Facing Out: The Week’s Most Interesting News

July 19, 2025

Remote but not desolate and beautiful beyond words, Lake Desolation is on the border of Greenfield and Providence in Saratoga County, N.Y.  (Jim Murphy)

Dear Clients and Friends:

So, all those who mocked Smallbany actually were on to something. For Albany, ever smaller is ever better.

Mere mortals like us struggle to fully grasp the dizzying advances in AI and the global race for competitive advantage in chip manufacturing. This week brought clarifying news, with the potential for a huge positive impact in our small corner of the world, Upstate New York. 

Albany, N.Y., is the new home to a National Semiconductor Technology Center Lab. This facility will use lasers, mirrors, and extreme ultraviolet light — EUV — to etch designs on silicon wafers. Only one company in the world, ASML of the Netherlands, makes the machines that do this work. Albany’s facility will house ASML’s most advanced EUV machine. This scanner can print smaller and smaller features on ever tinier chips, adding more transistors that move more data around the chip. This allows for chips that are more useful and more powerful even as they get smaller. Scientists want to add more capacity to ever-smaller chips and to do that they need to understand the best ways to use EUV. 

Intel Corp. Gordon Moore posited in 1965 that, through technological advances, the number of transistors on a chip would roughly double every two years. But the size of transistors is now reaching the size of atoms, and the industry may be approaching the limits of Moore’s Law. This is why scientists need to research EUV and learn how to keep driving innovation in lithography. 

For years, the National Semiconductor Technology Center had two locations – its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California and a lab in Tempe, Arizona. The new EUV lab in Albany will host the world’s top chip scientists, who will learn how to manufacture the next generation of chips. This concentration of brain power in Albany creates unprecedented opportunities for new wealth creation in Upstate New York.

How did Albany become a focal point for EUV research? China. And Sen. Chuck Schumer. China has built up its military and technological might. U.S. officials believed it was likely to gain control of the chipmaking supply chain, a serious national security and economic threat to the United States and others. The U.S. government has sought to keep the most advanced chip manufacturing here. Sen. Schumer saw the opportunity to bring it to his home state and used his considerable clout to bring it to the Capital Region.

What does all this mean for the Capital Region as a whole? We are on the verge of economic transformation and should take steps now to make the most of it. The suburbs and historic cities of the region would be smart to build more homes for researchers and their families and make the necessary water, sewer, internet and infrastructure investments. Our new neighbors are likely to gravitate toward communities that have top-notch schools and colleges and excellent healthcare. Invest in those assets now. Parks, too. They’ll seek out communities that are safe, interesting, entertaining and welcoming. Let’s hit the gas on our cultural and entertainment institutions, which will engage their creative minds and refresh their spirits. They’ll want to explore the Adirondacks, Saratoga Springs, Lake George and the Berkshires.  This is the right time for bold proposals like a national center for freshwater protection at Lake George and the creation of Venice-like canals on Albany’s waterfront as envisioned by Albany WaterWay. For a generation, the Capital Region has earnestly sought big opportunities to rebuild its private-sector economy. It’s happening. Let’s make the most of it.

LEADERSHIP IN ACTION: NVIDIA, at $4 trillion, is widely regarded as the world’s most valuable company.  It’s at the very heart of the AI boom. Last week, it pulled off a political masterstroke, persuading the Trump Administration to allow it to sell its H20 artificial-intelligence chip in China. This is a turnaround: The U.S. Commerce Department had restricted sales of the chip in April, costing NVIDIA billions of dollars. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang wants to make American tech platforms the global artificial-intelligence standard by gaining market share and engaging other countries with U.S.-developed computing infrastructure. That means doing business with China, the largest AI market outside the U.S. So, who is Jensen Huang, the former Denny’s dishwasher who co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 for a very different purpose — to enhance video gaming?

PARADISE LOST: The Grand Canyon Lodge was the only lodging within the canyon’s North Rim, built at a time when the federal government was eager to find ways to engage the public with the country’s most amazing natural offerings. The lodge was a winding 212-mile drive from the more popular South Rim where 90% of the tourists go. Hiking from one side to the other is even more arduous at over 20 miles with steep ascents at the end. But the historic building’s tranquility had an irresistible appeal for ambitious hikers and adventurous tourists eager to catch the magnificent views of one of the most remote and renowned landscapes in the world. Now it’s gone.

