupta, Nissan Motor Co.’s chief operating officer. “The repercussions of an unprecedented crisis like Covid highlight the fragility of our supply-chain model.”

. . .

(p. A10) One day in 1950, Toyota executive Taiichi Ohno visited an American supermarket and marveled how the shelves were restocked as they were emptied, as Jeffrey Liker recounts in his book “The Toyota Way.” Shoppers were kept happy even though the supermarket had only small storerooms. It was the polar opposite of the car industry where warehouses were kept full of sheet metal and tires to ensure the assembly line never shut down.

Supermarkets had little choice, since they couldn’t stockpile bananas for months. Still, Mr. Ohno reasoned, their practices eliminated waste and cut costs. Toyota would only pay for what it needed to produce cars for a day. That meant they could make do with smaller factories and warehouses.

. . .

The tide began to turn with the global financial crisis. At least 50 auto suppliers went bankrupt, catching car makers by surprise. When suppliers like Visteon Corp. , a maker of air conditioners, radios and other components, declared bankruptcy, it led to fears that car factories relying on Visteon would also be unable to operate.

A different shock prompted a rethinking of just in time at the company where it started. The 2011 earthquake in northern Japan hit Toyota suppliers including chip maker Renesas Electronics Corp.

. . .

For certain components, Toyota asked its suppliers to stockpile parts, the antithesis of just in time. The on-hand inventory held by Toyota’s largest supplier, Denso Corp., rose to around 50 days’ worth of supply in the year ended March 2020, up from 38 days in 2011, according to its financial filings. Denso declined to comment on inventory figures but said it has started keeping emergency stores of parts, especially semiconductors.

Toyota’s efforts have helped it weather this year’s shortages of semiconductors better than many of its rivals, although it wasn’t perfect.

For the full story, see:

Sean McLain. “Auto Makers Hit Brakes On Just-in-Time Manufacturing.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, May 04, 2021): A1 & A10.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 3, 2021, and has the title “Auto Makers Retreat From 50 Years of ‘Just in Time’ Manufacturing.”)

The most recent edition of the classic book on Toyota’s success, mentioned above, is:

Liker, Jeffrey. The Toyota Way, 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2021.

Founding Entrepreneurs Have Similar Brain Patterns for Their Children and Their Startups

(p. R6) A study published in the Journal of Business Venturing in March 2019 looked at the brain patterns of 21 entrepreneurs and 21 parents who weren’t entrepreneurs. The goal was to investigate why and how company founders bond with their ventures.

The result: When entrepreneurs think about their businesses, their brain patterns are very similar to the brain patterns of parents thinking about their children. Those findings shed light on why entrepreneurs run companies the way they do—and how they ought to.

. . .

In the experiment, researchers used a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging to see which parts of the participants’ brains were activated by a series of pictures. Entrepreneurs were shown photos of their business—such as the logo and product or service—as well as of other companies. The parents saw images of their own children, and other people’s.

The results were very similar for both test groups. When looking at the images of their own businesses or children, they experienced significantly more activity in the caudate nuclei, regions of the brain associated with parenting, as well as pleasant sensations and rewards, according to Tom Lahti, an associate professor at the Hanken School of Economics, in Helsinki, who co-wrote the study.

Meanwhile, when the test subjects viewed the images of the other companies or children, parts of the brain associated with negative emotional experiences, the bilateral insula, were much more active.

. . .

. . ., the emotional ties help explain why so many entrepreneurs are prepared to delay monetary gratification and stick with a venture in hopes of long-term success, Dr. Lahti says. That’s akin to parents making years of sacrifices on behalf of their children.

. . .

“The lead entrepreneur needs to share the responsibilities and ownership with the co-founders,” Dr. Lahti says, adding, “In some entrepreneurial teams, the lead entrepreneur may perceive [himself or herself as] owning the venture, while the other members of the entrepreneurial team do not. This could ultimately be a recipe for disaster, because the other members may not persist in the face of difficulty and setback.”

