Stack the Week

Today the Wall Street Journal printed a detailed account of the decision-making in the run-up to the Iran war. It shows, as the New York Times and others have, President Trump receiving explicit warnings about many of the dangers that have since materialized. He went ahead anyway.The great American national-security blunders have taken different forms: the groupthink behind the Bay of Pigs, Lyndon Johnson’s escalation in Vietnam, the failure to connect the dots before 9/11, and the false assumptions, faulty intelligence and wishful planning that produced the Iraq War.These four are the canon of blundering. In each, the president was one part of an institutional failure — advisers who missed signals, agencies that got the intelligence wrong, a process that broke down around him. Trump’s may be a new kind — not a failure of process, but a failure housed more centrally in the president himself, who actively rejected the process. The intelligence was right. The failure is his alone. That’s worth remembering next time a candidate boasts that he alone can fix something. It’s a warning.The warnings were specific. Then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Trump that killing Iran’s supreme leader would likely produce “a more hard-line regime open to acquiring nuclear weapons.” She warned that Tehran would “rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market,” and attack American forces and partners in the region. Military leaders warned of casualties, depleted weapons stockpiles and readiness problems for an already overstretched force.All of it happened. The war Trump promised would end within six weeks has reached the six-month mark without a clear end.“This was all predictable and predicted,” Eric Brewer, a former national-security official who served in Republican and Democratic administrations, told the Journal.I want to make a larger point but first, to show that I have metabolized the scale of the harm of this decision: we are watching the consequences spool out in real time as the administration lunges toward something it can call success. Consider the new economic sanctions announced Monday. Enforcing them against the Chinese institutions that sustain Iran could provoke a confrontation with Beijing. Declining to enforce them could expose another American threat as hollow. Longer term, the U.S. has burned through roughly two-thirds of its Patriot interceptor stockpile and close to half its THAAD inventory in under six months of fighting — inventories that take years, not months, to rebuild. And there are other years-long consequences: bruised alliances, and nations making choices based on a new — and perhaps warped — understanding of American strategic confusion.So put this on the to-do list: catalog the consequences of this decision and reward those who come up with the most creative and realistic solutions for containing those consequences and addressing the fallout. This is one way to combat the despair people feel when faced with the president’s combination of bluster and incompetence. Look for the helpers, as Mr. Rogers used to say. Seek out and lift up the people who can scope the problem, name the challenges and identify realistic ways of limiting the damage and beginning the repair.This brings us (if you’re still with me; I feel like I should pack a juice box to give us all a little energy at this point) to my little corner of obsession: presidential campaigns.Everything about Donald Trump’s decision-making is bad enough, but it gets worse when you measure his performance against his boasts about how he would perform as president. Donald Trump ran on the promise that he had a special quality in just these moments. In the South Carolina primary debate in 2016, he offered his opposition to the Iraq War as evidence of his superior judgment. He also stood by his earlier claim that George W. Bush had lied the country into war.“The war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake,” Trump said. “We shoulda never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” When the debate moderator (hi Mom!) reminded him that he had said Bush should have been impeached, Trump replied: “They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”Earlier in the debate, I had asked Trump to imagine his first day in the Situation Room and name the first three questions he would ask his national-security experts. Robert Gates had complained that the candidates were offering solutions “so simplistic and so at odds with the way the world really works.” Trump’s answer: “What we wanna do, when we wanna do it, and how hard do we wanna hit.”Oof.In that same debate, Jeb Bush, who was derided as insufficient for the task of being president, nevertheless outlined a vision of the office.“The next president’s gonna be confronted with an unforeseen challenge,” Bush said in his closing statement, sounding like the son and brother of presidents who understood one of the defining characteristics of the job. “It could be a pandemic, a major natural disaster or an attack on our country.” The question for voters, he said, was “who do you wanna have sittin’ behind the big desk in the Oval Office?”Next presidential campaign, listen to Jeb.Wait, every presidential candidate boasts. Trump is hardly new. Yes, they boast, and they shouldn’t, unless they have the goods. Matching promises with performance is, after all, essentially the job description. More important, we shouldn’t let candidates get away with boasts they can’t back up.One more point (hit the juice box!): Donald Trump’s boasts were special. He dismissed — and won escalating applause for dismissing — the very idea of planning, expertise and knowledge. He argued that every challenge could be made to disappear by the force of his personality.No.The Iran case provides an unusually clean test of his claim: The experts identified the risks, the president trusted his instincts, and the risks became reality.Every presidential national-security decision comes down to one person. The question was never whether a president acts alone against expert advice — sometimes that’s the job. Barack Obama learned this: he ordered the Bin Laden raid over the explicit objection of Robert Gates, who had more national-security experience than anyone else in the room. The question is how a president makes a lonely decision. Obama had a room of mixed opinion and picked the more confident read. Trump had a room in agreement and picked the opposite of what it told him.Experts, historians and wise people of good faith could help place this decision among other presidential failures — and determine, based on the reporting, just how badly President Trump shanked it. (Those with expertise will know how to sort post-hoc ass covering now that things have not gone according to plan).This would help us understand the Trump presidency. It would also help us, in advance of another presidential campaign, develop a vocabulary for the most important aspect of the job. Debate answers of the kind Donald Trump gave repeatedly about Iraq were popular, entertaining and politically successful. They also mischaracterized his own position on that war. No public record supports his claim that he opposed the invasion before it began; when Howard Stern asked him in 2002 whether he favored invading, Trump answered, “Yeah, I guess so.” Most dangerously, those answers turned thepresidency into a cartoon of easy choices effortlessly dispatched by a cartoon image of leadership.Clearing these cartoons from the stage will help us figure out what a president should be like so that we can ask our candidates if they’re up to the task. Embedded in this failure and every failure of the norm-breaking Trump administration is the raw material for forensic accountability. Not a verdict on one man. A standard the next one has to clear before we hand over the codes. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Confirmation hearings in the modern era are largely exercises in evasion. Senators deliver speeches disguised as questions. Nominees repeat rehearsed assurances. Everyone leaves carrying the opinion they brought into the room.By that contemporary standard, the confirmation process for Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche did something unusually useful. Instead of producing answers about his independence from the president, it produced a real-time test of it.At issue was an extraordinary arrangement, which Blanche signed, resolving President Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. It purported to grant sweeping protection from existing tax claims to Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization, and to create a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that could compensate people claiming to have been persecuted by the government—including, potentially, Trump’s political allies and January 6 defendants.The arrangement was not merely controversial. Critics questioned whether it was legally binding at all, and even after Blanche narrowed its scope, the remaining tax protections could still be worth tens of millions of dollars to the president and his family.U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, who is presiding over the case, dismantled both the lawsuit and the settlement it produced. She found that the suit had been brought for an “improper purpose.” This was not, she concluded, an ordinary lawsuit between genuinely adverse parties. The president was effectively suing an administration he controlled. She rejected the government’s attempt to present the resulting agreement as the product of an ordinary adversarial proceeding. She noted that the settlement outline bore only Blanche’s signature, even though the Justice Department purported to represent the government against the president.In the Senate, the arrangement that got such rough treatment from judge Williams was a double test of Blanche’s independence. Did he put the president’s interests and those of his allies above his duty to the law and Constitution?That independence matters because the attorney general leads a department powerful enough to shield a president and his allies from the law—or turn the law against their enemies.This weekend, we saw the conclusion of an episode that illustrates the danger of what happens when law enforcement becomes an instrument of the president’s passions in the department Blanche is asking to run outright. After president Trump blamed “vandals” for the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner, federal authorities charged former Olympic canoeist David Hearn with felony property destruction. Prosecutors have now moved to dismiss the case, acknowledging that the damage resulted from a rushed, botched installation—not vandalism. The government’s own filing acknowledged that the evidence no longer supported the vandalism theory. The machinery of federal law enforcement advanced far enough to put a man under felony indictment before the evidence stopped it. Even then, the president didn’t concede the point—he told reporters the damage was still “VANDALS,” contractor problems notwithstanding.Blanche was not a nominee being asked to speculate about some future conflict between presidential loyalty and the law. His signature was already on such a conflict.Blanche, the president’s former personal lawyer, helped create the arrangement, publicly defended it, and then called the fund “dead” while declining to rescind the order that had created it. When Republican Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn demanded that he put his assurance into binding form, he resisted. Only when they placed his confirmation in jeopardy did he issue the written order they had demanded. That sequence is more revealing than any hearing exchange. Blanche’s conduct tracked the location of leverage. Blanche had already shown how he would behave when presidential loyalty collided with the impartial administration of justice.As of this week, the senators have gotten a concession. What they have not gotten is any indication that the concession restrains anyone. Asked about the deal Monday, the president told reporters he hadn’t reviewed it — he understood there’d been a “sign-off,” he said, but didn’t know its terms, and waved off Blanche’s memo as simply restating things Blanche had already told Congress. Trump did not dispute that the fund was dead. He kept arguing for bringing it back.The senators extracted a concession from Blanche. They did not extract one from the president. Trump continues to argue for reviving the fund, suggesting the pressure to restore it has not disappeared.The ability to force a nominee into one concession is not evidence that he possesses the independent judgment required for the office in the future. If anything, the episode showed that Blanche responds to the person or institution holding the decisive leverage. First, that was the president. For a few crucial days, it was Cornyn and Tillis. Once Blanche is confirmed, the daily leverage returns overwhelmingly to the president, whose personal interests Blanche has already shown himself willing to accommodate with inventiveness.Senators Cornyn and Tillis can reasonably claim that they used the Senate’s power to stop an abuse. But they are treating the resulting concession as if it erases the conduct that made their intervention necessary. In fact, that conduct is the evidence.They are mistaking the success of their leverage for proof of Blanche’s independence—and are on the verge of voting to return the leverage to the president. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

The United States and Iran exchanged fresh missile barrages Thursday.Jordan’s air defenses intercepted five Iranian missiles Thursday without casualties. That was the second consecutive day that Jordan had to play whack-a-missile. Kuwait’s military said an Iranian strike hit a Chinese company’s building, killing a worker.Iran’s official news agency said an American strike on Qeshm (pronounced “GHESH-m”) Island killed three people and wounded two. Egyptian officials said drones caused fires aboard two natural-gas vessels.The war feels like it’s jumping the box despite months of bombs and boasts.Reuters reported that Tehran expects within weeks to receive the first part of an order for Chinese shoulder-fired air-defense launchers. These portable systems, commonly called MANPADS (man-portable air-defense system) allow small teams to fire at low-flying aircraft. They can force American pilots to fly higher, change routes or rely more heavily on long-range weapons. The sale would mark an unusually direct Chinese contribution to Iran’s war effort after Beijing had tried to support Tehran without becoming a combatant.Bloomberg placed that purchase inside what it called a “third missile age.” Nuclear missiles defined the first age and expensive precision weapons the second. Ukraine and Iran have demonstrated a third model: firing conventional missiles by the hundreds or thousands to overwhelm defenses, destroy infrastructure and exhaust interceptor supplies. Iran has fired about 2,000 missiles since February 28.Thursday’s reporting showed a widening difference between the allies over how to end the Iran war. Netanyahu urged Trump to intensify military and economic pressure. The administration still hopes negotiations can stop the fighting and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.Netanyahu also confronted JD Vance, who had accused Israeli officials of undermining American diplomacy because it wanted to keep hitting Iran and warned that Israel was alienating Republicans. The Israeli PM said neither was true.The Commerce Department said the economy grew at a 1.5 percent annual rate from April through June, down from 2.1 percent and below forecasts. But the headline was weaker than the economy underneath it. Consumer spending accelerated to a 3.2 percent rate, and business investment excluding housing grew at an 8.4 percent rate. When economists removed volatile government, inventory and trade figures, spending by American households and businesses grew at a 3.9 percent rate.A lot of the expansion in this quarter came from spending on AI. That expansion is creating demand for workers. The New York Times reported that hundreds of electricians building OpenAI’s project in Saline Township, Michigan, are working 10-hour days, seven days a week. Michigan calls it the largest single investment in the state’s history. A separate $50 million program backed by Google plans to increase annual enrollment in electrician apprenticeships from 19,500 to 30,000 during each of the next three years—a 54 percent increase.The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure, the PCE price index, rose 3.7 percent from a year earlier—down from 4.1 percent but still well above the Fed’s 2 percent goal.The Fed declined to raise rates, although three officials wanted to do so. The weak GDP headline supports caution; strong private demand supports higher rates to restrain prices. The Fed confronts a weak headline, sturdy spending and too much inflation. None of the choices is clean.Investors are also making borrowing more expensive without waiting for the Fed. The yield on the 30-year Treasury bond reached 5.23 percent Thursday, its highest level since 2007.A Treasury yield is the return investors receive for lending money to the U.S. government. When the 30-year yield rises, investors are demanding more compensation to tie up their money for 30 years. That can reflect expectations of higher inflation, higher future interest rates, stronger growth, or weaker demand for long-term Treasuries; heavier government borrowing can also put upward pressure on yields, though it’s usually one factor among several.Rates on mortgages and other long-term loans commonly follow Treasury yields, so the increase means higher borrowing costs can spread through the economy even when the Fed leaves its own short-term rate unchanged.Two national polls delivered the same basic finding: most Americans oppose the Iran war, and they increasingly connect it to the cost of living. AP-NORC found that about two-thirds of adults said the war was not worth fighting. Only one person in five wanted the attacks to continue. Trump’s approval on Iran fell to 28 percent, six points below June.Quinnipiac found 60 percent of registered voters opposed American military action and 34 percent supported it.Americans considered preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon important, but ranked fuel prices and a ceasefire higher.A CNN poll found the political damage extending to November’s congressional elections. Democrats led Republicans by eight points among registered voters on the generic ballot, which asks which party a person would support for Congress without naming candidates. That measure is seen as a rough proxy of how the parties will fare across the most contested races. Among voters who said they were extremely motivated to vote, Democrats held a 20-point advantage.The president’s nominee for attorney general is in danger. Two Republicans, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, have demanded that Todd Blanche confirm in writing that the approximately $1.8 billion fund created through Trump’s settlement with the IRS will not exist and that protections against future Trump family audits cannot be revived. Blanche has not provided those guarantees. The senators will not support him until he does, so the Judiciary Committee canceled Thursday’s vote. Trump later said he might withdraw the nomination for now. For now, the disputed fund has also stalled Blanche’s nomination.An update on Trump’s prime-time speech alleging Chinese interference in American elections: The Washington Post reported that officials in 12 of the 15 states named in administration intelligence reports said federal authorities never told them China had compromised their voter-registration systems, directly contradicting the White House’s public account.Major hospital systems reported a sharp increase in uninsured patients after enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expired. Congressional Republicans allowed the larger premium tax credits to end on January 1, 2026. Hospitals told The New York Times that more patients were arriving without coverage and could not pay their bills.When the credits disappeared, some families dropped coverage they could no longer afford. They did not stop getting sick; many delayed treatment until they reached emergency rooms, which must stabilize them whether they can pay. Hospitals absorb the resulting unpaid bills or shift costs elsewhere, potentially raising premiums for people outside the ACA marketplaces.The National Urban League released its 50th annual “State of Black America” report Thursday and said Trump administration policies had pushed the American Dream farther away for Black Americans than at any point since the civil-rights movement. The organization cited the dismantling and redirection of parts of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, changes at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and administration-backed voting restrictions. The report also measured persistent material gaps: the median Black household income remains 37 percent below the median white household income.In Ukraine, Russian missiles and drones killed at least nine civilians and wounded more than 50 overnight. Poland said a Russian missile crossed deep into Polish territory and fell there, prompting NATO aircraft to scramble.France allowed 84,000 wildfire evacuees to return home Thursday after firefighters gained control of the southwestern blaze.Congolese authorities reported that the official Ebola death toll has passed 1,500, an increase of about 50 percent in one week. Authorities called it the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record.Thousands of migrants crossed from Morocco into Ceuta (SAY-oo-tah), Spain’s small territory on the North African coast, after border controls broke down Thursday. At least three people died trying to arrive by sea. Spain and Morocco agreed to cooperate in returning illegal entrants. In May 2021, more than 8,000 people entered Ceuta in two days.AP said the immediate trigger for Thursday’s mass crossing was not clear. Surveys of migrants using the western Mediterranean route found that 54 percent cited economic reasons, 33 percent war or conflict, 23 percent targeted personal violence and 14 percent gradual environmental change (respondents could name more than one reason.) Most people crossing Thursday appeared to be Moroccan, while others had traveled to Morocco from elsewhere in Africa. Ceuta matters because reaching it means reaching Spanish—and therefore European Union—territory without making the longer sea journey to mainland Europe.WIRED reported that American children are running faster than ever, a phenomenon the track world has dubbed “trackflation.” An Ohio high school senior ran the indoor two-mile in 9 minutes, 37.15 seconds, breaking a national record that had stood since 2013, while a Texas sophomore covered 100 meters in 9.92 seconds, only one-tenth of a second off the collegiate record. The most exuberant performance may have come from a 12-year-old Utah girl who ran a mile in 4:40.98, nearly six seconds faster than the age-group world record, despite performing the Scuba Dance just before reaching the finish line. “Nobody was even in the camera with her,” one astonished commentator said.WIRED traced part of the change to the spread of elite coaching methods once largely confined to professional runners. Some teenagers are experimenting with Norwegian-style double-threshold training, completing two carefully paced workouts in a day and using blood-lactate readings to adjust their effort. Private coaches are also emphasizing efficient mechanics, deliberate recovery, nutrition and heat acclimatization. One coach said a program that once consisted of a 20-minute jog and a game of Capture the Flag now asks girls to run eight 400-meter repetitions at five-minute-mile pace. Young runners also benefit from carbon-plated “super shoes,” fast polyurethane tracks, pace lights and a growing national competition circuit that gives them opportunities to race equally fast peers. Coaches and researchers caution that such intensive training can also cause injuries, burnout and excessive pressure.The Financial Times highlighted a South Korean trend involving “dopamine sites,” imitation shopping and food-delivery services on which nothing is sold and nothing arrives. Waiting for Godot’s packages. The platforms reproduce the ritual in elaborate detail: users examine menus and reviews, compare products, fill a cart, check out and sometimes follow an animated courier across a live map. One service called Food Never Comes allowed one user to add 1,000 toppings to an imaginary order. What no pickles?! About 30,000 people a week were pretending to order food through the service by mid-June. Other sites offer fictitious clothing and merchandise, while some tell users how much money or how many calories they avoided consuming. The premise is that anticipation and selection supply much of shopping’s excitement, allowing users to indulge the ritual of an impulse purchase without receiving an unwanted package, an unnecessary meal or a credit-card charge. Therapists have said the sites may interrupt costly behavior, although some question whether rehearsing the shopping ritual reinforces the same habit it is intended to control. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome to Stack Stories Daily for the 29th of July. We’re trying a little bit something different here today, so hang with us. You can read it or listen to it as a podcast. Let’s get to it.The Iran war moved again from background to foreground. Iran launched missiles at U.S. forces in Jordan; U.S. Central Command said the missiles were shot down. The systems doing this work are the same scarce air-defense systems the U.S. has been burning through in the Iran war. The Wall Street Journal called it a surprise missile attack; the point is that Iran fired after a brief lull and while de-escalation talks were still being floated. There was action in Iraq. The United States and Saudi Arabia hit Iran-backed militias in Iraq. AP reports at least 20 militia fighters were killed, along with six Iranian advisers. Iraq condemned the strikes as a violation of its sovereignty. Iraq and Saudi Arabia are now more directly engaged in the war.Ukraine said it hit two major Russian oil refineries overnight. That pushes forward the strategy we talked about before: Ukraine is not just fighting Russian troops; it is attacking the fuel and revenue that feed Putin’s war. Ukraine’s Zelenskyy was in Washington getting support from senators who advanced a Russia sanctions bill, 86-12. The bill would punish countries that keep buying Russian oil, gas and other exports. The bill would also let Trump impose tariffs of 500 percent on Russian imports and tariffs as high as 100 percent on the five largest importers of Russian oil and gas. At Trump’s request, senators added sanctions aimed at Iran too.In Congo, Ebola is now making hunger worse. The head of the U.N. World Food Program told AP that more than 2.7 million people in affected health zones face acute food insecurity. People are being told to isolate, but they also need food. That is the trap.In Japan, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said at least 13 people had died after a magnitude-7.1 earthquake struck Kumamoto.In Europe two firefighters were killed on Crete on July 29 while battling a wildfire driven by extreme heat and high winds.The Fed held interest rates steady, but three officials wanted to raise them. Trump wants lower rates, which would make borrowing cheaper. But the Iran war is pushing oil prices higher, and that increases the price for gas and goods that move by gas-powered vehicles. The president insists his new Fed chair wants to lower rates. The war Trump is directing is making the rate cut he wants harder to justify.A CNN/SSRS poll found a record 73 percent of Americans saying Trump has not paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems. His approval among Republicans fell to a new low of 78 percent, and the share of Republicans enthusiastic about the rest of his second term fell from 38 percent last spring to 19 percent. 19 percent? Wowza.A new filing in the James Comey case says Trump requested notes from the Secret Service interview of Comey “to use in his 6 p.m. press conference,” while repeated searches by federal investigators, including Secret Service agents, for evidence that “86” meant killing produced inconclusive or empty results.Today’s Washington spectacle was Anthony Fauci’s appearance before the Senate. Republicans, led by Rand Paul, are still investigating the origins of COVID and whether Fauci misled Congress about U.S.-funded research. Paul claims Fauci helped obscure or deny U.S. support for risky “gain-of-function” research in Wuhan, and he released parts of Fauci’s diary to argue that Fauci privately took the idea that the virus leaked from a lab more seriously than he admitted publicly. Fauci has said the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research as Paul defines it. Gain-of-function research means altering an organism, often a virus, to study whether it becomes more transmissible, more dangerous, or better able to evade defenses. Fauci said he had testified or briefed Congress “well over 200” times during nearly 40 years in government. Today, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer more than 100 questions, saying the hearing was designed to trap him into criminal exposure. He said Paul wanted him to say “anything” that could fulfill Paul’s public pledges to put him “behind bars.” He also accused Paul of an “unhinged obsession” with him. Republicans now plan a contempt vote. So the fight is no longer only where COVID came from. It is whether Congress is investigating Fauci or trying to make him prosecutable.Todd Blanche’s nomination to become attorney general in full is wobbling. Politico reports Blanche skipped a scheduled meeting with Sen. John Cornyn, who then said he was still “not prepared” to support him. Cornyn’s issue is the Trump IRS settlement. He wants written assurance that a roughly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund is dead and that audit protections for Trump and his family cannot be revived or stretched forward. Blanche has said the fund is effectively gone, but Cornyn wants it in writing before he supplies the vote. The Senate Judiciary Committee is supposed to vote tomorrow, so the immediate question is whether Republicans have the votes to move Trump’s former lawyer into permanent control of the Justice Department.The morning after a federal judge ruled that no federal detention contract could override state law, ICE published proposed contracts for 5,500 beds declaring that state and local laws “shall not apply” to the facilities. The same proposed contracts would let detention centers operate indefinitely at 85 percent staffing, including medical staffing. A June inspection found one detainee’s health assessment was 22 days late and suicide-watch checks ran nearly 14 hours apart instead of the required eight. In Washington state, officials needed three years of litigation, after 10 refused inspections and 3,500 detainee complaints, to win a ruling allowing state health inspectors into the Tacoma detention center.Trump also denied $227 million in snow-disaster aid requests from four Democratic-led states even though FEMA or NOAA had found the requests met federal standards. Presidents since George W. Bush had approved 68 of the previous 69 qualifying snow-disaster requests. Last week it was disclosed that the administration had denied projects in states that did not vote for Trump.The United States also banned new foreign-made humanoid and four-legged robots, a move aimed mostly at China. The FCC says the issue is national security: robots can collect data, move through homes, schools and factories, and plug into American infrastructure. China dominates the humanoid robot market.It was generally a bad day for robots. In New York, a rural school district paused plans for a nearly $60,000 humanoid AI robot teacher named Sally. Sally has silicone skin, brown hair, facial expressions and “natural conversation,” and was supposed to help teach robotics and technology at Salamanca High School, on the Allegany territory of the Seneca Nation. Teachers, parents and state officials objected. They raised concerns about student privacy, replacing human judgment, and the fact that Realbotix acquired a company known for hyper-realistic sex dolls. One local substitute teacher put the deeper objection plainly: of all the schools to “test it out,” they chose Native American children again.U.S. job postings with “AI” in the title rose from 264 in the first quarter of 2022 to 822 in the first quarter of 2026, and Indeed found that AI titles are now more common outside the technology industry than inside it.Illinois has recorded 220 confirmed tornadoes through Monday, more than twice the total of any other state, along with nine significant weather events, the state’s highest number in a decade. There is not one tidy cause. The state climatologist has pointed to a year of repeated storm systems, warm and humid air, and Illinois sitting in the active zone where those ingredients kept meeting. There is also a reporting issue: better radar, storm-spotter networks and damage surveys can count weaker tornadoes that previous decades missed. But the record still points to a real year of repeated severe-weather setups over Illinois.College sports money kept accelerating. Ohio State reportedly agreed to a roughly $15 million-a-year JPMorgan jersey-patch deal, meaning the bank’s logo would appear on uniforms across Ohio State’s varsity sports, not just on signs around the stadium, only for Notre Dame to announce a roughly $20 million-a-year SoFi agreement hours later. Notre Dame’s deal would put SoFi’s logo on Irish jerseys and make the company an official financial-services partner. Schools can now share revenue directly with athletes; Ohio State plans to max out a roughly $21.3 million pool for 2026-27. Jersey patches are one way to pay for that new athlete payroll.In a Costa Rican forest, scientists have installed a 15-inch touchscreen to attract wild capuchin monkeys. AI-powered facial recognition identifies each animal, the screen presents a simple learning task, and a correct touch sends a dried banana slice sliding onto a tray. Which doesn’t happen around these offices, I tell ya, no matter how much I punch the screen. Ten of the sixteen monkeys that investigated the contraption eventually worked out the relationship between poking the glass and receiving their favorite treat. Eight remembered later. Researchers hope to add more sophisticated tests of memory and impulse control in the hopes of curing those of us who split off from the family tree 7 million years ago.In 2020, a visitor gave the New Bedford Whaling Museum one star for being the “Worst Aquarium Ever,” which was hard to dispute because it was not an aquarium. The museum put the review on T-shirts, sales jumped 250 percent, and now people are lining up to represent a place whose chief aquatic attractions are four enormous whale skeletons and, as of this year, one modest 250-gallon fish tank.Finally, the filmed version of the musical “Hadestown” earned $10.2 million in 1,949 North American theaters, narrowly beating “Hamilton” for the largest debut ever by a live theatrical capture. The folk-and-jazz retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice began as an indie project, reached Broadway in 2019 and won eight Tony Awards. Its five-day engagement was extended, with some of the strongest business coming from Huntsville, Salt Lake City, Eugene and Boise. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome to Stack the Week for Friday, July 23The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, notes and Apple podcast reviews which spread the word about how this product can also be listened to as you pass the time cleaning your gutters, updating your terms of service or engaging in musketry before the setting sun.Okay, let’s start.More Is Creating MoreIran’s retaliation is spreading across the American military network in the Middle East.Explosive drones targeted Irbil in northern Iraq, where U.S. troops are based. Sirens sounded in Bahrain, the location of the 5th fleet. Iran also claimed attacks against American facilities in Jordan.The United States does not project power into the region from one enormous base. It relies on a distributed network of airfields, ports, command centers and partnerships. That allows American forces to operate close to a crisis, detect threats earlier and respond without first moving an entire military presence into position.The network gives the United States reach. It also gives an adversary a lot of targets.The United States completed its thirteenth consecutive night of strikes against Iran. The emerging cycle is easy to see: The United States strikes Iran. Iran attacks American facilities around the region.Sun Tzu described the underlying problem more than two thousand years ago: “If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.”CBS reported yesterday that the Pentagon has begun moving interceptors into the Middle East from stockpiles previously positioned for the Indo-Pacific. That is especially revealing: The Iran war is not simply consuming ammunition; it is changing what is available for deterring China.The New York Times reports that the Pentagon reduced its public death toll from 18 to 14 by removing four soldiers killed in Jordan and Iraq after President Trump declared a cease-fire—even though the military’s own releases described their deaths as related to Iranian aggression. This is reminiscent of the Covid period when President Trump said he didn’t want to test for new cases because it would make the numbers look bad.Yesterday’s news was that the Houthis had opened another front in the Red Sea. Reuters today has the receipts connecting the rebels with their benefactors, reporting that Tehran sent Revolutionary Guard commanders and missile equipment to the Houthis in Yemen.Iran rejected the latest American cease-fire proposal. No functioning diplomatic process is evident. No mechanism for pausing the attacks, resolving disputed incidents or preventing one retaliation from producing the next. Also, thirteen nights into this latest round, nobody has said what winning is. Until the leadership quits, until the nuclear program is gone, until the government falls. Which one is being fought?Some final questions:Can a bombing campaign intended to make Iran’s leaders cry uncle succeed against a government with such a high tolerance for suffering—particularly when much of that suffering is borne by its people?Has the war become a contest of pain thresholds: how much destruction Iran’s leaders are willing to absorb, versus how much political and economic damage President Trump is willing to endure?And what has restrained Trump from ordering the “massive attack” he keeps threatening? If he believes such an attack would be decisive, the costs holding him back must be substantial—perhaps further damage to the world economy, perhaps a larger Iranian retaliation, perhaps something else we cannot yet see. Knowing what that constraint is would help everyone judge how seriously to take his next threat, or how worried we should all be for the retaliation if he makes good on that threat.Battling Production LinesDuring the war’s first year, Ukrainian drone incursions into Russia were isolated events, usually involving one or two aircraft. By summer 2023, nearly 200 suspected attacks over eight months represented a major escalation. Now, Russia says it intercepted 571 Ukrainian drones in a single night.Ukraine said its weapons struck an oil facility roughly 1,350 kilometers from the border and a factory producing aircraft and missile components. Russian officials said the factory attack killed six people and wounded 26.Near Kyiv, a Russian ballistic missile struck a military training site hosting defense-industry representatives, killing at least 10 people and wounding nearly 100.Russia is exploiting Ukraine’s shortage of Patriot interceptors by launching ballistic missiles that travel at several times the speed of sound and are difficult for other systems to stop. In one major July attack, Ukraine said it intercepted none of 29 ballistic missiles.The war is increasingly a contest of industrial capacity: Ukrainian drone production against Russian missile stockpiles, and against Ukraine’s supply of the interceptors that stop them.Which is where this connects to the war above it. The interceptors the Pentagon is moving toward the Gulf and the interceptors Ukraine cannot get are the same interceptors, off the same small number of production lines, running at roughly 600 a year now, with plans to reach about 2,000 a year by 2030, against a backlog measured in years. One line is being asked to underwrite three deterrents — Kyiv’s, the Gulf’s, and the one that was sitting in the Pacific for Taiwan.Wait, Did We do That?The Trump administration has admitted that it canceled hundreds of clean-energy grants because of how the affected states voted. This is not merely a dispute over climate policy or government spending. It is evidence that the federal purse was used to punish political opponents.In October 2025, the Energy Department announced the termination of $7.56 billion in awards, claiming an individualized review found the projects economically unsound. But filings in Thakur v. Trump tell a different story. The class-action lawsuit was brought by University of California researchers who alleged that federal agencies canceled grants for politically disfavored reasons rather than poor performance or violations of grant terms.The government’s admission substantially validates that central allegation. Officials acknowledged terminating 283 grants in states won by Kamala Harris while sparing 340 grants recommended for cancellation in states won by Donald Trump. The selection was based solely on the states’ political identity—not cost, performance, statutory requirements or project merits.The canceled awards supported electrical-grid upgrades, methane-leak reduction, manufacturing and hydrogen production. In related litigation, Judge Amit Mehta ruled that selectively canceling comparable grants in Democratic states violated the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. His order restored only the grants held by the plaintiffs before him, however. It did not resolve every cancellation in Thakur.Congress, not the president, holds the constitutional power of the purse. Treating awarded public funds as presidential patronage—money for friendly states, cancellation for hostile ones—undermines congressional authority and equal government under law. If that seems like jargon, what I’m describing is the American system that we celebrated this year at its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary.The admission also contradicts Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s congressional assurance that politics played no role. (If the majority in Congress were jealous guardians of their power, they might be upset about this.)By the way, if you’re gauging how the various branches of government are doing, note how the admission surfaced. In the judicial branch– because someone sued. During the Trump years it has been the only branch to seek to maintain standards.If future presidents can redirect appropriated money according to electoral support, what remains of the power of the purse? The question is not confined to grants. Elsewhere in today’s issue: a tax on nearly every import in the country, imposed without a vote, and a thirteen-night bombing campaign, prosecuted without one. Three of the day’s largest stories involve powers the Constitution assigns to Congress being exercised by the president, and in none of them is Congress audibly objecting.This is a particularly stark abdication in an election year where voters are supposed to evaluate the work being done in their name and either affirm or punish the lawmakers responsible for it. But a member who does not vote on a war never has to defend a war. A member who does not vote on a tariff never has to explain a price. The Republican leaders in Congress are behaving as if their authority is also a liability.Tariffs, now more than ever.President Trump has found a tariff workaround. He’s now rebuilt most of the tariff wall the Supreme Court knocked down in February.Trump first imposed sweeping tariffs in April 2025 under a law granting presidents emergency economic powers. The Supreme Court ruled that the law did not authorize tariffs. The administration responded with a temporary measure that kept most in place. They have now found a permanent one under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act. That statute permits retaliation against foreign practices that burden American commerce.The alleged offense is that the targeted countries are using forced labor. American officials say the targeted economies fail to block goods made under coercion from entering their markets, allowing abusive producers to directly undercut American workers. Supporters say market access should require trading partners to enforce comparable labor standards.But the remedy is not a ban on proven forced-labor goods. It is a tax on lawful imports.Imports from 60 economies—representing 99.4 percent of everything the United States buys abroad—now face duties of 10 or 12.5 percent. Because the European Union is counted as one economy, the policy reaches more than 80 countries.These are a tax on American companies. Importers can absorb the charge, negotiate lower supplier prices or pass it to consumers. Because nearly every supplier is covered, businesses have few untaxed countries to switch to.On who pays, the latest hard data say the burden falls overwhelmingly on U.S. firms and consumers, not foreign exporters: a February New York Fed study found nearly 90 percent of the economic burden from the 2025 tariffs was borne in the United States, with 94 percent through August 2025 and 86 percent by November; an NBER analysis estimated 2025 tariff pass-through at 94 percent, meaning importers bore most of the cost and foreign exporters generally did not cut prices.Australia, Japan, China, Brazil and other trading partners dispute the administration’s findings. Brazil is considering a World Trade Organization challenge. The new legal foundation is sturdier than the one the Court rejected because Section 301 expressly authorizes tariffs after an investigation. Yet judges may still ask whether a near-global tax is reasonably connected to each country’s labor practices—or whether forced labor supplied a convenient route back to the policy Trump wanted.MEASLES UPDATEThe record fell before August. The United States has recorded 2,318 measles cases this year, already exceeding the 2,289 reported during all of 2025. That makes 2026 the country’s worst measles year since 1991, with five months still remaining. The underlying story has not changed: vaccination coverage has fallen below the level needed to stop sustained transmission, while major outbreaks continue in Utah, Arizona and South Carolina. What changed today is the scale—and the consequence now coming into view. International health authorities will meet in November to determine whether the United States has lost the measles-elimination status it achieved in 2000.Smoke detector RemovedDisparate impact sounds like an expression only a statistician could love. It describes a problem: a rule can treat everyone alike on paper while treating groups differently in practice.In schools, disparate-impact analysis functioned as a smoke detector. Suppose Black students were suspended more often than White students under one policy. The disparity did not prove discrimination. It prompted investigators to ask whether the rule was necessary, applied consistently or replaceable with a less discriminatory alternative.The method addressed a problem that became more important after explicit segregation—rules assigning Black and White students to different schools—became illegal. Institutions could instead adopt neutral barriers, such as admissions tests unrelated to the program or attendance boundaries that preserved segregation.In 1971, the Supreme Court confronted this problem at a North Carolina power company. Black employees seeking better jobs had to possess diplomas and pass aptitude tests unnecessary for the work. The Court ruled that practices could be unlawful because of their effects, not only their stated intentions. Federal education officials later applied the principle to schools.The Education Department has now abandoned disparate-impact enforcement under Title VI, which prohibits racial discrimination in federally funded programs. Instead of asking whether a neutral policy creates an unnecessary racial barrier, investigators will principally ask whether officials intended to discriminate.The administration says unequal outcomes can have innocent causes. It argues that schools fearing investigation may soften discipline or alter admissions simply to make each racial group’s numbers look similar—even when the original rules were fair.Families generally cannot bring their own Title VI lawsuits based solely on disparate impact. They may still report intentional discrimination, but proving it can require an incriminating message or evidence of deliberately different treatment. A family may see the pattern without possessing either—and has now lost the principal federal mechanism for challenging it.The law can still punish whoever lights the match. What happens when everyone sees smoke but nobody can prove who struck it?The Missing Hands in Elder CareThey bathe our grandparents. They help them from bed to wheelchair. They make sure medications are taken. They know Mr. Johnson won’t finish lunch unless someone remembers the extra pudding cup.Those hands are becoming harder to find.The New York Times reports that President Trump’s immigration enforcement campaign is removing workers from senior-living facilities and leaving others afraid to report for work because of immigration raids or uncertainty about their legal status. Many of the workers now leaving have been employed legally for years under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) or Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Delays in renewing work permits and recent court rulings allowing the administration to end some TPS protections are forcing nursing homes to lose experienced caregivers who have often cared for the same residents for years.Immigrants make up about 28 percent of America’s long-term-care workforce and roughly 22 percent of nursing assistants. These are jobs that cannot be outsourced or postponed. Residents still need to be bathed, fed, lifted safely and monitored every day. More than half of nursing homes surveyed in 2023 reported turning away prospective residents because they already lacked enough staff, and nearly all said they were relying on overtime to cover shortages.The shortage does not remain a staffing problem for long. One worker leaves. Remaining employees work overtime. Burnout rises. Facilities rely more heavily on temporary staff. Continuity suffers. Researchers have long found that nursing homes with more direct-care staffing provide better care. The concern is that fewer caregivers could eventually mean more falls, medication errors, hospitalizations and other preventable injuries.America has quietly built much of its elder-care system around immigrant labor. As the administration targets those workers, immigration policy reveals a larger American challenge: how to provide enough caregivers for a rapidly aging population. The economics are already difficult. Nursing homes rely heavily on Medicaid, which reimburses facilities only about 82 cents for every dollar they spend on resident care, leaving little room to raise wages enough to attract more workers. The question is not just who will care for the patients immigrant caregivers once saw to, but whether the country has a realistic plan to provide the level of elder care Americans say they want as millions more people reach old age.DOJ Drops SubpoenaThe Justice Department withdrew subpoenas seeking testimony and phone records from New York Times journalists Thursday after a federal judge said prosecutors had treated an extraordinary, last-resort intrusion into newsgathering as an opening investigative move—and indicated he would otherwise quash the demands.The subpoenas arose from a leak investigation following July 8 and 9 Times reports about security deficiencies aboard President Donald Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One. FBI agents served three reporters at their homes on July 10 and attempted to serve two others. Prosecutors also sought telephone records associated with the five journalists.During a heated hearing in Manhattan, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian questioned why prosecutors had approached the reporters before exhausting alternative investigative avenues. Justice Department rules describe compulsory demands for journalists’ information as an extraordinary measure and require that subpoenas be narrowly tailored.The hearing revealed several errors. Some subpoenas targeted numbers belonging to two reporters’ spouses and another reporter’s mother. At least two sought records dating to January, months before the articles appeared. Prosecutors also failed initially to notify the journalists about the demands to telecommunications providers.In seeking a nondisclosure order, the government represented that disclosure could expose a nonpublic investigation, although the inquiry was already widely reported. One prosecutor called that an oversight. Another acknowledged that the family members’ numbers were included because investigators moved quickly and relied on database information.After Subramanian said the errors were “piling up,” prosecutors requested a break and returned to announce the withdrawal. The judge subsequently declared the subpoenas null and void.The Times called the outcome an affirmation of press freedom. Justice Department officials denied acting in bad faith and said the underlying investigation would continue. The withdrawal does not prevent prosecutors from issuing new subpoenas after pursuing other investigative steps and complying with applicable protections.CYCLOSPORA UPDATEOne outbreak becomes two. The Taco Bell-linked outbreak has expanded from five states to nine, with 1,947 illnesses and 98 hospitalizations now connected to shredded iceberg lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms. That conclusion still rests on interviews and supply-chain tracing rather than a confirmed positive lettuce sample. Separately, the FDA is investigating another cluster of 72 illnesses whose source and location have not been disclosed. The second cluster matters because it suggests the record national surge cannot be explained by the Taco Bell lettuce outbreak alone.Neanderthals are no NeanderthalsFor generations, scientists have debated whether Neanderthals disappeared because modern humans were more intelligent. A new analysis challenges that familiar explanation, suggesting that Neanderthal cognitive abilities largely overlapped with those of Homo sapiens.Researchers used deformation mapping, a technique that digitally reconstructs the inner surface of a skull. From these reconstructions, the team estimated the volumes of more than a dozen brain regions in Neanderthals and in modern people of European and Han Chinese ancestry. In several regions, the differences between the two living populations were greater than those separating modern humans from Neanderthals.The results do not prove that Neanderthals thought exactly as we do. Skull shape is an imperfect guide to the brain’s internal anatomy, while the size of a brain region is only weakly connected to cognitive performance. Still, the findings suggest that any average intelligence gap was modest. Neanderthals may have occupied much the same broad spectrum of language, memory and executive abilities found among people today.The study also reexamines earlier research reporting that Neanderthals had smaller cerebellums than early modern humans. Because the cerebellum contributes to language processing and memory, this difference had been proposed as a possible competitive disadvantage. Yet treating such anatomical variation as proof of inferior intelligence would require applying the same logic to differences among living human populations—an interpretation unsupported by current research.If superior intelligence did not doom the Neanderthals, what did? Was it their pack-a-day smoking habit, or their refusal to wear bicycle helmets? More plausible theories suggest that they interbred with a much larger population of Homo sapiens and were gradually absorbed. Neanderthals therefore did not disappear entirely: their genetic legacy survives today. Many people, particularly those with ancestry outside sub-Saharan Africa, carry a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA in their own genomes. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome to Stack the Week for Thursday, July 23The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, notes and Apple podcast reviews which spread the word about how this product can also be listened to as you negotiate a durable peace, update your look for fall or simply look for a way to free and extend your emotional life.Okay, let’s start.The Other Exit Is ClosingBrent crude, the international benchmark price for oil, crossed $100 a barrel Thursday for the first time since May. It had traded near $71 earlier in July, when investors still hoped a temporary understanding between the United States and Iran might hold.Part of the spike reflects Houthi attacks on Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, threatening the route Saudi Arabia has relied on to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.Saudi Arabia built its East-West Pipeline during the Iran-Iraq War for exactly this danger. The pipeline does not replace Hormuz, but it gives the kingdom a way to preserve millions of barrels of exports when the eastern route becomes unusable.Once that oil reaches reaches the end of the pipe, much of it still has to pass through the 18 miles between Yemen and the Horn of Africa at the southern entrance to the Red Sea.If that passage becomes too dangerous because of Houthi attacks or threats of same, tankers must sail the long way around Africa. That detour can add several weeks to a voyage and ties up the same tanker for longer, reducing the number of ships available to carry everyone else’s oil.The Houthi attacks also complicate President Trump’s announced formula for retaliation. He has said the United States will destroy an Iranian bridge or power plant whenever Iran attacks a ship in the Strait of Hormuz. But the Houthis attacked from Yemen, not Iran. They receive weapons and support from Tehran, but that does not establish that Iranian officials selected these particular tankers or ordered these particular launches. So do the Iranian people get punished anyway?The war now threatens both doors through which Gulf oil reaches the world. The Strait of Hormuz was the front entrance. The Red Sea was the fire exit.The fire exit is now under fire, too.Also of note on the Iran front: The New York Times has a fact check. The administration has claimed that the Iranian missile capability is caput. But the Times found visible damage at nine American military and intelligence sites across the region from recent Iranian attacks, suggesting Iran retains a more capable missile force than some public statements have implied. At the same time, The Wall Street Journal reports the United States is moving additional forces, medical units and weapons into the region after a twelfth consecutive night of strikes to give president Trump more options if he wants to escalate.They Died Where They Were Sent to RecoverOn March 16, Pakistani aircraft bombed a sprawling compound in Kabul known as the Omid Rehabilitation and Treatment Centre during Pakistan’s campaign against militants it says operate from Afghanistan.The Taliban has made drug addiction a national priority. Afghanistan has one of the world’s highest rates of opioid addiction, fueled in part by decades as the world’s largest producer of opium. Taliban authorities have repeatedly rounded up people addicted to drugs and sent many of them into compulsory rehabilitation centers like Omid.The strike killed at least 269 civilians and wounded at least 122, according to figures independently verified by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.Amnesty International has now called for the bombing to be investigated as a possible war crime.Pakistan said the compound contained technical-support facilities, weapons and ammunition used by militants attacking Pakistan.Amnesty reviewed dozens of photos and videos, satellite images, interviews with witnesses and workers, and bomb fragments from the site.Weapons experts concluded that at least one munition was a Pakistani-made Takbir precision-guided bomb, evidence that the facility had been deliberately selected rather than struck accidentally.Under the rules of war, armies may attack military objectives, but must distinguish them from civilians, homes, hospitals and other civilian facilities. Medical facilities receive special protection.Even if Pakistan possessed reliable evidence that militants had stored weapons somewhere in the compound—something Amnesty says it found no evidence to support—commanders still had to consider the people living around those weapons. The principle of proportionality prohibits an attack when the expected civilian harm would be excessive in relation to the concrete military advantage anticipated. The principle of precaution requires commanders to do everything feasible to verify the target, select weapons and timing that reduce civilian deaths, and warn people when circumstances permit.Amnesty cannot prosecute; its report is evidence, not a verdict. A war-crimes case would require an independent investigation, something Pakistan rejects. Still, the report preserves evidence while witnesses and documents remain, which matters because such cases often begin years later.23 Million Frozen in PlaceHealth insurance is trapping nearly one in four U.S. workers in jobs they want to leave. New West Health–Gallup research estimates that 24 percent—about 23 million adults—remain because they fear losing employer-sponsored coverage, up eight percentage points since 2021. The burden is especially acute among women, workers with chronic conditions and people facing medical debt. The consequences of this “job lock” extend beyond unhappy jobs. Workers pass up promotions, delay starting businesses, postpone retirement or stay in positions they no longer want because a gap in health coverage could expose them or their families to catastrophic medical bills. Across the economy, that reduces job mobility, slows new business formation and makes wages less responsive to competition.A Fine That Cannot Be PaidThe New York Times reports that the Trump administration is using another tool to pressure undocumented immigrants to leave the country: enormous daily civil fines.The Department of Homeland Security has sent more than 100,000 people letters saying they owe the federal government $998 for every day they remained in the United States after an immigration judge issued a final order requiring them to leave.One week costs $6,986. Thirty days cost $29,940. One year produces a bill of $364,270.A final removal order means an immigration judge has concluded that a person may be expelled from the United States. It does not necessarily mean the person can leave immediately. Practical, legal or humanitarian barriers may prevent departure. For example, a person’s home country may refuse to issue the travel documents needed for deportation, or a court may temporarily block removal while an asylum or other legal claim is resolved.The administration presents the fines as part of its campaign to encourage what it calls “self-deportation.”Yesterday we discussed The Washington Post’s reporting on overcrowded detention facilities. Last week we looked at how the drive to increase deportation numbers led to lower hiring standards and more reported use-of-force incidents. Those were about detention and arrests. This is about financial pressure. Taken together, they describe an immigration system expanding its enforcement tools faster than the institutions meant to support and oversee them and the humans at the end of these policies.One Referral for a National ForceIn a related story, House Homeland Security Democrats said an ICE briefing showed that the agency has received 56 excessive-force complaints since President Trump returned to office. Thirty-two have been closed. One officer has been referred for possible discipline, and no discipline has yet been imposed. Most of the remaining cases are still under investigation.At least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration agents since the crackdown began including Renée Good and Alex Pretti, the subject of a special report yesterday on CNN by Jake Tappe and the two immigrants shot and killed by ICE officers during attempted arrests in Maine and Houston within the span of a week.The Nuclear Exception Is Now an AgreementEnergy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman signed an agreement establishing the legal framework allowing the United States and Saudi Arabia to cooperate on civilian nuclear power. Without such an agreement, American companies generally cannot sell Saudi Arabia nuclear reactors, major reactor components, fuel or other sensitive nuclear technology.Saudi Arabia wants nuclear reactors partly so it can generate electricity without burning as much oil at home, leaving more petroleum available for export. The United States wants American reactor builders and fuel companies—not Russian or Chinese competitors—to win the work. The pact creates an opening for contracts worth billions of dollars.President Trump’s family also has significant financial ties to Saudi Arabia. Since leaving the White House, Jared Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, has received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and has pursued additional business in the kingdom. So President Trump’s son-in-law has a very strong financial interest in seeing the world the way the Saudi government sees it. President Trump is the man who approved the agreement.Successive Israeli governments have opposed the spread of uranium-enrichment capability elsewhere in the Middle East, arguing that civilian enrichment shortens the technological distance to a potential weapons program which takes advantage of the same expertise and technology.Under the terms of the agreement, Saudi Arabia cannot enrich uranium supplied directly under the American agreement but might retain a path to enrich uranium obtained through another arrangement or processed in a separate facility.President Trump added another condition Thursday: he said the nuclear pact depends on Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel through the Abraham Accords. Saudi leaders have previously linked normalization to progress toward a Palestinian state, something the Israeli government opposes. Saudi officials had not publicly accepted President Trump’s formulation when it was announced.Under the Atomic Energy Act, Congress has time to review the agreement. Congress now has to decide whether Saudi Arabia represents a singular exception to the prohibition against allowing enrichment capability —or the beginning of a new rule.A New War in Mali?The late Time magazine columnist Hugh Sidey used to tell a story about covering the White House during the Vietnam War. He recalled a weary administration official joking during the quagmire, “You know what we need? We need another war.”That came to mind when I read The Washington Post’s reporting about Mali.Mali is a vast, landlocked country in West Africa, roughly twice the size of Texas, with large stretches of desert and semi-arid grassland that the central government has struggled to control.The Trump administration is considering joining its war.Current and former American officials told The Washington Post that senior officials are debating military action against Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, usually called JNIM. It is al-Qaeda’s main affiliate in that part of Africa.The coalition has as many as 6,000 fighters, according to regional officials and experts interviewed by The Washington Post. It attacks army bases, ambushes convoys, taxes communities and transportation routes, kidnaps civilians and exploits conflicts among farmers, herders and ethnic groups.Across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, militant Islamist violence caused nearly 9,826 reported deaths over the most recent year measured by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies.The government the United States would be helping is a military junta that seized power in two coups, expelled French forces, pushed out a U.N. peacekeeping mission, turned to Russian mercenaries for support and still has not succeeded in containing JNIM.An intervention presents an unusual diplomatic problem. The United States would be supporting a military government that works closely with Russia’s Africa Corps.Other challenges include what to do when the bombing stops.JNIM functions as both an armed organization and an alternative system of coercive rule. In areas where the state appears mainly through corrupt officials, abusive soldiers or occasional airstrikes, militants can present themselves as the authority that settles disputes—even while imposing brutal religious restrictions and killing opponents.Military force can kill militants. It cannot create an effective government in places where one barely exists.A Student Visa Becomes a CountdownFor decades, most international students entered the United States under a rule called “duration of status.” In plain English, they could remain as long as they continued making satisfactory progress toward their degree.The Department of Homeland Security is replacing that system.Beginning September 15, most foreign students will receive permission to stay until their program ends or for four years, whichever comes first.The administration argues the change will make immigration laws easier to enforce and reduce opportunities for fraud.The larger question is whether it also makes the United States a less attractive place for the world’s most talented students.Many doctoral programs routinely last five, six or seven years because research rarely follows a schedule. More important, today’s graduate student often becomes tomorrow’s researcher, entrepreneur or technology executive. About 35 percent of America’s STEM workers with Ph.D.s are foreign-born and U.S.-trained, having first arrived as international students. Economists at the Peterson Institute estimate that a sustained decline in foreign STEM graduates could eventually reduce America’s high-skill STEM workforce by more than 11 percent at the Ph.D. level and trim hundreds of billions of dollars from long-run economic output.Medicaid WorkersHouse Republicans spent much of last year arguing that able-bodied Medicaid recipients should have to work to keep their health coverage. House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington said the only people expected to lose coverage under the party’s proposal were “able-bodied adults refusing to work.”A new Government Accountability Office report found that millions of Medicaid recipients already work, including many in full-time jobs.The report found that 13.8 million working-age adults enrolled in Medicaid worked at some point during 2024. Roughly two-thirds of those workers held full-time jobs. Another 10.6 million working adults lived in households receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, commonly known as food stamps.The report also found that workers receiving public assistance were concentrated in transportation, retail, restaurants and other industries that millions of Americans rely on every day. Amazon was among the employers showing the fastest growth in workers receiving Medicaid or food assistance in the states studied.The report does not accuse employers of violating wage laws, and it does not prove that low wages alone explain why workers qualify for public benefits. Family size, fluctuating hours and state eligibility rules all affect enrollment.It does raise a larger economic question.If millions of Americans already work—many of them full time—yet still qualify for Medicaid or food assistance, the debate shifts. The question is no longer simply whether people should work. It is whether work in today’s economy reliably provides enough income and benefits to avoid public assistance—and, if it does not, whether policymakers should focus as much on the quality of work as on requiring it.Public-School Enrollment DropsPublic-school enrollment decline is one of those slow stories that becomes a crisis only after the buildings are already closing.For more than a century, Americans treated the neighborhood public school as a promise: if children showed up, communities would invest in them. Horace Mann, the father of the common-school movement, called public education “the great equalizer of the conditions of men.” Today, that promise is colliding with a simple demographic fact: in many places, there are no longer enough children to sustain the system that promise built.Todd Wallack of The Washington Post reports that, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, districts closed more than 1,000 public schools during the 2025-26 school year—up from 755 just four years earlier, a roughly 35 percent increase. The end of federal pandemic aid has forced districts to confront enrollment losses they could postpone but not avoid.Where did the students go? They did not simply disappear. Some communities have fewer children because birth rates have fallen since the Great Recession. Some families have moved from expensive metropolitan districts to suburbs or faster-growing regions. Others have chosen charter schools, private schools or homeschooling. Homeschooling has grown from about 850,000 students in 1999 to roughly 3.4 million today—more than 6 percent of the nation’s school-age children. At the same time, slower immigration is reducing enrollment in districts that historically relied on immigrant families to offset declining birth rates.A closed school means longer bus rides, broken neighborhood routines, fewer after-school programs and the loss of one of the few public institutions that anchors a community.The decline also creates a feedback loop. Most states fund schools largely according to enrollment. Fewer students mean less money. Less money means larger classes, fewer electives, fewer counselors, fewer extracurricular activities and, eventually, more school closures. Those cuts can encourage still more families to choose charter schools, private schools or homeschooling, accelerating the cycle.Orca BitsThe Washington Post is where you should point your web browser if you’d like to see what happens to a sharp-tail sunfish when it’s rammed head on by an orca. You might not think you needed to see this, but upon viewing it you will marvel. It’s a pinata party. Scientists documented two cases in Mexico’s Gulf of California in which one orca seized a sharp-tail sunfish by its rudder-like tail and held it in place while another backed off, accelerated and rammed it nose-first with its full body.The impact exploded the several-hundred-pound fish into thousands of bite-size fragments, defeating its dense, gelatinous skin and calling young orcas to dinner, swimming through a rain of snacks.Researchers think the maneuver may be both a hunting technique, a lesson in teamwork and a method for all of us in making quick appetizers on a limited time budget while delighting your family with a full-contact food preparation.Japanese HeatJapan has run out of ways to say “blimey, it’s hot.” After temperatures hit 104°F, the country deployed kokushobi (pronounced koh-koo-SHOH-bee), meaning “cruel heat day”— that was the winner in a poll of 400,000 people who were asked to come of for a name for their melted condition. It beat rivals including “sweaty day” and “sauna day.”The phrase debuted Tuesday as three Japanese cities reached the threshold. The whimsy masks a grim trend: more than 100,000 heat-stroke cases were recorded last summer.Beyond Japan, Taiwanese media say people are “roasting like a sweet potato,” while health authorities in Shenzhen, China, have declared “barbecue mode.” Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome to Stack the Week for July 22, 2026.The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, the feedback, the emails, and the notes. And the Apple podcast reviews help keep us from hiding under a bushel. (They introduce us to a wider audience.)Remember, this is a podcast too. Listen while you sail through Copenhagen, reorder your holy cards or plan your ascent, vaulting on the bones of your enemies.So here we go:1. One Bridge at a TimeDid you ever play sandlot football as a kid? The quarterback would call everyone into a huddle, then draw the play on his chest with his finger. “Joey, you go left at the fire hydrant. Billy, you go long toward Mrs. Mcgillicuddy’s house.”Watching the administration’s rapidly evolving strategy for the Iran war Wednesday feels a little like that. The play keeps getting redrawn in public as the war unfolds.President Trump announced that every time Iran attacks a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, the United States will destroy one Iranian bridge or power plant. Some of the targets he identified lie near Tehran. That moves the threatened retaliation closer to Iran’s largest population center and appears intended to make ordinary Iranians—and therefore their leaders—feel a greater price for attacks in the strait. It would also put civilians at risk when electricity, transportation, water and medical systems depend on the infrastructure being struck.The announcement raises immediate practical questions. What happens if a proxy group acts on its own, a local commander ignores orders or American intelligence gets it wrong? Under the president’s formula, any of those events could lead to the destruction of infrastructure that millions of civilians depend on. On the other hand, if there is an attack and the president does not respond as promised, he suffers a loss of credibility.The policy could also give Iran additional leverage. Tehran already has the ability to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. If every attack automatically triggers a larger American response, Iran—or groups acting in its name—would gain more influence over the pace of escalation.Is this a standing policy or a negotiating tactic? International law prohibits deliberately attacking civilian objects unless they have become military objectives, and any attack must avoid disproportionate civilian harm. If bridges and power plants are now legitimate targets, what prevents Iran from broadening its own target list? And how does this policy reopen the Strait of Hormuz?2. The cost of France’s heat wave.Extreme heat can sound like an inconvenience: uncomfortable sleep, crowded beaches, another photograph of children running through a fountain.It can also be deadly.During the heat wave from June 17 to July 2, the affected parts of France recorded 21,674 deaths. Based on previous years, public-health officials would ordinarily have expected 15,910. The difference—5,764 people—is what epidemiologists call “excess deaths”: people who probably would not have died during those weeks under normal conditions.That does not mean every death certificate will say “heat.” Extreme temperatures can cause dehydration or heatstroke. They can also place additional stress on the heart, lungs and kidneys. An older person with heart disease may die of a heart attack brought on by the heat, but the certificate may record only the heart attack.France recorded 36 percent more deaths than expected during the heat wave—the country’s highest excess mortality during a heat wave since 2003.Funeral directors struggled to find room for the bodies. Some mortuaries filled and began turning them away. About one-third of the people who died across the affected regions died at home. About two-thirds of the excess deaths were among people 75 or older.3. Saudi Arabia Gets What Iran Can’t HaveSaudi Arabia wants nuclear power. It also wants permission to make the fuel itself. The Trump administration may let it.President Trump has now approved a proposed 30-year civil-nuclear agreement with the kingdom, according to officials familiar with the negotiations. It has not yet been signed, published or reviewed by Congress.Nuclear reactors use uranium as fuel. Before uranium can go into a reactor, centrifuges enrich it. At low levels, enriched uranium can produce electricity. At much higher levels, it can help produce a nuclear bomb. Getting from one to the other is not simple, but the same machines and much of the same knowledge are involved.A country that can enrich uranium for a reactor is closer to making bomb material than a country that has to buy its fuel from someone else. The United States and Israel have justified the war in large part as an attempt to keep Iran from turning its uranium-enrichment program into a nuclear weapon. Now Washington may allow another country in the same region to acquire the underlying technology.When the United Arab Emirates signed a nuclear agreement with Washington in 2009, it promised never to enrich uranium or reprocess used reactor fuel at home. Instead of banning Saudi enrichment, the agreement would reportedly create a two-year American-Saudi study of whether an enrichment plant should be built inside the kingdom. No plant has been approved. But the United States would be moving from “Saudi Arabia cannot have this” to “let’s decide under what conditions Saudi Arabia can have this.”Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Norah O’Donnell in a 2018 interview broadcast on *60 Minutes* that Saudi Arabia did not want a nuclear bomb. Then he named the exception: “If Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.”Iran will notice the unequal treatment. Washington is trying to eliminate or sharply restrict Iran’s enrichment program while considering domestic enrichment for Iran’s principal regional rival. That gives Tehran another reason to resist American demands at the negotiating table: Iranian officials can ask why enrichment is unacceptable in Iran but potentially manageable in Saudi Arabia.The Associated Press reports that the agreement is not expected to require the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Additional Protocol—the stronger inspection system that gives international monitors more information and access, including tools for looking for nuclear work a country has not declared.Why accept that risk? Saudi Arabia has refused to renounce enrichment, and Washington wants American companies—not Russian or Chinese companies—to build a nuclear industry worth tens of billions of dollars. The administration also wants to preserve a strategic relationship strained by the Iran war. Earlier American negotiations treated nuclear cooperation as part of a larger bargain in which Saudi Arabia would establish relations with Israel. The agreement reportedly does not require Saudi recognition of Israel.Israeli officials and security experts have reacted with alarm. A Saudi enrichment program could begin a regional competition in which Turkey and Egypt demand the same capability. It could also leave Israel facing two regional rivals with the industrial foundation for producing weapons material.4. ICE Kept Filling Unsafe Rooms“Covid man.” “A guy with monkeypox.” “Cardiac lady.”Those were the names ICE officials used in text messages while deciding which sick people most urgently needed the limited medical care available inside a dangerously overcrowded Manhattan holding facility, according to an exhaustively reported Washington Post piece.An ICE holding room is supposed to be a place where someone waits for a few hours after being arrested. The rooms have no beds or showers, and generally no full-time medical staff, because nobody is supposed to live in them.At 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, people lived in them anyway.One room was approximately 30 feet by 30 feet, with a hard floor, concrete benches and three toilets. It ordinarily held a handful of people. Last summer, ICE packed as many as 86 inside. At the worst point, each person had approximately ten square feet—the floor space of an old-fashioned telephone booth.These conditions were not separate from the administration’s deportation policy. They were one of its results.President Trump promised to remove the “worst of the worst.” But the administration also ordered ICE to make thousands of arrests a day. At 26 Federal Plaza, agents began arresting people immediately after their immigration-court hearings. Internal government data covering Trump’s first year found that fewer than 14 percent of ICE arrestees had been charged with or convicted of violent offenses; 42 percent had no previous criminal charge or conviction.Those being held, according to the Post reporting, went days without showers. The room smelled of sweat, urine and feces. More than 60 people were held in the building for over a week, although the government’s original limit was 12 hours.The facility accepted people with heart disease, diabetes, kidney failure, tuberculosis, dementia and other serious conditions. There was no doctor on site; one detainee was taken to a hospital with breathing problems.Officials repeatedly warned one another. “This is insane,” an assistant field-office director wrote in June.The Washington Post identified 177 facilities nationwide that ICE classifies as temporary holding rooms. Since last August, eight other facilities have held more than 200 people at once. In Mesa, Arizona, ICE placed more than 700 people in a facility with a stated maximum capacity of 203.The Department of Homeland Security says temporary rooms are necessary because it lacks sufficient detention space to carry out the president’s order. DHS’s defense amounts to: We were ordered to arrest at this pace, and we had nowhere to put people. That is an honest math problem. It is also a choice—holding the arrest rate fixed while capacity stayed fixed, rather than the reverse. Any administration that sets an execution target without funding the infrastructure to execute it humanely is making that same choice, regardless of the policy behind it. The test for citizens and legislators is not whether the gap existed. It is whether it was knowable in advance. Here it was: Officials described it in writing, in real time, months before the Post obtained the documents.DHS declined to answer the Post’s detailed questions about the conditions, citing an ongoing lawsuit.5. The Models Left the SandboxWhen companies test whether an advanced artificial-intelligence model can hack a computer system, they wall it off from the internet. The model may be more capable than its makers realize. So they place it in a sandbox: a closed practice environment containing computer systems it is allowed to attack.It is like teaching someone to investigate burglaries by encouraging them to break into mock houses. The locks are real enough to test their skills, but the houses contain nothing valuable.OpenAI placed two models inside such an environment: GPT-5.6 Sol and a more powerful model that had not yet been released. Their assignment was to solve difficult hacking challenges called ExploitGym. OpenAI reduced some of the models’ normal safety restrictions—the rules that would ordinarily cause them to refuse a hacking assignment—because the company wanted to see what they could do.The sandbox was not sealed. One service inside it was allowed to retrieve approved software. The models discovered a previously unknown weakness in that service and used it to reach a computer with unrestricted internet access. They had broken into the mock house and discovered a hidden passage into another house with a whole bunch of gold in it.Hugging Face was one of the houses in that neighborhood. It is a real company that stores AI models and datasets. The OpenAI models reasoned that it might also be storing the answers to ExploitGym. They broke into Hugging Face’s production systems, stole working login credentials and found restricted test solutions in a database.OpenAI says the models were not told to attack Hugging Face. They were told to solve ExploitGym. Without a human describing that route, the models found the exit, selected Hugging Face as a target and stole what they needed. Attacking Hugging Face became useful along the way.I would just like to interject that a story about possibly apocalyptic things happening at a company called Hugging Face suggests the scriptwriters got a little too excited.This does not mean conscious machines decided to escape, and it does not mean robots will be controlling us tomorrow—though I wouldn’t talk smack around the toaster just to be safe.But it does demonstrate the danger of a machine capable of pursuing a narrow objective through methods its operators did not expect and would not have approved.6. The Tariff on the Medicine CabinetPresident Trump announced a plan Tuesday that seeks to bring pharmaceutical manufacturing back to the United States. Imported generic drugs will remain free of tariffs for two years beginning August 1. In August 2028, the tariff would rise to 100 percent. One year later, it would rise to 200 percent.A generic is the less expensive version of a medicine whose patent has expired. Generics account for more than 90 percent of American prescriptions and more than 80 percent of existing drug shortages, according to the Food and Drug Administration. That is partly because generic prices and profit margins are extremely low. Production often becomes concentrated among only a few suppliers, leaving little spare capacity when a factory fails an inspection, closes or stops making an unprofitable drug.Trump’s proposal is intended to force drugmakers to manufacture those medicines in the United States. Make it here and you pay no tax, says the president.There is a national-security argument for producing more medicine here. The United States depends heavily on factories in India and China for finished generic drugs and their ingredients. A future pandemic, natural disaster or confrontation with China could interrupt medicines Americans need every day.But moving a drug factory is not like moving an office.Pharmaceutical plants require specialized machinery, trained workers, reliable ingredient suppliers and FDA inspections. One industry executive told Bloomberg that getting a new American facility operating would probably require at least three years—longer than the two-year period before the first tariff takes effect.The economics are also difficult. Generic manufacturers make very little money on each pill. American construction, labor and regulatory costs are generally higher than costs in India or China. A company must decide whether an American factory will remain profitable for years, even though a future president could change or cancel Trump’s tariff policy.Many medicines assembled in American plants still use active ingredients made overseas. The administration has not explained whether those ingredients would be taxed.A company unable to move production can pay the tariff and try to pass some of the cost to insurers, pharmacies and patients. It can accept a loss. Or it can stop selling that medicine in the United States.Many generic medicines have only two or three suppliers. If one company leaves the American market, the remaining manufacturers may be unable to replace its production quickly. The result would not be a more expensive antibiotic, anesthetic or cancer treatment. It could be no supply at any price.7. Measles Reaches a 35-Year HighThe United States has recorded 2,295 measles cases this year, the most in 35 years.Measles is not merely a childhood rash. Before the vaccine became widely available, measles hospitalized roughly 48,000 Americans and killed between 400 and 500 every year.The United States declared measles eliminated in 2000. “Eliminated” did not mean the virus had vanished from Earth. It meant measles was no longer spreading continuously inside the country. When nearly everyone around an infected person was vaccinated, the virus had difficulty finding another person to infect and the chain usually stopped.That protection requires vaccination rates of about 95 percent because measles is among the most contagious diseases known. National vaccination coverage among kindergartners has fallen from 95.2 percent in the 2019–20 school year to 92.5 percent. The national average also conceals communities where the rate is much lower. That is where one infected traveler can begin an outbreak.Most of this year’s cases have occurred among people who were unvaccinated. But the consequences do not stop with the person who declined the shot. Babies too young for their first dose and people with weakened immune systems depend on those around them to keep the virus away.8. Individualized Treatment Reduces Rare EpilepsyResearchers designed separate treatments for two children whose severe epilepsy was caused by different mutations in the SCN2A gene. The drugs suppressed each child’s defective gene copy without permanently changing the genetic code. After two years, seizures declined 26 percent in one child and 90 percent in the other; both reduced medications and gained language and motor skills. The older patient walked independently for the first time at 15. These were two experimental, individualized trials, not evidence that the treatment is ready for general use.9. EEOC Moves to End Workforce Demographic ReportsThe Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is the federal agency responsible for enforcing laws against workplace discrimination. It investigates complaints and can sue employers accused of discriminating because of race, sex, religion, national origin, disability, age or other protected characteristics. The commission voted 2–1 to begin the regulatory process of ending a nearly 60-year requirement that large employers report workers’ race, sex and job categories. The EEO-1 data helps regulators and litigants identify possible discrimination patterns across companies and industries. The proposal would also eliminate related reporting by unions, schools and state and local governments. The commission says federal civil-rights law does not require the collection. Critics say enforcement becomes harder when the government stops measuring disparities.10. The Wreck That Changed the Safety BriefingBefore an airplane takes off, a flight attendant points beneath the seats and explains how to use a life vest. Put it over your head. Fasten the straps. Inflate it only as you leave the airplane. Inflating it inside a flooding cabin can push you against the ceiling and prevent you from swimming down to an exit.Most of us barely listen. But airlines did not always give passengers that demonstration. One reason they do now is a Pan Am flight that sank off Puerto Rico in 1952.The wreckage of that airplane has just been found.Pan Am Flight 526A—known as the Clipper Endeavor—left San Juan for New York on April 11, 1952, carrying 64 passengers and five crew members. Shortly after takeoff, it lost power in two engines and landed hard on rough waterSurvivors told investigators that everyone survived the landing.Then the airplane began to sink.They had not been shown the exits or told what would happen after a water landing. There was a language barrier between some passengers and the crew. The flight attendants struggled to release the life rafts. Panic spread through the cabin as water came in.The airplane sank in less than three minutes. Seventeen people escaped. Fifty-two drowned.The Civil Aeronautics Board—*then the federal regulator and accident investigator*—responded by requiring airlines to explain emergency exits and demonstrate how to find and use flotation equipment. That safety speech eventually expanded into the routine presentation we hear today about seat belts, oxygen masks and life vests. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, the feedback, the emails, and the notes. And the Apple podcast reviews are helpful. They introduce us to a wider audience.Remember, this is a podcast too. Listen while you sand down that one drawer that never closes, deadhead the roses or re-caulk the tub.So here we go:The Strait Stayed ClosedTen weeks ago, The New York Times’ David Sanger asked President Trump what would be gained by increasing the bombing when the previous 38 days had failed to produce “the political changes in Iran” Washington wanted. The president suggested the question was “treasonous.”Ten weeks later, there is an answer.The United States reported striking more than 13,000 targets during the war’s first 38 days, and the stepped-up campaign has added hundreds more strikes. Since the latest cease-fire collapsed, the United States has bombed Iran every night. Yet Iran still threatened commercial shipping. A tanker came under attack Tuesday and normal commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remained largely stalled.Ten days of an intensified campaign hasn’t changed Iran’s behavior. And threats to send it to its room without any dinner aren’t doing much better.President Trump banged the gong harder, announcing an attack near Pickaxe Mountain, a fortified underground complex associated with one of Iran’s principal nuclear-enrichment sites.Iran doesn’t have to defeat the United States militarily. It only has to keep the Strait dangerous while other pressures accumulate. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan all showed that casualties, costs and domestic politics can become as decisive as the battlefield.Some of those pressures surfaced Tuesday. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told senators On the appropriations committee the war has cost $37.5 billion and warned of “critical shortfalls” without more funding. When senators pressed military leaders about reopening Hormuz, they received no clear answer. “Guys, we need straight answers,” Republican Sen. John Kennedy said.Oil traded above $90 a barrel. A July poll found that 59 percent of Americans had already cut back or delayed spending because of higher gasoline prices.Houthi warnings reportedly caused six ships to change course, threatening the Red Sea route Saudi Arabia has used to bypass Hormuz. A stepped-up campaign intended to reopen one strategic waterway now risks destabilizing another.Ten weeks ago, David Sanger asked why more bombing would produce a different outcome than the bombing that came before it. Perhaps if the question hadn’t been dismissed as “treasonous,” the strategy would have been subjected to the scrutiny it deserved.Canadian Trade TariffImagine you’re running Ford—or any company that builds products in North America.You don’t decide where to build a factory based on next month’s politics. You decide based on the next twenty years. When President Trump negotiated and signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement during his first term, companies reorganized supply chains around those rules. A car might cross the U.S.-Canadian border several times before reaching a dealer. Companies invested billions of dollars assuming those tariff rules would remain in place.On Monday, President Trump showed those assumptions no longer apply.He imposed a new 50 percent tariff on specified Canadian imports under three proclamations addressing disputes over motor vehicles, alcohol and dairy. The covered goods range from wine and hockey sticks to cement. The new duties take effect August 19.The administration argues Canada unfairly protects industries such as dairy and alcoholic beverages. And who among us doesn’t enjoy a little dairy in their alcoholic beverages? Canada says the new tariffs violate the trade agreement.Instead of withdrawing from the agreement, Trump invoked Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a law allowing tariffs against countries found to discriminate against American commerce. It is the first time the United States has actually imposed tariffs under that law. The move also attempts to avoid the legal problem that doomed Trump’s earlier tariffs. Rather than relying on emergency powers the Supreme Court ruled did not authorize tariffs, the administration turned to a different law that expressly allows them. Part of a larger pattern: a president responding to an adverse ruling by finding another delegation of power and testing its outer boundary.The first people paying these tariffs are American importers when Canadian goods cross the border. Those companies then decide whether to absorb the cost, negotiate lower prices from Canadian suppliers, cancel orders or pass the increase to customers. For consumers, the result is straightforward: some Canadian products will cost more, some may disappear from store shelves, and American-made products that rely on Canadian parts may become more expensive as well.The winners and losers won’t divide neatly by nationality. American companies competing against Canadian imports may benefit. American companies that rely on Canadian parts may pay more. Consumers could end up paying higher prices either way.The Billion-Dollar Medicaid HoldThe Trump administration has frozen more than $1 billion in federal Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota, accusing both states of failing to document claims that federal officials say “smell like fraud.”That is the phrase Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz used while announcing the action. The money can be released, officials say, once the states prove the questioned services were legitimate.The administration describes this as a pause, not a cut.California’s dispute centers largely on in-home care for seniors and people with disabilities. Spending on those services has risen 24 percent in two years—twice the growth rate elsewhere, according to Oz. California Medicaid Director Tyler Sadwith offers a different explanation: the state deliberately expanded home-based care because treating people at home costs less than placing them in nursing homes.Minnesota’s deferral covers 14 categories considered especially vulnerable to fraud, many involving personal and in-home care.Home-care programs have documented fraud vulnerabilities. Services are scattered among thousands of providers, difficult to monitor and historically attractive to fraudsters.The dispute is not whether fraud exists. It is whether the administration has shown enough evidence to justify freezing more than $1 billion before completing its investigation.Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Oz cite unusual billing patterns, eligibility questions and missing documentation. But, as Reuters reported, they have not publicly documented how much of the withheld money is tied to proven fraudulent claims.The order places the evidentiary burden on the states before the money is released. This approach may prevent federal dollars from reaching criminals and encourage states to scrutinize claims more aggressively. It may also delay payments to legitimate providers while officials argue over documentation.Governors Gavin Newsom and Tim Walz call the freezes political retaliation against Democratic states. Administration officials deny targeting political opponents and note that Florida has also received a request for program-integrity information. Yet California and Minnesota remain the only states subjected to publicly announced payment deferrals.The General After the MinisterLast week, President Volodymyr Zelensky fired Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov after siding with Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi in a dispute over how Ukraine should fight the war. Fedorov had become the public face of Ukraine’s military modernization, pushing drones, digital systems, procurement reform and more authority for frontline commanders. Many Ukrainians saw him as one of the government’s most effective wartime leaders.Instead of ending the dispute, the dismissal ignited the largest street protests since Russia’s full-scale invasion. Demonstrators demanded not only Fedorov’s return but increasingly turned their anger toward Syrskyi, whom many blamed for resisting the reforms Fedorov championed.On Tuesday, Zelensky fired Syrskyi too.Zelensky did not say he was responding to the protests. Publicly, he presented the change as part of strengthening Ukraine’s war effort. But the timing is difficult to ignore. Days after the biggest wartime demonstrations of his presidency, Zelensky removed the commander he had defended only a week earlier. Whether or not the protests caused the dismissal, they showed that wartime democracy in Ukraine remains something more than symbolic. Public pressure appears capable of changing the political calculation.The next commander inherits the same unanswered questions: how quickly to reorganize around drones, how much authority to push to frontline units, how to recruit and rotate exhausted troops, and how to balance rapid innovation with the discipline needed to command an army at war.The Food Stamp Time TaxCongress recently changed the rules for food assistance in a way that also changed the incentives for states. Under the new law, if a state approves benefits for someone who later turns out not to qualify, the state—not just the federal government—can end up paying part of the bill.That creates a difficult incentive. A mistaken approval can cost the state money. States therefore have a financial reason to demand more documentation and close questionable cases quickly. That can reduce improper payments, but it can also remove eligible families whose paperwork is incomplete or whose cases cannot be reconciled by an automated system. Food banks and charities pick up the slack.Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic has written about what she calls the “Time Tax”—the hours people spend completing paperwork, waiting on hold, gathering documents and navigating bureaucracies simply to receive benefits they qualify for. The New York Times found that time tax at work in Arizona, where nearly half a million people—including about 200,000 children—have left the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program since the new federal law took effect.Some of those people no longer qualified. Others found work, moved away or failed to meet legitimate requirements. But there is also another group: people who still appear eligible but were unable to navigate the administrative process required to keep receiving benefits.That doesn’t prove states are deliberately pushing eligible people off the rolls. It does suggest that administrative measures put in place to respond to penalties for questionable approvals may be too high to clear for some people who are nevertheless eligible.In Arizona, food banks now report serving more people than the SNAP program itself. Nationally, Reuters reports that more than 4.7 million people have left the program since the law took effect.The administration argues these changes protect taxpayers by reducing fraud and ensuring benefits go only to people who qualify. That goal has broad political support. The question raised by Arizona’s experience is different: how many eligible families are also being lost in the effort to find ineligible ones?Childhood Behind an Age GateFrance has become the first country in the European Union to approve a blanket social-media ban for children under 15, requiring platforms—not parents—to keep younger users from opening or maintaining accounts. President Emmanuel Macron wants the measure in place for the September school year, although a likely constitutional review and unresolved questions about existing accounts could delay or complicate enforcement.The idea reflects a problem many families already recognize. Parents can tell a child to delete an app, but that child still returns to a world where classmates remain online. Social media doesn’t just entertain; it organizes friendships, conversations and status. France’s law tries to solve that coordination problem by moving the decision from individual households to every platform at once.Supporters argue that the risks justify the step. Research has linked heavy social media use among some young people to bullying, sleep disruption, compulsive behavior and exposure to harmful or exploitative content. If children cannot legally create accounts, supporters argue, many of those risks become easier to reduce.But enforcing the law creates another challenge.A platform cannot reliably keep out 14-year-olds without first deciding how old everyone else is. That means verifying age through identification, third-party services or other technologies that raise questions about privacy, accuracy and data collection. A rule designed to protect children could also require millions of adults to prove who they are before using the internet.The law also raises practical questions. TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat clearly fall within its scope. But what about YouTube, Reddit, WhatsApp or online games where children communicate with one another? Draw the definition too narrowly and young users migrate elsewhere. Draw it too broadly and the rules reach educational, creative and support communities that were never the intended target. The legislation excludes online encyclopedias and educational or scientific directories, but the boundaries around several large platforms remain unsettled.The Recall After the RetractionHealth and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday that the nation’s cyclospora outbreak is “under control.”What would that mean?At the time he made the statement, investigators had not definitively identified the source of the outbreak. Taylor Farms remained under investigation despite the FDA’s retraction of an earlier positive laboratory test. The company was expanding its voluntary recall, and FDA officials said illnesses linked to the outbreak had occurred as recently as the latest reporting period.Those facts don’t prove the outbreak is not under control. They do mean the public has not yet seen the evidence that would normally support such a conclusion. That matters even more because the administration has reduced some of the very public-health capacity responsible for producing that evidence. Reporting by Wired quoted a former leader of the CDC parasite team saying its staffing had fallen from 11 scientists to three, limiting the government’s ability to connect cases across states and trace them to a common source.That reduction does not prove staffing cuts caused the outbreak. It means the government has fewer specialists available to determine whether illnesses in different states share the same strain and exposure.The broader public-health question is different. In public health, reassuring statements ultimately stand or fall on evidence, not confidence. The evidence to watch is straightforward: Are new illness-onset dates declining? Have investigators identified the contaminated source with confidence? And have recalled products disappeared from stores and restaurants?The New Jersey Voter Roll ErrorNew Jersey says a software error mistakenly registered about 6,600 noncitizens to vote between 2023 and 2024, even though those applicants had identified themselves as noncitizens when applying for driver’s licenses. A preliminary state analysis found that fewer than 400 of the people registered through the error later cast ballots, according to Gov. Mikie Sherrill. The affected registrations included Democrats, Republicans and independents.The discovery arrives as the Trump administration presses states to tighten voter-roll maintenance and require proof of citizenship for voting. State officials say they’re removing the erroneous registrations, replacing the software vendor and investigating what went wrong. The immediate lesson is less about fraud than administration: election integrity depends not only on catching intentional misconduct but on ensuring government systems correctly record the information voters provide.The preliminary number should not be treated as a final adjudication of 400 illegal votes. The state must still establish each person’s eligibility at the time a ballot was cast and determine how the error survived existing safeguards.Updates and Short StackPublic Charge UpdateWe told you earlier about the administration’s revival of the “public charge” test for immigrants seeking green cards. The latest guidance makes explicit that immigration officers may weigh an applicant’s health and expected future medical costs more heavily when deciding whether that person is likely to depend on public assistance.Supporters say the rule protects taxpayers from predictable future costs. Critics argue it will discourage immigrants from seeking medical care for themselves or their children and effectively turns health into another factor in deciding who can become a permanent resident.Russia’s Auction FailedJohn Ellis highlighted Russia’s second failed government bond auction in four weeks—a sign that financing the war is becoming more expensive.In practical terms, Russia offered to borrow money to help pay for the war, but investors demanded higher interest rates or submitted terms the government would not accept. That doesn’t mean Russia is running out of money. It does mean the government must increasingly choose among less attractive options: pressure banks to buy its debt, print money, cut civilian spending or pay more to borrow.The failed sale was the second in four weeks, and officials subsequently suspended additional auctions. Russia’s combined fiscal shortfall for the previous year and its current trajectory approached 11 trillion rubles. Suspending sales matters more than one disappointing auction because it removes the government’s preferred mechanism for converting domestic savings into war financing.Russia has repeatedly increased financial incentives for military recruits because voluntary enlistment has slowed, while inflation and interest rates have climbed as wartime spending strains the economy.The question is no longer whether Russia can afford the war. It’s how much of the cost ordinary Russians will increasingly be asked to bear.The Switch Buried in the DashboardWired reports that security researchers found an insecure KARR aftermarket alarm system installed by dealerships in at least 2.2 million vehicles. The researchers do not suggest someone secretly planted the device. Rather, they found an undocumented component already built into the supply chain that could provide a pathway for hackers if exploited.Using a Bluetooth connection, researchers demonstrated that the vulnerability could allow an attacker to unlock doors, track a vehicle or immobilize its engine. There is no evidence the flaw is being exploited on a large scale, and a patch is being distributed. The immediate problem is that many owners do not know the dealer-installed device is in their car or that it needs an update.The Biden TapesThe Associated Press reports that a federal appeals court cleared the way for release of the audio recordings from former President Joe Biden’s interviews with Special Counsel Robert Hur in the classified-documents investigation, although the order is temporarily on hold while Biden seeks further review.The Biden administration released transcripts of the interviews but withheld the audio. Conservative groups seeking the recordings argue the public should hear the evidence Hur relied on when he described Biden’s memory as poor. Biden argues the recordings would be taken out of context and discourage future presidents and witnesses from cooperating with investigators.The issue isn’t just Biden. It’s whether the public gets to hear evidence government investigators relied upon or only their written characterization of it.Burnham’s First BillBloomberg reports that British Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s first major act in office was eliminating the 5 percent value-added tax on household electricity bills.The change takes effect October 1 and will save the average household about £45 a year, providing modest relief after energy prices surged in recent years.The political test comes next: proving the government can pay for it. Burnham says the tax cut will be financed by canceling a planned national digital ID program. But Darren Jones, a close ally of Burnham’s predecessor, said the abandoned program was itself unfunded. If there was no money allocated to the project, cancelling it cannot finance the estimated £850 million cost of the tax cut. Burnham must still identify a spending reduction, tax increase or additional borrowing.Chopping Down RecordsThree women’s world records fell at the Lumberjack World Championships in Hayward, Wisconsin, the Associated Press reports.Karolina Urbanová of the Czech Republic stood on top of an 11-inch white pine log and chopped it in half with an axe in 21.28 seconds. She then set another record by chopping through a standing nine-inch log in 19.38 seconds. A third record fell in the boom run, where competitors sprint across eight floating cedar logs without falling into the water. Meredith Ingbretson of Hayward completed the out-and-back course in 13.78 seconds.When the championships began in 1960, women competed only in logrolling. Today they compete in more than 20 timber-sports events and, this weekend, rewrote three entries in the record book.Four at OnceDoctors at Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital delivered identical quadruplet girls, a birth estimated to occur roughly once in 15 million pregnancies. The girls were conceived without fertility treatment, developed from a single fertilized egg and shared one placenta—an arrangement the hospital described as unprecedented.Identical quadruplets begin with a single fertilized egg that splits again and again until four genetically identical babies develop. The odds are so long that most hospitals will never see a case.Climate Left a Record in Birds’ BonesResearchers report that bird skeletons preserve evidence supporting a long-standing idea about evolution: species appear to change more quickly in places with greater seasonal swings in temperature.The bones themselves didn’t change. University of Michigan researchers used an artificial-intelligence system called Skelevision to measure thousands of songbird skeletons held in museum collections. They combined those measurements with evolutionary and climate records to uncover patterns that weren’t visible one specimen at a time.The finding doesn’t mean climate alone drives evolution. It suggests that environments with bigger seasonal changes may create stronger pressures for species to adapt. The study, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, found that rapid changes in the body plans of passerine birds frequently coincided with climate shifts across Earth’s history.The study turns natural-history museums into archives of evolution. Long before computers existed, curators unknowingly collected the data needed to answer questions scientists hadn’t yet thought to ask. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, the feedback, the emails, and the notes. And the Apple podcast reviews are helpful. They introduce us to a wider audience.Remember, this is a podcast too. Listen while you sand down that one drawer that never closes, deadhead the roses or re-caulk the tub.So here we go:The Strait Stayed ClosedTen weeks ago, The New York Times’ David Sanger asked President Trump what would be gained by increasing the bombing when the previous 38 days had failed to produce “the political changes in Iran” Washington wanted. The president suggested the question was “treasonous.”Ten weeks later, there is an answer.The United States reported striking more than 13,000 targets during the war’s first 38 days, and the stepped-up campaign has added hundreds more strikes. Since the latest cease-fire collapsed, the United States has bombed Iran every night. Yet Iran still threatened commercial shipping. A tanker came under attack Tuesday and normal commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remained largely stalled.Ten days of an intensified campaign hasn’t changed Iran’s behavior. And threats to send it to its room without any dinner aren’t doing much better.President Trump banged the gong harder, announcing an attack near Pickaxe Mountain, a fortified underground complex associated with one of Iran’s principal nuclear-enrichment sites.Iran doesn’t have to defeat the United States militarily. It only has to keep the Strait dangerous while other pressures accumulate. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan all showed that casualties, costs and domestic politics can become as decisive as the battlefield.Some of those pressures surfaced Tuesday. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told senators On the appropriations committee the war has cost $37.5 billion and warned of “critical shortfalls” without more funding. When senators pressed military leaders about reopening Hormuz, they received no clear answer. “Guys, we need straight answers,” Republican Sen. John Kennedy said.Oil traded above $90 a barrel. A July poll found that 59 percent of Americans had already cut back or delayed spending because of higher gasoline prices.Houthi warnings reportedly caused six ships to change course, threatening the Red Sea route Saudi Arabia has used to bypass Hormuz. A stepped-up campaign intended to reopen one strategic waterway now risks destabilizing another.Ten weeks ago, David Sanger asked why more bombing would produce a different outcome than the bombing that came before it. Perhaps if the question hadn’t been dismissed as “treasonous,” the strategy would have been subjected to the scrutiny it deserved.Canadian Trade TariffImagine you’re running Ford—or any company that builds products in North America.You don’t decide where to build a factory based on next month’s politics. You decide based on the next twenty years. When President Trump negotiated and signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement during his first term, companies reorganized supply chains around those rules. A car might cross the U.S.-Canadian border several times before reaching a dealer. Companies invested billions of dollars assuming those tariff rules would remain in place.On Monday, President Trump showed those assumptions no longer apply.He imposed a new 50 percent tariff on specified Canadian imports under three proclamations addressing disputes over motor vehicles, alcohol and dairy. The covered goods range from wine and hockey sticks to cement. The new duties take effect August 19.The administration argues Canada unfairly protects industries such as dairy and alcoholic beverages. And who among us doesn’t enjoy a little dairy in their alcoholic beverages? Canada says the new tariffs violate the trade agreement.Instead of withdrawing from the agreement, Trump invoked Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a law allowing tariffs against countries found to discriminate against American commerce. It is the first time the United States has actually imposed tariffs under that law. The move also attempts to avoid the legal problem that doomed Trump’s earlier tariffs. Rather than relying on emergency powers the Supreme Court ruled did not authorize tariffs, the administration turned to a different law that expressly allows them. Part of a larger pattern: a president responding to an adverse ruling by finding another delegation of power and testing its outer boundary.The first people paying these tariffs are American importers when Canadian goods cross the border. Those companies then decide whether to absorb the cost, negotiate lower prices from Canadian suppliers, cancel orders or pass the increase to customers. For consumers, the result is straightforward: some Canadian products will cost more, some may disappear from store shelves, and American-made products that rely on Canadian parts may become more expensive as well.The winners and losers won’t divide neatly by nationality. American companies competing against Canadian imports may benefit. American companies that rely on Canadian parts may pay more. Consumers could end up paying higher prices either way.The Billion-Dollar Medicaid HoldThe Trump administration has frozen more than $1 billion in federal Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota, accusing both states of failing to document claims that federal officials say “smell like fraud.”That is the phrase Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz used while announcing the action. The money can be released, officials say, once the states prove the questioned services were legitimate.The administration describes this as a pause, not a cut.California’s dispute centers largely on in-home care for seniors and people with disabilities. Spending on those services has risen 24 percent in two years—twice the growth rate elsewhere, according to Oz. California Medicaid Director Tyler Sadwith offers a different explanation: the state deliberately expanded home-based care because treating people at home costs less than placing them in nursing homes.Minnesota’s deferral covers 14 categories considered especially vulnerable to fraud, many involving personal and in-home care.Home-care programs have documented fraud vulnerabilities. Services are scattered among thousands of providers, difficult to monitor and historically attractive to fraudsters.The dispute is not whether fraud exists. It is whether the administration has shown enough evidence to justify freezing more than $1 billion before completing its investigation.Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Oz cite unusual billing patterns, eligibility questions and missing documentation. But, as Reuters reported, they have not publicly documented how much of the withheld money is tied to proven fraudulent claims.The order places the evidentiary burden on the states before the money is released. This approach may prevent federal dollars from reaching criminals and encourage states to scrutinize claims more aggressively. It may also delay payments to legitimate providers while officials argue over documentation.Governors Gavin Newsom and Tim Walz call the freezes political retaliation against Democratic states. Administration officials deny targeting political opponents and note that Florida has also received a request for program-integrity information. Yet California and Minnesota remain the only states subjected to publicly announced payment deferrals.The General After the MinisterLast week, President Volodymyr Zelensky fired Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov after siding with Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi in a dispute over how Ukraine should fight the war. Fedorov had become the public face of Ukraine’s military modernization, pushing drones, digital systems, procurement reform and more authority for frontline commanders. Many Ukrainians saw him as one of the government’s most effective wartime leaders.Instead of ending the dispute, the dismissal ignited the largest street protests since Russia’s full-scale invasion. Demonstrators demanded not only Fedorov’s return but increasingly turned their anger toward Syrskyi, whom many blamed for resisting the reforms Fedorov championed.On Tuesday, Zelensky fired Syrskyi too.Zelensky did not say he was responding to the protests. Publicly, he presented the change as part of strengthening Ukraine’s war effort. But the timing is difficult to ignore. Days after the biggest wartime demonstrations of his presidency, Zelensky removed the commander he had defended only a week earlier. Whether or not the protests caused the dismissal, they showed that wartime democracy in Ukraine remains something more than symbolic. Public pressure appears capable of changing the political calculation.The next commander inherits the same unanswered questions: how quickly to reorganize around drones, how much authority to push to frontline units, how to recruit and rotate exhausted troops, and how to balance rapid innovation with the discipline needed to command an army at war.The Food Stamp Time TaxCongress recently changed the rules for food assistance in a way that also changed the incentives for states. Under the new law, if a state approves benefits for someone who later turns out not to qualify, the state—not just the federal government—can end up paying part of the bill.That creates a difficult incentive. A mistaken approval can cost the state money. States therefore have a financial reason to demand more documentation and close questionable cases quickly. That can reduce improper payments, but it can also remove eligible families whose paperwork is incomplete or whose cases cannot be reconciled by an automated system. Food banks and charities pick up the slack.Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic has written about what she calls the “Time Tax”—the hours people spend completing paperwork, waiting on hold, gathering documents and navigating bureaucracies simply to receive benefits they qualify for. The New York Times found that time tax at work in Arizona, where nearly half a million people—including about 200,000 children—have left the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program since the new federal law took effect.Some of those people no longer qualified. Others found work, moved away or failed to meet legitimate requirements. But there is also another group: people who still appear eligible but were unable to navigate the administrative process required to keep receiving benefits.That doesn’t prove states are deliberately pushing eligible people off the rolls. It does suggest that administrative measures put in place to respond to penalties for questionable approvals may be too high to clear for some people who are nevertheless eligible.In Arizona, food banks now report serving more people than the SNAP program itself. Nationally, Reuters reports that more than 4.7 million people have left the program since the law took effect.The administration argues these changes protect taxpayers by reducing fraud and ensuring benefits go only to people who qualify. That goal has broad political support. The question raised by Arizona’s experience is different: how many eligible families are also being lost in the effort to find ineligible ones?Childhood Behind an Age GateFrance has become the first country in the European Union to approve a blanket social-media ban for children under 15, requiring platforms—not parents—to keep younger users from opening or maintaining accounts. President Emmanuel Macron wants the measure in place for the September school year, although a likely constitutional review and unresolved questions about existing accounts could delay or complicate enforcement.The idea reflects a problem many families already recognize. Parents can tell a child to delete an app, but that child still returns to a world where classmates remain online. Social media doesn’t just entertain; it organizes friendships, conversations and status. France’s law tries to solve that coordination problem by moving the decision from individual households to every platform at once.Supporters argue that the risks justify the step. Research has linked heavy social media use among some young people to bullying, sleep disruption, compulsive behavior and exposure to harmful or exploitative content. If children cannot legally create accounts, supporters argue, many of those risks become easier to reduce.But enforcing the law creates another challenge.A platform cannot reliably keep out 14-year-olds without first deciding how old everyone else is. That means verifying age through identification, third-party services or other technologies that raise questions about privacy, accuracy and data collection. A rule designed to protect children could also require millions of adults to prove who they are before using the internet.The law also raises practical questions. TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat clearly fall within its scope. But what about YouTube, Reddit, WhatsApp or online games where children communicate with one another? Draw the definition too narrowly and young users migrate elsewhere. Draw it too broadly and the rules reach educational, creative and support communities that were never the intended target. The legislation excludes online encyclopedias and educational or scientific directories, but the boundaries around several large platforms remain unsettled.The Recall After the RetractionHealth and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday that the nation’s cyclospora outbreak is “under control.”What would that mean?At the time he made the statement, investigators had not definitively identified the source of the outbreak. Taylor Farms remained under investigation despite the FDA’s retraction of an earlier positive laboratory test. The company was expanding its voluntary recall, and FDA officials said illnesses linked to the outbreak had occurred as recently as the latest reporting period.Those facts don’t prove the outbreak is not under control. They do mean the public has not yet seen the evidence that would normally support such a conclusion. That matters even more because the administration has reduced some of the very public-health capacity responsible for producing that evidence. Reporting by Wired quoted a former leader of the CDC parasite team saying its staffing had fallen from 11 scientists to three, limiting the government’s ability to connect cases across states and trace them to a common source.That reduction does not prove staffing cuts caused the outbreak. It means the government has fewer specialists available to determine whether illnesses in different states share the same strain and exposure.The broader public-health question is different. In public health, reassuring statements ultimately stand or fall on evidence, not confidence. The evidence to watch is straightforward: Are new illness-onset dates declining? Have investigators identified the contaminated source with confidence? And have recalled products disappeared from stores and restaurants?The New Jersey Voter Roll ErrorNew Jersey says a software error mistakenly registered about 6,600 noncitizens to vote between 2023 and 2024, even though those applicants had identified themselves as noncitizens when applying for driver’s licenses. A preliminary state analysis found that fewer than 400 of the people registered through the error later cast ballots, according to Gov. Mikie Sherrill. The affected registrations included Democrats, Republicans and independents.The discovery arrives as the Trump administration presses states to tighten voter-roll maintenance and require proof of citizenship for voting. State officials say they’re removing the erroneous registrations, replacing the software vendor and investigating what went wrong. The immediate lesson is less about fraud than administration: election integrity depends not only on catching intentional misconduct but on ensuring government systems correctly record the information voters provide.The preliminary number should not be treated as a final adjudication of 400 illegal votes. The state must still establish each person’s eligibility at the time a ballot was cast and determine how the error survived existing safeguards.Updates and Short StackPublic Charge UpdateWe told you earlier about the administration’s revival of the “public charge” test for immigrants seeking green cards. The latest guidance makes explicit that immigration officers may weigh an applicant’s health and expected future medical costs more heavily when deciding whether that person is likely to depend on public assistance.Supporters say the rule protects taxpayers from predictable future costs. Critics argue it will discourage immigrants from seeking medical care for themselves or their children and effectively turns health into another factor in deciding who can become a permanent resident.Russia’s Auction FailedJohn Ellis highlighted Russia’s second failed government bond auction in four weeks—a sign that financing the war is becoming more expensive.In practical terms, Russia offered to borrow money to help pay for the war, but investors demanded higher interest rates or submitted terms the government would not accept. That doesn’t mean Russia is running out of money. It does mean the government must increasingly choose among less attractive options: pressure banks to buy its debt, print money, cut civilian spending or pay more to borrow.The failed sale was the second in four weeks, and officials subsequently suspended additional auctions. Russia’s combined fiscal shortfall for the previous year and its current trajectory approached 11 trillion rubles. Suspending sales matters more than one disappointing auction because it removes the government’s preferred mechanism for converting domestic savings into war financing.Russia has repeatedly increased financial incentives for military recruits because voluntary enlistment has slowed, while inflation and interest rates have climbed as wartime spending strains the economy.The question is no longer whether Russia can afford the war. It’s how much of the cost ordinary Russians will increasingly be asked to bear.The Switch Buried in the DashboardWired reports that security researchers found an insecure KARR aftermarket alarm system installed by dealerships in at least 2.2 million vehicles. The researchers do not suggest someone secretly planted the device. Rather, they found an undocumented component already built into the supply chain that could provide a pathway for hackers if exploited.Using a Bluetooth connection, researchers demonstrated that the vulnerability could allow an attacker to unlock doors, track a vehicle or immobilize its engine. There is no evidence the flaw is being exploited on a large scale, and a patch is being distributed. The immediate problem is that many owners do not know the dealer-installed device is in their car or that it needs an update.The Biden TapesThe Associated Press reports that a federal appeals court cleared the way for release of the audio recordings from former President Joe Biden’s interviews with Special Counsel Robert Hur in the classified-documents investigation, although the order is temporarily on hold while Biden seeks further review.The Biden administration released transcripts of the interviews but withheld the audio. Conservative groups seeking the recordings argue the public should hear the evidence Hur relied on when he described Biden’s memory as poor. Biden argues the recordings would be taken out of context and discourage future presidents and witnesses from cooperating with investigators.The issue isn’t just Biden. It’s whether the public gets to hear evidence government investigators relied upon or only their written characterization of it.Burnham’s First BillBloomberg reports that British Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s first major act in office was eliminating the 5 percent value-added tax on household electricity bills.The change takes effect October 1 and will save the average household about £45 a year, providing modest relief after energy prices surged in recent years.The political test comes next: proving the government can pay for it. Burnham says the tax cut will be financed by canceling a planned national digital ID program. But Darren Jones, a close ally of Burnham’s predecessor, said the abandoned program was itself unfunded. If there was no money allocated to the project, cancelling it cannot finance the estimated £850 million cost of the tax cut. Burnham must still identify a spending reduction, tax increase or additional borrowing.Chopping Down RecordsThree women’s world records fell at the Lumberjack World Championships in Hayward, Wisconsin, the Associated Press reports.Karolina Urbanová of the Czech Republic stood on top of an 11-inch white pine log and chopped it in half with an axe in 21.28 seconds. She then set another record by chopping through a standing nine-inch log in 19.38 seconds. A third record fell in the boom run, where competitors sprint across eight floating cedar logs without falling into the water. Meredith Ingbretson of Hayward completed the out-and-back course in 13.78 seconds.When the championships began in 1960, women competed only in logrolling. Today they compete in more than 20 timber-sports events and, this weekend, rewrote three entries in the record book.Four at OnceDoctors at Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital delivered identical quadruplet girls, a birth estimated to occur roughly once in 15 million pregnancies. The girls were conceived without fertility treatment, developed from a single fertilized egg and shared one placenta—an arrangement the hospital described as unprecedented.Identical quadruplets begin with a single fertilized egg that splits again and again until four genetically identical babies develop. The odds are so long that most hospitals will never see a case.Climate Left a Record in Birds’ BonesResearchers report that bird skeletons preserve evidence supporting a long-standing idea about evolution: species appear to change more quickly in places with greater seasonal swings in temperature.The bones themselves didn’t change. University of Michigan researchers used an artificial-intelligence system called Skelevision to measure thousands of songbird skeletons held in museum collections. They combined those measurements with evolutionary and climate records to uncover patterns that weren’t visible one specimen at a time.The finding doesn’t mean climate alone drives evolution. It suggests that environments with bigger seasonal changes may create stronger pressures for species to adapt. The study, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, found that rapid changes in the body plans of passerine birds frequently coincided with climate shifts across Earth’s history.The study turns natural-history museums into archives of evolution. Long before computers existed, curators unknowingly collected the data needed to answer questions scientists hadn’t yet thought to ask. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome to Stack the Week for Monday, July 20The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, the feedback, the emails, and the notes. And those Apple podcast reviews help introduce us to a wider audience.Remember, this is a podcast too. Listen while you polish your door knocker, trim back the basil or try to put the screen door back on the track.So here we go, with what mattered today:Seventeen, and Twenty ShipsThe Pentagon on Monday identified First Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, and Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas, as the latest Americans killed in the war with Iran. Both were killed in an Iranian attack on a U.S. air base in Jordan.The U.S. military death toll in the Iran war now stands at 17. That number includes a service member who was killed in Iraq while conducting a “controlled detonation” of unexploded ordnance from a downed Iranian one-way attack drone.Approximately 430 American personnel have been injured in the war, according to Reuters. The Pentagon is no longer regularly publishing a cumulative wounded count and has also withheld details about earlier attacks in Jordan that reportedly injured dozens and damaged helicopters.The Pentagon is also no longer regularly publishing the number of Iranian sites struck each day. Its last major public briefing on the war was in early May.The Pentagon provided frequent, televised briefings during the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, despite limited independent battlefield access.Operational security may explain some of the current silence, but it also makes it harder to measure losses against a clearly articulated objective. With fewer official details, it becomes harder for the public and their elected representatives to evaluate the human and financial costs of the war. Recent polling finds most Americans now say the Iran war was a mistake and want it ended as soon as possible, with opposition to continued strikes running well ahead of support.U.S. strikes are headed into their consecutive 9th day. “We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that,” a U.S. official told The Washington Post, as dwindling air-defense and long-range munitions and battle damage constrained plans for a wider Iran war.Here’s the Hormuz count. Roughly 130 ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz each day before the war. Just 20 passed over the weekend; 18 used the corridor mandated by Iran.Last week there was a debate about who controlled the strait. The behavior of the ships suggests that the limited number of vessels still making the passage are largely following Iran’s rules.Yemen’s Houthis announced a maritime embargo against Saudi Arabia, specifically threatening Saudi shipping between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, according to the Associated Press. Saudi Arabia has been using its East–West Pipeline to send oil to the Red Sea and bypass Hormuz; threats near the Red Sea’s southern gateway therefore place additional pressure on the kingdom’s principal workaround.AAA listed the national average for regular gasoline over $4. Gas rose to $4.50 in May and fell below $4 in June.The consequences are not confined to American pump prices: Associated Press reporting from northern Nigeria found families skipping meals as petrol costs jumped and food prices followed, including one father who lost his taxi income and watched his 18-month-old daughter relapse into malnutrition. UNICEF warned that continued war could push as many as 23.4 million additional children into monetary poverty by year’s end, with at least 80 percent of them in Africa and Asia.Ukraine and Russia AttackUkraine and Russia opened the week with another demonstration that the war’s air campaign is becoming broader, faster and harder for either side to contain. Ukraine launched hundreds of drones toward Moscow from late Sunday into Monday. According to the Russians, most were intercepted far from the capital and 85 near it. Regional officials reported 10 people wounded and damage to homes and civilian infrastructure. Ukraine said its targets included logistics sites, an oil depot and vessels linked to Russia’s sanctions-evading “shadow fleet.”The assault followed a major Russian bombardment of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. Russia is using more ballistic missiles, which travel at supersonic speed and leave civilians and air defenses only minutes to react. The Institute for the Study of War says Russia has already fired more ballistic missiles in July than it reportedly produces in a month, suggesting Moscow may be drawing down stockpiles. Ukraine, unable to match Russia missile for missile, is exploiting increasingly capable long-range drones against a vast territory that is difficult to defend.Ukrainian strikes this weekend hit warehouses operated by Wildberries, Russia’s largest e-commerce marketplace, causing a fire that burned for two days and was visible in satellite imagery. The episode undercuts the Kremlin’s effort to insulate ordinary Russians from the war.Record Student-loan defaultsStudent borrowers are still feeling the pain of the pandemic. About 9.5 million people—roughly one in five federal borrowers—are in default, with $233.3 billion unpaid. That appears to be a record high for federal student‑loan defaults, and the numbers have been climbing rather than stabilizing. The default population has jumped from 5.3 million since borrowers again became eligible to default in June 2025, after a one‑year “on‑ramp” gave them a buffer while payments restarted. During the pandemic, most federal borrowers were allowed to stop paying for more than three years without going delinquent or defaulting, and interest did not accrue.For borrowers, those numbers translate into missed rent, postponed medical bills and the feeling that the degree they were told would unlock the middle class has instead locked them out of it.The Trump administration has eliminated SAVE, the most generous income‑based repayment plan, and is moving borrowers into a much simpler but less forgiving setup with one flat payment plan and one income‑based plan. In practice, that means many people who were shielded by very low or even zero payments under SAVE will be shifted into plans that demand more money each month and offer fewer ways to cap or reduce what they owe over time.Another 1.4 million borrowers were already late enough in March to be at risk of default within six months, suggesting the default total may not be the peak. As defaults spread, borrowers lose access to credit or pay more for it, which can mean fewer car purchases, delayed home‑buying and less money circulating in the local economies that depend on their spending.The damage is concentrated. Mississippi’s default rate is 28.3 percent, and Southern states cluster near the top, with Puerto Rico’s rate higher than any state. Borrowers who attended for‑profit colleges are faring worst: about a third are at least 90 days behind, more than twice the rate among borrowers from public institutions. For‑profit schools tend to enroll more low‑income and first‑generation students, charge higher prices and deliver weaker job outcomes, leaving graduates and dropouts with more debt and less income to repay it.For many borrowers, this shows up first as credit damage and growing delinquency; for those who fall into default, it can eventually mean wage or Social Security garnishment when collections resume. The system was built on the promise that borrowing for college is a ticket into the American middle class. A record default count, concentrated in poorer states and among for‑profit students, is a sign that promise is breaking down for many of the people who needed it most.Burnham Takes OverBritain’s prime minister runs the world’s fifth‑largest economy and a major nuclear power. Decisions from No. 10 change how Britain taxes, spends and regulates. They also affect global markets, NATO planning and arguments over populism, immigration and inequality. When that job changes hands, it can change how a key U.S. ally treats energy, trade, finance and security—and how other democracies think about their own politics.Today, that power formally passed to Andy Burnham. Keir Starmer went to Buckingham Palace to resign, and King Charles asked Burnham to form a government. As we’ve told you before, Labour had already picked Burnham as its next leader; today is the constitutional handoff that makes it official. Burnham then walked into 10 Downing Street for the first time as prime minister, promised a new 10‑year plan for Britain and said he wants to put “life’s essentials” like housing and basic services back under public control.He promises to tackle Britain’s cost‑of‑living crisis with changes people would feel quickly: cheaper bus fares, more help with household bills and relief for renters who have seen costs jump. When he talks about giving local governments more authority—devolution—he means shifting decisions on housing, transport, schools and local investment out of London and into city regions and towns, backed by a new “Number 10 North” office in Manchester, meant to give the regions a direct line into the center of government. And when he calls for greater public control of buses and water, he is talking about moving some services out of purely private hands, with tighter public oversight and, in some cases, public ownership of struggling utilities such as Thames Water.He inherits slow growth, high public debt, strained public services and the lingering effects of Brexit, Britain’s 2020 exit from the European Union. Burnham also faces Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s anti‑immigration party, which is drawing voters from both Labour and the Conservatives. The question is whether he can scale up what worked for him in Manchester—and whether voters accept the costs once he explains how he plans to pay for his ideas.Congo Ebola: Still BadCongo’s health ministry says the country’s Ebola outbreak is not just growing; it is accelerating. The official death toll has risen to at least 930, with 37 deaths in a single 24‑hour span from Friday into Saturday, one of the highest daily totals since the outbreak was declared in mid‑May.A little caveat which will sound familiar from the Covid days. WHO says part of the sharp numerical increase reflects expanded surveillance, testing and diagnostic capacity, and that some newly reported cases and deaths may come from a specimen backlog. Even with better detection, officials say the trend line is still bad: more cases, more deaths and an outbreak spreading faster than they can trace.Head Start RestrictionsHead Start is supposed to be one of the cleanest promises the government makes to poor children: before kindergarten, before the achievement gap hardens, before family poverty becomes school failure, the country gives them a better start.The Trump administration is reportedly considering a rule that would change that bargain. Under the draft described by The Bulwark, Head Start could be restricted based on a parent’s immigration status, even when the child is a U.S. citizen. That turns a preschool program into an immigration checkpoint.The moral question is not complicated: if a four-year-old is poor enough to qualify, should the government ask whether her parents have the right papers before letting her learn letters, numbers, songs and how to sit in a classroom?Paramount-Warner PauseA federal judge has put the Paramount-Warner deal on hold for at least two weeks, giving a coalition of states time to press its antitrust case.That sounds like a media-business story, but the stakes are larger than who owns which studio logo. This is about whether a shrinking number of companies will control more of what Americans watch, stream, buy and remember. The states argue the merger would kill competition; the companies argue scale is the only way to survive in the streaming economy.The useful frame is: Hollywood says it needs bigness to compete. The states say bigness is the problem.NYC ICE FireA man is in custody after a fire was set outside a federal building in New York City that houses immigration offices, authorities said. Officials did not immediately report any injuries or major damage, and the blaze was quickly brought under control. Investigators are looking into the suspect’s motive and whether the building’s role in immigration enforcement was a factor. The site includes offices for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Cyclospora TrailThe cyclospora story was already messy enough.Health officials were investigating a Taco Bell‑linked outbreak and tested shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms, a supplier in central Mexico. A sample first came back positive for the parasite, then the FDA said that particular test was a false positive and withdrew it.That does not mean the whole case collapsed. Investigators still say the pattern of illnesses points toward shredded iceberg lettuce as the most likely source, even if one key test result did not hold up. The Taco Bell outbreak is the confirmed restaurant cluster. The lab result changed, but the basic suspicion did not.As we mentioned Friday, the larger summer cyclospora numbers include many other cases that may have different sources.The Spain WaySpain won the World Cup, which you of course know by now, but what you may not know is just how dominant Spain has become. Its men’s team now has another World Cup to go with recent European titles, the women’s team are reigning world champions, and Spanish youth teams keep reaching and winning finals. Across age groups and genders, Spain is not a one‑off Cinderella story; it is one of the sport’s new superpowers.I don’t know soccer the way a tactics nerd does, but here’s the conventional wisdom about why Spain is so good. First, there is a clear “Spain way” of playing—keep the ball, pass quickly, press when they lose it, and make decisions as a unit instead of relying on solo runs. Players learn that style in club academies and youth national teams, so when they reach the senior sides they already fit into the pattern. Second, Spanish clubs invest heavily in those academies, which turn out lots of technically gifted players rather than just one or two stars per generation. Third, the federation and clubs coordinate closely, so backups can slot in without changing how the team plays. Put together, that system keeps producing winning teams long after any single star ages out.Five Cups of Coffee PleaseIt can be hard to remember where we are in the cycle of coffee is good for you, coffee isn’t good for you. But according to a new American Heart Association scientific statement reported by Axios and others, up to five 8-ounce cups of coffee a day, about 400 milligrams of caffeine, is generally safe for most adults.Moderate intake is linked with lower risk of cardiovascular disease, heart failure, stroke and Type 2 diabetes. The likely helpers are not just caffeine but coffee’s other compounds, including polyphenols, which may affect inflammation and metabolism.But the blessing is for coffee, not dessert pretending to be coffee. Sugar, cream, syrups and high-calorie add-ins can wipe out the upside. And the AHA draws a bright line between coffee and energy drinks, where high caffeine doses and other stimulants can raise heart risks.So the clean takeaway is: if coffee agrees with you, you probably do not need to feel guilty about it. The sweet spot is roughly three to five cups.We’re just going to believe this and not listen to the next study that contradicts it.The Museum of Endangered SoundsIf you are of a certain age, I am sorry. Or maybe not. Perhaps you feel the golden glow of experience and life’s sweet progression. But that’s not really the point. If you are of a certain age, you felt the special jolt that came from the scream of a dial-up modem. In my case it meant the file I was sending as a Time magazine reporter from somewhere on the road was one step closer to making it to New York. It was the sound of progress, though it was, by itself, a nuisance sound without that connotation.You can visit this sound in the only place it will be in not too long: The Museum of Endangered Sounds, created by Brendan Chilcutt. You can visit it at savethesounds.info. This is not a new thing, but it was new to me and I don’t need no stinking badges.The site preserves the noises that used to organize ordinary life: the scream of a dial-up modem, the chatter of a dot-matrix printer, the Nokia ringtone, the mechanical bite of a typewriter, the rewind of a cassette tape, the click and whirr of machines that once told you the world was working.The old world made a sound when it did something. A phone rang like a bell. A camera snapped. A register opened. A coffee percolator bubbled and hissed and announced that morning was assembling itself in the kitchen. Now the same actions happen silently, behind glass, inside sealed devices, as if modern life has been put on mute.These old sounds were proof of how work felt, how waiting felt, how rooms sounded before everything became frictionless. The museum says: listen closely, because the soundtrack of your life is being retired while you are still living it. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome to Stack the Week for Monday, July 20The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, the feedback, the emails, and the notes. And those Apple podcast reviews help introduce us to a wider audience.Remember, this is a podcast too. Listen while you polish your door knocker, trim back the basil or try to put the screen door back on the track.So here we go, with what mattered today:Seventeen, and Twenty ShipsThe Pentagon on Monday identified First Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, and Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas, as the latest Americans killed in the war with Iran. Both were killed in an Iranian attack on a U.S. air base in Jordan.The U.S. military death toll in the Iran war now stands at 17. That number includes a service member who was killed in Iraq while conducting a “controlled detonation” of unexploded ordnance from a downed Iranian one-way attack drone.Approximately 430 American personnel have been injured in the war, according to Reuters. The Pentagon is no longer regularly publishing a cumulative wounded count and has also withheld details about earlier attacks in Jordan that reportedly injured dozens and damaged helicopters.The Pentagon is also no longer regularly publishing the number of Iranian sites struck each day. Its last major public briefing on the war was in early May.The Pentagon provided frequent, televised briefings during the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, despite limited independent battlefield access.Operational security may explain some of the current silence, but it also makes it harder to measure losses against a clearly articulated objective. With fewer official details, it becomes harder for the public and their elected representatives to evaluate the human and financial costs of the war. Recent polling finds most Americans now say the Iran war was a mistake and want it ended as soon as possible, with opposition to continued strikes running well ahead of support.U.S. strikes are headed into their consecutive 9th day. “We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that,” a U.S. official told The Washington Post, as dwindling air-defense and long-range munitions and battle damage constrained plans for a wider Iran war.Here’s the Hormuz count. Roughly 130 ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz each day before the war. Just 20 passed over the weekend; 18 used the corridor mandated by Iran.Last week there was a debate about who controlled the strait. The behavior of the ships suggests that the limited number of vessels still making the passage are largely following Iran’s rules.Yemen’s Houthis announced a maritime embargo against Saudi Arabia, specifically threatening Saudi shipping between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, according to the Associated Press. Saudi Arabia has been using its East–West Pipeline to send oil to the Red Sea and bypass Hormuz; threats near the Red Sea’s southern gateway therefore place additional pressure on the kingdom’s principal workaround.AAA listed the national average for regular gasoline over $4. Gas rose to $4.50 in May and fell below $4 in June.The consequences are not confined to American pump prices: Associated Press reporting from northern Nigeria found families skipping meals as petrol costs jumped and food prices followed, including one father who lost his taxi income and watched his 18-month-old daughter relapse into malnutrition. UNICEF warned that continued war could push as many as 23.4 million additional children into monetary poverty by year’s end, with at least 80 percent of them in Africa and Asia.Ukraine and Russia AttackUkraine and Russia opened the week with another demonstration that the war’s air campaign is becoming broader, faster and harder for either side to contain. Ukraine launched hundreds of drones toward Moscow from late Sunday into Monday. According to the Russians, most were intercepted far from the capital and 85 near it. Regional officials reported 10 people wounded and damage to homes and civilian infrastructure. Ukraine said its targets included logistics sites, an oil depot and vessels linked to Russia’s sanctions-evading “shadow fleet.”The assault followed a major Russian bombardment of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. Russia is using more ballistic missiles, which travel at supersonic speed and leave civilians and air defenses only minutes to react. The Institute for the Study of War says Russia has already fired more ballistic missiles in July than it reportedly produces in a month, suggesting Moscow may be drawing down stockpiles. Ukraine, unable to match Russia missile for missile, is exploiting increasingly capable long-range drones against a vast territory that is difficult to defend.Ukrainian strikes this weekend hit warehouses operated by Wildberries, Russia’s largest e-commerce marketplace, causing a fire that burned for two days and was visible in satellite imagery. The episode undercuts the Kremlin’s effort to insulate ordinary Russians from the war.Record Student-loan defaultsStudent borrowers are still feeling the pain of the pandemic. About 9.5 million people—roughly one in five federal borrowers—are in default, with $233.3 billion unpaid. That appears to be a record high for federal student‑loan defaults, and the numbers have been climbing rather than stabilizing. The default population has jumped from 5.3 million since borrowers again became eligible to default in June 2025, after a one‑year “on‑ramp” gave them a buffer while payments restarted. During the pandemic, most federal borrowers were allowed to stop paying for more than three years without going delinquent or defaulting, and interest did not accrue.For borrowers, those numbers translate into missed rent, postponed medical bills and the feeling that the degree they were told would unlock the middle class has instead locked them out of it.The Trump administration has eliminated SAVE, the most generous income‑based repayment plan, and is moving borrowers into a much simpler but less forgiving setup with one flat payment plan and one income‑based plan. In practice, that means many people who were shielded by very low or even zero payments under SAVE will be shifted into plans that demand more money each month and offer fewer ways to cap or reduce what they owe over time.Another 1.4 million borrowers were already late enough in March to be at risk of default within six months, suggesting the default total may not be the peak. As defaults spread, borrowers lose access to credit or pay more for it, which can mean fewer car purchases, delayed home‑buying and less money circulating in the local economies that depend on their spending.The damage is concentrated. Mississippi’s default rate is 28.3 percent, and Southern states cluster near the top, with Puerto Rico’s rate higher than any state. Borrowers who attended for‑profit colleges are faring worst: about a third are at least 90 days behind, more than twice the rate among borrowers from public institutions. For‑profit schools tend to enroll more low‑income and first‑generation students, charge higher prices and deliver weaker job outcomes, leaving graduates and dropouts with more debt and less income to repay it.For many borrowers, this shows up first as credit damage and growing delinquency; for those who fall into default, it can eventually mean wage or Social Security garnishment when collections resume. The system was built on the promise that borrowing for college is a ticket into the American middle class. A record default count, concentrated in poorer states and among for‑profit students, is a sign that promise is breaking down for many of the people who needed it most.Burnham Takes OverBritain’s prime minister runs the world’s fifth‑largest economy and a major nuclear power. Decisions from No. 10 change how Britain taxes, spends and regulates. They also affect global markets, NATO planning and arguments over populism, immigration and inequality. When that job changes hands, it can change how a key U.S. ally treats energy, trade, finance and security—and how other democracies think about their own politics.Today, that power formally passed to Andy Burnham. Keir Starmer went to Buckingham Palace to resign, and King Charles asked Burnham to form a government. As we’ve told you before, Labour had already picked Burnham as its next leader; today is the constitutional handoff that makes it