UNDER WATER: The New York City subway system, the century-old essential means of transportation for millions of people, was inundated with rain this week and shut down. Water rushed onto platforms and trains. In one station, the water shot up from a manhole like a geyser. The subway system has a longstanding infrastructure problem that is only getting worse as rainfall becomes heavier and more frequent. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the New York state agency that runs the transit system, has already invested billions of dollars into climate resiliency measures. But there is no easy fix for subway flooding, and it could take years of cooperation among various government agencies to keep the subways dry.

Rain so heavy it looked like snow at the Saratoga Racecourse last weekend as 40 days of racing began at America’s most historic race track. (Skip Dickstein)

EVEN SO… New York City is having a hell of a summer. Many of the city’s major attractions are outdoing their performance of last year, when New York hosted a near-record 64 million visitors. Attendance at Broadway shows is at its highest level since at least 2019, and visits to museums like the Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue are also higher. More than seven million people passed through Times Square in June, up 6% from that month last year. New York City hotels averaged an occupancy rate of 82% a week for roughly the first half of the year. That is on par with last year—and nearly 20 percentage points higher than the national rate, according to real-estate analytics firm CoStar.

TO FIND A GOOD LADY: “On 1/8/23, my love, Janet Mae, left this world. I am very lonely without her in my life. Janet made me promise that if she died, I would find a good lady to love and be happy again. This sounds like a good solution, but I have failed in my attempt to find anyone.” These are the words of Brian Kitchen, who is 80.  “The first year, I tried to see if women on the street didn’t have any ring, and I’d ask if they’d like to have a friend or something. And all they wanted to do was call the police,” he joked.  He didn’t understand dating apps. He wasn’t about to hang out in bars. Instead, he came up with his own way of putting himself out there. He made flyers to advertise himself.

FACE THE MUSIC: Coldplay’s music wasn’t all that was playing at Foxborough Stadium near Boston this week, with 60,000 people in attendance. Somehow the Kiss Cam focused on the one couple who were not keen for attention: a married tech company CEO and his company’s chief HR officer. Their embrace went viral. D’oh!

VOW OF SILENCE: Police in Thailand have arrested a woman who allegedly enticed Buddhist monks into sexual relationships and then pressured them into making large payments to cover up their intimacy. At least nine abbots and senior monks have been cast out of the monkhood, the Royal Thai Police Central Investigation Bureau said.

GIVE THAT DIVE A 10: Peeling barstools, strong drinks, cheap beers and a well-worn pool table make a great dive bar, and The Tavern Bar at the Andes Hotel in the Catskills has just been named one of the 50 best dive bars in America by outdoor lifestyle brand Huckberry. 

UNREGISTERED RUNNER: Eighty five hundred people gathered in Utica, N.Y., for the 48^th annual Boilermaker 15K road race. At about the four-mile mark, an unexpected competitor joined the race: A doe that barreled out of a wooded area and collided with a runner.

GAME OF KINGS: Derrick Rose had a remarkable NBA career. First draft pick in 2008. Rookie of the Year. Youngest MVP in NBA history. But he kept a secret from his teammates and fans all those years. He loved chess. Retired now, he’s working with the world’s top-ranked player to promote the game.

STILL LOVE YOU, ELMO: Elmo, the lovable fuzzy red character with the falsetto voice on Sesame Street, has his own account on the X platform, of course, with 650,000 followers. This week a hacker took control of the account and posted a string of disgusting very un-Elmo like racist and antisemitic messages.

BAG BONANZA: Hermes’ art director happened to sit next to British actress Jane Birkin on an Air France flight in 1981. He saw she needed a large, fashionable bag that could hold all her stuff.  The encounter inspired him to create the beloved Hermes Birkin bag. This week in Paris the original bag was sold for $10.1 million.