For the full story, see:

Cheryl Winokur Munk. “My Company, My Child.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, June 3, 2021): R6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 2, 2021, and has the title “Why Many Entrepreneurs Treat Their Businesses Like Their Children.”)

The research discussed above was published in:

Lahti, Tom, Marja-Liisa Halko, Necmi Karagozoglu, and Joakim Wincent. “Why and How Do Founding Entrepreneurs Bond with Their Ventures? Neural Correlates of Entrepreneurial and Parental Bonding.” Journal of Business Venturing 34, no. 2 (March 2019): 368-88.

Small Firms Nimbly Pivoted to Face Masks

(p. R3) The humble face mask has proved to be a lifesaver not just by slowing Covid-19—but by helping small businesses.

Countless companies in dire straits during the lockdown have turned to masks to generate revenue. A lot of them have gotten into the niche from very diverse backgrounds. And, for some, mask sales haven’t only helped them survive but also driven their earnings higher than they were before Covid.

Here’s a look at some businesses that took a big gamble on masks—and saw it pay off.

. . .

Before the pandemic, custom-furniture maker David Halbout had a small but stable income and a waiting list stretching about four months. Within a week of the lockdown, though, his business came to a halt because he couldn’t meet customers to discuss the job or go to their home to work on projects. Almost all of his orders were canceled within days.

. . .

Facing that situation—and seeing the need that medical workers faced for protective equipment—the couple decided to turn their Red Bank, N.J., business to making masks. “We wanted to use our talents to help, so we started making fabric face masks with ties and elastic around the head,” says Mr. Halbout.

It turns out that the design was a hit for an unexpected niche. Because his products don’t interfere with hearing aids like traditional straps do, people who use the medical devices flocked to the masks, says Mr. Halbout. He estimates that his business, French Fix LLC, has sold 20,000 masks and donated another 3,000. Mr. Halbout says that he is making substantially more money from the masks, which start at $10.99 for children and $17.99 for adults, than he did from furniture.

. . .

Even so, “the core of my business stayed the same: I am still a creative person,” says Mr. Halbout. “I still design and I still work with my hands. I now work with fabric rather than wood.”

For the full story, see:

Elizabeth Garone. “The Lucrative Pivot to Making Face Masks.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, June 03, 2021): R3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 2, 2021, and has the title “4 Entrepreneurs Who Found Big Money in Face Masks During Covid.”)

Serendipitous Water Cooler Collaboration “Is More Fairy Tale Than Reality”

(p. B1) When Yahoo banned working from home in 2013, the reason was one often cited in corporate America: Being in the office is essential for spontaneous collaboration and innovation.

. . .

Yet people who study the issue say there is no evidence that working in person is essential for creativity and collaboration. It may even hurt innovation, they say, because the demand for doing office work at a prescribed time and place is a big reason the American workplace has been inhospitable for many people.

“That’s led to a lot of the outcomes we see in the modern office environment — long hours, burnout, the lack of representation — because that office culture is set up for the advantage of the few, not the many,” said Dan Spaulding, chief people officer at Zillow, the real estate market-(p. B7)place.

“The idea you can only be collaborative face-to-face is a bias,” he said. “And I’d ask, how much creativity and innovation have been driven out of the office because you weren’t in the insider group, you weren’t listened to, you didn’t go to the same places as the people in positions of power were gathering?”

“All of this suggests to me that the idea of random serendipity being productive is more fairy tale than reality,” he said.

. . .

“There’s credibility behind the argument that if you put people in spaces where they are likely to collide with one another, they are likely to have a conversation,” said Ethan S. Bernstein, who teaches at Harvard Business School and studies the topic. “But is that conversation likely to be helpful for innovation, creativity, useful at all for what an organization hopes people would talk about? There, there is almost no data whatsoever.”

“All of this suggests to me that the idea of random serendipity being productive is more fairy tale than reality,” he said.

. . .

. . . Professor Bernstein found that contemporary open offices led to 70 percent fewer face-to-face interactions. People didn’t find it helpful to have so many spontaneous conversations, so they wore headphones and avoided one another.