official. Burnham then walked into 10 Downing Street for the first time as prime minister, promised a new 10‑year plan for Britain and said he wants to put “life’s essentials” like housing and basic services back under public control.He promises to tackle Britain’s cost‑of‑living crisis with changes people would feel quickly: cheaper bus fares, more help with household bills and relief for renters who have seen costs jump. When he talks about giving local governments more authority—devolution—he means shifting decisions on housing, transport, schools and local investment out of London and into city regions and towns, backed by a new “Number 10 North” office in Manchester, meant to give the regions a direct line into the center of government. And when he calls for greater public control of buses and water, he is talking about moving some services out of purely private hands, with tighter public oversight and, in some cases, public ownership of struggling utilities such as Thames Water.He inherits slow growth, high public debt, strained public services and the lingering effects of Brexit, Britain’s 2020 exit from the European Union. Burnham also faces Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s anti‑immigration party, which is drawing voters from both Labour and the Conservatives. The question is whether he can scale up what worked for him in Manchester—and whether voters accept the costs once he explains how he plans to pay for his ideas.Congo Ebola: Still BadCongo’s health ministry says the country’s Ebola outbreak is not just growing; it is accelerating. The official death toll has risen to at least 930, with 37 deaths in a single 24‑hour span from Friday into Saturday, one of the highest daily totals since the outbreak was declared in mid‑May.A little caveat which will sound familiar from the Covid days. WHO says part of the sharp numerical increase reflects expanded surveillance, testing and diagnostic capacity, and that some newly reported cases and deaths may come from a specimen backlog. Even with better detection, officials say the trend line is still bad: more cases, more deaths and an outbreak spreading faster than they can trace.Head Start RestrictionsHead Start is supposed to be one of the cleanest promises the government makes to poor children: before kindergarten, before the achievement gap hardens, before family poverty becomes school failure, the country gives them a better start.The Trump administration is reportedly considering a rule that would change that bargain. Under the draft described by The Bulwark, Head Start could be restricted based on a parent’s immigration status, even when the child is a U.S. citizen. That turns a preschool program into an immigration checkpoint.The moral question is not complicated: if a four-year-old is poor enough to qualify, should the government ask whether her parents have the right papers before letting her learn letters, numbers, songs and how to sit in a classroom?Paramount-Warner PauseA federal judge has put the Paramount-Warner deal on hold for at least two weeks, giving a coalition of states time to press its antitrust case.That sounds like a media-business story, but the stakes are larger than who owns which studio logo. This is about whether a shrinking number of companies will control more of what Americans watch, stream, buy and remember. The states argue the merger would kill competition; the companies argue scale is the only way to survive in the streaming economy.The useful frame is: Hollywood says it needs bigness to compete. The states say bigness is the problem.NYC ICE FireA man is in custody after a fire was set outside a federal building in New York City that houses immigration offices, authorities said. Officials did not immediately report any injuries or major damage, and the blaze was quickly brought under control. Investigators are looking into the suspect’s motive and whether the building’s role in immigration enforcement was a factor. The site includes offices for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Cyclospora TrailThe cyclospora story was already messy enough.Health officials were investigating a Taco Bell‑linked outbreak and tested shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms, a supplier in central Mexico. A sample first came back positive for the parasite, then the FDA said that particular test was a false positive and withdrew it.That does not mean the whole case collapsed. Investigators still say the pattern of illnesses points toward shredded iceberg lettuce as the most likely source, even if one key test result did not hold up. The Taco Bell outbreak is the confirmed restaurant cluster. The lab result changed, but the basic suspicion did not.As we mentioned Friday, the larger summer cyclospora numbers include many other cases that may have different sources.The Spain WaySpain won the World Cup, which you of course know by now, but what you may not know is just how dominant Spain has become. Its men’s team now has another World Cup to go with recent European titles, the women’s team are reigning world champions, and Spanish youth teams keep reaching and winning finals. Across age groups and genders, Spain is not a one‑off Cinderella story; it is one of the sport’s new superpowers.I don’t know soccer the way a tactics nerd does, but here’s the conventional wisdom about why Spain is so good. First, there is a clear “Spain way” of playing—keep the ball, pass quickly, press when they lose it, and make decisions as a unit instead of relying on solo runs. Players learn that style in club academies and youth national teams, so when they reach the senior sides they already fit into the pattern. Second, Spanish clubs invest heavily in those academies, which turn out lots of technically gifted players rather than just one or two stars per generation. Third, the federation and clubs coordinate closely, so backups can slot in without changing how the team plays. Put together, that system keeps producing winning teams long after any single star ages out.Five Cups of Coffee PleaseIt can be hard to remember where we are in the cycle of coffee is good for you, coffee isn’t good for you. But according to a new American Heart Association scientific statement reported by Axios and others, up to five 8-ounce cups of coffee a day, about 400 milligrams of caffeine, is generally safe for most adults.Moderate intake is linked with lower risk of cardiovascular disease, heart failure, stroke and Type 2 diabetes. The likely helpers are not just caffeine but coffee’s other compounds, including polyphenols, which may affect inflammation and metabolism.But the blessing is for coffee, not dessert pretending to be coffee. Sugar, cream, syrups and high-calorie add-ins can wipe out the upside. And the AHA draws a bright line between coffee and energy drinks, where high caffeine doses and other stimulants can raise heart risks.So the clean takeaway is: if coffee agrees with you, you probably do not need to feel guilty about it. The sweet spot is roughly three to five cups.We’re just going to believe this and not listen to the next study that contradicts it.The Museum of Endangered SoundsIf you are of a certain age, I am sorry. Or maybe not. Perhaps you feel the golden glow of experience and life’s sweet progression. But that’s not really the point. If you are of a certain age, you felt the special jolt that came from the scream of a dial-up modem. In my case it meant the file I was sending as a Time magazine reporter from somewhere on the road was one step closer to making it to New York. It was the sound of progress, though it was, by itself, a nuisance sound without that connotation.You can visit this sound in the only place it will be in not too long: The Museum of Endangered Sounds, created by Brendan Chilcutt. You can visit it at savethesounds.info. This is not a new thing, but it was new to me and I don’t need no stinking badges.The site preserves the noises that used to organize ordinary life: the scream of a dial-up modem, the chatter of a dot-matrix printer, the Nokia ringtone, the mechanical bite of a typewriter, the rewind of a cassette tape, the click and whirr of machines that once told you the world was working.The old world made a sound when it did something. A phone rang like a bell. A camera snapped. A register opened. A coffee percolator bubbled and hissed and announced that morning was assembling itself in the kitchen. Now the same actions happen silently, behind glass, inside sealed devices, as if modern life has been put on mute.These old sounds were proof of how work felt, how waiting felt, how rooms sounded before everything became frictionless. The museum says: listen closely, because the soundtrack of your life is being retired while you are still living it. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome to Stack the Week for Friday, July 17The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, the feedback, the emails, and the notes. And the Apple podcast reviews are helpful. They introduce us to a wider audience.Remember, this is a podcast too. Listen while you organize the new bookshelves, weed the garden bed or arrange briquets to get moving on that brisket that everyone loves so.For paid readers, I’ve gone back in and put some thoughts about why I made some of the choices I did.Okay, let’s start.Iran Infrastructure WeekThe Iran war is an infrastructure story today. U.S. bombing moved deeper into the systems civilians and markets depend on: bridges, ports, shipping routes, energy sites and drinking-water plants. The campaignis aimed at the physical network that lets Iran move troops, supplies and oil.The chronic kink in the Strait of Hormuz is changing corporate behavior: According to the AP, Chevron is investing in Iraqi oil fields and a pipeline route that could bypass Hormuz. Remember the time when people used to talk about this war being over? Now companies are placing bets about a permanent condition where the Strait of Hormuz is up for grabs.Iran answered by widening the target set on its side of the Gulf. One Iranian strike damaged a Kuwaiti power and desalination plant. In a dry Gulf country, desalination is not a side industry; it is the tap. Kuwait gets about 90 percent of its drinking water from desalination. The fire there was contained, but the point was made: modern Gulf water and power systems are now a part of Iran’s target list.Iran also expanded the map, striking eastern Syria in its first attack on Syrian territory in this conflict, saying it aimed at a U.S. special operations command center. The conflict is spreading, which makes it harder to stop and increases the chances that more countries—and their soldiers, supplies, and economies—get pulled in.I was unsatisfied about this Syrian bit. On the one hand, expanding the war and the downsides of that are kind of obvious, but I felt like there was something more to be said about an attack in Syria, but I just couldn’t figure out what that was by the time we got to publication hour.Iranian officials say dozens have been killed and hundreds wounded in recent days. The United States is on its seventh straight day of attacks.ICE PressureThe Associated Press reports that David Brouillette, the ICE agent who killed Johan Guerrero, has a long history of violent, terrifying behavior and serious mental‑health struggles, raising the question of how someone with that record cleared ICE’s vetting, received a gun, and was sent into an armed immigration operation. Johan Guerrero was in the country legally, was not the target, and was shot while his wife watched. I came across this interview while I was looking for how to pronounce David Brouillette’s name and came across this interview with his ex-wife. “How do you keep getting into these jobs when you’re around guns all the time.” It’s an extraordinary interview.AP reports that Brouillette’s relatives warned supervisors about his instability and abuse, that he cycled through law‑enforcement and public‑safety jobs, and that he was removed from a volunteer fire department after disputes and refusal to follow orders—each a red flag that should have mattered in a federal background check.Democrats have called for an investigation. That investigation is really about whether the pressure to deport has hardened into a machine that reliably produces human tragedy. Start with hiring and vetting. If ICE is expanding quickly, are standards slipping? Are background checks catching histories of violence, instability, misconduct, or bad judgment before people are armed and sent into volatile encounters, or has the system accepted risks it once would have rejected to meet the deportation quota?Also training. These operations increasingly look less like civil immigration enforcement and more like fugitive work: vehicle stops, surprise encounters, families nearby, frightened people, split‑second decisions. If officers are not trained for de‑escalation, for mistaken identity and families in the line of fire, the policy is not only aggressive, it is careless.This is mission creep on top of mission creep. Immigration enforcement moved away from focusing on “the worst of the worst,” the phrase that was meant to reassure voters that deportation would focus on the most dangerous people. Now it is shifting toward a more militarized posture in which civil enforcement begins to resemble street policing or tactical arrest work. ICE says it conducts more stops away from homes because agents often cannot enter without a warrant. But that limit is not a loophole to route around; it is the system drawing a line. Slowness, imposed by courts and standards, protects values, including that human life should have some value.Voters wanted deportations, but that signal is not a license to do anything. They expect promises to be fulfilled inside American rules, which is why the language became “the worst of the worst” in the first place. Candidate Trump was pledging restraint. And finally there is a permission structure here. If officials describe immigrants as invaders, praise agents after deaths, attack judges and communities, and raise quotas instead of pausing after tragedy, agents learn something: that force will be defended first and examined later. Maybe.The Burnham Age BeginsAndy Burnham was elected leader of Britain’s governing Labour Party on Friday, making him the country’s seventh prime minister in a decade. Though new traditions come slowly to a venerable political system, that pace of turnover almost begs for a new ritual in keeping with Britain’s love of ceremony: something like each time a new occupant checks bags at 10 Downing Street, he should pose for a photo next to the catapult that will eventually eject them from office. At least then the exits would start to match the drama of the arrivals.The previous PM Keir Starmer resigned in June under months of pressure from Labour MPs who feared he would lose the next election to the hard-right Reform UK. Burnham hopes to forestall the fate that met his predecessors by rebalancing power. He earned the nickname “King of the North” as mayor of Greater Manchester, where he became a national figure by arguing that northern England deserved more power, money and respect. In his victory speech, he said Britain took a wrong turn in the 1980s, when political power became centralized and economic power was privatized.His core promise is the biggest rebalancing of power Britain has ever seen: moving control over transport, housing, skills, spending and economic growth away from Whitehall—the shorthand for London’s central government departments—and toward regional leaders.Burnham is trying to answer the same political disease that feeds populism all over the world: voters who think government happens somewhere else, for someone else. His immediate political task is to stop the nationalist Reform UK’s rise by convincing those voters that Labour can still hear them. His governing task is harder: prove that devolution is not a slogan, but a machine that can make life cheaper, fairer and more competent in the places that feel ignored.This preceding paragraph is essentially the kind that I’d like to have in every item in the stack. What happened, why it happened and then this: why it matters beyond the narrow confines of the story. Burnham’s first test is whether “power out of Whitehall” survives Treasury arithmetic. A high-debt, low-growth state can promise regions control over housing, transport, skills and growth, the question is whether it will also let them– or can let them– control enough money to make those promises real.Gaza Funeral StrikePeople gathered to bury one victim of the war. The war added more.An Israeli strike hit a funeral in Gaza on Friday, killing at least seven people and wounding 22, according to Palestinian officials. The funeral was for a Palestinian killed in an earlier strike the same day.The formal ceasefire agreed in October reduced the heaviest fighting, but it has not stopped killing in Gaza. Gaza’s Health Ministry says at least 1,123 people have been killed since the ceasefire took effect. Israel says its continued strikes respond to militant attacks and ceasefire violations; five Israeli soldiers have been killed over the same period.Xi’s AI pitchThe next generation of AI will not just live inside chatbots that explain soccer offsides rules. It will make decisions in hospitals, schools, workplaces, police departments, banks, border systems, energy grids and media feeds. It will help decide which job applicants are interviewed, which medical scans get flagged, which neighborhoods get more patrols, which loans are approved and which power plants turn on when the grid is stressed.That is why the real question for humans is not which company has the biggest models—or which company has the largest initial public offering—but who writes the rules that protect ordinary people. Neither the United States nor China, the world’s two biggest AI powers, offers a clear, trusted way to protect everyday rights while this technology spreads.The incentives for dominance and profit often point away from those guardrails rather than toward them.That was the backdrop for Xi Jinping’s speech at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Friday. He cast AI as a “symphony of international cooperation” and used the stage to launch the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, WAICO, an intergovernmental body headquartered in Shanghai and advertised as a way to help poorer and middle‑income countries catch up. In plain language, WAICO is meant to be a club for governments that want help using AI. Xi promised places in training programs for officials and engineers, AI‑powered weather‑warning tools for countries that face floods and storms, and centers where China would help regional groups apply AI to transport, agriculture, health and other fields.The pitch is: we will help you learn this technology, we will share tools, we will not wrap everything in U.S.‑style national‑security restrictions. It sounds generous. Underneath the language, WAICO is an attempt to gain dominance under the cover of looking helpful. It is designed to put China at the center of global AI governance—shaping standards, making other governments rely on Chinese models and turning Beijing into the place countries go first when they want AI expertise.Lettuce not go to Taco BellCyclospora, the parasite that you’ve all learned about that gives people explosive diarrhea, does not appear in lettuce by magic. It arrives when human waste and food‑handling systems intersect and no one stops it.On the farm, that usually means contaminated water or poor sanitation. Irrigation water, wash tanks or hydrocooling systems that are tainted with sewage or runoff carrying human fecal matter can deposit Cyclospora onto lettuce leaves. In the plant, workers with diarrhea or inadequate hand‑washing can spread the parasite onto ready‑to‑eat greens through direct contact with produce or food‑contact surfaces. Once the parasite is on shredded iceberg, normal rinsing and typical chlorine levels do not reliably kill it, because Cyclospora’s outer shell lets it survive routine washing.Traceback teams followed the trail of this outbreak from sick patients to what they ate, where they ate it to the supplier who furnished the shredded iceberg lettuce used at Taco Bell restaurants in several Midwestern states. The CDC has tied 1,644 illnesses and 94 hospitalizations to a Taco Bell cluster. They ultimately traced the contaminated lettuce back to a single source, identified by people familiar with the inquiry as Taylor Farms, which said Friday it was pulling all iceberg lettuce from the region. Taco Bell said it was removing the lettuce nationwide.The Taco Bell-linked outbreak is the traced restaurant cluster; the broader summer cyclospora count appears larger and may include unrelated cases.Smoke Gets into Your ContinentFire has become the atmosphere.The center of the story is Ontario, where officials report 191 active fires as of Friday, 81 not under control and 21 newly ignited. Evacuations have been ordered in at least 15 communities, some of them remote and reachable only by air. Across Canada, more than 850 fires remain active, with 113 listed as out of control.The smoke has moved into the United States. More than 100 million people in 18 states plus Washington, D.C. have been under air‑quality alerts. Washington has seen some of its worst pollution on record, with monuments disappearing into haze. Toledo, Milwaukee and Detroit saw readings above 500 on Thursday; air is considered hazardous above 300. Emergency rooms across the Northeast reported spikes in patients with breathing and heart problems.The danger is PM2.5, the tiny particles that can slip into the lungs and bloodstream and worsen asthma, bronchitis, diabetes, heart disease and other conditions.Republican politicians in Michigan and Ohio attacked Ontario’s handling of the fires. Ontario Premier Doug Ford snapped back that if U.S. politicians wanted to complain, they should send help, pointing out that Ontario has helped America in past crises, including California fires.If It’s New to YouI didn’t want to go on at such length on this, as you could tell from the previous day’s item, but I couldn’t make it any shorter by publishing time. Donald Trump is one of the most successful showmen in American political history. He was even able to turn the catastrophic failure of the January 6 attack into political success. On Thursday night, however, he lapsed into reruns in prime time.He promised a major revelation about election fraud and foreign interference, then delivered a familiar argument with more official staging than proof. Trump’s central claim was that American elections are dangerously compromised. He argued that the 2020 election was corrupted by foreign interference, bad voting technology, noncitizen registration and a “deep state” cover‑up.The largest claim involved China. Trump alleged that China interfered in the 2020 election, including by acquiring or compromising U.S. voter data. He framed this as a major national‑security scandal and suggested officials had hidden or minimized the threat.He did not produce evidence that votes were manipulated or that any election outcome was altered. The allegation also left out context so basic it was either bad faith or confusion. Much of the “voter data” he was talking about is public: registration lists, names, addresses, party affiliation in some states. You have access to it too. As election expert David Becker put it on NPR, knowing who is in a class is not the same as knowing how they scored on a test; having a list of voters is not the same as having the power to change how they voted or how their ballots were counted.Trump also claimed that U.S. intelligence or national-security officials suppressed the true scale of Chinese activity. This was the “deep state” portion of the argument: not just that China acted, but that American officials covered it up.The same officials he now says hid foreign interference are the ones he publicly doubted when they found it. In Helsinki in July 2018, three days after the Justice Department indicted twelve Russian military intelligence officers for hacking Democratic emails, Trump stood beside Vladimir Putin and was asked whom he believed. He said Putin had denied it, and added: “I don’t see any reason why it would be.”The president went on to describe vulnerabilities in electronic systems and suggested that machines could be compromised. But a vulnerability is not evidence of exploitation. Repeated audits, court cases, state reviews and Republican‑run examinations after 2020 did not show machine fraud.Trump also cited a finding that large numbers of noncitizens appeared on voter rolls. But being flagged on a voter roll is not the same as voting illegally. It can reflect data errors, outdated records, naturalized citizens incorrectly flagged, duplicate entries or database mismatches. Even if some registrations were improper, he did not establish that those people voted, that they voted. The evidence that does exist shows in‑person voter fraud to be vanishingly rare.Trump used these claims to push the Save America Act. He framed the bill as an obvious anti‑fraud measure, but the evidence he presented did not prove widespread fraud that would require that remedy.The danger is not that Trump proved his case. He did not. The danger is that the presidency can make unproved claims feel official, and then use those claims to justify new voting restrictions, pressure state and local officials, mobilize federal agencies and threaten media companies. The speech failed as evidence, but it may still succeed as pressure.The sharpest irony, as Sam Stein at The Bulwark pointed out, is that the intelligence report itself warned that foreign actors spread exaggerated claims about voting-system compromise to undermine confidence in American elections. Trump then went on television from the Oval Office and did nearly the same thing: inflated fragments into a story of national betrayal, not to prove what happened, but to make people doubt the system that counted the votes.LHS 1140 bOne of the places out there in the great beyond that we already thought might be worth watching appears to have one of the basic conditions that make watching worthwhile.Astronomers say LHS 1140 b shows the first strong hint of an atmosphere on a small world in the “habitable zone” of another star. In plain language, that means this planet sits at a distance from its star where temperatures could allow liquid water on its surface and, as you all know, where there is water means the possibility of cruise ships, which means the bacteria necessary for life coursing through the Lido deck. New data suggests LHS 1140 b is also wrapped in a real sky rather than being just bare rock. That makes it one of the best current candidates for a world that could support Earth‑like surface conditions.LHS 1140 b has been on the books since 2017 as a promising planet. The new discovery is not the planet itself but the characterization of its atmosphere and interior. Early observations told us that it existed and roughly how big and massive it was. New data from Webb and careful reanalysis let scientists see how starlight changes as it passes through any air during a transit and how the planet’s mass and radius fit different interior models. That shift—from knowing “there is a planet there” to saying “this is probably a water world with a thick atmosphere”—is what turns an old entry in a catalog into a fresh piece of news. It does not mean we have spotted animals or forests; it means the planet has some of the basic ingredients that make life possible here, not proof that life exists there.Scientifically, it shows that planets with Earth‑like temperatures and atmospheres may not be rare, and that we now have instruments good enough to tell a bare rock from a world with a sky at interstellar distances. That matters because it turns the search for habitable planets from guesswork into something more like engineering and survey work: we can measure, reject and refine candidates instead of just dreaming about them.Could we visit? No, not with anything like current technology. LHS 1140 b is about 49 light‑years away. Mars is minutes away at the speed of light; this is decades of light‑travel time. At present spacecraft speeds, it would take tens of thousands of years to get there. For us, it is a world for telescopes and models, not trip adviser reviews. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome to Stack the Week for Thursday, July 16The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, the feedback, the emails, and the steady stream of notes. And the Apple podcast reviews are helpful. They introduce us to a wider audience.Remember, this is a podcast too. Listen while you mow the lawn, debone a filet, or drive back from the urgent clinic after the rescue dog bites your hand. (I’m fine, but today’s stack is going to be a little short.)Okay, let’s start.Iran ExpansionThe U.S. has been hitting Iran for five straight days, striking farther north towards Tehran while broadening the kinds of targets it is attacking.Reuters reports that three U.S. officials describe the latest strikes as “shaping operations”—attacks intended not only to reopen the Strait of Hormuz but to destroy the military capabilities the United States would want removed before any larger campaign.That helps explain why recent strikes have expanded beyond forces directly threatening shipping to include air defenses, command centers, surveillance sites, energy infrastructure and areas tied to Iran’s nuclear program.But these hits don’t necessarily have to be softening the ground for more intervention. The New York Times reports attacks this week on Iran’s naval power, oil production and nuclear infrastructure are meant to degrade the systems that would allow Iran to sustain a longer war. In other words, make them cry uncle.Here’s the daily count you’re used to: Before the war, more than 130 ships passed through the Strait of Hormuz on an average day. On Wednesday, only nine made it.Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that Iran continues expressing interest in a deal. Iran reinforced that signal by releasing dual U.S.-Iranian citizen Dena Karari, whom President Trump called a goodwill gesture. Both governments continue to escalate militarily while leaving open the possibility of negotiations.More Than 500 Rohingya Feared DeadMore than 500 people are feared dead after two crowded refugee boats disappeared in the Bay of Bengal.The passengers were Rohingya, a Muslim minority from Myanmar, which sits between India and Thailand.The Rohingya have lived there for generations, but Myanmar’s government says they are immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh rather than one of the country’s recognized ethnic groups.Human rights organizations reject that claim. Instead, they say the Rohingya have long faced ethnic and religious discrimination in the predominantly Buddhist country.In 2017, Myanmar’s military drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya from their homes by burning villages, killing civilians, and forcing families to flee. Most escaped to refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh.Life in those camps is difficult. People have few opportunities to work, little hope of building a permanent future, and almost no legal way to move to another country. Some decided to risk a dangerous sea voyage, hoping to reach Malaysia, where they believed they could find safety and jobs.The boats left in late June. One disappeared almost immediately. The other is believed to have sunk off Myanmar’s coast on July 8. The United Nations is still trying to confirm exactly what happened, which is why officials say the passengers are “feared dead.”If the number is confirmed, it would rank among the deadliest refugee boat disasters in recent years. More than 800 migrants died when an overcrowded boat sank off Libya in 2015, and more than 600 were believed lost when the Adriana sank off Greece in 2023.Stops ICE Brings Back Vehicle StopsThe Atlantic reports that President Trump insisted ICE resume stopping suspects in their cars after some of his supporters criticized the agency’s brief pause, arguing it signaled a retreat from aggressive immigration enforcement.ICE says it increasingly has little choice. Many migrants have learned that if they remain inside their homes, ICE often needs a judicial warrant to enter and arrest them. Catching someone after they leave in a vehicle avoids that problem.But stopping moving cars creates a different danger. Unlike local police, ICE agents generally receive far less training in conducting high-risk traffic stops. Those encounters can unfold in seconds, forcing agents to decide whether a driver is trying to escape or whether the vehicle poses a deadly threat.The law draws an important line. The Supreme Court has held that officers cannot use deadly force simply because a suspect is fleeing. Deadly force is allowed only if an officer has probable cause to believe the suspect poses an immediate threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or someone else.Update: Court filings cited in recent reporting allege that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the man shot and killed by ICE agents in Houston, had drugs in his vehicle. If that allegation proves true, it may describe what investigators found after the shooting. It does not answer the central question investigators must resolve: What did the agents know before they fired, and did they reasonably believe Salgado Araujo posed an immediate deadly threat? Evidence discovered afterward cannot, by itself, justify an earlier decision to use deadly force.Beginning in September, immigration officials deciding whether to approve a green card can once again weigh an applicant’s use of some public benefits as evidence that the person may become financially dependent on the government.Supporters say the rule helps ensure that people granted permanent residency are unlikely to depend on government assistance. They argue immigration policy should favor applicants who can support themselves without relying on public benefits.Critics argue its biggest impact falls on families who are legally entitled to benefits but avoid medical care, food assistance, or other programs because they worry using them could hurt their chances of getting a green card.Wildfire Smoke Spreads Across the EastEveryone east of the Rockies can see this story out the window. As I type this I feel like a ham hock. Hazy skies, a milky sun, and, in some places, the smell of smoke. All are the result of large wildfires burning in Canada and Minnesota.The smoke has drifted hundreds of miles south and east. A large area of high pressure, sometimes called a heat dome, is trapping it close to the ground instead of allowing it to blow away. More than 115 million people could experience unhealthy air, and cities including Philadelphia have issued Code Red air quality alerts.The smoke is expected to linger through at least Friday in parts of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. Conditions will improve only when the winds shift or the weather pattern trapping the smoke begins to break down. As long as the fires continue burning, smoky conditions could return.Ebola OutbreakEbola is moving in opposite directions across central Africa.In eastern Congo, confirmed infections have risen from roughly 1,926 to 2,073, while deaths climbed from 702 to 796.Uganda, meanwhile, has discharged its last Ebola patient and begun the World Health Organization’s 42-day countdown toward declaring its outbreak over. Uganda’s outbreak remained comparatively small and occurred in a more stable security environment. Workers could identify cases, trace contacts and isolate patients before the virus spread widely. In eastern Congo, years of conflict have repeatedly interrupted that.The Wall Street Journal reports one reason the outbreak continues to worsen in Congo: false claims spreading through WhatsApp voice notes have led people to hide deaths and attack health workers. Rumors circulated in Uganda as well, but they did not overwhelm the response. In Congo, misinformation has combined with armed conflict, displacement and distrust of authorities, making it much harder for health workers to find infected people before they infect others.The United States has now imposed an unusual “do not board” policy, meaning Americans who have recently been in the outbreak zone cannot simply board a commercial flight home. Previously, they could travel if they met ordinary screening requirements.Instead of relying mainly on screening after travelers begin their journey, the policy works by preventing potentially exposed passengers from boarding commercial flights in the first place, stopping them at the ticket counter rather than after they arrive in the United States.Ukraine Fires the Minister Who Wanted to Modernize the WarUkraine’s government has removed Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov (mih-KAI-loh fed-OR-ov), the 35-year-old architect of much of the country’s military innovation, after a reported clash with Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi (oh-lek-SAHN-der seer-SKEE).Ukraine cannot match Russia soldier for soldier or shell for shell. Fedorov argued its best chance was to make every soldier more effective by using drones, software, artificial intelligence, and faster weapons development. Under his leadership, Ukraine dramatically expanded drone production, pushed to move supplies with unmanned ground vehicles instead of soldiers, and argued that technology—not manpower—would determine the future of the war.His critics argued that winning today’s war still requires the basics: mobilizing troops, holding trenches, maintaining discipline, and running a large conventional army.The argument isn’t really about whether technology matters. It’s about how quickly a country fighting for survival should bet the future of its army on it.Meanwhile, the fighting has shifted to another battlefield: grain. Ukraine has stepped up drone attacks on Russian shipping in the Sea of Azov, disrupting routes that carry about a quarter of Russia’s grain exports. Russia has answered by intensifying strikes on Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, cutting Ukraine’s grain export capacity by roughly one-third. Together, Russia and Ukraine account for about a third of the world’s wheat exports, so when both sides target the other’s ability to ship grain, the effects reach far beyond the battlefield, driving up food prices around the world.Oh, Those Epstein VictimsTodd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general may now depend on a meeting with Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican whose vote could determine whether Blanche advances out of committee, said Thursday he will not support the nomination unless Blanche meets with the survivors first. Within hours, the Justice Department said Blanche planned to do just that, after previously testifying that legal and procedural constraints had so far prevented such a meeting.One survivor, Dani Bensky, testified that the group had spent months trying unsuccessfully to secure a meeting with Blanche.Tillis also wants firm assurances that the Justice Department’s proposed $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund cannot be revived.Sen. John Cornyn of Texas is another Republican holdout. He has raised broader concerns about the Trump tax settlement that created the fund and said Thursday he remains unconvinced Blanche’s assurances that it is “dead” are sufficient.But the Blanche fight is bigger than Epstein and bigger than one confirmation vote. The Economist reports that the Justice Department itself has been profoundly degraded over the past 18 months. About a quarter of its lawyers have left. Divisions that once handled cryptocurrency fraud and public corruption have withered. Election fraud, which is not a real large-scale problem but is one of President Trump’s fixations, is consuming more of the department’s time and resources.That means the question before the Senate is not simply whether Blanche will meet with Epstein’s victims or whether one settlement fund is really dead. It is whether Trump’s personal lawyer will be confirmed to run a Justice Department that is already being retooled around the president’s enemies, obsessions, and personal legal needs.I should have explained yesterday why Blanche can still run the Justice Department as acting attorney general even if the Senate never confirms him. The key is the Attorney General Succession Act, 28 U.S.C. § 508, which says that when there’s a vacancy in the office of attorney general, the deputy attorney general may exercise all the duties of that office—and unlike the Federal Vacancies Reform Act (FVRA) it contains no time limit. Under the FVRA’s own terms, specific succession statutes like § 508 are exceptions to its usual time limits, which is why courts and the GAO have treated parallel provisions at other departments as allowing “forever nominees.” Blanche is effectively in the same posture Julie Su occupied at Labor: a deputy elevated by statute who can keep doing the job for as long as the president wants, whether or not the Senate ever confirms him.China Pulls AheadChina has now pulled ahead of the United States in global public opinion, and it’s not just one outlier survey. A new 36‑country study from the Pew Research Center finds that in most of the nations it polled, more people now have a favorable view of China than of the U.S. On average, Beijing’s favorability comes in a few points higher than Washington’s, a reversal from earlier in the decade when the U.S. held a clear edge. Pew’s findings line up with Gallup’s latest World Poll, which shows global approval of China’s leadership at 36 percent in 2025, compared with 31 percent for U.S. leadership.This doesn’t mean the world has suddenly decided it prefers China’s political system. Pew still finds the U.S. rated more highly on respecting personal freedoms in many countries, especially among long‑time American allies, though that gap has narrowed. What’s changed is the risk calculus. Views of China have improved at the margins, while views of the United States have deteriorated more sharply, particularly since Donald Trump returned to office.Countries look at Washington and Beijing and ask a simple, practical question: “Who is more likely to hit us with surprise tariffs, sudden sanctions, or public fights we can’t control?” If the United States feels jumpy and unpredictable, and China feels more steady or at least more consistent, some leaders decide they’d rather manage China’s downsides than America’s.In other words, they’re not embracing China’s system. They’re just deciding which partner is less likely to give them a headache — and more of them are starting to think that working with Beijing may be the safer, more predictable bet than working with Washington right now.Consumers Have Not Stopped SpendingJune’s retail report shows a slowdown, not a stall. Government data for June put retail and food-service sales up 0.2 percent from May and 6.7 percent compared with a year earlier. The monthly increase is small enough to be within the survey’s margin of error, but the year‑over‑year gain confirms that overall spending is still rising, not rolling over. A big share of the strength came from auto dealers and online retailers, while categories like grocery stores, clothing, and health and personal‑care stores were weaker.This isn’t a picture of a booming consumer, but it’s clearly not a collapse either. The headline number actually understates some of the underlying strength because lower gasoline prices pulled down receipts at gas stations, even as drivers may have bought similar amounts of fuel. At the same time, the growth we do see is uneven and may owe a lot to discounting, promotions, and timing of car purchases rather than across‑the‑board confidence on Main Street.It’s also worth remembering what this report does and doesn’t capture. Retail sales measure dollars, not units, so higher prices can flatter the topline even if people aren’t buying more stuff. And the data are mostly about goods, not services, so they miss big pieces of consumer spending like rent, travel, health care, and entertainment. Consumers are still spending enough to keep the economy moving, but this report doesn’t say that every household—or every kind of store—is sharing equally in that resilience.Pentagon Testosterone ScreeningThe Pentagon will begin annually screening service members age 30 and older for low testosterone and offering voluntary replacement therapy. The move grows out of a culture‑war frame—Fox host Pete Hegseth has talked about building a “High‑T Department of War”—but the department has not clearly explained how women service members fit into the new regime.Testosterone isn’t a simple readiness gauge; levels fluctuate during the day and are heavily influenced by sleep, stress, weight, illness and medication. In ordinary practice, doctors diagnose low testosterone only when there are symptoms and repeated low readings, not just a single lab value below some target threshold.There is a serious counterargument in favor of more testing. Military service puts unusual strain on people’s bodies, and hormonal deficiencies can affect bone density, muscle mass, mood and recovery, so systematic screening might catch treatable problems before they sideline troops. So more systematic hormone testing could be justified as a preventive, readiness-enhancing measure rather than just a political stunt or “vanity.”Still, in the end this is probably a way to think about it: normal testosterone helps you function; more testosterone is not the same thing as more bravery; and making “high T” a goal for the whole force invites a lot of medical risk and red tape in the name of a slogan.The President’s Election SpeechPresident Trump says newly released government material will show serious problems with U.S. elections. If he presents credible evidence that votes were altered or officials concealed a breach, it would be major news—not because he’s making the claim, but because it would be the first time he has backed such allegations with proof. President Trump has made unsupported claims of election interference or election fraud dating back to at least 2012. He’s made the claims related to his elections and those of others. In elections and caucuses. What has unified the claims is the whistling lack of proof.Perseverance Runs a MarathonOn Mars, the Perseverance rover has just crossed a marathon’s distance: 26.2 miles in five years and four months. It’s now in a small off‑world distance club, chasing NASA’s old Opportunity rover, which holds the record after logging about 28 miles before a dust storm ended its mission. Spirit made it nearly five miles before getting stuck, Sojourner in the 1990s managed only a few hundred feet, and China’s Zhurong rover covered a little over a mile before it went silent.A marathon at roughly the pace of a glacier, which on Mars counts as sprinting.T Rex Crime SceneA new fossil gives us a freeze‑frame of dinosaur violence instead of another educated guess. Paleontologists have found a Tyrannosaurus rex tooth embedded in the skull of an Edmontosaurus, unusually direct evidence of a face‑to‑face predator‑prey encounter rather than an inference from scattered bones and bite marks. Paleontology usually reconstructs behavior from what death left scattered; this fossil preserved one violent moment almost intact.I decided to look up what other kinds of grisly finds archaeologists have stumbled upon and came up with these. In one Belgian cave, researchers uncovered Neanderthal bones with cut marks and smashed long bones mixed in with animal remains, strong evidence of cannibalism. In ancient Egypt, at a palace in Avaris, excavators found pits filled only with severed right hands, thought to be trophies taken from defeated enemies and traded to the king for rewards. And across parts of Eastern Europe, “vampire” burials have turned up: skeletons pinned down with stakes or sickles or buried with stones jammed in their mouths, apparently to keep the dead from rising.And on that note we will put a stone in my mouth and conclude this episode. We’ll see you when we see you. I’m going to go try to make peace with Cujo. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome to Stack the Week for Wednesday, July 15The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, the feedback, the emails, and the steady stream of notes. And the Apple podcast reviews are helpful. They introduce us to a wider audience.Remember, this is a podcast too. Listen while you mow the lawn, debone a filet, or wipe down the whiteboard on which you’ve been trying to sync the movement of the planets with your Google calendar.Okay, let’s start.Iran 2.0Washington Post columnist David Ignatius calls this phase of the Iran war Iran Fiasco 2.0. His argument: the administration went back to bombing without solving the problem that made the first round fail. Iran doesn’t need to win. It only needs to keep threatening ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which it can still do after every American strike. Same campaign, same result.Which is what David Sanger of the New York Times asked weeks ago on Air Force One, and got called a traitor for: if you start bombing again, why do you expect a different result?The United States restored the naval blockade of Hormuz Wednesday and flew a fourth overnight round of strikes, hitting Iranian military sites including an army barracks. By late afternoon the US military said it was launching another wave of strikes, the third in 24 hours.President Trump threatened bridges and power plants unless Iran negotiates. He would not rule out ground troops. The attacks continue until he decides they’re enough, he says.Iran fired missiles and drones toward Jordan, which intercepted three. Alerts in Bahrain. In Kuwait, cruise missiles, a ballistic missile, and dozens of drones — the heaviest attack on that country so far — wounding naval personnel.The Revolutionary Guard set its terms: energy exports stay open to everyone or to no one. If Iran can’t sell its oil, nobody sells theirs.Gas prices are going up as you’d expect. Regular is at $3.89. Diesel is near $5, which is the number that matters more, because diesel moves the trucks that move the groceries.John Ellis’s News Items points to a War on the Rocks analysis on how Iran built for this. After studying previous American wars, it designed a mosaic defense — a decentralized system in which local commanders and allied forces keep fighting after headquarters is gone.Iran handed real authority to local commanders and to allies outside Iran — the Houthis in Yemen, militias in Iraq. They don’t need to be told what to do. So bombing Tehran doesn’t stop the missile crew on the coast or the drone team in Yemen. There is no headquarters to destroy. That’s why each new round of bombing can leave the underlying military problem intact. The plan is already inside everyone’s head.Military experts told NPR the strikes so far have not destroyed enough of Iran’s missiles, drones, and small boats to make the water safe. Even optimistic military assessments describe a campaign measured in weeks, not days.That is a much larger and much longer war than the administration has described.ICE DeathsA 28-year-old Mexican national ran from federal agents at a St. Augustine gas station and was struck by a tractor-trailer. He is the third man to die in an immigration-enforcement encounter in eight days.The other two:Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Houston. Agents followed his work van. DHS said he weaponized the vehicle and tried to run over an officer. Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said the agents’ actions resembled no law-enforcement tactic he’d seen, and that they were either untrained or putting themselves where firing into a car could be justified. Araujo was here illegally. He was not the target of the operation.Johan Sebastián Guerrero, Biddeford, Maine. Video caught shouting, gunfire, and his car turning in a circle before agents pulled him out while his wife and young daughter watched. His father said he had legal status and worked two jobs.Neither agent who fired wore a body camera. They were not required to. DHS now requires each arrest team to include at least one — the team, not each officer, and not necessarily the officer who fires. About half of DHS field officers have cameras. ICE has released no footage from Houston or Maine and has not named the shooters.Neither dead man was armed. Alex Pretti and Renée Good died in Minneapolis before these three, and they were described as aggressors too. They were not.Since Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, agents in the immigration crackdown have shot at least 22 people. Six died. Three were American citizens. Nearly all involved officers firing into cars. The Washington Post names the recurring question: whether officers step into a car’s path and then call the moving car a weapon.Trump’s answer: ICE personnel are doing a “GREAT job,” and the government cannot give up what he called one of its most effective crime-fighting tools.After Pretti and Good, the administration changed personnel, discussed body cameras, promised less controversy. Then Congress approved multiyear funding with no mandatory accountability provisions.This week ICE paused most vehicle stops after two fatal shootings. Border czar Tom Homan insisted it was a short review, not a policy change, and said agents would soon return to “doing what they do best.” Less than a day later, President Trump ordered the tactic resumed.The question is what evidence a citizen should require before accepting the government’s claim that a car became a weapon — when the government holds the footage, the identities, and the narrative, and has released none.Three men are dead in eight days, two of them shot by federal agents, the third chased into traffic. The agents work for the federal government and are paid by taxpayers.A country gets to decide who lives in it, but the people who voted for deportations were told it would only be the worst of the worst. Neither of the men shot was. Araujo wasn’t the man they came for. Guerrero was here legally. These were mistakes, but no one in government is treating them that way. No regret from DHS, ICE, or the White House. No condolence to Guerrero’s wife, who watched. The response was to praise the agents and defend the tactic. An institution that thought it had made a mistake would say something.Israel, Gaza, Lebanon and the West BankIsraeli and Lebanese officials concluded a sixth round of U.S.-mediated talks in Rome Wednesday. The subject: “pilot zones” in southern Lebanon, where Israeli forces would withdraw and the Lebanese Army would take over. The test is whether the Lebanese state can hold ground Israel gives up, which means keeping Hezbollah off it.Trump told Netanyahu last Thursday to pull troops out of southern Syria and Lebanon, Axios reported: “They don’t want you there. You should redeploy.”An Israeli strike in central Gaza Wednesday killed a man, his wife, and their six-year-old daughter. Days earlier, a strike on a police station in a northern Gaza refugee camp killed several people, including a senior police commander; Israel said the station was used for military activities.In the West Bank, the Israeli government announced 34 new settlements. Ministers called it a historic expansion meant to prevent the creation of a future Palestinian state. Netanyahu himself endorsed a demilitarized Palestinian state in a 2009 speech. He spent the years after walking it back, and in 2019 campaigned on annexing the settlements instead. The land these 34 will sit on is the land that the state was supposed to occupy.Todd Blanche Confirmation HearingsSen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, asked Todd Blanche a softball at his confirmation hearing: Is the president your friend?