BRING IN THE CLOWNS, PLEASE: Political wags love to dismiss their adversaries as “clowns.” It’s an unthinking toss off that’s hurtful to real clowns, some of whom train for a lifetime in the art of helping people laugh, heal and reflect.  Clowns are more than children’s birthday party performers. They perform in refugee camps, war zones and places controlled by warring gangs.

YOUR NEXT TRIP: North Korea has opened a new luxury beach resort. A 2.5-mile beach of the Kalma Peninsula has some 400 buildings, including high-rise hotels and villas that can accommodate around 20,000 guests. There are cultural and commercial amenities, too, like a water park, gym, concert hall, restaurant, auto shop, beer hall and department store. What it does not have: tourists. North Korea remains reluctant to allow in foreign tourists other than Russians.

BILL GATES was the seventh generation of the Gates family to live in Bolton Landing on Lake George, the ancestor of John Gates, a Revolutionary War veteran who served under George Washington. He lavished his considerable creative energy and talent on his community as a school teacher, writer, singer, historian and steamboat captain. He published 12 books on Lake George area history. He spent 40 summers navigating the lake as the inaugural captain of the Sagamore Resort’s Morgan and for the Lake George Steamboat Company’s Mohican and Lac du Saint Sacrement. He played guitar, wrote songs, founded two oldies rock and roll bands and performed three times with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Saratoga Performing Arts Center as part of the Saratoga-Potsdam Chorus. He served on the board of the Marcella Sembrich Museum and the Bolton Historical Museum and was co-Historian for the Town of Bolton, where he researched, drafted, and oversaw the creation of most of the town's New York State Historical Markers. He was 80.

FAUJA SINGH took up running at the age of 89 to ease the depression he suffered after his wife and daughter died in quick succession and after he witnessed the particularly gruesome death of his son, Kuldip.  They were checking on their farm fields in the middle of a storm when a piece of corrugated metal blown by the wind decapitated Kuldip in front of his father’s eyes. Believed to be the world’s oldest marathon runner, he told admirers that he was able to accomplish his feats because he could talk to God while running. He was killed crossing the road in his native village near Jalandhar in Punjab at 104.

HENRY RAYMONT was a United Press International reporter on assignment in Havana in April 1961 when he discovered that Cuban exiles had come ashore at Bahía de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs, on the island’s southwestern coast. He was the first to report to the world on the Bay of Pigs covert military operation that was intended to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro, in power then for a little more than two years. For his work, Raymont was imprisoned and threatened with execution by the Castro regime. The mission, financed and guided by the United States, was a thorough failure, and “Bay of Pigs” became a metaphor for almost any venture doomed because of inept planning. Mr. Raymont died at his longtime home in Mexico at 98.

CONCETTA FRANCONERO was just 13 when she changed her name to Connie Francis. She became the first female singer to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold over 40 million records before she was 25. She appeared in the 1961 film, “Where the Boys Are.” But her big breakthrough was covering a 1923 song, “Who’s Sorry Now?” She hated it, but it became her signature and the eventual title of her autobiography. After a life of fame and tragedy, she died at 89.

“I have never been more excited about the future of America than I am right now, right this minute.”
 —  Home Depot founder, chairman of NYU Langone Health and philanthropist Ken Langone, 89.

Perry the Pit Bull is now safe. He had a brief moment of fame in New York City this week when he was spotted wandering malnourished on the elevated tracks of the A Train in Queens. Police officers responded and wrangled Perry into a cage and brought him to an animal rescue organization.

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Principal Author: Mark Behan.

Contributors: Bill Callen, Ryan Moore, Amanda Metzger, Jim Murphy, Troy Burns, Kristy Miller, and John Brodt.

FACING OUT is what we do. We help companies, organizations and individuals work effectively with their most important external audiences – their customers, their shareholders, their communities, the government and the news media.  www.behancommunications.com

Facing Out features news and other nuggets that caught our eye, and that we thought might be of value to you, our friends and business associates. Some items are good news about our clients and friends, others are stories that we hope will leave you a bit more informed or entertained than you were five minutes ago. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback. 

Let’s make it a conversation: mark.behan@behancom.com