. . .

. . . some creative professionals, like architects and designers, have been surprised at how effective remote work has been during the pandemic, while scientists and academic researchers have long worked on projects with colleagues in other places.

Requiring people to be in the office can drive out innovation, some researchers and executives said, because for many people, in-person office jobs were never a great fit. They include many women, racial minorities and people with caregiving responsibilities or disabilities. Also, people who are shy; who need to live far from the office; who are productive at odd hours; or who were excluded from golf games or happy hours.

For the full commentary, see:

Claire Cain Miller. “THE UPSHOT;Returning to the Office? The Myth of Serendipity.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sunday, July 2, 2021): B1 & B7.

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated July 1, 2021, and has the title “THE UPSHOT; Do Chance Meetings at the Office Boost Innovation? There’s No Evidence of It.”)

The Bernstein research mentioned above is:

Bernstein, Ethan, and Ben Waber. “The Truth About Open Offices.” Harvard Business Review 97, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 2019): 82-91.

Bezos’s Intuitions Drove Amazon’s Innovations

(p. 12) . . . Alexa, the voice coming out of my Echo, more or less is Jeff Bezos. He came up with the idea of a smart speaker in January 2011, back in the era of Google Plus and the iPod Shuffle. Bezos emailed his top deputies that month and declared, “We should build a $20 device with its brains in the cloud that’s completely controlled by our voice.”

For the next nearly four years, he obsessively micromanaged the project, pushing teams in Atlanta and Gdansk to make speech recognition seamless. He put in place a surreal testing protocol that involved hiring temps to spend days in empty apartments chattering away to silent speakers, and berated executives who told him it would take decades to develop speech recognition. He took home an early Echo prototype and when, in a moment of frustration, he told it to go “shoot yourself in the head,” it sent a wave of panic through the engineers who were listening in. He even came up with the idea for the LED ring on top, Stone writes, and with the name “Alexa” (in homage to the ancient library of Alexandria).

. . .

Amazon in the 2010s was an intensely personal venture, run by one of the wealthiest men in the world according to his own desires and reflecting his own personality.

. . .

Like Alexa, Amazon as a company seems to embody some of Bezos’ best personal qualities (his relentless drive to get you that package on time) and his worst (an “informal cruelty” that defines his company’s culture and requires that his factory workers and executives make personal sacrifices for corporate needs).

At Amazon, nearly every big decision comes down to a meeting with Bezos, at which his deputies hold their breaths, genuinely uncertain of whether he will berate them and tear up their proposals, or double their planned budgets. Some of his fixations, like his determination to create a smart speaker, are visionary.

. . .

It was, Stone writes, “a different style of innovation,” in which employees “worked backwards from Bezos’ intuition and were catering to his sometimes eclectic tastes (literally).”

For the full review, see:

Ben Smith. “Colossus.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, June 13, 2021): 12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated June 17,, 2021, and has the title “To Understand Amazon, We Must Understand Jeff Bezos.”)

The book under review is:

Stone, Brad. Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021.

“Anti-Heroism Goes Too Far”

(p. 11) In “Extra Life,” Steven Johnson, a writer of popular books on science and technology, tells the stories behind what he calls, in an understatement, “one of the greatest achievements in the history of our species.” Starting in the second half of the 19th century, the average life span began to climb rapidly, giving humans not just extra life, but an extra life. In rich countries, life expectancy at birth hit 40 by 1880, 50 by 1900, 60 by 1930, 70 by 1960, and 80 by 2010.

. . .

It’s been a long time since the history of technology has been recounted as the triumph of plucky heroes, and Johnson’s stories reflect today’s more sophisticated understanding.

. . .

Sometimes the anti-heroism goes too far — Norman Borlaug, whose Green Revolution saved a billion lives, is unmentioned. But altogether, Johnson is a fine storyteller. Among his cast of characters are John Graunt (1620–74), the British haberdasher who studied mortality reports as a hobby and thereby invented epidemiology; Joseph Bazalgette (1819–91), the man behind “one of the 19th century’s greatest engineering achievements,” which you probably did not guess was the London sewers; “Moldy Mary” Hunt (1910–91), the Peoria bacteriologist who scoured fruit markets for the perfect rotten cantaloupe, the one with a strain of mold that enabled the mass production of penicillin; John Stapp (1910–99), who strapped himself into his invention, the rocket sled, and safely decelerated from 628 miles per hour to 0 in 1.4 seconds; and Dilip Mahalanabis, 86, the Indian pediatrician who discovered that a bit of salt and sugar dissolved in clean water could stop fatal diarrhea and thereby saved the lives of nearly 60 million people.

For the full review, see:

Steven Pinker. “Modern Miracle.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, June 13, 2021): 11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May [sic] 11, 2021, and has the title “How Humans Gained an ‘Extra Life’.”)

The book under review is:

Johnson, Steven. Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer. New York: Riverhead Books, 2021.

Subsidies for Black Farmers Fuel Claims of “Reverse Racism” and “All Farmers Matter”

(p. 1) LaGRANGE, Mo. — Shade Lewis had just come in from feeding his cows one sunny spring afternoon when he opened a letter that could change his life: The government was offering to pay off his $200,000 farm loan, part of a new debt relief program created by Democrats to help farmers who have endured generations of racial discrimination.

It was a windfall for a 29-year-old who has spent the past decade scratching out a living as the only Black farmer in his corner of northeastern Missouri, where signposts quoting Genesis line the soybean fields and traffic signals warn drivers to go slow because it is planting season.

But the $4 billion fund has angered conservative white farmers who say they are being unfairly excluded because of their race. And it has plunged Mr. Lewis and other farmers of color into a new culture war over race, money and power in American farming.

. . .

(p. 19) The plans have drawn thousands of enraged comments on farm forums and are being fought by banks worried about losing interest income. And some rural residents have rallied around a new slogan, cribbed from the conservative response to the Black Lives Matter movement: All Farmers Matter.

. . .

“It’s a bunch of crap,” said Jeffrey Lay, who grows corn and soybeans on 2,000 acres and is president of the county farm bureau. “They talk about they want to get rid of discrimination. But they’re not even thinking about the fact that they’re discriminating against us.”

. . .

. . . rural residents upset with the repayments call them reverse racism.

White conservative farmers and ranchers from Florida, Texas and the Midwest quickly sued to block the program, arguing that the promised money amounts to illegal discrimination. America First Legal, a group run by the former Trump aide Stephen Miller, is backing the Texas lawsuit, whose plaintiff is the state’s agriculture commissioner.

“It’s anti-white,” said Jon Stevens, one of five Midwestern farmers who filed a lawsuit through the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative legal group. “Since when does Agriculture get into this kind of race politics?”

. . .

One recent afternoon, a friend, Brad Klauser, who runs his family’s large cattle and grain farm, swung by Mr. Lewis’s barn to catch up. As they talked bills, rising fuel costs and sky-high land prices, the conversation turned to the debt relief that only one of them was eligible to receive.

“Everybody should have the same option,” said Mr. Klauser, who is white, leaning on the flatbed of Mr. Lewis’s pickup. “Do you think you’re disadvantaged?”

“There’s definitely disadvantages,” Mr. Lewis replied, saying that officials scoffed when he first tried to get a federal farm loan. “They didn’t take me serious.”

After Mr. Klauser headed home, Mr. Lewis thought about how the two friends were both trying to reap a profit from the land. “Everyone should have a chance at farming,” he said.

For the full story, see:

Jack Healy. “Windfall for Black Farmers Roils Rural America.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, May 23, 2021): 1 & 19.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated May 24, 2021, and has the title “‘You Can Feel the Tension’: A Windfall for Minority Farmers Divides Rural America.” The online “pressreader” version showed the continuation page as p. 21. The continuation page of my “National” print version was p. 19.)