“I’m his lawyer,” Blanche said. Then, almost instantly: “Was his lawyer. And now I’m the deputy attorney general.”The whole hearing lived inside that correction.Blanche defended Donald Trump in the hush-money trial and the federal prosecutions. Since Watergate, the attorney general has been expected to run the Justice Department independently of the White House.The question before the Senate was whether someone who spent years serving one man can convincingly serve the institution and the Constitution instead.Adam Schiff, a former federal prosecutor whom Trump has targeted for prosecution, asked, “What happened to the Todd Blanche who was a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York?”Blanche asked to respond.“I am still here. I am the same exact person I was when I was a federal prosecutor.”Democrats argued his record now tells a different story. They pointed to the indictment of James Comey, investigations of John Brennan and Cassidy Hutchinson, an IRS settlement that a federal judge has since condemned as a bad-faith misuse of the legal process, and Blanche’s continued insistence that the 2020 election was rigged.Some 16,000 employees have left the Justice Department during his tenure, including more than a quarter of its attorneys. More than 1,200 former Justice Department employees signed a letter opposing his confirmation. More than 100 former judges filed a disciplinary complaint against him.Ten of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims sat in the hearing room. Senator Dick Durbin asked Blanche whether he would meet with them.“They have lawyers,” Blanche replied. “I’m prohibited from meeting directly with them.”Democrats noted that Blanche personally interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell last summer while she was represented by counsel. Senator Cory Booker called Blanche’s explanation “utter nonsense.”Blanche raised his voice.“You can ask the questions, but you cannot control my answers.”Since three million pages of Epstein files were released—after Congress forced the disclosure—the department has prosecuted no one. Blanche’s predecessor, Pam Bondi, said Blanche was responsible for the release that publicly identified victims by name.Republican Senator John Cornyn focused on another issue: the $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund created in Trump’s IRS settlement. Blanche insisted the fund was dead because no money had ever been transferred.But he also acknowledged that the settlement itself remains “an enforceable document.”Cornyn emerged unconvinced.“The argument was that the anti-weaponization fund is dead,” he said, “and what he confirmed was that it’s not.”One Republican vote against Blanche in committee would block his confirmation. Since Lindsey Graham’s death, Republicans hold an 11-10 majority on the panel. Senator Thom Tillis appears likely to vote yes.But Blanche can continue serving as acting attorney general regardless of the committee vote. The confirmation won’t determine who runs the Justice Department. It will record whether the Senate approves of how he’s run it.In other confirmation news, Jay Clayton, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be Director of National Intelligence, repeatedly refused to say Joe Biden won the 2020 election when asked directly. The job requires telling a president things he may not want to hear. That matters most when a president’s assumptions meet reality—as they are now in the Iran war. Senators were really asking a different question: if a nominee won’t acknowledge a settled fact under oath, but must cater to the president’s illusions at the cost of their self respect, what confidence should Americans have that he would be able to do his job when it matters most?Floods and FireThe Weather Prediction Center issued its highest flood risk — Level 4 of 4 — on back-to-back days over the Texas Hill Country. High-risk days come fewer than 4% of the time and account for more than 80% of all flood damage.Six to 12 inches fell overnight into Tuesday, with 10 more possible by Wednesday morning at rates of 2 to 4 inches an hour. Four inches an hour is more than a car’s wipers can clear. Flood watches cover six million people. Game wardens photographed an empty vehicle floating away; the occupants had been rescued minutes earlier. Governor Abbott declared disasters in 59 counties.This is the same ground, one year and eleven days after the Fourth of July floods that killed more than 130 people in the Hill Country, including 25 girls and two counselors at Camp Mystic. Steep slopes, shallow soil, exposed bedrock that sheds rain instead of absorbing it. The ground says no and the water goes somewhere else.They could use the water in Minnesota. Seventeen wildfires are burning across the northeast corner of the state. The five largest cover 30,000 acres and none are contained.The smoke would normally rise and disperse. It isn’t, because a heat dome — a lid of high pressure — is sitting over the eastern half of the country, holding the smoke down at ground level and pushing it east. That’s why Manhattan’s sky went hazy Wednesday from fires 1,200 miles away. The same lid has nearly 100 million people under major or extreme heat warnings from the Dakotas to New England.Let Us Now Avoid Lettuce2026 is now the worst cyclospora year on record. State data puts the count past 4,700 — the mark set in 2019 — across more than 30 states.Michigan interviewed more than 1,000 patients and one item kept coming up: lettuce. Salad greens. Officials there now say buy whole heads, throw away the outer leaves, wash the rest and then throw it out and run from the house screaming. Not exactly, but you can never be too careful. True advice: skip the bagged lettuce and salad kits.Two things make it hard to catch this parasite. Symptoms take days to weeks to appear, so patients are being asked to remember a salad from three weeks ago. And many standard food-poisoning tests aren’t built to detect it.Law Firms and AdministrationThe New York Times reports the Justice Department has subpoenaed thirteen of the country’s biggest law firms.Early last year, Trump signed executive orders against firms whose lawyers had crossed him. The orders stripped their security clearances, barred their lawyers from federal buildings, and threatened the government contracts of any client who kept them. The pressure wasn’t directed only at the firms. It was aimed at their clients.Nine of the biggest capitulated, pledging nearly a billion dollars in free legal work for causes he supports. Four other firms fought in court instead. The firms that fought won. The administration eventually abandoned those cases.One of the president’s personal lawyers, Boris Epshteyn, negotiated the deals. He is not a government employee.The American Bar Association sued in June to stop the campaign and asked a judge to make the White House turn over communications about the deals. The Justice Department moved to quash that request. Then it subpoenaed the law firms for many of the same records the ABA was seeking, demanding documents about the agreements and depositions from firm leaders.The firms that made peace with the White House got subpoenaed anyway. Some told the Times they fear objecting will trigger a new executive order. The four firms that fought remain in court, where they already were.Before the second term began, incoming White House counsel David Warrington wrote that Epshteyn’s conduct “must be stopped” and his proximity to Trump “terminated”—otherwise, “at best a scandal,” at worst “criminal indictments.” That’s from the new Haberman and Swan book. The Justice Department is now subpoenaing thirteen law firms for their correspondence with Epshteyn.IBMIBM lost $69 billion of market value Tuesday. Shares fell more than 25% — the largest one-day drop in the company’s history.Which is strange, if you think AI is lifting everything with a chip in it. The AI boom is the reason IBM fell.Companies have a fixed technology budget. This year they are spending it on AI, and the AI bill is large. So they buy servers, storage, and memory chips — the hardware that runs AI — and they stop buying what they used to buy. What they used to buy was IBM.DealBook asked who’s next. Software companies fell with IBM on Tuesday — but was that a real fear or a momentary panic? IBM’s problem was mainframes nobody’s buying. What does that have to do with software?A lot, if the IBM story is about limited budgets. Those budgets are limited for software too. Analysts at Evercore disagree; they say the mainframe miss doesn’t generalize, and the firms that should worry are the consultants — the ones you hire to build your software for you — because AI does what they charge for. They fell too.One company went up 12%: CrowdStrike, which sells cybersecurity because AI models keep opening holes nobody knew were there.France and Assisted SuicideFrance’s National Assembly gave final approval to a bill legalizing assisted dying, voting 291 to 241 to let terminally ill adults end their lives with medical help — a step beyond current law, which allows only deep sedation. Patients must be 18 or older with an incurable, life-threatening illness in an advanced stage and suffering that can’t be relieved; psychiatric illness or Alzheimer’s alone doesn’t qualify.The patient makes the request personally, a medical team reviews it for 15 days, and the patient confirms after a two-day waiting period. Patients take the medication themselves unless physically unable. National health insurance pays. The bill, a priority of President Macron, now goes to the Constitutional Council for a final review expected to take up to a month. Opponents, including disability advocates, warn the law could pressure the sick and elderly to choose death rather than become a burden; supporters call it a right to end unbearable suffering on one’s own terms. France joins Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Canada in permitting some form of assisted dying.Elon Musk and WisconsinA bipartisan Wisconsin election panel found probable cause that Elon Musk broke the state’s election bribery law with his $1 million payments to voters in the 2025 state Supreme Court race. The Wisconsin Elections Commission — three Democrats, three Republicans — voted 5-1 to refer two voter complaints to the Brown County district attorney. The finding centers on a Musk social media post offering $1 million to people who voted in the election, which the commission says was made to induce them to vote. Musk handed checks to three Wisconsin voters. His PAC also paid $100 to voters who signed a petition against “activist judges.” Musk and allied groups spent at least $20 million backing the Republican-endorsed candidate, who lost by 10 points in the most expensive judicial race in American history. The state’s attorney general sued to stop the checks before they were handed out; the courts declined. The finding arrives fifteen months after the election it concerns. The door on the barn is firmly closed. The horse is on Mars.Sak Tahn WaaxAnd finally, we’re just catching up to the news about Sak Tahn Waax (SAHK-tahn-wah-ash), but that’s true of mankind as well.Twelve hundred years ago, Sak Tahn patiently tracked Mars and Venus across years of nights. He did the math and worked out the rules that coordinated the Maya calendars with the movements of those two planets.He never got credit. We refer to it as a civilization’s achievement, as though a whole people leaned in at once. Like the Egyptian pyramids. Meanwhile we know the Greeks by name — Hipparchus (hip-AR-kus), Ptolemy (TOL-uh-mee) — the men who measured the same sky and got to keep their signatures on it.Now we know Sak Tahn Waax, because an eighth-century inscription gives him the credit.It was found at Xultun (shool-TOON), in Guatemala, in a small rectangular room archaeologists call Structure 10K-2. The walls are covered in microtexts — faint handwritten calculations and astronomical tables. They think the room was a workshop: a whiteboard where scholars drafted and refined the formulas before they went into the formal books.It’s the first time anyone has identified a specific person from the Classic Maya period credited as a mathematician and astronomer.His name translates to white-chested fox. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome to Stack the Week for July 14th, Tuesday.The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, feedback, the emails, and the steady stream of notes. Oh and the Apple podcast reviews are helpful. They introduce us to a wider audience.If you’re reading this text on a screen instead of listening to the audio, remember that this is also designed as a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re commuting, folding laundry, or simply reclining into the posture that allows you to be delivered from the uncertainties and cares and illusions that beset the people of the world.Okay, let’s start.Drop the Toll Keep the BlockadeClap on. Clap off. The Clapper!If you are a certain age, you may remember that advertisement for a device that allowed you to turn on the light by simply clapping. You clapped it on and clapped it off. The Iran war is the Clapper war.Mostly it’s been clap on. The U.S. military says it hit dozens of Iranian targets Monday, then struck six coastal cities and islands early Tuesday. Iran fired back at Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait and hit three tankers, killing two mariners and wounding 14, according to the International Maritime Organization. Before the war, 147 ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz in a day. Last week the count was 22, according to Kpler, a firm that tracks global shipping.Then came the clap off: the president’s Monday idea of charging a 20 percent toll for passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump announced he would replace the fee with trade and investment deals from Gulf states, saying kings and emirs had called him. “I don’t think anybody should be able to charge a fee for the strait,” said the man who proposed the fee the day before.Yesterday, when I presented the president’s plan for a 20 percent fee, I mused out loud about how such a thing might be calculated. A basic question. Nothing fancy about it. The president didn’t quite get there. Neither did his administration. The Wall Street Journal reports that hours after Trump announced the toll, aides rushed to figure out who would collect it — some officials assumed the Treasury Department, others argued for the Energy Department, since the cargo in question is oil. Officials were planning meetings on how to carry out the policy when the president abandoned it. Semafor, citing a White House official, reported that Trump ordered up the toll over the objections of advisers who had talked him out of the idea before. Axios reported that Gulf governments, whom the plan was supposedly built around, learned of it by surprise and called the White House asking what it meant. The toll also contradicted the president’s own secretary of state, who said weeks ago that international law forbids any country from charging tolls on an international waterway.And then clap on again. Even as the toll vanished, the United States resumed a naval blockade of Iranian ports Tuesday afternoon, attempting to choke off Iran’s trade by other means.I would recommend Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, which outlines in detail the way Donald Trump makes decisions. The scramble on the 20 percent is the daily operating procedure in the White House: decisions made on a whim which everyone else has to scramble after. The authors report that a half-dozen people around Trump make decisions so fast that the Pentagon and State Department often learn what’s going on after the fact.These are decisions about a war of choice whose consequences now extend well beyond the battlefield—to global shipping, energy markets and the movement of commerce through one of the world’s most important waterways. .Inflation: A Bit of Good News—For NowInflation has two clocks. One asks, “What happened this month?” The other asks, “How much more expensive is life than it was a year ago?”This month’s clock showed something unusual: prices, on average, fell 0.4% from May to June—the biggest monthly decline in four years. Imagine walking into the grocery store on June 1 and buying a cart full of groceries. Then imagine buying that same cart on July 1 and finding it cost a few dollars less. That’s unusual. Prices don’t normally move down across the whole economy. They usually keep creeping upward, just faster or slower than before.But the yearly clock still showed prices were 3.5% higher than they were a year ago. That’s what economists mean when they say “annual inflation” was 3.5%: the average basket of things Americans buy still costs 3.5% more than it did last June, even though prices eased during the most recent month.One month doesn’t erase years of inflation. The cost of living is still high compared with what most people remember paying. But it does suggest businesses, on average, weren’t raising prices in June the way they had been.Economists were also looking for signs that higher energy costs from the Iran war had spread into everything else—restaurant meals, clothing, rent, airline tickets and thousands of other prices. They largely hadn’t. Core inflation, which strips out the more volatile food and energy categories, was flat. As economist Michael Metcalfe put it, “Yes, gas prices went up, but nothing else did, more or less.”That’s why this report surprised economists. Many expected both higher oil prices and President Trump’s tariffs to push inflation more broadly through the economy. June’s numbers suggested that hadn’t happened—at least not yet. Some economists think businesses have absorbed part of the higher tariff costs instead of passing them on to consumers. Others think the effects simply haven’t worked their way through the economy yet. The prediction has not yet come true, and economists don’t yet agree why.Investors liked what they saw. The nation’s biggest banks also reported stronger-than-expected earnings. Banks make money when consumers keep spending, businesses borrow to expand, companies sell stock and bonds, and investors continue making deals. Strong bank profits don’t mean every American is thriving, but they do suggest that much of the economy is still moving. Together, the inflation report and the bank earnings lowered expectations that the Federal Reserve would need to raise interest rates to keep inflation from accelerating, which would increase the cost of economic activity.Maine ICE ShootingSuppose I told you that a young Latino immigrant had been shot and killed by federal immigration agents. He wasn’t the person they were looking for. He was in a vehicle. Agents said they were forced to shoot. There is no body-camera footage.Which case am I describing?You can’t know, because those details now describe two fatal ICE shootings in the last week.That is an extraordinary sentence to be able to write.The latest happened Monday in Biddeford, Maine. Twenty-six-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero (pronounced yo-HAHN seh-bas-tee-AHN doo-RAHN geh-REH-roh), a Colombian immigrant who lived with his wife and young daughter, was killed after ICE agents attempted to stop his vehicle during surveillance of another man with a final deportation order. Authorities now acknowledge Durán Guerrero was not the target of the operation.The Department of Homeland Security says an officer fired because he feared for public safety after Durán Guerrero attempted to flee in his vehicle. And by flee in his vehicle, I mean leave a place in the same manner you would to go to the store.One witness heard the wounded driver say, “I tried to stop.” Security camera footage shows officers pulling his body from the vehicle afterward, but not the shooting itself. The agents were not wearing body cameras, leaving investigators to reconstruct the encounter from witness testimony and the officers’ own accounts.The Houston shooting last week ran along the same lines: a bystander, not the target, dead in a vehicle, no footage.These shootings come as ICE has dramatically accelerated enforcement. The agency arrested more than 10,000 people in five days at the end of June—roughly 2,000 arrests a day—as the administration pushed agents to sharply increase arrests.In response, ICE has ordered agents to suspend most vehicle stops while it reviews the incidents and provides additional training.Ebola Is Moving Faster Than Public HealthThe World Health Organization issued one of its starkest warnings yet Tuesday: eastern Congo’s Ebola outbreak continues to outpace efforts to stop it.Nearly 2,000 people have been infected and more than 700 have died. The outbreak, caused by a rare strain with no approved vaccine or treatment, has become the fastest-growing Ebola epidemic ever recorded in Africa.If you’ve been following this story with us, that may sound familiar—and in one sense it is. We’ve told you about the conflict, the attacks on health workers, the lack of a vaccine and the invisible spread. Today’s development is different. The WHO is no longer describing obstacles. It is saying, plainly, that those obstacles are now winning.Four out of five new infections are coming from people who were never on any contact-tracing list. In other words, health workers are no longer interrupting chains of transmission—they’re discovering many of them only after they’ve already spread.That’s an important threshold in any epidemic. Public health works by getting ahead of a virus. Once doctors, laboratories and contact tracers are mostly discovering infections after they happen instead of preventing the next ones, the outbreak begins dictating the pace of the response instead of the other way around.That’s why today’s WHO statement matters. It isn’t simply another update on Ebola’s growth. It’s the moment the world’s leading public-health agency publicly acknowledged that, despite expanding treatment centers and laboratories, it is losing the race.Justices Ask Congress for Protection“I had to explain to my 12-year-old why I was wearing a bulletproof vest.”That’s how Justice Amy Coney Barrett explained the Supreme Court’s growing security needs as she and Justice Elena Kagan appeared before Congress Tuesday to request a larger budget.One measure of political polarization is what institutions have to buy. As the Supreme Court has become more politically consequential, the cost of protecting the people who serve on it has grown with it.The Court says threats against the justices are expected to rise another 38% this year. It is asking for six additional security agents for each justice, a new residential security office, expanded cybersecurity and stronger threat-assessment capabilities. Those requests come after the attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022, the swatting of Justice Barrett’s home this spring and a wave of threats invoking Daniel Anderl — the 20-year-old son of federal Judge Esther Salas, shot dead in 2020 by a man who came to their home to kill her. His name has since become a kind of grim shorthand among those who threaten judges: a reminder that the danger is real and has already killed.The Supreme Court isn’t alone. Congress has expanded the Capitol Police. Election officials around the country now receive security once reserved for far more prominent public officials. Polarization has a price tag. You can decide which political movements have produced more violence. You can also ask whether the Court’s increasingly consequential decisions—and the way it sometimes hands them down—intensify the sense that national policy is being imposed from above.But Congress belongs in the picture too. When lawmakers fail to settle immigration, voting, climate, war powers and other major questions through durable legislation, presidents act on their own and opponents turn to the courts. Nine justices then become the place where the country’s unresolved political fights are decided. The Court has sometimes enlarged that role through its own decisions, but Congress’s paralysis helps explain why so much power, attention and anger now collect there.Economists AI WarningMore than 200 economists and artificial intelligence researchers have signed an open letter warning that governments and institutions need to prepare now for AI’s economic disruption. The group includes 16 Nobel Prize winners, as well as employees of Anthropic, Google and OpenAI. The letter compares AI to the Industrial Revolution, as many have before, but argues that this transformation could happen over years rather than generations. That could bring enormous gains in productivity and living standards—but also large-scale job displacement.You’ve heard this warning before. What’s different is who’s making it. Economists usually argue that technological revolutions destroy some jobs but ultimately create even better ones. Technology companies usually emphasize the opportunities AI will unlock. Here, leaders from both groups are acknowledging that market forces alone may not distribute those gains fairly. If that language sounds familiar, it echoes the moral argument Pope Leo has made about AI: markets create wealth, but they cannot by themselves decide how that wealth should be shared.Economists have spent two centuries arguing that labor markets eventually adapt to technological change. This letter suggests many of them are beginning to question whether AI may move faster than workers can.The letter itself offers few specifics. It calls for new incentives, guardrails and institutions but leaves the details to governments. Ideas already circulating include helping workers retrain, temporarily replacing part of the wages lost when someone takes a lower-paying job after being displaced, making benefits like health insurance and retirement savings easier to carry from one employer to another, and changing tax incentives so companies have stronger reasons to use AI to augment workers rather than simply replace them. (Portability of health insurance was what the Affordable Care Act was supposed to address. As STW listeners know, the ACA is under considerable strain right now).At the heart of the debate are three questions: How quickly do jobs disappear? How quickly do new ones appear? Who carries the cost in between? The optimistic camp says technological revolutions destroy some jobs but create even better ones. The pessimistic camp says that may be true—but the long run can be a very long time if you’re the person who just lost your job.Tylenol lawsuits revivedMore than 500 lawsuits alleging that taking Tylenol during pregnancy contributed to autism or ADHD can move forward after a federal appeals court revived the cases Tuesday.The ruling does not say Tylenol causes autism. It does not resolve the underlying science. Instead, the appeals court ruled that a lower-court judge dismissed the cases too early by excluding the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses before a jury had a chance to hear the disputed evidence.That’s an important distinction. Courts decide what evidence juries are allowed to consider. Scientists decide whether a hypothesis withstands scrutiny. Those are different questions.For now, the scientific picture remains unsettled. Large reviews have not established a causal relationship between acetaminophen and autism or ADHD, and physicians continue to note that untreated fever and severe pain during pregnancy also carry risks. Tuesday’s decision changes the legal fight, not the scientific consensus.Trump backs down on child care funding freezeThe Trump administration has backed away from a plan to freeze roughly $10 billion in child-care and social-service funding for five Democratic-led states after suffering repeated defeats in federal court.The administration said it was trying to prevent fraud and stop federal money from benefiting undocumented immigrants. The states argued the White House lacked the authority to withhold money Congress had already appropriated, and federal judges repeatedly agreed.Critics also saw the freeze as an effort to pressure Democratic-led states that have opposed the administration’s immigration agenda by withholding billions of dollars in federal aid. Those five states account for roughly a third of the nation’s population, meaning millions of families could have been affected if the freeze had remained in place.For the families affected, though, the constitutional argument isn’t the first thing they notice. A child-care subsidy isn’t really about child care. It’s about whether a parent can keep showing up for work. Lose that support, and the dominoes can fall quickly: missed shifts, lost wages, even the loss of a job.The larger question is one we’ve returned to repeatedly. Once Congress appropriates money, how much discretion does a president have to decide not to spend it? Federal courts have continued to answer: not nearly as much as this administration has claimed.Four organs. Thirty-six hours. One second chance.A 28-year-old Chicago woman with cystic fibrosis underwent a 36-hour operation to receive both lungs, a liver and a kidney in what doctors say was the first procedure of its kind in Illinois and only the sixth in American history.Her name is Jasmine Jones. She thanked the anonymous donor with a sentence that captures what organ transplantation really is: “You gave your life to give a life.”Manhattanhenge belongs to everyone nowBack in 2002, Neil deGrasse Tyson began telling New Yorkers about the evenings each year when the setting sun lines up perfectly with Manhattan’s street grid. He borrowed the name “Manhattanhenge” from Stonehenge and even recommended the best viewing spot: the Tudor City overpass, where you can look straight down 42nd Street without standing in traffic.The New York Times Metropolitan Diary reports that one evening he was there explaining the phenomenon to curious onlookers when someone behind him yelled, “Down in front, sonny!”His first thought was, Without me, you wouldn’t even know this was happening.What he actually did was apologize and sit down. We have the right to work but not the fruits of that work.Update: E. Jean Carroll Gets a Check Finally Receives the MoneyNow for a few updates on some previous stories we’ve presented you.A federal court has released the $5,625,005.48 Donald Trump owed E. Jean Carroll after his efforts to block the payment failed. The money represents the original $5 million judgment—plus interest—from the 2023 civil trial in which a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll and defaming her after she publicly accused him of the assault. The money had been sitting in a court-controlled escrow account while Trump’s appeals worked their way through the legal system.Carroll marked the moment with a celebratory post on her Substack titled “The Eagle Has Landed.” She thanked her legal team and, with evident sarcasm, one of Trump’s former attorneys, Alina Habba: “I could not have done it without you.”Update: Air Force One and the Public InterestA brief update on yesterday’s story. The New York Times is now arguing that its reporting wasn’t simply about a classified aircraft. It was about whether Air Force One’s defenses against missile attacks had kept pace with modern threats. The paper says that information belongs in the public interest because Air Force One carries not only the president but hundreds of government officials, members of Congress, military personnel, journalists and others.Sparkle: Sky MirrorAnd finally, In Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, Eärendil sails to the forbidden West to beg the gods for light in a dark age — and they set him in the heavens with a burning jewel on his brow, where he becomes the Evening Star. That was how you got light from the sky in the old stories: you pleaded, and heaven decided. The FCC is the one that decided now, giving a California startup clearance to shoot Eärendil-1 into the sky. It carries a square mirror 18 meters on a side that unfolds once in orbit and tilts to bounce sunlight back down after dark — a 5-kilometer circle of full-moon glow, steered across the ground for minutes at a time. The company plans to sell the beam to solar farms that want to generate past sunset, to rescue crews, to farms now burning diesel for light. You could imagine other uses: Say you’re on the lam. Deep in the national forest, dogs a ridge back, darkness your last remaining friend — when a circle of light five kilometers wide slides over the treetops and finds you, lighting you up like the noonday sun, Dr. Kimble. One mirror delivers only moonlight. To approach daylight, the company ultimately hopes to place as many as 50,000 mirrors in orbit. Nearly 1,900 people and institutions filed objections — more than SpaceX drew for a proposed million satellites. They warned that nocturnal animals need darkness to hunt, migrate, and breed; that light at night disrupts human sleep; that a stray flash could temporarily blind pilots and drivers; and — as the FCC itself acknowledged — that if the company loses control of the satellite at the end of its mission, the mirror could tumble and sweep random flashes across the Earth for up to a year. Astronomers calculate Eärendil-1 could shine brighter than Venus — the very star the first Eärendil became. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome to Stack the Week for July 13th, Monday.The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the feedback, the emails, and the steady stream of notes. Oh and the Apple podcast reviews are helpful. They introduce us to a wider audience.If you’re reading this text on a screen instead of listening to the audio, remember that this is also designed as a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re commuting, folding laundry, or pondering what you’re going to do with all that World Cup knowledge you accumulated after next week.A brief note about Laura Doan and Annie Cohen. They have both increased the labor participation rate by finding employment in corporations larger than Dickerson Enterprises and Picayune. Congratulations to them both!Okay, let’s start.Man Made DeathsHow do you count the people who die because someone dismantled the system that would have kept them alive? That’s the question Atul Gawande raises in the latest New Yorker, borrowing a concept from historian Richard Rhodes called “public man-made death.”Examples include: the child whose malnutrition treatment never comes, the woman who dies in childbirth after her clinic closes, the tuberculosis patient whose medicine disappears. Gawande cites research from Boston University and The Lancet estimating that the dismantling of USAID has already contributed to roughly 700,000 deaths, with millions more possible if the cuts persist. Those figures remain projections and are disputed by the Trump administration and Elon Musk who ran the operation that dismantled USAID. But Gawande’s larger point survives the debate over the exact number: policy decisions can kill people just as surely as wars do.Why did we lead with this? Because our sorting criteria at the moment weighs human death– no matter what nationality of human– as a key priority. Human death as a consequence of human choices also pushes it higher.Iran is Back OnImagine you’re the captain of a 1,000-foot supertanker—longer than three football fields—or a container ship stacked 20 stories high, entering one of the most dangerous waterways on Earth. You’ve switched off your AIS transponder—the electronic beacon that normally tells nearby ships, insurers, and satellites who you are and where you’re headed. That makes you harder to target, but harder for everyone else to avoid. Collision risk rises. Rescue becomes more difficult. Insurers lose the ability to monitor your voyage in real time. Oh, and you might hit a mine or be hit by a drone.That’s why only six ships passed through the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday, the lowest daily total in five weeks. Before the war, roughly 3,000 ships crossed every month, carrying about one-fifth of the world’s oil.One of them was hit anyway. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard attacked a Cyprus-flagged container ship because it used what Iran called an unauthorized route, crippling the vessel and leaving one civilian crew member missing. Open access to the Strait of Hormuz was part of June’s ceasefire agreement. By declaring which routes are “authorized,” Iran is rewriting that agreement by force.The United States answered with a third round of strikes in a week, reportedly hitting about 140 Iranian military targets.Before February, Iran had almost no say over what moved through Hormuz. Today, it fires warning shots, dictates shipping lanes, inspects commercial traffic, and proposes charging tolls.Monday President Donald Trump declared the United States would become the “Guardian of the Hormuz Strait,” said it would charge ships a 20 percent fee for safe passage, and suggested America would effectively take responsibility for keeping the waterway open. That will take more time, money, military effort and risk, just the kind of mission-creep candidate Trump often argued had drawn previous presidents into costly, open-ended conflicts.The Financial Times reports that Dubai is planning a new port designed to reduce dependence on Hormuz altogether. They no longer see it as a passing military episode.The Washington Post reports that Israel shared intelligence with Washington, indicating that elements of Iran’s hard-line leadership want President Donald Trump dead. U.S. officials stress the intelligence reflects the views of ultra-hardliners rather than an approved assassination plot. Some officials also caution that Israel may have emphasized intelligence because it knows how President Donald Trump makes decisions: present him as the target, and he may become more receptive to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s argument that military pressure on Iran should continue.Trump dismissed the warning. “Israel came up with nothing,” he told the New York Post, while adding that he has been Iran’s “number one” target for years.Security officials worry less about an official assassination order than about a lone actor inspired by the rhetoric. A government doesn’t have to authorize an attack if one supporter decides to carry it out.A New York Times report. It says Mossad secretly recruited former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—the man who once called for Israel’s destruction—met him in Budapest, paid his expenses, hid him inside Iran after the war began, and hoped he might someday lead the country.Another ICE DeathA federal immigration agent shot and killed a man during an ICE enforcement operation Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine, after authorities say he drove his vehicle toward an officer while attempting to flee. The shooting brings to at least nine the number of people who have died during the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign. State and local officials from both parties, including Governor Janet Mills, Senator Susan Collins and Mayor Liam LaFountain, called for a full, transparent investigation. The agents were not wearing body cameras, leaving investigators without video evidence of the encounter. The shooting also comes as Minnesota prosecutors announced they have finally obtained evidence the Trump administration withheld for more than six months in two earlier fatal ICE-related shootings, while prosecutors in Houston say federal officials are still refusing to provide key evidence in another fatal ICE shooting last week.Lindsey Graham FalloutJust one day before he died, Senator Lindsey Graham was on the phone from Kyiv with CBS’s Margaret Brennan, celebrating what he believed was a breakthrough. After months of lobbying President Donald Trump, he had finally won White House backing for his bipartisan Russia sanctions bill. Twenty-four hours later, he was dead.He had suffered an acute aortic dissection—a tear in the inner wall of the aorta, the body’s largest artery. Blood had forced its way between the layers of the artery wall, causing them to separate. It is one of the deadliest cardiovascular emergencies in medicine. Roughly half of patients die before reaching a hospital. Doctors describe the pain as feeling “like a knife to the heart.”Graham had just returned from his tenth trip to Ukraine. His bipartisan sanctions bill would impose severe secondary sanctions and tariffs on countries—including China and India—that continue buying Russian oil.In the short term, Republicans effectively lose one vote. Until South Carolina appoints a successor and Senator Mitch McConnell returns from medical leave, Republicans have only a 51-47 majority on paper.Graham’s death also creates one more Senate race Democrats will at least examine. South Carolina remains a deeply Republican state. Donald Trump carried it by roughly 18 percentage points in 2024, Republicans hold every statewide elected office, and Republican Governor Henry McMaster has appointed Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, as her late brother’s temporary replacement . That makes a Democratic pickup unlikely.Even so, an open seat is almost always more competitive than one held by a well-known incumbent. Republicans may have to spend money defending South Carolina.To win the Senate, Democrats must gain four Republican-held seats while holding every Democratic seat they currently control. The key Republican targets remain North Carolina, Ohio, Maine, Alaska, Iowa and Texas, while Democrats must also defend the open seat in Michigan.The overall judgment from six pollsters and political analysts surveyed by The New York Times was consistent: Democrats remain favored to win the House, but the Senate map still tilts toward Republicans. North Carolina appears to be Democrats’ strongest pickup opportunity. Beyond that, they would likely have to win several states Donald Trump carried comfortably.McConnell SpeaksAfter four weeks of speculation, McConnell explained his absence: a fall at his Washington home on June 14 left him briefly unconscious and hospitalized, followed by a mild case of pneumonia. The 84-year-old, who survived childhood polio and has fallen repeatedly this year, said his doctors found no fractures, no stroke, no heart attack, no tumor. He’s moved to a rehabilitation center and isn’t cleared to return to the floor. His statement came with a photo — smiling beside his wife Elaine Chao, holding Sunday’s Washington Post sports section, a tacit answer to online rumors that he’d died.He addressed the long silence directly: “You all know how folks of my generation often hesitate to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older.” It took Kentucky’s Democratic governor publicly asking him to update the public to break it. McConnell is retiring in January, the longest-serving party leader in Senate history.Times SubpoenasWhen does a leak investigation become an attack on the press? That’s the question raised Friday when federal agents showed up at the homes of four New York Times reporters with subpoenas ordering them to testify before a Manhattan grand jury this Wednesday. Their reporting had revealed that President Donald Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One lacked some of the defensive systems installed on the older presidential aircraft, prompting the Secret Service to switch the President back to the older plane for part of his trip home from the NATO summit.Before publication, the FBI urged the newspaper not to publish the story, arguing it would damage national security, and demanded the identities of the reporters’ confidential sources. The Times refused. The Justice Department insists the reporters are not the targets. The targets, it says, are government officials who illegally disclosed classified information.The dispute reaches beyond whether one story should have run. News organizations argue that compelling reporters to identify confidential sources weakens one of the few independent checks on government power. Much of what the public knows about how wars are fought, intelligence agencies operate, presidents make decisions and taxpayer money is spent comes from officials willing to speak only if their identities remain protected.For decades, subpoenaing reporters was treated as an extraordinary measure reserved for the rarest circumstances. The Trump administration has revived the tactic. Earlier this year it subpoenaed reporters at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal before withdrawing those demands after court challenges.The larger question isn’t whether governments should investigate leaks. Every administration does. The question is where the line sits between protecting national secrets and protecting the independent reporting citizens rely on to understand what their government is doing. That question carries particular weight during a war, when governments naturally seek greater secrecy, and in an administration that has made aggressive use of executive power while providing relatively little visibility into its internal decision-making. If courts allow prosecutors to routinely compel journalists to reveal their sources, the consequence will reach far beyond this one airplane. It will shape what government officials are willing to reveal—and what the rest of us are able to know.Blanche Has Rough Times AheadWho does the Attorney General work for? A federal judge offered a sharp answer Monday in a 56-page ruling rejecting one of the Trump administration’s most controversial legal agreements.The case began when President Donald Trump sued the IRS over the disclosure of his tax returns. The Justice Department later announced a settlement that did far more than end that lawsuit. It granted President Trump, his family and their businesses broad protection from future IRS investigations and proposed creating a $1.8 billion fund to compensate Trump allies who claimed they had been victims of government “weaponization.” The administration later claimed to have abandoned the fund after bipartisan criticism but said the tax protections would remain.Judge Kathleen Williams ruled that the agreement was not a legitimate settlement but “an attempt to use the court to provide some legitimacy” to a deal conferring extraordinary protections on the President and those affiliated with him. The suit, she wrote, “was not brought to vindicate rights” but to “manipulate the judicial process” — an attempt to use the court “to provide some legitimacy” to a deal conferring immunity and earmarking taxpayer billions for grievances the law does not define. A lawsuit needs two opposing sides, and this one had a president suing an agency he runs. “It is risible,” she wrote, “to suggest that there was ever adverseness between the Parties.” Someone should do a count on the use of the word risible in responses to Trump administration lawsuits.She barred the parties from describing the arrangement as a “settlement,” sanctioned Trump attorney Daniel Epstein and prohibited him from practicing in the Southern District of Florida for one year. She also said she would forward her opinion to New York disciplinary authorities already investigating Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Those penalties make the decision more than an angry judicial rebuke: the judge formally concluded that the lawyers had misused the legal process.The Justice Department occupies a peculiar place in American government. The Attorney General is appointed by the President but is expected to represent the interests of the United States—not the personal legal interests of the President who appointed him.That principle and this case now sits at the center of Blanche’s confirmation hearing this week. Senators aren’t simply deciding whether to promote a nominee. They’re deciding whether the nation’s chief law enforcement officer should be someone a federal judge concluded tried to use the courts to legitimize extraordinary legal protections for the President and his family.The Family BusinessThe war in Iran has driven billions of dollars toward defense technology. At the same time, President Donald Trump’s sons have been investing in companies positioned to receive that money.A Washington Post analysis found Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump tied, mainly through two investment firms, to more than a dozen defense technology and artificial intelligence companies. Since President Trump’s election, those companies have received at least $3.2 billion in federal contracts, with another $3.1 billion available through contract options. Some are also eligible to compete for much larger pools of future Pentagon work.Some of the companies held federal contracts before the Trump sons invested. The companies say they won the work on merit, Pentagon officials say political relationships played no role, and the White House calls the reporting “the same, tired narrative.” Which, we should note, is a response not an answer.No evidence shows that Donald Trump Jr. or Eric Trump broke the law or personally steered a contract.The conflict lies elsewhere: the President is expanding military spending while members of his family hold financial interests in companies that can benefit from it.Private institutions often run on relationships or even just vibes. Government is supposed to impose a higher standard though because the money belongs to the public. Competitive bidding, career contracting officers, inspectors general, financial disclosures, congressional oversight and the press are meant to ensure that contracts follow merit rather than access.But influence does not always leave evidence of a phone call or an order. Companies know who has access. Investors anticipate where government money will move. Officials know which relationships carry political weight. Proximity can acquire value without anyone explicitly trading a favor.That is why this is not merely a story about nepotism. It is a conflict-of-interest story about a wartime spending boom, a presidential family investing inside it, and whether the safeguards separating public decisions from private gain remain strong enough to earn public trust. Or, maybe it may just be an election story. While the majority of Americans say the country’s economy isn’t working for them, this is another story where things work out well for those in power.Bangkok FireTwenty-seven people died in a Bangkok music bar Monday, and at least 25 more remain in critical condition after a fire trapped patrons inside. Investigators believe the blaze began with an electrical fault, but they’re focusing on something more familiar: whether blocked exits, flammable interior materials and poor emergency planning turned a survivable fire into a mass-casualty event. Survivors said thick smoke drove people toward the back of the building, where many became trapped in bathrooms because they couldn’t find a way out.Thailand has seen this story before. A nightclub fire in Bangkok in 2009 killed 67 people and led to promises of tougher enforcement. Yet investigators are again asking whether safety rules existed on paper but not in practice. Entertainment venues rarely become death traps because a fire starts. They become death traps when a series of small safety failures—locked doors, blocked exits, combustible decorations, poor signage—leave people with nowhere to go once it does.Ukraine Builds a Missile ShieldUkraine and nine European countries announced a new ballistic-missile-defense coalition in Paris on Monday, a concrete attempt to build the protection Ukraine needs against Russia’s expanding missile campaign. The coalition will coordinate weapons, sensors, training and financing—another sign that European governments increasingly expect the war, and the need to defend against it, to continue.President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, promised Monday to answer Ukraine’s latest attacks with strikes “several times more powerful,” signaling that he intends to escalate rather than negotiate. As we’ve discussed over the past week, Ukraine has deliberately expanded the battlefield beyond the front lines, striking oil refineries, ports and other infrastructure deep inside Russia in an effort to make the war impossible for ordinary Russians to ignore.There are signs Ukraine’s strategy is beginning to bite. The Economist reports growing frustration inside Russia over fuel shortages, internet outages and military draft raids. Gallup found a record 60 percent of Russians say their local economy is worsening—the highest level since 2006. Even with higher oil prices from the Iran war, Moscow has cut its own 2026 growth forecast from 1.3 percent to 0.4 percent, while oil and gas revenues fell 45 percent in the first quarter. One produce seller in Rostov summed up the mood: “We used to live just fine. Now all you do is scramble from one problem to the next.”Paramount BlockageThe fight over Paramount is no longer just about one company. It’s becoming a test of who gets to police media consolidation when Washington won’t. A bipartisan coalition of twelve state attorneys general sued Monday to block Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, arguing the deal would reduce competition, eliminate jobs and leave Americans with fewer choices and higher prices for entertainment. The Justice Department has already approved the merger. The Associated Press values the transaction at $81 billion; the Financial Times and others put its enterprise value, including debt, at roughly $110 billion.The combined company would place CBS and CNN, Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, HBO Max, Warner Bros., DC Studios and two of Hollywood’s major theatrical operations under one corporate roof. Supporters say only companies of that scale can compete with streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon and YouTube. Opponents argue fewer media companies mean fewer competitors for talent, fewer places to pitch ideas and fewer independent editorial institutions reporting on the government, politics and public life.Japan Spies.Donald Trump has long argued that America’s allies should rely less on Washington and do more for themselves. Japan just took him up on it. For the first time since World War II, Japan is creating a centralized intelligence agency to counter threats from China, Russia and accommodate an unpredictable U.S. partner. For a country whose 1947 constitution renounced war and whose wartime secret police left a lasting distrust of domestic surveillance, that represents a remarkable reversal.Sugar in SpaceThe universe just got a little sweeter.Astronomers announced Monday that they’ve found another sugar drifting through the vast clouds of gas and dust between the stars. It’s called erythrulose. On Earth, it’s found in raspberries and even some self-tanners. In space, it floats through the raw material from which new stars and planets eventually form. The discovery didn’t come from a photograph. Using radio telescopes, scientists detected the molecule’s unique pattern of radio frequencies—its chemical fingerprint—and matched it to measurements made in laboratories on Earth.Scientists aren’t excited because they found dessert in the Milky Way. They’re excited because sugars are among the building blocks of life. DNA itself depends on sugars. Every new one discovered in space strengthens the possibility that the chemistry needed for life isn’t unique to Earth but scattered throughout the galaxy, waiting for the right conditions to assemble itself. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome to Stack the Week for July 10th, Friday.The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the feedback and the reviews on Apple Podcasts.If you’re reading this instead of listening, remember this is also a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re driving, making dinner, or trying to lessen the cognitive load at the end of the week because frankly you’re a blob of jelly and just forming words is a challenge.Here at Stack the Whatever We Call it, we have the words.Thank you to Laura Doan for helping me bolt all of this together.Iran Again off AgainThe repetitive rhythm of this war—attack, retaliation, ceasefire, collapse—invites a danger. Every day feels like yesterday, so we stop asking key questions.Wake me when the war’s over.This hands over our critical faculties to the people who try to confuse us. So I’m going to give you the news and then try to knock us all out of our presentism.First, the news: The U.S. hit more than 170 targets in Iran over two days. Iran answered the recent U.S. attacks with missiles and drones at bases in four countries—Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan—including Qatar, the mediator of the talks it’s still supposedly conducting.The US attack included a railway bridge —civilian infrastructure, not just military hardware. Central Command says the bridge moved weapons toward the Strait; Dana Stroul, the Pentagon’s former top Middle East official, told The New York Times the strike was a message that Iran’s bridges and railways are now targets.Problem: attacks on civilian infrastructure could constitute war crimes. The administration is trying to write around that by saying the civilian infrastructure is dual use. On the other hand, who will take the U.S. to court?In last month’s memorandum of understanding the U.S. gave Iran sanctions relief in return for its assurance that it would allow free use of the Strati of Hormuz.Iran cheated, taking the relief while trying to keep control of the Strait by forcing shippers onto an Iran-approved route and when tankers didn’t take that route Iran attacked, as it did with three commercial ships earlier this week.That’s the news. Here’s the 30,000-foot view:One of the world’s worst regimes—one that murders and suppresses its own people, funds terrorists abroad, and seeks to build the means to do both more effectively with missiles and nukes—has been significantly degraded.The costs of the degradation are:Death.A thirst for revenge implanted in an entirely new Iranian generation.Destabilization of the world economy.Further deterioration of the American public’s faith that their leaders will tell them the truth about the highest-stakes actions taken in their name.Missile stockpiles—both the interceptors that defend and the weapons that attack—have dwindled, weakening the United States and its allies against every other threat.Russian oil allowed to flow, propping up a regime that kills Ukrainians.Hardliners are in power in Tehran. Nobody in Washington can say who they’ll be negotiating with in five years.The U.S. has publicly claimed the right to hit bridges and power plants under a dual-use theory, a precedent Russia and China can now cite back at us.Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan absorbed attacks on their own soil for hosting American forces, a bill that will come due.Congress never voted—four months of war, 170 targets in two days, and the constitutional question has simply been steamrolled.The war has also consumed something harder to measure but just as finite: American attention. Attention is finite. Every hour, intelligence asset, diplomat, or Patriot battery devoted to Iran isn’t available for China, Ukraine, or the next crisis.Was it worth it? And was it worth it the way it has been done? Could it have been done no other way? The only way to come up with an honest answer is to keep the question right at the end of our nose.Making a final calculation also depends on what finally comes of diplomatic negotiations (let’s not call them peace talks or a ceasefire—those words have lost the snap in the waistband).Finally, and I know I mentioned it earlier in the week, but as the war heats up, I return to the spin from the administration and its allies: that when Donald Trump signed the June Memorandum of Understanding, it was a savvy move to quiet the war’s impact in advance of the November elections. That spin was folly at the time and today’s news reminds us why. It’s a double folly really: the happy talk of 18 dimensional electoral chess strategy echoes the original criticism of the war—that it was built on happy talk, fantastical outcomes and incapable of hard thinking about long-term and unintended consequences.Houston Shooting UpdateWe told you Tuesday about the Houston construction worker who was fatally shot by an ICE agent during a traffic stop. The Department of Homeland Security initially said the driver had tried to run over an officer with his van, forcing the agent to fire in self-defense.The update: in reporting by The Washington Post and the Associated Press, the three men who were in the van have now given detailed, consistent accounts disputing that version, saying the van never drove toward an officer and that agents opened fire from the side of the vehicle. There is still no body-camera footage. ICE says the agents involved had not yet been issued body cameras, even though the agency has adopted a policy requiring their use where they have been deployed. ICE has not released other evidence supporting its account.Body cameras matter here because they reduce the space where competing official and eyewitness narratives can survive indefinitely. In ordinary policing, video increasingly settles factual disputes within days. Immigration enforcement still operates in many places without that evidentiary backstop, leaving the public to judge credibility instead of evidence.Several other fatal encounters involving ICE agents are also in dispute, with similar claims that victims acted aggressively toward officers. In the case of two incidents in Minneapolis, reporting later showed that video evidence contradicted key parts of ICE’s initial account.Election Assistance CommissionDonald Trump fired the remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Friday. If your reaction was, “The what?”, you’re not alone.Congress created the commission after the disputed 2000 Bush-Gore election, not to run elections—despite the repeated efforts by president Trump that remains the responsibility of the states—but to make elections run better. The EAC tests and certifies voting machines, distributes election-security grants, maintains the national voter registration form, shares best practices with thousands of local election officials, and coordinates efforts to protect election systems from cyberattacks.The immediate practical effect may be limited. States will still run this November’s elections, and the commission has operated without a full slate of commissioners before. The larger story is what this says about the long-running fight over who gets to shape American elections. President Trump has repeatedly argued that elections need stronger safeguards against illegal voting, including requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register.Those in touch with the data and facts respond that documented cases of noncitizen voting and other forms of voter fraud are exceedingly rare. Democrats say requirements of the kind Trump is advocating risk making it harder for eligible citizens to vote. Federal courts have already blocked parts of the administration’s effort to impose document requirements through executive order, saying the Constitution largely leaves the conduct of elections to Congress and the states.This is one of the first major tests of the Supreme Court’s recent expansion of presidential authority to remove leaders of independent federal agencies. We know that Donald Trump has a history of repeated claims that elections were rigged when there is no evidence. Removing experts who could fact-check him allows his evidence-free claims to flourish in an environment where being loud and wrong is more powerful than facts or reason.Trump and Housing BillIf the Election Assistance Commission isn’t really about elections anymore, maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that the housing bill isn’t really about housing anymore either.Hours after firing the commissioners, Donald Trump refused to sign Congress’s bipartisan housing bill—not because he objected to anything in it, but because the Senate had failed to pass his SAVE America Act, which he says would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote.The housing bill will become law anyway at midnight because Trump chose neither to sign nor veto it, foregoing a chance to boast about an issue close to people’s election year concerns.So what does that mean for housing costs? Probably not much this year. The bill tries to increase housing supply over time by making it easier and cheaper to build homes, easing federal regulations, encouraging local governments to permit more construction, and limiting some large institutional purchases of single-family homes. Economists generally see it as a useful, incremental supply bill—not one that will noticeably lower your rent or mortgage in the near future.The larger point is the one we’ve been talking about all week. Increasingly, legislation isn’t judged on its own merits. It becomes leverage in a fight about something else. In this case, one of the largest bipartisan housing bills in decades has been turned by the president into something else. The thing that might help people with the necessity they care about most is overshadowed by a phantom problem that gains them nothing.EbolaIn the United States or Europe, an Ebola case sets off a rapid, almost choreographed response: teams fan out, contacts are traced within hours, names logged on clipboards, temperatures checked, patients isolated before the virus can move. In eastern Congo, clinics in the conflict zone are attacked. Roads are unsafe. Contact lists are incomplete or nonexistent. House-to-house searches begin late and proceed slowly. Four out of five new patients were never on any tracing list at all, meaning the virus is spreading unseen. The World Health Organization now estimates the outbreak could already be two to four times larger than the official numbers. The latest news: Suspected cases have now appeared in provinces where the virus hadn’t been seen before, and one of those cases has no obvious connection to the known outbreak.That doesn’t mean Ebola is about to become a global pandemic. Ebola remains difficult to spread; it requires close contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids, unlike an airborne virus such as COVID. But outbreaks like this remind us that conflict doesn’t just kill people directly. It also dismantles the ordinary machinery—clinics, surveillance, trust, transportation, and paid health workers—that keeps dangerous diseases from becoming much larger ones.White House UFC Attack PlotLast month, with spectators crowding the White House lawn and surrounding a ring where fighters were beating each other bloody, another group had a very different spectacle in mind: explosive-laden drones flying into the crowd, followed by sniper fire aimed at panicked people trying to escape. Their alleged target list included President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Elon Musk, and other senior officials.Fortunately, they never got anywhere close. According to an indictment unsealed Friday, investigators uncovered the plot four days before the event, arrested the alleged participants across multiple states, and have now charged eight men in a single conspiracy case.Stocks and Real EstateStocks now make up 34% of American household wealth — the highest share ever recorded. Real estate, which held American wealth for generations, has fallen to 26%. That 8-point gap is also a record. The figures come from Barclays’ Alexander Altmann on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, flagged by co-host Tracy Alloway in the show’s newsletter on Friday.For most of modern American history, the family home held the family’s wealth. Now the stock market does. That changes what a crash means or even daily market fluctuations. When wealth lived in houses, a crash hurt people who owned stocks. Now it hurts almost everyone, because people spend based on how wealthy they feel — and when portfolios shrink, spending stops. Altmann says a 20% drop in the S&P 500 wipes out about $16 trillion, half of what the US economy produces in a year.Politicians now have more reason than ever to keep stock prices from falling, because a crash punishes voters, not just investors. And stock prices are high right now largely because investors expect AI companies to make huge profits someday. Those profits haven’t arrived. If they never do, stock prices fall, families that hold their savings in stocks get poorer, and they cut their spending. That’s how disappointment about one technology could shrink the whole economy.Man Sucked from Plane“I love you so much I would grab your legs and refuse to let go if you were sucked through a plane window.” As a marriage vow, that would be highly specific and somewhat odd. And yet you’d want it pressed with a rose in your wedding album if you found yourself where a 61-year-old Serbian man found himself on Friday: five minutes with his head outside a Boeing 737 at altitude. He is alive because his wife grabbed his legs and refused to let go. The New York Times reported this, God love them.The window next to his seat came apart shortly after the plane left Thessaloniki, Greece, bound for Memmingen, Germany. The escaping cabin air pulled his upper body through the opening. Other passengers helped his wife drag him back inside. The plane, a Ryanair subsidiary Malta Air flight, turned around and landed in Thessaloniki. The man is in a hospital with friction burns, conscious.Ryanair confirmed the window “dislodged inflight” but did not address how a paying customer ended up partially outside the aircraft, a class of service that was not on his ticket and which you can’t really purchase at any price. Boeing says it’s in contact with the airline, so that’s comforting.A plane at cruising altitude keeps its cabin pressurized to feel like it would at 6,000–8,000 feet while the air outside is far thinner. When a window fails, the high-pressure cabin air rushes out through the hole, and it takes anything nearby with it — papers, phones, a61 year old Serbian man. If you’re seated next to the breach when this happens, the pull is strongest in the first seconds, then weakens once cabin and outside pressure equalize.The person stuck in the opening faces three problems at once: air roaring past at hundreds of miles an hour, thin air with too little oxygen, and cold that can hit 60 below. The immediate killer, when there is one, is usually blunt-force trauma — the body slamming against the fuselage. Upsides include: that windblown look, a strong narrative spine for dinner conversation and the grace of seeing the world through the fresh recollection that our time in it is fleeting.How often does this happen? Almost never. In 2018 a Southwest passenger did die, but it was the first passenger fatality on a US airline in nine years. The most famous precedent is stranger still: in 1990, a British Airways windscreen blew out and the captain was sucked halfway out of the cockpit; a flight attendant held his ankles for 20 minutes until landing, and the captain survived and returned to flying. Commercial windows are built in multiple layers precisely so one crack doesn’t open a hole, which is why investigators will want to know what happened to this one.Even though this is rare, we’d be letting you down if we didn’t arm you with some practical knowledge. The first thing to do is marry well. The man’s wife did what you’re supposed to do. As a general matter the instructions are this: If someone near you is being pulled toward a breach, do not maintain an ironic distance. Grab and hold! The initial suction fades within seconds as pressure equalizes, so surviving the first moments is most of the battle. Oh, and put your own oxygen mask on first; at cruising altitude you have perhaps 15–30 seconds of useful consciousness without it, and you can’t hold anyone’s legs while blacking out. Stay belted — the seatbelt is what keeps the hole from getting you in the first place. Then wait: pilots train for exactly this, and the plane will descend fast to thicker air where everyone can breathe.That Air Force One NewsIn other plane news, you might have heard that President Trump flew home from the NATO summit on the old Air Force One instead of the new Boeing 747 donated by Qatar. Apparently, it lacks some of the sophisticated missile countermeasures found on the older presidential aircraft. This is just a temporary presidential aircraft. The permanent replacement planes, still under construction by Boeing, are expected to include the full suite of defensive systems.Wait. How can another country give the president an airplane? Doesn’t the Constitution prohibit that?The Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause bars federal officeholders from accepting gifts from foreign governments without Congress’s consent. The Trump administration argues the aircraft was accepted by the U.S. government—not by Donald Trump personally—and that it is being used as government property during his presidency before eventually being transferred to his presidential library after he leaves office. This feels a little like putting your hands over your eyes and thinking no one can see you. It’s a gift, called one thing while Trump is in office and then another when he keeps it upon leaving.Farage Bin ChallengeOn Monday we told you about Nigel Farage’s decision to resign his seat in Parliament and force a special election, arguing that voters—not Parliament’s ethics watchdog—should judge the questions surrounding the gifts and cash he received from interested parties.Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats have refused to give in to his stunt and field candidates. So, one of Farage’s highest-profile opponents is now Count Binface, a candidate who campaigns dressed as a giant trash can (or bin as the Brits call it when they’re not saying alluminium). Binface describes himself as an intergalactic warrior from the planet Sigma IX. His platform includes moving a badly placed hand dryer in a local pub, capping the price of croissants, bringing back the old BBC teletext service, and, for reasons known only to Count Binface, nationalizing Adele.Binface is in the tradition of UK novelty candidates—including Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony Party. In 2002, a man dressed as a monkey was elected mayor of Hartlepool.Now, nobody likes a good laugh more than I do... except, perhaps, my wife... and some of her friends. Oh, yes, and Captain Johnson. Come to think of it, most people like a good laugh more than I do, but that’s beside the point.It falls upon me to remind you that the reason Farage has so many people up in arms is that his platform—and the platform of his Reform UK party—isn’t a joke. It calls for Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, sharply reduce immigration, detain and deport people arriving illegally, abandon Net Zero policies, expand domestic oil and gas production, cut taxes, and take a harder line on crime.The Bayeux Tapestry’s Secret JourneyJust before three o’clock Friday morning, a yellow truck backed through the gates of the British Museum under police escort. Inside the truck was a cage. Inside the cage was a crate. Inside the crate was another crate. Inside that was a metal shell containing a 950-year-old, 225-foot-long piece of embroidery, folded back and forth 28 times like the world’s most valuable accordion.The Bayeux Tapestry had arrived in England, on loan while the museum housing it—which John Dickerson failed to visit while he was on a shoot and staying in Bayeux because he was just too tired and had a really long day ahead of him—undergoes a 2 year renovation.The tapestry is one of the great survivors of Western civilization: an embroidered eyewitness account of William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066—the Battle of Hastings, Halley’s Comet, warships crossing the English Channel, cavalry charges, and the death of King Harold. Think of it as Europe’s oldest graphic novel.Moving it was an engineering project worthy of NASA, according to Chris Heath’s remarkable reporting in National Geographic. The tapestry was cushioned by giant vibration-dampening springs, monitored by sensors measuring every bump, and driven under police escort through the Channel Tunnel after multiple full-scale rehearsal trips.All this for an object that, during the French Revolution, was nearly used to cover a wagon, was once almost cut into strips to decorate a parade float, survived Napoleon, and later survived Hitler. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome to Stack the Week for July 9th, Thursday. The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the feedback and the reviews on Apple Podcasts. If you’re reading this instead of listening, remember this is also a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re driving, making dinner, or concluding that you really haven’t done enough to decide what your new look for summer is going to be.Thank you to Laura Doan for helping me bolt all of this together.I usually start with a big thought connecting the day’s events that I can roll at you to say I am Lazarus, come from the dead. I’m not seeing it in the entrails today. I don’t want to force one and then have one, settling a pillow by her head, say, “That is not it, at all.”So, get yourself a peach and follow along with what happened, sorted through our way.Iran is a big mess againThe ceasefire stopped organizing the Iran war. Now we’re back to a more dangerous process of watching each side calculate which has more leverage and how to get more.For the last few weeks, every new development was measured against the question: Would the ceasefire hold?Now we are back to a familiar formula: Iran cannot match the United States bomb for bomb. It doesn’t have to. It has its hand around the throat of something the rest of the world cannot afford to lose: the Strait of Hormuz.I won’t bore you with the shipping math. The world needs what moves through that narrow stretch of water. And Iran doesn’t have to close the strait to use it. It only has to make ship captains, insurers, energy traders, and presidents nervous.That’s why the June memorandum of understanding–—the ceasefire that lifted the American naval blockade, and reopened the Strait— mattered more than it first appeared. It wasn’t simply an agreement. It was an acknowledgment that the Strait itself had become one of the central prizes in the conflict. And as acute listeners will know, it was not a prize before the conflict because it was not an issue of contention.Even as the formal truce collapsed into open conflict, high-level mediators from Qatar, Pakistan, and Egypt kept lines of communication open around the clock. The war and the negotiations are no longer alternating; they are happening simultaneously.The problem was not that Washington failed to imagine Iran’s leverage. The problem was that it acted as if American military superiority could make that leverage irrelevant. That’s a big mistake and a big one for Donald Trump who presents himself as having a killer instinct that understands all possibilities.So now that President Trump has declared the ceasefire over, what are the choices now? The United States can try to degrade Iran’s ability to threaten shipping, do the slow, hard work of reopening the Strait, and rob Iran of its leverage. Or it can escalate the bombing in the hope of forcing the regime to yield. The Iranian regime can continue asking its people to absorb the pain while betting it can disrupt the Strait long enough for pressure from the world economy—and perhaps from the approaching November election—to produce better terms.Ukraine’s Strategic ShiftThe lesson of the Iran war—if we can’t beat your army, we’ll attack the system that keeps it fighting—is playing out in Ukraine too.Ukraine is going after the machinery that lets Russia keep fighting: oil depots, refineries, fuel terminals, tankers, rail links, and the supply lines that keep Crimea and the front fed.On Thursday, Ukrainian drones hit more Russian oil facilities and set two oil tankers ablaze in the Sea of Azov. Fires broke out at oil sites prompting evacuations, while one tanker continued burning after its crew fled.President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calls the campaign “long-range sanctions.” If sanctions are supposed to squeeze the revenue and supply lines that sustain war, Ukraine is now trying to do with drones what Western governments have tried to do with finance.Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries and fuel infrastructure have helped trigger gasoline shortages, rationing, and long lines in multiple Russian regions. Foreign Policy reports that Ukraine has hit Russian oil refineries 194 times this year—11 times as often as during the same period last year—and that more than half of Russia’s regions have reported fuel shortages, rationing, or restrictions on civilian sales.This is the change in the war. Ukraine is no longer only trying to stop Russian advances at the front. It is trying to make the front harder for Russia to supply. I don’t know what to do with this exactly, but for years, Ukraine’s allies worried that striking inside Russia would escalate the war. How worried should we be about escalation now?The lesson isn’t being lost on the rest of NATO. On Thursday, at a NATO summit, Germany announced it will buy American Tomahawk cruise missiles, giving it—for the first time since the Cold War—a ground-based weapon capable of striking targets more than 1,000 miles away. Since NATO was created to counter the Russian threat, those 1,000 miles might be measured straight into Russia.European allies also pledged billions of dollars to develop their own long-range strike systems. Europe is drawing the same lesson Ukraine has learned by necessity: in modern war, holding an enemy’s logistics, industry and infrastructure at risk may matter as much as defeating its armies at the front.President Trump said Wednesday that the United States would give Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriot air-defense systems. A license is not a shield over Kyiv: A top Ukrainian official warned that it could take a year or more to produce Patriot interceptor missiles.Fire in the Land of ShoesChina’s shoe capital became the site of one of the country’s deadliest industrial accidents in years Thursday.A fire tore through the Huiteng shoe factory in China’s Fujian Province, killing 28 people. More than 200 workers escaped or were rescued, but many were trapped as flames spread through the multi-story building. The fire broke out in Jinjiang, a city whose factories produced more than 1.2 billion pairs of shoes last year—roughly one out of every five pairs made anywhere in the world.Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered what state media called an “all-out” rescue effort and demanded that those responsible be held accountable. Authorities arrested the factory owner and other managers, froze the company’s assets, and opened an investigation into what caused the fire.Preliminary findings suggest the blaze started on the building’s ground floor. Officials said materials such as rubber soles, adhesives, and chemical solvents used in shoe production helped it spread rapidly, while firefighters told state television that large quantities of stored materials had been piled into stairwells, slowing both evacuations and rescue efforts.The speed of the government’s response reflects a familiar pattern in China. Major industrial accidents often produce an immediate promise of accountability, arrests of local managers, and a national investigation. The harder question usually comes later: whether the findings lead to broader changes in workplace safety or simply identify people to blame.Perhaps not the Time for a Fruit HabitFood has become remarkably good at traveling across America. Unfortunately, so have the things that sometimes come with it.Health officials are investigating one of the country’s largest cyclospora outbreaks in years after nearly 1,000 people in Michigan and hundreds more in neighboring Ohio became sick with a parasite that causes severe diarrhea. More than 40 people have been hospitalized, but no one has died. Officials still don’t know what food caused the outbreak.Cyclospora exposes a weakness in the modern food system. By the time people become sick—sometimes two weeks after eating contaminated food—the lettuce, basil, cilantro, berries or other produce that carried the parasite has long since been harvested, shipped, sold and eaten. One contaminated ingredient may have passed through multiple distributors into grocery stores and restaurants across dozens of states before investigators even know an outbreak exists.Tracing the source is unusually difficult. The parasite cannot be grown in a laboratory, many routine tests don’t look for it, and investigators often discover that the only thing hundreds of patients shared was a single ingredient hidden inside dozens of different meals. Sometimes they never find the source.The defenses are modest: Wash produce, though washing may not remove this parasite. Peel what you can. Skip pre-cut produce during an outbreak. And if diarrhea lingers after a meal of fresh produce, tell your doctor what you ate. Sometimes the most important clue isn’t in a lab result—it’s in your last meal.Participation PuzzlerThe unemployment rate tells you how many people are looking for work and can’t find it.The labor-force participation rate tells you something different: How many Americans are even in the game? It measures the share of adults who either have a job or are actively trying to get one. Stop looking, and you disappear from both the labor force and the unemployment rate. Your family, however, will still expect you at dinner.That’s why economists watch it so closely. A falling unemployment rate usually signals a healthy economy. A falling participation rate can mean people aren’t finding work, can’t work, or no longer think work is worth pursuing.USA Today highlighted just how dramatic that shift has become. In June, roughly 720,000 Americans left the labor force, pushing the participation rate down to 61.5 percent. Outside the pandemic, that’s the lowest level in nearly half a century.Why are they leaving? No one agrees. Some are retiring as America ages. Some have left work to care for children or aging parents. Some are living with chronic illness or disability. Others have concluded that after paying for childcare, transportation, housing, and food, a full-time job simply doesn’t add up.Whatever the reason, those Americans haven’t disappeared. They still need income, housing, healthcare and food. The question is who now carries that burden: a spouse, parents, savings, credit cards, disability programs, or Social Security.The labor market may have enough jobs. The deeper question is whether those jobs actually match the skills, pay expectations, and life circumstances of the people available to fill them—and whether enough Americans can, or want to, take them.For generations, the American promise was simple: if you were willing to work, there would be a place for you—and that work would buy stability, independence, and a shot at something better. If hundreds of thousands of Americans are now stepping away—not because they are unwilling, but because the math no longer adds up—then this isn’t a labor-market story. It’s a question of whether work still works.Platner BlindnessThe New York Times has reconstructed the rise and collapse of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign, and its reporting suggests the implosion was not caused by one revelation but by a repeated failure of vetting. Again and again, campaign advisers, Democratic officials, donors and allied organizations asked Platner the same question: Is there anything else? Again and again, they were told no. Again and again, there was something else.The allegations and controversies were different—a Nazi-linked tattoo, inflammatory online posts, sexual messages, accounts from former girlfriends, and finally a rape allegation that Platner denies. What linked them was not their subject matter but the campaign’s inability to anticipate them. The Times reports that key advisers believed a thorough background investigation had been done. In reality, much of the vetting depended on what the candidate disclosed about himself.That distinction matters beyond one Senate race. Every campaign constructs a story about its candidate. Good vetting is an effort to destroy that story before opponents do. It assumes the candidate may be wrong, forgetful, embarrassed, or simply unwilling to tell the whole truth. The purpose isn’t to protect the candidate. It’s to protect everyone else who decides to invest their reputation in that candidate. In campaigns that call themselves movements, that means protecting the movement from becoming captive to one person’s blind spots—or the blind spots of the people closest to him.By the time Democrats began asking whether there was “anything else,” the campaign no longer controlled the answer. The press did. The next question isn’t simply who replaces Platner on the ballot. It’s whether Democrats treat this as a lesson about better vetting or turn it into another chapter in the party’s long-running argument over whether outsider, grassroots candidates or establishment candidates make better nominees. If Platner’s collapse becomes evidence in that larger ideological fight instead of a lesson about how campaigns should examine their own candidates, the damage won’t end with one Senate race.Cartel DronesIn Mexico, drones are not changing a war between states. They are changing what happens when the state is absent.Cartels have used drones before—primarily for surveillance and, in recent years, to drop explosives—but attacks like the one in Guerrero show how routine and destructive that tactic has become.At 6 a.m. Wednesday, as the sun came up over the mountains of Guerrero, bombs began falling from cartel drones on a cluster of rural communities. Residents had spent weeks warning state authorities that La Nueva Familia Michoacana was closing in. They posted videos of cartel drones overhead. They shared locations of cartel fighters approaching their homes.Help did not come.So a group of more than 70 residents hid in an abandoned medical clinic– women, children, and elderly residents– huddled while explosions and gunfire sounded outside. Others sheltered in churches. “While some are celebrating goals, others are getting massacred by drones carrying bombs,” one woman told the Associated Press. The World Cup cities in Mexico were secure; places like Guerrero were not.Authorities have not confirmed how many people were killed in the attack, and early reports focused more on the scale of the assault and the displacement of residents than on a verified death toll.Authorities initially denied the attacks, even as residents livestreamed gunfire and smoke from mountain lookout posts. After the AP asked about the reports, Mexico’s Security Cabinet said forces were heading to the area to verify the situation and strengthen the state presence.In the absence of government protection, residents formed a self-defense group. But that solution carries its own corruption. The vigilantes have been armed by rival cartels fighting La Nueva Familia Michoacana for territory. They carry military-grade weapons smuggled from the United States, grenades, and drones of their own.So the village is not choosing between the state and the cartel. It is choosing among armed powers, none of them fully protective, all of them dangerous.Eswatini ImmigrationSometimes, when Americans are asked to care about a country far away, someone inevitably says, “Most people couldn’t even find it on a map.” I’ve always disliked that argument. Your inability to locate a country should not determine whether you care about actions taken there in your name.Which brings us to Eswatini, a kingdom of about 1.2 million people, wedged between South Africa and Mozambique.This week it accepted another 11 people deported from the United States, making this the fourth group of deportees Eswatini has taken in under an agreement with the Trump administration. None of them are citizens of Eswatini, which means they are being sent to a country where they likely have no family ties, may not speak the local languages, and have no established support networks. Many cannot easily be returned to their own countries. Under the agreement, they are expected to remain in Eswatini while their cases are worked out.For generations, immigration detention has largely happened inside the American legal system. People were held in American detention centers, under American rules, with access—however imperfect—to American courts.Now another model is emerging. The United States is increasingly asking other countries to perform part of that function instead.We’ve seen versions of this before. Australia has processed asylum seekers offshore. Britain tried to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. Italy has pursued migrant processing in Albania. The details differ, but they all ask the same institutional question: When governments run into legal, political, or practical limits at home, do they move the function somewhere else?The Trump administration has reached agreements with nearly two dozen countries to accept third-country deportees. Eswatini is one of the most active participants. Human-rights groups say the secrecy surrounding these arrangements makes it difficult to know where people are being sent, what conditions they face, or what legal protections they have once they arrive—raising the possibility that individuals could be held for long periods with little oversight or recourse, even as the Eswatini government says it is acting lawfully and on humanitarian grounds.As an example of the kinds of thing that can go wrong, migrants deported from the U.S. and detained in a hotel in Equatorial Guinea say that authorities there also have used the facility to quarantine at least one suspected Ebola patient, deportees and lawyers representing them said Thursday.Peanut Butter FloorOne of the easiest ways to make people look at something is to tell them it’s important. Dutch artist Wim T. Schippers spent a career trying the opposite.A museum in Rotterdam this week covered a 270-square-foot floor with more than 800 pounds of peanut butter—enough for roughly 15,000 sandwiches—to recreate one of Schippers’ best-known works after his death last month. Museum staff told visitors simply to “follow the smell.”The work, first created in 1969, has no hidden message. Schippers insisted the peanut butter be spread “as smoothly and boringly as possible.” He once said, “Isn’t it fantastic that we are all standing here looking at peanut butter?”Schippers believed art had become too serious, too eager to declare everything profound. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, he spent decades directing people’s attention toward things that seemed almost aggressively unimportant: a bottle of lemonade poured into the sea, a floor covered in peanut butter, absurd television programs, even voicing Ernie and Kermit the Frog in the Dutch version of Sesame Street.Most artists try to persuade you that ordinary things contain hidden meaning. Schippers asked a different question: What if simply paying attention is enough? In 1969, that was a prank on profundity. Then the world changed around the joke. In an economy engineered to harvest every spare second of human attention, standing in a room looking at peanut butter is no longer nothing. Schippers spent a career insisting his work meant nothing. In celebrating him, we have discovered that the work is also useful.UpdateA little update on that Manhattan skyscraper that listeners have been following closely. We’ll let the New York Times take it from here.“A developer behind the Midtown office conversion project that suffered structural damage on Tuesday played down the problems in an interview, saying there was never a danger of a building collapse and that he expected the project to be delayed for only a few weeks.“This incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap,” Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, said on Tuesday evening. “It happens unfortunately far too often on construction sites: falling cranes, people — God forbid — falling off buildings, windows falling out.”God forbid.Editorial NoteOne editorial note before we go.President Trump ended the NATO summit sounding markedly warmer toward America’s European allies than he had when he arrived. He spoke of the “respect and the love in the room,” adding, “They like the job I’m doing,” and described the summit as showing “tremendous unity.”We could spend the next ten minutes asking whether he meant it, whether it was tactical, whether European leaders believed it, or whether it signals another turn in American foreign policy.I decided not to.There is simply too much else to understand. What countries actually do matters more than what everyone spends a day guessing the president really meant. Germany is buying Tomahawks. Europe is investing billions in long-range strike weapons. Ukraine is trying to manufacture Patriots. Iran is trying to use the Strait of Hormuz as leverage. Those are durable facts. They will shape events long after today’s interpretations of presidential tone have disappeared.One of the hardest editorial decisions every day is deciding what not to chase. With a President who lies as often as you and I receive and expel breaths, the challenge is greater. He is a deeply consequential figure, but his words are not. Today, I chose to spend our time on the machinery rather than the mood. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome to Stack the Week for July 8th, Wednesday, which is still not Friday.The experiment continues. Thank you for the feedback and the reviews on Apple Podcasts. If you’re reading this instead of listening, remember this is also a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re driving, making dinner, or finally finishing that wooden boat you’ve been building in the basement since the Hoover administration.Thank you to Laura Doan for helping me put this together.We sort the news into sections to make it manageable. Foreign news over here. Markets over there. Elections down at the local level, run by county clerks. The world doesn’t work that way:The Iran war is across the globe but hit us in our gas tank on Wednesday. A president gave away a private company’s license. Federal officials crossed the boundaries into state-level election decisions. In Maine, a candidate and the party are each drawing a different line. Detention centers can’t detain viruses. Viruses don’t stay inside detention centers…… Only the inhabitants of the worst corners of the internet were content to stay inside their box.The Iran war arrives on Wall StreetOn Wednesday, President Trump declared the ceasefire with Iran “over” and promised to “hit them hard again tonight.” Speaking at the NATO summit in Ankara, he called Iran’s leaders “scum,” “sick people,” and “vicious, violent people,” adding: “And if they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it.” Tehran answered that it would not negotiate under military threat. “The era of bullying and extortion is over,” said Iran’s parliament speaker. “It leads nowhere. We don’t fold.”Events on Wednesday proceeded from the exchange of fire on Tuesday. Iran fired on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. forces answered by striking more than 80 Iranian targets—air defenses, coastal radar, and dozens of Revolutionary Guard boats. Iran then launched missiles and drones Wednesday at American bases in Bahrain and Kuwait.Brent crude jumped about eight percent—its largest one-day increase since this phase of the conflict began. Earlier spikes in this conflict had been roughly two to three percent.The Dow fell roughly 800 points. Higher oil prices eventually reach trucking companies, airlines, manufacturers, farmers, grocery distributors, and ultimately consumers. Traders were no longer pricing isolated attacks. They were pricing the possibility of a prolonged conflict that could repeatedly disrupt oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. How much will corporate profits sink, or will they pass along the higher prices?NBC News reported Tuesday that the Defense Department, with a budget of nearly a trillion dollars, is running out of cash. Defense officials asked Congress for more than $67 billion. Lawmakers haven’t approved it, in part out of frustration over how little the administration tells them about the war.Ukraine gets a license, not missilesRussia fired ballistic missiles at Kyiv Tuesday night into Wednesday—the third attack on the capital in less than a week. The strikes exploited the shortage we talked about Monday: Ukraine can shoot down ballistic missiles only with Patriot interceptors, and it is running out of them. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has spent six months asking Washington both for more Patriot interceptors and for permission to build his own.Lockheed Martin builds roughly 600 Patriot interceptors a year. Russia builds roughly 120 ballistic missiles a month—and recently fired 30 in a single night. Everyone defending against ballistic missiles draws from that same limited supply. Gulf states have fired more than 1,100 Patriots defending against Iran, and every interceptor the production line replaces for the Gulf is one that can’t protect the golden church domes of Kyiv.At the summit Wednesday, President Trump granted the license—while ruling out more American missiles, because “we need them for ourselves too.” He announced the license before telling Lockheed Martin, the company whose technology he had just promised away.A license, however, is not a missile. Trump claimed new U.S. plants could stand up production in two to three months. Lockheed Martin’s expansion of its existing line will not reach 2,000 interceptors a year until 2030. It remains unclear whether the license covers interceptors, the full Patriot system, or where production would happen. And a missile factory in Ukraine would sit inside the range of the weapons it is meant to stop. Or, Russians could seize production and use it themselves.In the main, the Trump complain was mainly aimed at Spain. The U.S. president continued his long-running push for NATO members to increase defense spending. Spain is the only alliance member that has not committed to spending 5 percent of GDP on defense by 2035.“I don’t want anything to do with Spain,” he said. “Cut off all trade with Spain, please, including visits.”But it is unclear whether Trump could single out Spain, the European Union’s fourth-largest economy, without threatening the broader U.S. trade relationship with the EU’s 27 member countries. The president has made similar threats toward Spain before without following through.The DOJ sends 51 lettersThe Justice Department warned every top election official in the country Tuesday that they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting.The threat targets a crime that, like overcrowding at a seance or unicorn stampedes, doesn’t exist. Noncitizen voting is already a federal crime—punishable by prison and, for the voter, deportation. That is why it rarely happens. State audits, including in Republican-led states, have found noncitizen voting to be extremely rare, and every state already has procedures to prevent it.So why would the head of the Civil Rights Division bang out a directive on the keyboard? For the same reason World Cup Soccer players flop all over on the ground and pretend they’ve been fouled.President Trump has spent years claiming that elections he loses are rigged. Republicans are not favored in November’s midterms. If the Justice Department is already telling states they could be prosecuted for allowing noncitizens to vote, then after the election it can point to those warnings and argue that any Republican loss was caused by illegal noncitizen voting.The pushback is bipartisan. Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state called the letters insulting to county recorders. Utah’s Republican chief election official, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, described “another love letter” from the DOJ and called the threats “truly bizarre behavior” from “the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”The letters follow a losing streak. The department has sued 30 states and D.C. for their voter rolls and has yet to win a case. Eleven federal courts have dismissed its demands, and the department lost its first appeal. Courts also blocked key parts of Trump’s executive order that sought to restrict mail voting. The department keeps losing for the same reason: the Constitution assigns the running of elections to the states.Five DaysYou can tell a live oyster from a dead one with a tap. A live oyster snaps shut. A dead one gapes. Within hours the meat begins to rot, announcing itself to everyone huddled over a Red Stripe looking for solace.Which brings us to the dying candidacy of the Democratic nominee for Maine’s Senate seat.Graham Platner farms oysters for a living. Since Monday, Democrats have been tapping. Even Stephen King, Maine’s most famous Democrat, deleted his post defending Platner. No snap. Platner was silent Wednesday, and the smell of a dead campaign has reached every passerby since Monday’s rape allegation—which he denies.His campaign held a staff call that set no timeline for a decision. A person close to the campaign told CNN: “I think he knows it’s over,” but “he thinks ‘I built this thing’”—and wants a say in who gets the nomination.The Maine Democratic Party is already designing a replacement process. It rebuffed Platner’s attempts to shape the pick. His campaign insists it wants “voters and volunteers” choosing a successor, “not the political establishment.” The party’s answer: nothing starts until he withdraws.The candidates aren’t waiting. Troy Jackson, the former state Senate president who campaigned alongside Platner, filed exploratory paperwork Tuesday—the first to do so. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows is considering a run. So is Nirav Shah, the former CDC director.Platner has until 5 p.m. Monday to withdraw; the party has until July 27 to name someone.A virus inside, a shooting outsideMeasles is loose in federal custody. DHS confirmed seven active cases among detainees at the Florence Detention Center in Arizona. It’s the second cluster in Arizona federal custody this year.The system is designed to spread it: ICE constantly transfers detainees from one facility to another—to open up beds, to stage deportations—so an infection doesn’t stay where it starts. It rides the bus to the next facility. In June, one infected detainee from the Arizona network arrived at Fort Bliss in Texas, and the facility had to quarantine nearly 180 people. That’s the arithmetic of measles, among the most contagious viruses we know: one case in a crowded building means everyone unvaccinated nearby is presumed exposed.A detention center gives measles everything it wants: people packed in close quarters, a population that turns over constantly (fresh virus shipments daily!), and no reliable record of who’s been vaccinated. In response, ICE has stopped in-person visits at Florence, stopped moving detainees around inside the facility, and quarantined anyone suspected of contact with an infected person.Quarantining the building doesn’t quarantine the outbreak, because immigration detention isn’t a prison sentence—people leave all the time. They post bond. They win their cases. Judges order them freed. When someone who’s been exposed walks out the door, local health officials and the migrant shelters that receive them need to know, so they can watch for symptoms and trace contacts. The shelters say ICE isn’t telling them. The virus’s trail goes cold at the gate.Around 6:30 Tuesday morning in Houston’s Magnolia Park, a historic Mexican-American neighborhood, ICE officers attempted a traffic stop on Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who had lived in the United States for nearly 35 years, worked construction, and was in the legal process of obtaining a work permit. An officer shot him in the abdomen. He died shortly after reaching the hospital.ICE says Araujo tried to evade arrest, rammed a law-enforcement vehicle, and “weaponized his vehicle” against an officer, who fired in self-defense. Business surveillance footage didn’t capture the shooting, but it recorded Araujo afterward, handcuffed face down on the ground, groaning. Neighbors heard him cry out in Spanish: “They’re killing me!” The League of United Latin American Citizens says he was on his way to work to pick up his employees.ICE accounts of vehicle-ramming in past shootings have been contradicted by video, producing dropped charges and lawsuits.How an insurance pool diesHealth insurance works by pooling money. Everyone pays premiums; the money covers whoever gets sick that year. Healthy people pay in more than they use. Sick people use more than they pay in. The insurer needs enough healthy people paying to cover the sick ones’ bills.A death spiral is what kills that arrangement. Premiums rise. Healthy people look at the new price and decide they’d rather risk it—they’re not sick, so insurance feels like money spent on nothing. They cancel. But the sick people can’t cancel; they need the coverage. Now the insurer is collecting less money and paying the same medical bills. To cover the gap, it raises premiums on everyone left. That new price drives out the next-healthiest group. Fewer payers, same bills, higher premiums, more cancellations. Each round the pool gets smaller and sicker, and the price climbs until almost no one can afford it.That is now happening in the individual insurance market. Insurers are proposing a median 14 percent premium increase for 2027 Affordable Care Act plans, according to a KFF and Peterson Center report out Wednesday—the second consecutive year of double-digit hikes. Congress triggered it. Federal subsidies had been paying part of everyone’s premium, which kept the price low enough that healthy people stayed. The subsidies expired at the end of 2025. Prices jumped, healthy people canceled, and the pools got sicker. The 14 percent is the insurers’ forecast: they expect the people still buying coverage next year to be sicker and more expensive, and they’re setting premiums high enough to pay those bills.The people who will pay the higher premiums are the roughly 20 million Americans no employer covers: contractors, farmers, gig workers, people who retired before Medicare kicks in.The 14 percent is a proposal, not the final price. Two things could still lower it. State insurance regulators review these requests every summer and often force them down. And Congress could bring back the subsidies that kept healthy people in the pool in the first place. What won’t change is the timing: the final prices arrive in mailboxes this fall, a few weeks before the midterm elections.50,000 people watched and no alarm rangA Berlin court on Wednesday sentenced a 32-year-old medical professional, identified as Zhiting S., to five years in prison as an accessory to aggravated rape. He never assaulted the victims himself. Instead, he used his medical training to teach men in a Telegram network which drugs, and in what doses, would render women unconscious without leaving evidence. He is the fourth member of the network’s inner circle convicted this year. The ringleader received 14 years in February for serial rape and attempted murder.An Associated Press investigation reveals what the network had become. About two dozen Telegram channels, operating under the innocuous name “German Driving School for Experts,” used coded language—women were “cars”—to evade automated moderation. Behind the code, eight core members, mostly Chinese nationals living in Germany, drugged and raped Chinese women studying and working across Western Europe, filmed the assaults, and distributed the videos to channels that eventually drew 50,000 members who bought, traded, and reviewed them.The network survived for at least four years because its design defeated detection. Telegram permits groups of up to 200,000 members with little internal moderation. The coded language slipped past keyword filters. No participant reported the channels because every viewer was implicated, and the victims often had no memory of the assaults because of the drugs.Police uncovered the operation only after the ringleader escalated from women he knew socially to strangers he met online. Strangers knew something had happened and went to the police.Telegram told the AP that sexual violence is prohibited on the platform and that it complies with European law, but declined to explain how channels with tens of thousands of members shared evidence of rape for years without intervention. Its founder was arrested in Paris in 2024 over allegations that the platform’s architecture facilitates organized criminal activity.The German judges rejected the idea that this was an isolated group. They called it the “industrialization of abuse.” The description fit: the network had instructors, logistics, distribution, and customers. What it lacked, for four years, was anyone looking inside.Generational roomatesOne-third of Americans under 35 now live with their parents, according to a recent Realtor.com report highlighted by The New York Times. At 33 percent, the share has climbed back near the pandemic peak of 34 percent reached in 2020.Young adults are more educated and broadly employed, but home prices, rents, and borrowing costs have risen faster than wages. Many working professionals are moving home not because they can’t find work, but because they can’t afford a household of their own.What feels like a new social failure may actually be a return to an older economic pattern. For most of American history, young adults did not leave home at 18 or 21 to establish independent households. In the 18th and 19th centuries, they typically remained part of extended family economies or lived with other households while learning trades and accumulating savings. The expectation that young adults would quickly move into homes of their own was largely a product of the extraordinary prosperity that followed World War II. From that perspective, today’s living arrangements may say less about a generation failing to launch than about an economy that no longer supports a postwar exception.Soccer advantageSoccer socks are skin-tight by design—they anchor the shin guards and steady the ankle—but the calf muscle swells every time it fires, thousands of times a game, and the fabric squeezes back. Legs tingle. Legs go numb. So players cut holes in the socks, at the calf — the back of the lower leg, over the muscle, between the ankle and the knee to let the muscle breathe, and swear they run freer.Science’s response: no. Wired reports there’s not a single study showing the holes help. The research on compression gear contradicts the folk wisdom —a snug sock, properly fitted, actually limits muscle inflammation. Sports medicine specialists say the benefit lives entirely in the player’s head.Which doesn’t make it worthless. A player who believes his sock is strangling his calf plays like a man being strangled. Cut the hole and the belief goes away—performance unchanged, confidence restored.The rules permit it, by the way. You can shred your socks so long as the shin guards stay covered. Tear your jersey and you have to change it. FIFA, an organization facing questions about heat, ticket prices, and stadium surveillance, has taken a firm regulatory line on shirts.Trump ordered to pay E. Jean CarrollIt’s been roughly 30 years since Donald Trump sexually assaulted writer E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store dressing room, and three years since a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and awarded Carroll more than $5 million.On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered Trump to finally pay that judgment, which has grown to $5.8 million with interest. The money had been held in a court-controlled account while Trump appealed. Last week, the Supreme Court let the 2023 civil verdict stand, clearing the way for Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to release the funds.Trump’s legal team is still trying to delay payment by asking the Supreme Court to rehear the case, though such requests are rarely granted.A much larger judgment remains unresolved. Trump is also appealing the separate $83.3 million verdict a jury awarded Carroll in 2024 after finding he defamed her after she publicly accused him of the assault.UpdatesYesterday we told you about a skyscraper in Manhattan that was abruptly freaking everyone out as a result of structural failures created by the effort to turn it from an office building into a residential building. Engineers discovered buckling columns. The project is a byproduct of the post-COVID office glut: developers are trying to turn half-empty towers into housing. But converting offices into apartments isn’t like repainting the walls. Every kitchen and bathroom means more plumbing, more holes cut through concrete floors, and much more weight than the building was originally designed to carry. The Wednesday update: emergency crews spent the night installing temporary steel supports, and city officials now say the building has stabilized, with no further movement detected since Tuesday morning. Some nearby buildings have reopened, but several remain evacuated while engineers investigate what caused the failure and determine whether the project can safely continue. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome to Stack the Week for July 7th. It’s still not Friday. We here at Stack the Whatever We’re Calling It have a grasp of the totally obvious, if nothing else.But we are pushing our Soap Box Derby car out of the shed and seeing how far it will go before the wheels come off and roll into the abandoned lot with the tires and discarded refrigerator.Thank you to Laura Doan for helping sous chef all of this into a format available to all humans.Thank you out there, as always, for your subscriptions, your comments, and your favorable reviews on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere. Our marketing department has let us know there might be some confusion about how you can listen to this offering. It is a podcast, and so it is available here as a podcast or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You don’t have to listen to the AI-generated voice that Substack provides.Today the world’s most important waterway caught fire again, a militant group gave up a government it held for nineteen years (maybe!), the Atlantic alliance renegotiated its founding bargain, and the Democratic Party spent the day trying to talk its own Senate nominee off the ballot in Maine. Also: a man who fought beside American soldiers in Afghanistan died in American custody, and almost nobody noticed. And in New York, engineers noticed a sagging skyscraper just in time.The Strait of Hormuz is hot againBefore dawn, a mayday. A Qatari tanker carrying liquefied natural gas was struck by a drone. Its engine room caught fire. Reuters has the audio recording — the captain calling out his ship’s name, reporting the hit on the port side.Simultaneously, a Saudi supertanker was struck by a missile. By afternoon, the British military reported a third tanker hit by a drone; it remains damaged but sailing.All three used the southern route along Oman’s coast — the route Iran told the world last Thursday not to use. They are out there because the main northern lanes are heavily mined.No casualties reported on any of the three. Qatar’s foreign ministry called the strike a grave violation of international law.Brent crude rose on the news — climbing about two and a half percent to just under seventy-four dollars a barrel. A five-month high for global oil.In response, the U.S. revoked a license that had authorized the sale of Iranian oil. This ended economic life support granted Tehran just last month, effectively killing the interim ceasefire.Now, either the administration allows global energy prices to spiral by choking off Iranian crude, or it is forced to back up its economic penalties with direct military strikes to keep the strait open.The ten-year Treasury yield ticked up, one of those numbers you hear on the news but rarely understand. It means investors lending money to the government now want a bigger return. One reason is that they expect higher oil prices to push up inflation. When it costs more to move oil, it usually costs more to move almost everything else.I started this item with a little bit of theatricality because I was trying to locate the story in flesh and blood—the captains who must traverse the Strait and hope that nothing hits their vessel from above or below. With every strike, fewer captains are going to want to make the run, and fewer insurance companies will be willing to risk their cargo. When ships stop sailing, prices go up. That’s how all of this makes life more expensive for you.There is a theory that President Trump agreed to the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran because he wanted everything to cool down before November’s elections, planning to push Iran into greater concessions afterward. Today’s events expose the weakness in that theory. The Iranians push a couple of buttons, and the transmission line between those explosions and your wallet is short. They can keep doing it until November, making it impossible to guarantee the calm that agreement was supposed to buy.President Trump said Monday that Iran must make a deal or the United States would finish the job. Iran’s foreign minister answered this morning: no more talks while the threats continue.The death of an allyThis story hasn’t gotten much pickup, but by our framework, a loss of life outranks a political scandal.Official medical examiner findings and death certificates released Tuesday reveal that Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, 41, died of acute anaphylaxis and severe asthma less than twenty-four hours after entering federal custody this March. Paktiawal was a combat ally who spent more than a decade fighting alongside U.S. Army Special Forces in Afghanistan before being evacuated to America in 2021.Paktiawal’s family alleges that arresting agents confiscated and withheld his necessary medical inhaler during the booking process.For more than ten years, this man bet his life on America’s word, walking patrols with Special Forces in a country where helping Americans was a death sentence. We flew him out in 2021 because we owed him. He survived a decade of the Taliban. He did not survive his first day in ICE custody.Fifty-two people have died in ICE custody since January of last year, according to Human Rights Watch. Thirty-three died in 2025—the most in more than two decades—and this year is on pace to break that record. The death rate in detention has more than doubled, rising faster than the detained population.Platner back on the farmThis is the story you might have expected to be the lead story today. Nearly every American front page leads with it. Is that news judgment or rubbernecking?The campaign of the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, Graham Platner is in jeopardy. By the time you hear this, that campaign may be referred to in the past tense. But at noon Tuesday, the story was a credible Politico report featuring an on-the-record sexual assault allegation by a former partner, Jenny Racicot, which Platner denied. By 1:25 p.m., Senator Bernie Sanders publicly cut ties and told him to withdraw immediately. An elevator full of other prominent Democrats did too.The Senate runs through Maine. Democrats’ most plausible path to a majority requires beating Susan Collins, and their nominee’s collapse makes that path substantially harder.The story also matters because it sits inside a recurring national argument: what we owe accusers, what we owe the accused, and how a movement responds when one of its stars is accused of wrongdoing. That’s not gossip. It’s how parties demonstrate their values—and a model for how the rest of the culture handles abuse in the workplace and at home.Under Maine’s election statute, a nominee who withdraws by 5 p.m. on the second Monday in July—this coming Monday, July 13—can be replaced on the November ballot. The party then has until July 27 to name someone. Miss the deadline and Platner’s name stays, disowned by nearly everyone who put it there.Yesterday, we noted that Platner’s rise reflected what can happen when a political movement prizes raw, unvetted “authenticity” above all else. But as our community rightly noted—and I should have said—authenticity doesn’t inherently breed misconduct, nor are establishment candidates immune.NATO, renegotiatedThe postwar Atlantic bargain—America underwrites European security, Europe follows America’s lead—is being renegotiated in real time.The summit was convened in Turkey rather than Brussels, the de facto headquarters of NATO and the European Union. Alliance meetings are typically held there to signal unity and institutional continuity. Instead, leaders gathered in President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s palace compound, and Trump said that if Erdoğan weren’t hosting, he might not have come. Trump likes Erdoğan—a strongman who deals leader to leader, flatters generously, and skips the lectures Trump gets from Western Europe.The strategic reason is that the war in Iran has made Turkey’s geography indispensable. It fields NATO’s second-largest army, controls the straits connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, hosts pipelines carrying Caspian and Iraqi oil west, and remains the one NATO capital on speaking terms with Moscow, Kyiv, and Tehran at once.Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it the most consequential gathering in the alliance’s history, and he meant it as a boast. In the administration’s telling, this is the summit where NATO rebuilds on American terms: Europe paying more, Europe supplying the troops and ships America pulls out.The Americans who distrust NATO and the Europeans who run it now agree on the basic facts: after this week, America does less and Europe does more. They only disagree about what to call it. The White House calls it fixing a bad deal. Much of Europe calls it being left on their own by the country that helped write the rules of the modern global order.Trump renewed his demand that the United States acquire Greenland—territory of Denmark, a NATO ally—and suggested that if Europe keeps resisting, the U.S. could pull every service member off the continent.The alliance came to Ankara carrying billions in new arms deals—much of it buying American—assembled less as strategy than as appeasement. Europe is arming to make itself less dependent on a partner it no longer fully trusts, while paying that partner in the meantime. The Thank you, sir, may I have another strategy.Sitting beside Erdoğan, Trump announced he’ll lift the sanctions imposed in 2020 after Turkey bought Russia’s S-400 air defense system—”We don’t want to sanction friends,” he said—and that he’ll consider selling Turkey the F-35, the stealth fighter Turkey was expelled from in 2019 for that same Russian purchase. Congress wrote the expulsion into law; Trump did not explain how he’d get around that law. Erdoğan says he’s been promised five jets. Israel’s prime minister spent Monday morning on television claiming the sale was a threat to its security and urging Washington not to do it. The original objection—that operating F-35s alongside Russian radar could teach Moscow how to detect those aircraft—got a one-sentence answer from Trump: “No concerns at all.”Asylum filesA sweeping push for mass deportations drove federal officials to cut a deal with an enemy state, according to a lawsuit highlighted by The Washington Post.The lawsuit, filed by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund and Public Citizen, alleges that in March 2025 immigration officials wanted to deport hundreds of Iranians in federal custody. But under international law, you cannot simply dump people at a foreign border. The receiving country has to agree to take them. According to the complaint, the administration offered Tehran access to confidential asylum files to help make that happen.To apply for asylum in America, you have to write down a detailed map of exactly why your home country wants to kill or imprison you—whether you participated in pro-democracy protests, converted to Christianity, or are LGBTQ. The lawsuit alleges that U.S. officials hand-delivered or mailed that exact information to the Iranian Interests Section at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington.This is the equivalent of giving your executioner the pin drop to your house.You may remember that the United States recently bombed Iran because, among other reasons, the regime kills so many of its own people. The very kinds of people whose identities and stories are at the center of this case.By September 2025, Tehran signed an agreement to take back up to 400 nationals. Roughly 115 Iranians have since been deported on three flights. The lawsuit relies on testimony from a whistleblower inside the embassy and from deportees who say that when they were summoned for ICE interviews, senior Iranian consular officials were sitting across from them, already holding their confidential U.S. asylum files. According to the complaint, the information-sharing continued even after the war began.The Department of Homeland Security flatly denies the allegations, saying that ICE only facilitates standard consular access to help detainees get passports. If the court ultimately finds the administration traded confidential asylum files to hit its deportation metrics, it would mean the government violated its own asylum protections to hand dissidents over to the state it now says threatens international security.Blanche AG Nomination Revolt:An institutional revolt has sprung up against the president’s choice for Attorney General ahead of his confirmation hearing on July 15. More than twelve hundred former federal prosecutors, judges, and FBI veterans have signed a joint public letter sent directly to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing the nomination.The 59-page letter warns that confirming acting Attorney General Todd Blanche could transform the Department of Justice from an independent arbiter of law into an arm of presidential power because, the signatories argue, he has treated the department as the president’s private defense firm.They point to several developments: over sixteen thousand career employees—nearly a quarter of the department’s workforce—have left during his tenure, many, they argue, because they refused what they considered unlawful or unethical directives. They also accuse Blanche of purging the teams that handled the January 6th and Special Counsel investigations, installing political loyalists to pursue cases against the administration’s opponents, and telling all 93 U.S. Attorneys that their chief client is not the American public, but the occupant of the Oval Office.According to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in Regime Change, Trump has long wanted an attorney general who would serve as his personal Roy Cohn—a fierce legal fixer whose loyalty to the president outweighed loyalty to the institution. To the letter’s authors, Blanche represents the fulfillment of that search.✔️Small Businesses small coverageMore than a quarter of American workers earn their paycheck at a small business—a firm with fewer than fifty employees. A new report from STAT shows those businesses are giving up on offering health insurance because it’s simply too expensive. Three in ten small firms now offer coverage, down from nearly half in 2000. Their average premium has risen 182 percent over that stretch—more than double general inflation. STAT calls it the lowest offer rate ever recorded, part of a longer slide in which job-based coverage among working-age adults has fallen from 67 percent in 1998 to about 60 percent today.As we reported yesterday, the federal exchanges, where workers go when the workplace plan disappears, are fraying at the same time. Fresh federal data shows Obamacare enrollment down about 13 percent nationwide—roughly 3 million people—with the deepest losses concentrated in Ohio, Oklahoma, Arizona, South Carolina, and Minnesota following the expiration of the enhanced premium tax credits. Ohio and Oklahoma each lost nearly a third of their enrollment.When we talk about the American dream, these numbers should be top of mind. For decades, the social compact was built on the private employer. You worked hard, built a business—or found a job at one—and that effort earned your family basic health security. When that pillar snaps, economic self-reliance goes with it.Our inflation debate often misses the prices that matter most. A two percent drop in core inflation looks great on a government chart, but it means little to a parent whose monthly health premium just became a second mortgage. The hidden tax isn’t just higher prices. It’s the loss of predictability. When health insurance slips out of reach, families stop planning for the future and start managing the next bill.Farage ResignsIn our somewhat recurring series, “British Politicians: They’re Nothing Like Ours,” populist right-wing leader and staunch Trump ally Nigel Farage announced Tuesday that he is resigning his seat in the British Parliament—only to immediately turn around and run for it again.Farage is forcing a flash by-election, betting his voters will send him right back to Westminster. The move temporarily pauses the parliamentary investigation into his conduct.The Parliamentary Standards Commissioner is investigating Farage over a five-million-pound gift from a cryptocurrency billionaire ahead of his 2024 campaign. A watchdog is also considering a second inquiry into housing, staff, and private security allegedly financed by a close friend later jailed in the United States for wire fraud.British law requires MPs to declare any benefits worth more than three hundred pounds in the year before their election if they relate to their political activity. Farage says these were purely personal, “unconditional” gifts and calls the scrutiny an establishment witch-hunt.Here is the punchline, and the proof that British politics operates on a different planet: Farage might win the by-election without anyone running against him. Within hours, Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats announced they would boycott the ballot, calling it a “pathetic, desperate stunt.”But the strategy has a built-in expiration date. If Farage wins, the investigation resumes immediately. If the commissioner ultimately finds he broke the rules, Parliament must suspend him, triggering another by-election—this time on his opponents’ timetable, not his.Hamas dissolves its government (Maybe)Nineteen years of Hamas rule in Gaza may have just come to an end.Monday, at a press conference in a hospital courtyard, an official announced that the militant group responsible for the October Seventh attacks has dissolved its government. As part of a U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal, Hamas says it is preparing to transfer power to a technical committee backed by the United Nations.If this transition holds, it represents a fundamental rewiring of the entire region. Hamas describes the decision as evidence of its commitment to rebuilding Gaza after years of war. But according to the Associated Press, the group did not say whether it plans to take the most crucial step of all: disarming, or handing over security to an international force.And that is where the deal hits a wall. Nine months after the ceasefire was signed, negotiations between Israel and Hamas remain largely deadlocked over this second phase. The Israeli Foreign Minister dismissed Monday’s move entirely, saying it was designed specifically to avoid disarmament. His statement was blunt: “As long as Hamas retains its weapons, any civilian government will, of course, operate as Hamas dictates.”On the ground, the violence has not stopped. On Monday, Israeli strikes killed at least five people in Gaza—including three in Khan Younis and two in an apartment in Gaza City, according to health officials. The Israeli military says it was targeting a Hamas operative and a Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant. At the same time, militants have carried out shooting attacks against Israeli troops, and five Israeli soldiers have been killed since the ceasefire began nine months ago.Cuba BlackoutBy Tuesday morning, technicians in Cuba had slowly restored power to about thirty percent of the capital, mostly to hospitals and water pumps. Much of the rest of the country remained without electricity after an island-wide blackout Monday left nearly ten million people in the dark.This is the third time the national grid has completely collapsed in the last six months. For years, Cubans survived on a creaking system of dilapidated, Soviet-era power plants. But the tipping point came in January, when the Trump administration launched a campaign to cut off Cuba’s oil supplies—cutting off fuel shipments from Venezuela, pressuring Mexico to halt its supply, and threatening steep tariffs on any foreign company delivering oil to the island.The State Department has explicitly called the Cuban government a national security threat and says these sanctions are designed to strangle the economy and trigger social unrest that could lead to regime change.The consequence on the ground is a humanitarian crisis. Cuba produces only forty percent of the fuel it needs to keep its lights on. Public transit has stopped. Tens of thousands of surgeries have been canceled. One thirty-six-year-old woman in Havana told the Associated Press she spent the night searching by flashlight for charcoal so she and her father could cook enough rice to eat.Skyscraper opening :When you take a 1961 office giant and try to carve 1,500 apartments out of it, you have to cut thousands of new holes through the concrete floors to run plumbing and cables for 1,500 kitchens and bathrooms. That is a lot of holes. At the same time, you are piling on massive amounts of new weight—all the drywall, tile, and appliances that go into a modern apartment building. This has, as we learned in high school, consequences.Those consequences arrived just before eight o’clock Tuesday morning.Up on the twenty-first floor, workers heard concrete cracking, windows buzzing under immense pressure, and heavy steel groaning. Two main structural steel box beams started to bend and deflect, buckling under a load they were never built to hold.By the time the FDNY and emergency engineers arrived, the damage wasn’t just a localized crack. The building was actively moving. A six-floor section of the skyscraper—from the twenty-first floor to the twenty-sixth—was visibly sagging.The city immediately established a collapse zone, shutting down a large section of Midtown from Fortieth to Forty-Fifth Streets. The threat was so severe that emergency crews evacuated eight surrounding high-rises and a nearby school, forcing four hundred children and hundreds of other people into the streets.A union representative for the steamfitters on site put the blame squarely on a rushed job, pointing out that contractors were tearing out structural walls and boring holes without adding enough steel reinforcement to compensate.Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters that engineers are tracking movement in the compromised columns minute by minute. The plan is to use drones to monitor the structure until it’s stable enough for emergency crews to install massive truss systems to keep the thirty-seven-story building from collapsing into the middle of Forty-Second Street. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome to Stack the Week for July 6th. Wait, it’s not Friday. No, it’s not. This is a new turn on the experiment. So, let’s give this Monday a nudge and see if it can walk on its halting legs out of the haybed in the barn and into the sunlight.Maybe this is the theme of every day, but if you look at today’s ledger, a repeated theme is that the old speed bumps built to keep the world stable are melting away. For generations, we counted on institutional rulebooks, legal processes, and treaties to slow raw power and keep things fair. Monday you see that changing:* A sixty-four-year-old soccer rule vanishes the moment a president makes a personal phone call.* A humanitarian law built to protect solo immigrant children is stripped down just to move bodies out of the country faster.* What happens when the National Guard is on the crime beat.* A president trying to redefine economic success.* A rising political star is forced out of a crucial Senate race because voters don’t want a peacemaker anymore—they want a street-fighter.When you tear out the joists that keep a society steady, you lose the protections against chaos. The world stops operating by tradition or fairness and collapses into a raw game of tug-of-war, where the only rule left is who has the muscle to pull the hardest. But at least the sun is weaker than we thought.Thank you to Laura Doan for helping with this iteration of the experiment.1. Ukraine/Russia/NATOEvery missile hit. Russia fired 29 ballistic missiles at Kyiv overnight and Ukraine intercepted none.Normally the Patriot missiles would have answered — the American-made system is the only thing Ukraine has that can stop a ballistic missile. But the Patriot missiles from the US that would have resupplied Kyiv were spent months ago defending Israel and American bases across the Middle East against Iran, and new ones can’t be built fast enough. Ukraine had been stretching what remained — one missile per incoming warhead when the manual says two to four. Sunday night the medicine cabinet was empty.The total Russian barrage — 419 weapons in all, 351 drones and 68 missiles — killed at least 12 and wounded 60, four days after a strike that killed 31.The strike was called in by Putin, whose other phone use this weekend was a nearly 90-minute call to Donald Trump — the Kremlin readout says Trump offered to help find a solution to the war, and Putin reminded him of his open invitation to Moscow. We are coming up on the one year anniversary of the Alaska summit that was heralded by the president and his men as a huge success. Nothing much came of it.The U.S. calls battlefield progress “frozen”; the more accurate assessment is asymmetric stalemate — Ukraine’s long-range strikes onto Russian territory are causing fuel shortages inside Russia while Russia empties ballistic inventory into a capital that can’t stop them as they once could.Tuesday, Trump meets Zelenskyy in Ankara, at a NATO summit with one question under every agenda item: Europe promised Trump it would pay for more of its own defense, but money takes years to become weapons and soldiers — can the allies show him enough, fast enough, to keep America in the alliance? They doubt it themselves: for months they’ve been meeting in secret to plan a NATO without the United States.2. Iran mourns its leaderThe flag-draped casket of Ali Khamenei moved by truck through Tehran Monday morning. Organizers actually had to shorten the ten-kilometer route from Revolution Square to Freedom Square because the mourning crowds were simply too massive. The eighty-six-year-old Supreme Leader—who ruled for thirty-seven years—was killed alongside his family in a joint U.S.-Israeli strike. Behind his casket came four more coffins: his daughter, his son-in-law, his daughter-in-law, and his fourteen-month-old granddaughter.Along the route, the state prominently displayed a photograph of Khamenei holding the baby. It is a deliberate piece of propaganda—an attempt to reframe a ruler responsible for decades of massacres and state terror into a grieving grandfather. By spotlighting that one small coffin, the regime hopes the world will focus on the bloody imprecision of an American and Israeli strike, rather than the thousands of Iranians Khamenei sent to the gallows.Mourners chanted death to America, hanged a Trump effigy, chalked grief messages onto a black, concrete wall by the thousands. Organizers misted water over the crowd to fight the heat. Revolutionary Guard men, who never talk to reporters, talked to reporters: the war is not over until he’s avenged, they said.The late Henry Kissinger asked whether Iran wanted to be a country or a cause.The funeral asks Kissinger’s question all over again, and Iran has to answer fast. The new supreme leader is Khamenei’s son Mojtaba — badly burned in the same strike that killed his father, and he hasn’t appeared in public since. He takes over a country pulled two ways: the crowds in the street are demanding revenge on America, while his government is negotiating peace with America. Those talks are paused for the mourning. They will start again Thursday, once his father is buried.3. The quickened pace of removing migrant childrenMigrant children were never guaranteed a place in America. They were guaranteed a process — a hearing, a lawyer’s help, a humane exit if the answer was no. ProPublica reported Monday that the administration has whittled that system down into a sliver of its former self in an energetic effort to get children out of the country as fast as possible. “Unaccompanied minor,” the designation for the children we’re talking about, means anyone under 18 with no legal status and no parent at the crossing. Most were sent alone toward a relative already in America. Their legal claims run from asylum from persecution in their home countries to visas for children abused, abandoned, or trafficked. Children with applications pending have lost the legal counsel and the shield from deportation that let them wait for an answer. Another new wrinkle: the kids are bait. To claim a child from federal custody, an adult must come forward — and the child-welfare agency now hands that adult’s name, address, and fingerprints to the deportation agency. A government document recovered in litigation this year warns children that an undocumented sponsor faces “arrest and removal.” The parent’s choice: step up and risk deportation, or stay hidden and leave the child in custody.Since the start of Trump’s second term, immigration courts have issued more than 10,000 removal orders against minors a month, nearly quadrupling the old pace. The vast majority removed last year had no criminal record. When federal legal services ended in March 2025, some 26,000 children lost their lawyers; children as young as two have since faced judges alone.What we’re talking about here is not whether children hear no, but the process for delivering that news. The door was never open to these migrant children. A 2008 statute, passed unanimously and signed by George W. Bush, accepted deportation as an outcome and civilized the path to it: a hearing, a screening for trafficking, placement with relatives while waiting, and — for the children who lose — a handoff to a named adult in the home country, not a minor deposited at a border crossing at night. Last fall, the administration pulled Guatemalan children from shelter beds and loaded them onto overnight deportation flights before a court order stopped the planes.The process used to take years, which itself became a magnet. Word traveled that a child who crossed alone got a long runway before any judge said no, and parents made rational decisions on that basis. The administration’s actions demagnetize the attraction.The article tells the story of Elder Chavez, 18, who wears braces. His parents abandoned him as a toddler in Honduras — a fact proven in family court, which earned him the legal status Congress built for children with no parent to return to. At 14 he crossed alone to reach his older sister in Alabama, who took him in and paid for the braces. Now, he sits awake most nights in an adult detention center in Louisiana, finally falling asleep near 4 a.m., the hour guards call detainees to breakfast. He was brought there after a traffic stop. Before last year, he’d have gotten a ticket and gone home to his sister.4. National Guard ShootingEarly Sunday morning in downtown Memphis, National Guard soldiers shot and killed Tyrin Johnson, 20. His is the third death tied to the federal task force Trump has deployed across six Democrat-run cities. Johnson lived in Nashville, worked construction, took university classes, and had his first child earlier this year. Police responding to shots-fired calls just before 4 a.m. say they spotted him carrying a handgun; he ran; Guard soldiers joined the foot chase. What happened next, the state investigators’ statement renders in the passive voice: “for reasons under investigation, the situation escalated.” Police say Johnson turned toward the soldiers with his weapon. His family says he was shot twice in the chest. “I just want to know, how they shot a 20-year-old twice in the chest, he hadn’t harmed anyone,” said his cousin, who called him “as good a boy as can be.” Two Guard medics knelt to treat the wounds. A Tennessee judge blocked this deployment as unconstitutional; an appeals court overturned the injunction in April, and the troops stayed. They patrol a city where crime was already falling before they arrived, part of an operation projected to cost taxpayers more than $1 billion this year. The shooting came during the most violent stretch of the American calendar. At least 52 people were shot in nine states over the holiday weekend, eight of them at Coney Island, four of those children.5. China pops offWhile Russia was reminding NATO what it could do, China staged a flex of its own: a rare ballistic missile test across the Pacific, launched from a nuclear-powered submarine, the first such test China has ever publicly acknowledged. The medium is the message. China’s land-based missiles sit in silos that American satellites watch around the clock. A submarine hides. A missile fired from one arrives without warning from a launch point no one has found, which means China’s ability to strike back could survive even if everything on Chinese soil is destroyed first.For years that threat was more theory than fact because China’s missile submarines were easy for the U.S. Navy to hear coming. Analysts believe the missile was the new JL-3, with the range to hit the continental United States from Chinese coastal waters. The choreography carried its own messages. China notified Japan, Australia and New Zealand hours in advance. It did not notify the United States, the audience the test was for.The Pentagon counts roughly 600 Chinese warheads today and expects more than 1,000 by 2030. That is double what China had five years ago, and still a fraction of the American and Russian arsenals, which hold several thousand warheads each. The timing lands on an American vulnerability. The Iran war consumed more than half of the U.S. supply of Patriot interceptors and large shares of its Tomahawks and other key missiles, and defense analysts estimate the stockpiles will not return to prewar levels until 2029 or 2030.6. The president rings the bellOn Monday, there was somehow more gold in the Oval Office—a feat that hadn’t seemed possible given the globules already affixed to the walls and the gold statues holding up gold statues on every available surface. The newest addition was a gold bell. The president rang it to open the day’s trading—the first joint NYSE-Nasdaq bell ever rung from the White House—to launch Trump Accounts, a tax vehicle that deposited $1,000 into index-fund accounts for 500,000 newborns on the Fourth of July. The accounts are designed to make every American child a shareholder from birth; the ceremony was designed to make the stock market the ultimate barometer of the nation. It isn’t. The market only prices the projected profits of major corporations—a narrow slice of reality—and lately, it’s narrower than advertised. Ten stocks currently hold roughly 38 percent of the S&P 500’s value, a top-heavy concentration that Treasury’s own internal reporting likens to a bubble. When a tiny handful of massive tech companies drives nearly all the market’s growth, it acts like a false front: if those few giants stumble, the whole index collapses, even if thousands of ordinary businesses on the ground are doing perfectly fine.If the economy were truly healthy, a boasting president would cite real median income, wage growth, or the jobs numbers. Instead, real median household income has stalled at $80,610—effectively flat since its pre-pandemic high—while consumer prices continue to outpace weekly wage growth so that real earnings are actually falling. Furthermore, the economy added just 115,000 jobs last month, a sluggish pace that lands well below the administration’s public boasts of an historic labor boom. Because the broader economic indicators offer no cover, the president turned the theatrical setting into a transactional playground for allies. Mid-ceremony, Trump gestured to billionaire tech executive Michael Dell—a major financial contributor to the newborn accounts who was standing in the room—and told the crowd to “go out and buy a Dell computer.” Dell shares immediately jumped 7 percent. The president’s own financial disclosures reveal 24 Dell trades last year, predominantly buys.7. Muscle on the pitchOne of the other pieces of gold in the Oval Office Monday was the FIFA Club World Cup trophy—the original, which Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, handed Trump last year and told him to keep while the actual champions play for a replica. This weekend, that relationship paid out. After U.S. striker Folarin Balogun drew a red card on Wednesday against Bosnia, the White House mobilized a high-level pressure campaign. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and World Cup task force director Andrew Giuliani engaged lawyers to exploit gaps in FIFA’s vague disciplinary code, while a billionaire hedge-fund donor dug up unproven match-fixing allegations against the Brazilian referee to arm the president for a personal phone call to Infantino.The transaction cleared just over 30 hours before kickoff. Citing a rarely used probation clause called Article 27, FIFA’s disciplinary committee suspended Balogun’s mandatory one-match ban, making him eligible for Monday night’s knockout match against Belgium. An automatic suspension following a World Cup red card has been ironclad law for as long as anyone currently playing has been alive; FIFA has not nullified one since the Brazilian government successfully lobbied for it in 1962.Fewer than eight hours before kickoff, a FIFA judge dismissed a furious legal challenge from the Belgian federation, while European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, blasted the turnabout as “incomprehensible and unjustifiable” with its integrity in tatters. Balogun plays tonight in Seattle, where the U.S. chases its first World Cup quarterfinal in 24 years. The golden trophy on the shelf in the Oval Office turned out to be a receipt. And no one had to bring out the horse head.8. Obamacare shrinkageNew federal data reveals that the expiration of enhanced subsidies caused Obamacare rolls to collapse over the past year, stripping coverage from 2.6 million Americans and slashing enrollment by nearly a third in states like Ohio and Oklahoma. The drop—a 13 percent decline nationwide that brought total effectuated enrollment down to 19.2 million in February—represents the first major contraction for the health exchanges after four consecutive years of record growth. Independent analysts at KFF note that the expiration of the COVID-era premium tax credits caused monthly fees to double or triple for many low-income families, forcing them to drop coverage entirely.The Trump administration, however, frames the shrinkage as a victory for program integrity, claiming a full-scale crackdown by the Department of Health and Human Services successfully rooted out 2.9 million “phantom or improper enrollments” driven by commission-seeking insurance brokers.A recent HHS report defends this claim with data showing that 40 percent of individuals in zero-premium plans had zero health claims, confirming that unscrupulous brokers were indeed quietly signing up millions of oblivious citizens to pocket the commissions. Yet independent health economists point out that the administration is using this genuine fraud to clean up a messy economic reality: when the enhanced subsidies expired, average monthly out-of-pocket premiums spiked by 58 percent, causing millions of real, low-income people to simply stop paying. The administration is framing that entire drop as a deliberate anti-fraud purge. Health economists say it’s basic economics: when you double the price of a service, millions of real people simply stop buying it.9. McMorrow and McMorrow and McMorrow not tomorrowEighty percent of Democratic voters say the political and economic system needs to be torn down entirely or heavily renovated, according to a New York Times/Siena poll, which is why so many of the party’s most engaging characters are fighters from outside the establishment. On Sunday, this debate claimed a casualty. State Senator Mallory McMorrow quit the primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat 30 days before the vote. McMorrow had been considered a rising national star who could bridge the party’s deep ideological divisions. The field is now comprised of Representative Haley Stevens, the establishment’s choice, who is a four-term congresswoman, and Abdul El-Sayed, the insurgent progressive whose combative style defines the restive mood: “When they go low,” he once said, “we take them to the mud and choke them out.”McMorrow became famous in 2022 for giving a fierce, viral speech that blasted a Republican lawmaker’s personal attacks. But when she actually ran for the Senate, she tried to act like a moderate peacemaker—even though her own famous speech had helped supercharge the aggressive, angry tone voters now wanted from a candidate. Running on grassroots donations against a $32 million onslaught of outside establishment spending backing Stevens, she discovered the race the fighting built had no lane left for her.Also, as we were going to press this Monday night the following story was developing: Platner’s campaign in Maine might be going down the drain. Just weeks after Graham Platner secured the party’s nomination to challenge incumbent Republican Susan Collins, he said Monday he was reflecting on his “path forward.” Politico printed the latest bombshell about his private life. It alleged he committed sexual assault five years ago. This latest misconduct accusation joins a mountain of existing vulnerabilities—including past misogynistic Reddit commentary and a controversial chest tattoo—leaving party leadership scrambling to figure out how to salvage a must-win seat now that their nominee is an undeniable political liability. The meltdown exposes the hidden tax of the outsider era: when voters bypass traditional institutional gatekeepers in search of raw, anti-establishment energy, they also bypass the screening filters that keep a campaign from self-destructing on the launchpad. There are few models that show Democrats winning back the Senate without winning Maine.10. Sparkle: Sun won’t swallow the earth.We try to keep things in perspective. Take the 30,000-foot view. But even we here at Dickerson Industrial Enterprises and Plumbing Supplies, we don’t take the 5-billion-year view. Scientists do, however, and so it was comforting to learn that in five billion years, the sun will not swallow the earth as it explodes.A study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics by researchers at Belgium’s University of Leuven has overturned decades of cosmic doom by rewriting the math on stellar death. The fate of our planet comes down to a colossal tug-of-war between two opposing forces. As the dying sun expands into a red giant, its blistering surface will kick up massive internal tidal waves that create a gravitational drag, trying to pull Earth inward.At the same time, the sun will be violently shedding its own weight via powerful stellar winds; as the star gets lighter, its gravitational grip weakens, allowing Earth to drift outward.Until now, astrophysicists assumed the inward tidal drag would easily win, spiraling Earth into a fiery engulfment. But by utilizing advanced modeling and examining a nearby aging star named L2 Puppis—a glimpse into our sun’s future—the researchers discovered that these inward tidal forces are actually much weaker than previously calculated. If the sun sheds mass fast enough, Earth will successfully migrate to a wider, safer orbit. The revised cosmic eviction notice is not entirely a victory: Mercury and Venus are still scheduled for total vaporization, and the sun’s escalating heat will boil our oceans and sterilize all life on Earth within two billion years anyway. But the physical rock itself will pull through, surviving as a scorched, barren monument orbiting a cooling white dwarf.Have a good dinner! Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

IntroWelcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for June 22 through June 26. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player.Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering.Measuring Iran, UK PM goes down, the pedestrian’s enemy, The Supreme Court closes doors, more drones than ever hit Russia, Vance says Watergate Shmatergate, Clive Davis could say more in three minutes than Alan Greenspan in a weekend and when this guy yells you’d better cover your ears.Let’s take it day by day.Monday June 22Hammering out a deal after the bombs.Was the war in Iran worth it? As the U.S. and Iran work on a deal to end the war, each item in that deal should be seen in the light of that question.JD Vance departed Switzerland on Monday after talks that stretched past 1 a.m. He said Iran had agreed to let international nuclear inspectors back into the country. Iran’s foreign minister said inspections would “continue as usual.” In the word choices lies a key distinction. Iran has had inspectors in the country, on and off, for decades, including before the war.The question – as it has been going back to the Obama era agreement– is which sites the inspectors can visit, and on what terms.Under the 2015 nuclear deal — the one Trump called “one of the worst deals ever” and cancelled in 2018 — Iran agreed to give inspectors access to Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain, including uranium mines, centrifuge production facilities, and access to undeclared or military sites within 24 hours at declared facilities.Critics at the time — Trump-ally Senator Tom Cotton chief among them — said the inspections schedule wasn’t enough. Inspectors had to be allowed in anytime anywhere.After Trump cancelled the deal in 2018, Iran reduced the access it had given. Since last June, Iran has barred inspectors entirely from sites bombed by the U.S. and Israel — which include the facilities where Iran had been producing and storing highly-enriched uranium.What Vance announced Monday then, was a return to something like the 2015 baseline — the arrangement that wasn’t good enough for the hawks who cheered Trump’s decision to blow up the Obama-era deal.Iran’s president said his country’s frozen assets– $100 billion held in unpaid oil bills and decades-old military contracts.-- would be unfrozen and returned. Vance said Iran could use it only to buy American agricultural products — soy, corn, wheat– and only if Iran cooperated in negotiations.The Strait of Hormuz remains open to shipping, Vance said, though the main central route is still mined. Iran’s military said Saturday it had closed the strait in response to continued fighting in Lebanon; U.S. Central Command disputed that. By Monday, Vance said the strait was open. Before the war, 100 to 130 vessels passed through the strait each day. Over the weekend, there were 71 confirmed transits.Keir Starmer to exitBritain is now on its seventh prime minister in a decade. The position is the Spinal Tap drummer of global leadership. Keir Starmer announced his resignation Monday morning, two years and roughly two months into a term that began with Labour’s largest parliamentary majority this century.The majority was the misleading part. Labour won 34 percent of the vote in July 2024 because the conservative opposition was fractured, not because voters were enthusiastic. In fact, it was a record low for a party forming a government.Analysts called Starmer’s victory a “loveless landslide.” And the love did not arrive after the marriage. Starmer left office as the least popular prime minister in polling records.There’s been so much turnover in the office of the prime minister that Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group said, in the future, everyone will be prime minister of Great Britain for fifteen minutes.Starmer did not launch a failed war, mismanage a pandemic, or crash the economy. His missteps were more mundane. He cut the winter fuel payment — an annual heating subsidy worth £200 to £300, paid to nearly all British pensioners since 1997 — restricting it to only those on the lowest means-tested benefits. That took the payment away from roughly 10 million people. The stated rationale was filling a £22 billion hole in the public finances left by the Conservatives. He reversed course which the left called it callous, and financial markets called it indecisive.Starmer then proposed cutting the benefit that helps millions cover the extra daily costs of living with a long-term disability, such as help getting dressed, getting around, or managing medication. Over 100 Labour MPs threatened to vote it down. He backed off that too.The problem for Starmer and any British prime minister is structural. More than half of Britain’s annual government spending — roughly 600 billion pounds — goes to three line items: the National Health Service, the welfare state (disability payments, housing support, and pension benefits) and debt repayment. All three are growing.America faces a version of the same fiscal trap UK leaders face. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest on the national debt together consume more than half of all federal spending, and every one of those lines is growing. Touch any of them and you lose the next election. Touch other popular items to fix the problem and people revolt.There were non-policy problems as well. Under Starmer’s predecessors, Conservative lawmakers had thrown parties in Downing Street during the Covid lockdowns they themselves had imposed on the country. So when the labor party’s P.M. accepted tickets to Taylor Swift and Arsenal matches while he was calling for austerity measures, he was open to charges that he’d dropped his posture as an antidote to the Conservatives’ culture of entitlement.He also appointed Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to Washington despite Mandelson’s well-documented ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Starmer fired Mandelson in September once those ties became clearer. The question that followed him — what he knew, and when, about whether security officials had cleared Mandelson — was made sharper by the fact that the British royal family had already forced Prince Andrew out over his Epstein ties. The institution least associated with accountability had managed to show some. The prime minister hadn’t.You can see how he might have miscalculated though. The country he was sending Mandelson to, after all, was one whose president had been photographed with Epstein dozens of times, whose cabinet included officials who had maintained ties with Epstein after his conviction for sex trafficking. If Washington had set the bar that low, an ambassador with a special Epstein relationship might help with the special relationship, the term sometimes used to describe U.S./U.K. ties.Federal judges blockingPresident Trump has engaged in a multi-pronged effort to change American voting. In legislation, by executive order and rhetorically. His specific target – non-citizen voting– which is already illegal and fraud which is rare and has never been shown to remotely affect a national election.In the executive branch, the Trump administration took a database the government uses to check immigration status — a tool called SAVE that was built to cover the roughly 26.5 million noncitizens and naturalized citizens who had passed through the federal immigration system — and expanded it to cover nearly every American with a Social Security number, folding in citizenship data and biometric records. This allowed states to run their voter rolls through the tool to flag supposed noncitizens. Several Republican-led states used the system and removed people it had identified as noncitizens — some of whom were, in fact, U.S. citizens.Monday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the use of the overhauled SAVE tool. Her 75-page ruling found that federal agencies had been “scrambling to comply” with an executive order mandating its use in the creation of eligible voter lists for each state which caused sloppy results. She ruled the system violated three federal laws meant to protect private information: the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. The administration’s argument — that only a small number of records were inaccurate — she called a red herring. Disseminating false citizenship data, she wrote, is defamatory, because it implies the flagged voter committed a federal crime.The larger fight is about who controls elections. The Constitution assigns that authority to states, not the president — a deliberate choice by founders who explicitly sought to dilute concentrated federal power. The Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington D.C. to force them to hand over voter rolls — and is 0 for 9 so far in court.Minnesota meanA grand jury subpoena is one of the most powerful tools in federal law enforcement — a demand by prosecutors for testimony or evidence that is almost impossible to refuse and almost never blocked by a judge. On Monday, a judge blocked one. Or six of them, in fact, all aimed at Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and other state and local officials.The subpoenas arrived on January 20th, the same day Trump posted on social media promising a “Day of Reckoning & Retribution” for Minnesota’s leaders — one day before the Justice Department leaked word of a federal investigation into Walz. The DOJ’s stated justification was that Walz had obstructed federal immigration agents during Operation Metro Surge, an immigration sweep that left two Americans dead and resulted in roughly 4,000 arrests.Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz — a George W. Bush appointee — found that explanation “risible.” The connections between the information sought and any actual criminal violation– the standard required for the subpoena to be valid– ranged from, in his words, “extremely weak to nonexistent.”What the subpoenas were actually doing, Schiltz found, was using the grand jury process to punish officials for refusing to direct state resources toward federal immigration enforcement. States have no constitutional obligation to do that. The federal government cannot compel them. So the administration reached for the next available lever: the threat of criminal exposure. Schiltz called it “a blatantly unlawful and unethical use of the grand-jury process” and threw the subpoenas out.Ebola growingConfirmed Ebola cases in eastern Congo have reached 1,003, with 254 deaths. This outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain has now produced more than seven times the total case count of both previous outbreaks of that strain combined, making it the largest Bundibugyo outbreak ever and the second-largest Ebola outbreak on record, behind only the 2014-2016 West African epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people. There is no approved vaccine or treatment for this strain.The WHO declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern on May 17 — its highest-level designation, used previously for Covid-19, the 2014 Ebola epidemic, and mpox.Contact tracing — the process of tracking down everyone who came into contact with an infected person before symptoms appeared — has reached only 55 percent of known contacts. Public health officials believe the target threshold required to successfully contain a highly infectious disease outbreak is greater than 90% of identified contact persons traced.The United Nations refugee agency said at least two million displaced people, including more than 320,000 refugees, live in areas at risk. Access is complicated by ongoing attacks from the Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamic State-affiliated rebel group active in Ituri.Donors have pledged $910 million for the response. Less than $90 million has reached the affected countries. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control announced Monday it would release $107 million in emergency funding. The CDC has also rerouted flights arriving from Congo and Uganda to four U.S. airports — Dulles, Atlanta, Houston, and JFK — for enhanced screening. Its current assessment is that the risk of the outbreak spreading to the United States is low.How alarmed should Americans be? More than most are, less than the worst-case framing suggests. The outbreak is out of control by the CDC’s own metrics — contact tracing is failing, the true case count is unknown, and the virus is spreading in a city of more than a million people. It has no vaccine and no treatment.But Ebola spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids, not through the air, which limits its pandemic potential in countries with functional health infrastructure. The danger is concentrated where it already is: in one of the poorest, most conflict-affected regions on earth, where the response is underfunded and the disease has a head start.Keep on truckin’In November 2022, researchers from the Transportation Department’s Volpe Center met with senior officials at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and told them that America’s most popular vehicles were killing hundreds of pedestrians who would not have died if the vehicles had stayed the size they were in 2002.A senior NHTSA official disputed the data and said new pedestrian-sensing technology was already improving safety. The meeting ended without a plan.That was three and a half years ago. On Sunday, the New York Times published the study those researchers had been working from, along with new analysis matching federal crash records to vehicle dimension data. The finding: the shift toward larger SUVs and pickup trucks caused an estimated 3,000 pedestrian deaths between 2016 and 2024. That’s between 200 and 400 people a year who would be alive if vehicles had remained roughly the same size as a generation ago.Why? Hood height. The average vehicle hood today stands about three feet high. Anyone shorter than five-foot-six — roughly half of American adults — would be knocked to the pavement by most vehicles on the road. A pedestrian struck at the center of gravity goes down and under the vehicle. A pedestrian struck lower goes up and over, which is survivable. The second explanation: blind zones. Using a three-dimensional scanner, the Times compared sightlines in four of the most popular pickup trucks today against their counterparts from the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Silverado’s blind zones have nearly doubled. The Sierra’s and Tacoma’s grew by about 60 percent.The auto industry’s response is that pedestrian-sensing technology will solve the problem. The Times found that many such systems fail in common conditions: bad weather, shadows, uneven road surfaces, or when a pedestrian is running, pushing a stroller, or is the size of a small child.The full-size pickup truck now averages a sticker price of $70,000 — double that of a sedan — and is the source of virtually all of the U.S. auto industry’s profits.Alan GreenspanAlan Greenspan died Monday at his home in Washington at 100. His wife of 29 years, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell, confirmed the cause as complications of Parkinson’s disease.Greenspan led the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006 — eighteen years, which included the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. The second-longest tenure in the Fed’s history, he was appointed by Ronald Reagan and reappointed by George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. No other Fed chairman has been reappointed by presidents of both parties in succession.During his time as chief of the Fed, he transformed the perception of the role itself - creating the conditions where the chairman of the Federal Reserve was seen as a sort of Superman controlling vast swaths of the American economy. His mere use of the expression “irrational exuberance,” in which he asked whether asset prices had become too high shocked the markets. This encouraged him to change his public statements and say very little but at great length.He arrived in office 69 days before Black Monday — October 19, 1987 — when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 508 points, 22.6 percent, the largest single-day drop in history at the time. Every stock trade involves a two-day gap between when you agree to buy or sell and when the money and shares actually change hands. Firms had promised to pay customers Monday’s prices. By the end of Monday, those shares were worth 22 percent less — but the firms still owed what they had promised. Multiplied across millions of trades, the gap between what was owed and what the stocks in their hands were worth was too large. They turned to banks for loans but the banks refused.It looked like the machinery that processes every buy and sell order in America was about to stop.Greenspan said the Fed would provide. He called the heads of the major New York banks himself and told them to keep lending. The Fed made $17 billion available to the banks in a single day. The idea was to cover the chaos, diminish panic for long enough for prices to recover and the Fed to get its $17 billion back. The economy suffered no lasting harm. The episode established him.His predecessor Paul Volcker had spent eight years solving high inflation. Greenspan showed the Fed could also be fast and generous in a crisis. The assumption that the Fed would always step in to cushion a crash still shapes how Wall Street takes risks today.Critics blamed his low-rate policy of the early 2000s for inflating the housing bubble that collapsed in 2007 and 2008. By keeping interest rates low, Fed made money cheap which encouraged banks and borrowers to take risks. Greenspan, who knew banks were issuing mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them, chose to trust the market to police itself rather than use the Fed’s regulatory authority to stop it. In 2008 congressional testimony, he said his belief that markets were guided by rational actors — that banks and investors would restrain themselves out of self-interest — had turned out to be wrong.Greenspan’s last public act: joining all other living former Fed chairs and former Treasury secretaries in signing a statement opposing the Trump administration’s criminal investigation of current Fed chair Jerome Powell.Clive DavisClive Davis died Monday at his home in Manhattan at 94.Davis was the chief creative officer of Sony Music Entertainment and the former president of Columbia Records, founder of Arista Records, and founder of J Records. He signed or developed Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Carlos Santana, Aerosmith, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Alicia Keys, and Jennifer Hudson, among dozens of others.He had no background in music when he started in Columbia’s legal department in 1960 at 28. His education came from studying the Billboard charts and analyzing what made a hit. The epiphany that remade his career arrived at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, where he saw Janis Joplin perform. He signed her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, shortly after.He was fired from Columbia in 1973, accused of using $94,000 in company funds — roughly $700,000 today — for personal expenses including his son’s bar mitzvah. He denied it. He pleaded guilty in 1975 to one count of failing to pay taxes .Houston’s 1985 debut album, prepared over two years spent searching for the right songs and producers, produced three number-one singles and sold more than 25 million copies. His Grammy parties — hosted annually since 1976 — were among the music industry’s fixed institutions.When Davis signed Springsteen he told him he was too static onstage, that he just stood there. Springsteen appeared to absorb nothing. Two years later Davis caught him at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village and Springsteen was jumping off the stage, onto tables, into the crowd. Afterward backstage he looked at Davis and said: “Did I move around enough for you?”Mozart pairs upIn May 1778, Wolfgang Mozart was giving composition lessons in Paris to the teenage daughter of a duke, a talented harpist who could not, in Mozart’s assessment, compose. “She has no ideas, nothing comes of it,” he wrote to his father.On February 2 of this year, François-Pierre Goy, a conservator at the French National Library who has managed manuscripts predating 1800 since 1995, was working through a stack of anonymous documents before his retirement when he opened a 44-page notebook. He recognized two distinct handwriting styles — a student’s and a teacher’s — and the teacher’s handwriting matched what he knew of Mozart’s: the rounded treble clefs leaning forward, the particular way of drawing braces, the double final bars.The notebook contains seven previously unknown works for flute and harp. In the most substantial piece, a fast movement lasting about five minutes, curators estimate Mozart wrote roughly 75 to 80 percent of the music himself, correcting and completing his student’s work so thoroughly that it became his own.Tuesday June 23Tech stocksTraders sold a lot of AI stocks Tuesday. One reason was a predictable blip in the hype cycle– that flicker when a critical mass of investors consider that their exuberance might be non-rational. Maybe AI isn’t going to be as revolutionary as we thought, at least not as fast as we thought. Also, the Fed might raise rates on inflation concerns. Higher borrowing costs make the math on AI infrastructure spending — billions going out the door, revenue still mostly theoretical — harder to justify.The S&P fell 2 percent. SpaceX, which soared in its first days of public trading, has given back a fifth of its value in three sessions.War powers after the warThe Iran fight Tuesday was over uranium no one can find — and whether a deal will ever require Iran to give it up.The U.S. wants Iran to render its most dangerous nuclear material unusable and to allow inspectors to verify it’s happening before any money moves. Iran wants the money first, and its president said that Iran would never surrender its right to enrich uranium in the first place.Satellite analysis suggests Iran moved its stockpile underground before the U.S. bombs fell — meaning the facilities the administration said it destroyed may have been empty. The international nuclear watchdog has since said it doesn’t know where the material is.The Senate voted Tuesday to direct the removal of U.S. forces from the conflict. Four Republicans joined Democrats to pass it. The administration considers the underlying law constitutionally optional, so the vote is better understood as a message than a leash. The troops aren’t going anywhere — the U.S. military presence in the region will remain through at least the implementation of any agreement, which could take months.The U.S. military presence required to hold this deal in place is substantial: roughly 50,000 personnel in the Middle East, more than 20 warships including two aircraft carriers, and hundreds of military aircraft.A rare agreement under one roofTuesday the House passed a major bipartisan housing bill after Monday’s 85 to 5 Senate passage. The first significant piece of federal housing legislation since 1990, it passed 358 to 32 on its way to the president’s signature.Republicans hope to use the legislation to show they’re addressing people’s concerns about affordability ahead of the midterms which are likely to turn on that issue. Democrats hope to do the same as well as show their base they have addressed the liberal desire to cap private equity home ownership.The bill’s headline provision caps the number of single-family homes an institutional investor can own at 350. The idea — backed by both Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott, an unlikely pairing that helped drive the legislation — is that large investment firms have been bulk-buying single-family homes, converting them to rentals, and pricing families out of the market for existing homes in the process. A Harvard poll in May found 71 percent of registered voters support the restriction.Housing economists say that provision will do little. Institutional investors own roughly 3 percent of single-family rentals and less than half a percent of the total single-family housing stock, according to the Urban Institute. However, there are many urban places where they control more and particularly starter homes. As Annie Lowery pointed out in the Atlantic, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Center for Geospatial Solutions published a report showing that corporations now own one in 11 residential real-estate parcels in the 500 urban counties with data robust enough to analyze. In some communities, they control more than 20 percent of properties.But the larger problem isn’t that the homes that exist are being hoarded by Wall Street landlords — it’s that there aren’t enough homes. The Urban Institute estimates the shortage at 4.7 million units. Some impediments to creating more housing include, local restrictions limit building, rates are high and there’s a shortage of construction workers.The provisions in the legislation housing experts say actually matter are less visible. The bill eliminates a federal rule requiring manufactured homes to be built on a steel chassis with wheels and an axle — a holdover from when regulators assumed such homes would be moved. Most never are. Dropping the requirement could lower the cost of building a new manufactured unit by up to $10,000, according to the Niskanen Center.The bill aims to make it easier to get a mortgage for properties below $100,000, which could particularly help rural Americans seeking smaller loans that tend to be unpopular for lenders who don’t earn much from them. It launches pilot programs to test different regulations to incentivize banks to issue more of these loans. The bill also ties federal Community Development Block Grant money — flexible federal funds that cities currently use for a range of development projects, from road repairs to affordable housing construction — to increasing housing supply, meaning cities that approve more new homes get more federal money, and cities that don’t, get less.The average American home sold for $150,000 in 1990. It sells for just over $500,000 today. Adjusted for general inflation, that 1990 home would cost about $360,000 now — meaning prices have risen roughly 40 percent beyond what CPI inflation alone explains.Antifa convictionOn the Fourth of July last year, a group of protesters gathered outside the Prairieland Detention Center near Dallas to demonstrate against immigration detention. One of them, a former Marine reservist named Benjamin Song, yelled “get to the rifles” and opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle, striking a police officer in the shoulder and neck. The bullet narrowly missed the officer’s spine.On Tuesday, Song was sentenced to 100 years in prison. Seven others received sentences ranging from 30 to 70 years.The case is the first the Justice Department has brought to sentencing under Trump’s executive order designating antifa a domestic terrorist organization. A jury convicted all but one of the eight on terrorism charges in March. The sentencing judge called what happened “an assault on democracy” and said “the need to deter this type of conduct is high.” Neither the jury nor the judge pushed back on the antifa framing. The sentences are remarkable partly because of their length — and partly because of what prosecutors used to justify them. Bringing firearms, first aid kits, and wearing body armor were presented as evidence of terrorist intent.Defense attorneys said their clients came legally armed, for their own protection, to what was planned as a late-night noise demonstration with fireworks. Song said he fired because he believed the officer was about to shoot a protester. Several defendants said they had no role in the shooting or the planning. One was sentenced to 30 years for moving a box of his own belongings — artwork, poetry, journals — after the event. Nothing in the box was illegal.The fight over the word “antifa” runs through the entire case. Antifa is not an organization. It is a political identity — short for anti-fascist — shared by loosely affiliated individuals who oppose far-right extremism. There is no membership, no leadership, no hierarchy. Trump designated it a domestic terrorist organization anyway, even though no legal mechanism exists to designate a domestic group the way the State Department designates foreign ones. Prosecutors defined the “North Texas Antifa Cell” in court filings as a “militant enterprise” that “explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States government.”The Justice Department filed new charges against 15 people in Minnesota last week on similar grounds.Speedy deportationsWhen immigration agents arrest someone in the country without authorization, that person normally has the right to appear before an immigration judge — a hearing where they can explain why they should be allowed to stay, claim asylum, or simply establish that the government has the right person. Expedited removal skips all of that. No judge. No hearing. Agents arrest, process, and deport, sometimes within days.For decades, expedited removal applied only to migrants caught near the border shortly after crossing. In January 2025, Trump signed an executive order extending it to anyone in the country illegally who cannot prove they’ve lived here continuously for at least two years — which means, in practice, nearly the entire undocumented population. A federal district judge blocked that expansion in August, finding the administration hadn’t built adequate safeguards against deporting the wrong person. The ruling cited documented cases of people who had lived in the country far longer than two years but were removed anyway.On Tuesday, a divided appeals court reversed that block. Two Trump appointees on the D.C. Circuit ruled the expansion of expedited removal can proceed. The Obama-appointed judge dissented. The majority acknowledged the error cases but said they resulted from individual officers breaking the rules, not from a flaw in the rules themselves — a distinction the ACLU called a way of insulating the policy from its own consequences.The legal question underneath this is who bears the burden of proof. Under the expanded policy, migrants must establish they’ve been here two years or more to avoid expedited removal, but the administration is not required to tell them that. The majority said the Constitution requires only notice of the action being taken and a chance to respond — not, in Judge Walker’s words, “what amounts to legal advice.” The dissent and the ACLU say that standard makes due process theoretical for people who don’t know it exists.Brexit regretTuesday was the tenth anniversary of the Brexit vote — June 23, 2016, when 52 percent of Britons chose to leave the European Union and triggered the resignation of David Cameron, the first of those seven prime ministers that have moved so fast through the office its more like an extended stay Air B and B.The central promise of those advocating leaving was that money Britain sent to Brussels to pay EU bureaucrats could be spent on the National Health Service at home instead.Economists now estimate Brexit has made the British economy between four and eight percent smaller than it would otherwise be — the result of lost trade with Britain’s largest trading partner; five years of suppressed business investment while companies waited to find out what the new relationship with Europe would actually look like; and a labor shortage in health and social care, where hospitals and nursing homes had relied on workers who could move freely from EU countries.A YouGov survey this month found that 57 percent of Britons now believe leaving was the wrong choice — up from 36 percent who thought so when the vote was held. Just over half of Britons said they would support rejoining the EU.Mon Dieu its hotSummarizing the stint by UK PM Keir Starmer, the Economist wrote, “Sir Keir was simply unable to marshal power or say why he wanted it. His government wilted like a houseplant in a heatwave.” Perhaps a true assessment but for our purposes a sign of just how hot things are in the UK.It has been historically hot in the UK this week, with the country smashing its all-time June temperature records two days in a row amid a dangerous “heat dome” and a rare red extreme heat warning.France recorded its hottest day ever Tuesday — measured as a national average across thirty weather stations. The previous record was set in August 2003, when an estimated 15,000 people died, most of them elderly, most of them in apartments without air conditioning.The Eiffel Tower closed early. The Louvre said it would close two hours ahead of schedule through Saturday. France has recorded forty drowning deaths in the past week as people seek to cool off in the water. Most of the dead are young.Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures rising twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s. Of France’s fifty-two official heat waves since 1947, half have occurred in the past sixteen years.One in four French homes has air conditioning. In the United States, the figure is nine in ten.In 2024, Europe recorded more than 60,000 heat-related deaths during a heatwave; this year’s will be even hotter.X-Ray letter openerSomewhere in a museum, there is a clay envelope that has never been opened. Inside it, there is a letter that’s pressed into clay — roughly the size of a smartphone, written four thousand years ago, The outer layer of clay carries a name. The inner layer carries the message. To read one, you used to have to break the other.Researchers in Germany have built a portable X-ray scanner that gets inside without breaking anything. The innovation matters because the machines capable of this work typically weigh several tons — they don’t travel, and neither do the tablets, which museums won’t ship. So the letters have sat unread not from neglect but from physics. The new device disassembles into eight pieces, flies to the collection, and reconstructs the interior in three dimensions.The team has now read more than a hundred of these unopened letters. A merchant confirming a textile delivery. A woman trying to settle a debt while her husband was away. A digest of the week’s news called Stack the Clay.The empty spot on Messi’s trophy shelfLionel Messi has won everything. Eight individual player of the year awards. Four Champions League titles. The World Cup, finally, in 2022 at age 35. The one thing missing from a career longer than most novels is the Golden Boot — the award for the tournament’s leading scorer, which he has never won in five World Cups.He’s leading it now, with at least four games left to play. He is 38.Kylian Mbappé of France and Erling Haaland of Norway are one goal behind him and are scheduled to play each other Friday. After Norway beat Senegal on Tuesday, Haaland was asked about his next opponent. “They’re probably going to win against us,” he said. “They’re probably going to win the whole tournament.”France is as hot as the weather in the country the team represents. The country’s team has scored freely, which is a departure — two years ago at the European Championship they reached the semifinals without a single goal from open play, winning only on penalties and own goals. Whatever was stuck is now unstuck.It’s not you it’s meA Bank of America survey of Americans aged 18 to 29 found that 51 percent spent nothing on dates in the past month. Twenty-three percent said they are delaying moving relationships forward because of their financial situation. Only 11 percent described themselves as actively dating.The average all-in cost of a date — including grooming and gas — reached $189 earlier this year, up 12.5 percent from the prior year, according to a Bank of Montreal survey. One 26-year-old in Los Angeles told Bloomberg he estimates a dinner date costs him $250, up from $120 a few years ago. Gas in California runs just under $6 a gallon. He matches only with people who live within a 20-minute drive.Forty-two percent of the Bank of America respondents said they were living paycheck to paycheck, including 29 percent of those earning over $100,000 a year.Wednesday, June 24The socialists are coming.Zohran Mamdani has been mayor of New York City for six months. By Wednesday morning, he was the most consequential figure in the Democratic Party’s internal argument about what it wants to be.His three endorsed candidates swept competitive congressional primaries in New York City, ousting two sitting members of Congress. Big deal. In 2024, the incumbency reelection rate was near 98 percent. All three winners ran on the same platform: abolish ICE, tax the rich, end U.S. support for what they call a genocide in Gaza.Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader and a Brooklyn native, backed candidates who lost. He now faces the prospect of a caucus that includes four democratic socialists — up from two — none of whom have committed to supporting him as speaker if Democrats win back the House in November.All three winning candidates attacked their opponents for accepting donations from the Israeli lobbying group AIPAC or refusing to use the word genocide. Jews make up an estimated 10 to 15 percent of the city’s electorate, which has traditionally meant candidates felt compelled to support the Israeli government. But the party is changing nationally. A Gallup poll from February found that 65 percent of Democrats now express sympathy for Palestinians, compared to 17 percent for Israelis. Eighty percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents view Israel unfavorably—a metric that has climbed steadily from 69% and 56% in recent years.What does this mean outside New York? A Manhattan Institute survey of registered Democrats and Harris voters found that 47 percent of the coalition identifies as moderate, 37 percent as progressive liberal, and only a small fraction as socialist — and a plurality across every demographic group, including Black and Hispanic voters, wants the party to move toward the ideological center, not further left.The Pew Research Center recently released a typology of American politics. Leftward Progressives — Mamdani’s ideological base — make up 7 percent of U.S. adults and 14 percent of Democrat-leaning voters. They are by far the youngest typology group, with 79 percent under 50, and 61 percent say they are online almost constantly. They are also among the most politically engaged, which means their energy gets amplified in low-turnout primaries. A small, intense, digitally active faction shapes the party’s public face in ways that don’t reflect the full coalition.Mamdani is popular in New York — Marist found 55 percent of city residents view him favorably — but his coalition is concentrated in places he already won. Every race he entered Tuesday was in a district he carried comfortably last year. The theory of his movement has not yet been tested anywhere that doesn’t already agree with it.Republicans understand this. They will try to convince voters in battleground districts and states like Michigan and Pennsylvania that liberal views popular in ideological enclaves define the entire Democratic party.The new left is powerful, energetic and successful. But the late, long-serving Congressman Barney Frank, in a May interview with the Times, warned that this includes a tension. The left’s problem, he said, is not the positions themselves but the insistence on making every position a litmus test before building public support for it. The gay rights movement won, he argued, by starting with the most popular fights — gays in the military, employment — and leaving marriage for last. The new left wants everything at once. “If you insist on the most controversial parts all at once, you make it harder.”Trump holds housing bill hostageWednesday morning, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the housing legislation that had just passed through Congress “one of the most significant pieces of housing affordability legislation in American history,” and James Blair, the recently departed White House deputy chief of staff now running Trump’s midterm operation, dubbed it “a signature commitment that President Trump laid out in the State of the Union.”But something got tangled in the Hormuz. An hour and a half before the president was due to sign the bill at the Capitol at noon, the president posted online minimizing the bill as one “of minor importance,” calling it “The Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren centric housing bill.” Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, was one of the main authors of the bill in the Senate. He caught lawmakers and his staff by surprise, declaring on social media that a news conference and signing ceremony was “hereby cancelled until such a time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency.”The news conference that was not cancelled was the one ongoing when that social media post arrived. House Speaker Mike Johnson and other House GOP leaders were touting the housing bill at a news conference, the stage set for the president in the National Statuary Hall — including a table and chair to sign the legislation.The Save America Act is Trump’s proposed law requiring proof of citizenship to vote and effectively ending mail-in voting. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has said repeatedly that it does not have the votes to pass. The 53-47 Senate can’t get to 60 without Democrats, and Democrats are uniformly opposed because the requirement would fall hardest on the voters they represent — lower-income Americans, minorities, and the elderly — many of whom are eligible citizens without ready access to the documents the bill demands. Democrats also note that federal law already prohibits non-citizens from voting, which makes the bill, in their telling, a cure for a problem that doesn’t existTrump knows this. He has known it for months. What he did Wednesday was use a bill that would have helped Republican candidates in November as leverage for a bill that cannot pass — a hostage taken for a ransom no one can pay.A D.C. court blocked his expansion of the SAVE database Monday. A Boston judge permanently barred his citizenship verification executive order Wednesday. And on Thursday, a federal judge blocked the proof-of-citizenship requirement from his first elections executive order. Three courts in a week. The Senate doesn’t have the votes. The crusade is running into the same wall from every direction.The housing bill can still become law without Trump’s signature. If Congress sends it to the White House and he neither signs nor vetoes it within ten days, it becomes law automatically, on the condition that Congress stays contiguously in session for those ten days. But House leadership hasn’t sent it yet — that clock hasn’t started — and Speaker Johnson said Wednesday he expects Trump to sign it within the ten-day window once he does.Trump shouts at SenatorsTrump blew off the signing ceremony but kept his lunch date with Republican Senators where he blew off steam.Inside the lunch, Trump spent most of an hour not on the housing bill or the elections legislation he says is his top priority, but on Iran — specifically on the four Republican senators who had voted the day before to rebuke his handling of the war. He called them losers. He accused them of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Senator John Kennedy said Trump arrived “mad as a murder hornet.”Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana stood up and told the president that the war was not going as well as senators were being told. “It was supposed to last four weeks,” Cassidy said afterward. “It’s lasted four months.” Trump responded by bringing up Cassidy’s recent primary loss — the one Trump caused by endorsing his opponent. Cassidy called it an attempt to bully him out of asking a question the American people deserved answered.Majority Leader Thune, sources said, did not speak.Trump is powerless.Also on Wednesday, a federal judge in Boston permanently barred Trump from implementing the proof-of-citizenship requirement from his first elections executive order. The Constitution, Judge Denise Casper wrote, “does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.”Camp Mystic bankruptcyCamp Mystic, the all-girls Christian camp in central Texas where catastrophic flooding killed 28 people last July — 25 campers, two counselors, and the camp’s longtime executive director — filed for bankruptcy protection on Wednesday. The operators listed debts exceeding $10 million against assets of between $1 and $10 million.Chapter 11 allows a company to reorganize rather than liquidate, but it also freezes most civil lawsuits against the debtor — which matters here, because the families of the dead are almost certainly plaintiffs. State investigators found earlier this month that the camp had failed to provide adequate emergency plans and that nearby adults had been unprepared to act when the floodwaters came.Gen Z wants to helpA Gallup survey out Wednesday found that nearly 80 percent of Gen Zers (those between 14 and 29) want jobs that help other people. Those who feel they’re making a positive impact in others’ lives are dramatically more likely to find their own lives meaningful. But the economy isn’t meeting them where they are. Almost half said care-focused jobs don’t pay enough, and half said what they actually want most from a career is a job that makes enough money without being too stressful. At which point someone’s father says “that’s why they call it work.”When researchers removed the financial constraint and asked what they’d do on a comfortable salary, most said they’d take the meaningful job. The motivation is there, which means those who pay care workers should increase salaries to tap the meaning-focused generation. And if that doesn’t happen we’ll have another case where there’s agap between what a generation says it values and what the economy makes possible.Thursday, June 25Venezuelan double quakeTwo earthquakes struck Venezuela’s northern coast Wednesday evening, 39 seconds apart — a 7.2 and then a 7.5. The second was the strongest to hit Venezuela since 1900. By Thursday morning, at least 164 people were dead and nearly 1,000 injured. By Friday that number had risen to over 500, with thousands still missing. The United States Geological Survey estimated a 41 percent probability that the final death toll could exceed 10,000.La Guaira sits just north of Caracas and contains the country’s main airport, which sustained heavy damage and was closed. The buildings that fell were mostly unreinforced brick and concrete — structures that, in a large earthquake, fail floor by floor, one pancaking onto the next.Residents were wandering the streets, shouting names of the missing. Since there were no machines, neighbors were the ones who started digging.The country’s coffers are largely empty. Trump posted that Venezuela’s people were his “new and great friends” since he seized Venezuela’s then-president, Nicolás Maduro, in a military raid. The president instructed all federal agencies to move quickly. Rubio called it “a setback” to stabilization efforts. He said the response would be “big, fast, and effective” — then noted the airport closure was complicating logistics.State TV showed some international emergency responders started to arrive Friday to help dig through the aftermath in search of thousands of missing people. A website compiling reports of people still missing had 50,000 names listed as of Friday morning, according to Reuters.Previously, the record for the deadliest quake in Venezuela’s modern history was a 1967 earthquake that killed 240 people.Not so EZ pass.Iran’s Revolutionary Guard issued a warning Thursday to any vessel using the alternative shipping route through Omani waters — the route organized by the International Maritime Organization to move hundreds of ships stranded in the Persian Gulf since the war began. The Guard called the route “unacceptable and completely dangerous.” “Violators will be dealt with,” it said, without elaborating. Hours later, a cargo ship on that route was struck by an unknown projectile. The UK Maritime Trade Operations center confirmed the vessel sustained damage to its bridge. No casualties. No confirmation yet of who fired.Before the war, 130 or more ships passed through the strait each day. Wednesday had 78 transits — the most since the war began, but still well short of normal.The underlying dispute is not just about routes. It is about who controls the strait permanently, and on what terms, after the 60-day window in the memorandum of understanding expires. The MOU says Iran will allow toll-free passage “for 60 days only” — after which Iran and Oman will negotiate “the future administration and maritime services” of the waterway. Iran has already set up a Persian Gulf Strait Authority to regulate and collect fees. Rubio said Thursday that Iran will never be permitted to charge tolls under any final deal: “International waterways do not belong to any nation state.” Iran has not agreed to that. The MOU does not resolve it. It schedules a conversation about it — one that, based on Thursday, is not going well.This was not an issue before the war. If what’s won in the end is less than the status quo before the bombing started — or before Trump tore up the JCPOA — then a lot was spent for a weaker result.Just one in four Americans believes President Donald Trump’s war with Iran was worth its costs ‌and a majority worry that a truce with Tehran is unlikely to last, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.Inflation still hereThe Personal Consumption Expenditures index — the PCE — is the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge because, unlike the better-known Consumer Price Index, it tracks how Americans actually adjust their spending as prices change, capturing the full economy rather than a fixed basket of goods. The Fed’s target is 2 percent annual PCE inflation. In May, it came in at 4.1 percent — the fastest annual rate in more than three years. The main driver was oil prices, pushed up by the war.But the so-called core measure, which strips out food and energy, rose 3.4 percent — a sign the question going forward is not just whether war-driven fuel prices will fall. It is whether inflation from tariffs, and from the broader stress the war placed on supply chains, has now embedded itself in the wider economy. If it has, the oil-price relief from the ceasefire may not be enough. About half of Fed officials now expect to raise interest rates by year’s end. The Fed’s new chairman, Kevin Warsh, is under pressure from the president to cut them instead.SCOTUS TPSThe Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Thursday to allow the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians. TPS is the program Congress created in 1990 to give people from countries struck by war or natural disaster temporary legal status and work permits in the United States. It does not provide a path to citizenship.Among the 350,000 Haitians facing deportation: 15,000 agricultural workers, 13,000 nursing assistants, and 8,000 caregivers, according to the National TPS Alliance. Many have American-born children. Panic rippled through communities from Florida to Ohio within hours of the ruling. TPS recipients from Haiti concentrated in nursing homes, factories, and elder care facilities because they were among the few sectors that actively recruited them: health care for its chronic labor shortage, manufacturing for its tolerance of workers without college credentials. Miami Jewish Health had already cut 120 nursing home beds in part due to pending TPS cancellations. At a Boston rehabilitation center, managers began preparing to lose the dietary aides and certified nursing assistants caring for 115 elderly residents.Immigrants began making plans to sell homes and resolve custody arrangements. The State Department currently warns Americans not to travel to Haiti in its strongest terms, citing gang violence, kidnapping, and limited health care. Four Haitian women deported in February were found beheaded and dumped in a river several months later, according to court documents filed by immigration lawyers.The administration moved to end TPS for people from 13 of the 17 countries that had it when Biden left office. Lower courts had blocked the terminations, finding that the administration had not followed the process Congress required — including a genuine consultation with the State Department about country conditions — and that the Haiti decision was likely motivated by racial animus in violation of the Fifth Amendment. Thursday’s ruling clears the path to deportation. Stephen Miller told reporters Thursday that Haitians and others who lose TPS should be detained and deported immediately.Writing for the majority, Justice Alito said the statute bars courts from second-guessing the Homeland Security secretary’s designation decisions. On the racial animus argument, Alito did not say the claims were false. He said the statements cited — including Trump calling Haiti a “filthy, dirty, disgusting” country and amplifying false claims that Haitians were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio — were not “overtly racial” and insufficient to prove race was a motivating factor.Justice Kagan’s dissent rested on two grounds. The first is procedural: she argued courts can review whether the secretary followed the required process, even if they cannot override the final decision. The second is constitutional: she argued the Constitution’s guarantee that the government cannot act out of racial animus applies here, and that the evidence was plain. “The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike,” she wrote, that race entered into the decision. Kagan noted that Trump’s comments were “so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.” The practical effect is that the constitutional claim goes back to lower courts — but the injunction keeping people in legal status while that litigation proceeded is now lifted.Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, called the decision “a mistake” and said it is too dangerous to deport people to Haiti. New York Governor Kathy Hochul vowed to fight the ruling: “It’s going to cripple our health care system. Who’s going to show up tomorrow to take care of grandma?”SCOTUS AsylumImagine you are fleeing gang violence in Honduras. You make it to the US border. You walk up to an official crossing and tell the officer you are afraid to go home. For decades, federal law has been understood to guarantee you the right to be heard — to have someone evaluate whether your fear is credible before anything else happens. On Thursday, the Supreme Court ended that guarantee.The court ruled 6-3 that the administration can turn people away before they set foot on American soil. The majority’s reasoning: federal law gives asylum rights to anyone who “arrives in the United States,” and a person standing in Mexico, stopped at the border, has not arrived. Justice Alito: “A guest does not arrive in a house when he knocks on the front door.”The ruling leaves asylum seekers with two options. They can present themselves at an official crossing and be turned away without any evaluation of their claim. Or they can cross between ports of entry — which is illegal under US law. The 1951 Refugee Convention, which the United States ratified unanimously in 1968, says refugees should not be penalized for illegal entry when fleeing persecution. But that protection only applies once you’re on US soil — which you can no longer reach legally without the administration’s permission.The same treaty prohibits returning anyone to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened. The United Nations’ position is that turning people away at the border without evaluating their claim violates that obligation. The court’s majority held that domestic law governs what happens at the border. The treaty has no enforcement mechanism. There is no court that can make the United States comply.Justice Sotomayor read her dissent aloud from the bench — an unusual act of public protest — saying the ruling “extinguishes the light of the torch of the Statue of Liberty.” The policy is not currently in use, but the ruling makes it available whenever the administration wants it. White House aide Stephen Miller reacted to the ruling by declaring that “America’s doors are closed to asylum seekers.”SCOTUS RoundupFor about 20 years, John Durnell was the “spray guy” for his neighborhood association in St. Louis — killing weeds at local parks without protective equipment. He developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the white blood cells, and attributed it to his exposure to Roundup beginning in 1996. A jury awarded him $1.25 million. Thursday’s ruling erases that verdict and closes the courthouse to the more than 100,000 people who filed similar claims.A 7-2 court held that Bayer cannot be sued in state courts for failing to warn consumers about cancer risk because the EPA has determined no such warning is required. The World Health Organization classified Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, as “probably carcinogenic” in 2015. The EPA has said it is unlikely to cause cancer when used as directed.The principle the ruling establishes goes beyond Roundup: once a federal agency approves a product’s label, state courts cannot second-guess that approval — even if the underlying science is contested, even if internal documents suggest the company knew more than the label disclosed. The agency’s word is final. Medical devices, cosmetics, other pesticides — anything governed by a federal labeling requirement could now be shielded from state failure-to-warn claims by the same logic.That makes the ruling politically awkward in a specific way. Trump sided with Bayer. Robert F. Kennedy built the MAHA movement — the movement that helped elect Trump — on the argument that federal agencies like the EPA have been captured by the industries they regulate, approving products not because they’re safe but because corporations shaped the process. Thursday’s ruling holds that once the EPA speaks, the courthouse door closes. That is precisely the outcome MAHA activists believe enabled decades of harm. Kennedy has not reconciled that position with the administration’s.UKs next PMOn Thursday, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Keir Starmer’s government — the equivalent of the Treasury Secretary in American terms — threw her support for the next prime minister behind Andy Burnham.Burnham is the 56-year-old former mayor of Manchester and currently the sole declared candidate for Labour leader. Under his nine years in that job, he took the city’s bus network back into public control, capped fares when they were rising nationally, and became the most popular politician in the Labour Party — including among voters in areas the party has been losing to Reform.To become party leader, Labour rules require a seat in Parliament. Burnham didn’t have one, so a sitting MP resigned his position to trigger a by-election — the first time since 1965 that had been done solely to clear a path for someone outside Parliament. Burnham won last week, routing the Reform UK candidate — the nationalist party that wants to halt immigration, scrap climate targets, and push the NHS toward private providers. If he faces no challenger when nominations close July 16, he could be prime minister by July 17.The Greens blinkFrance recorded its hottest day ever Tuesday. Only 25 percent of French households have air conditioning, compared to 50 percent in Spain and Italy and 90 percent in the United States. Thousands of schools have closed this week. Medical workers say conditions in hospitals are becoming intolerable. Richard Salmon, director of the Air Conditioning Company in the UK, said residential inquiries have more than tripled in five years. “People just can’t function when they’re boiling at 3 a.m.,” he said.Marine Le Pen, of the nationalist National Rally party , has called for a national plan to equip all schools and hospitals with air conditioning, backed by €20 billion in government loans. The head of the Ecologists party broke with her movement’s longstanding argument — that air conditioning treats the symptom while worsening the disease, consuming electricity, expelling heat onto city streets, and raising urban temperatures by two to three degrees — and said air conditioning in schools and hospitals is now unavoidable.They are not wrong. They are also losing the argument.World’s loudest personAnd in totally unrelated air conditioning news, an Australian air conditioning repairman and honorary town crier named Joseph McGrail-Bateup has been recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s loudest person. He yelled the word “now” at 122.4 decibels — the range of a jet taking off — breaking a record set in 1994 by a Northern Ireland schoolteacher who had yelled “quiet.”If you heard him up close you would exceed the physical pain threshold for most humans. Just below a jackhammer or air raid siren which cause immediate physical pain.McGrail-Bateup said there was no way to train for the attempt. It took him seven tries. His voice, he said, was shot for days afterward.The previous record had stood for 31 years.FridayFoolish violationPresident Trump called it “a foolish violation of what we agreed to” referring to the ceasefire with Iran. Iran is reported to have launched at least four drones at a container ship in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, and one struck the upper deck of the Ever Lovely while the U.S. military says it shot down the other three. The ship was damaged but continued its transit.Iran’s deputy foreign minister said safe passage through the strait is “not guaranteed under vague arrangements, parallel routing systems, or decision‑making processes that exclude Iran as a coastal state.” The International Maritime Organization announced a temporary pause in its evacuation of hundreds of vessels stranded in the Persian Gulf since the war began. Ships on the U.S.-backed southern route, hugging the Omani coast, were ordered to turn back or hold position. Thursday’s transit count through the strait fell to about 54, from roughly 73 the day before. Before the war, say with me won’t you, around 130 or more ships passed through each day.One week in, what has the agreement produced? The war has stopped, which has likely saved lives. Iran is selling oil again — about 3.8 million barrels exported in the first week after the naval blockade ended, with the ability to sell to anyone at market prices instead of offering China steep discounts. Frozen assets worth more than $100 billion remain in dispute. Nuclear inspections remain in dispute.LebanonFour rounds of U.S.-mediated talks between Israel and Lebanon have failed to resolve the central questions: the scope and timing of any Israeli pullback from areas of southern Lebanon where its troops have operated since the latest phase of fighting began, and how Lebanese state forces will assume control on the ground. Hezbollah has urged Beirut not to separate its own diplomatic track from Iran’s, arguing that any Israeli withdrawal should be secured as part of Tehran’s negotiations with Washington.After days of haggling in Washington, a fifth round produced a framework agreement. At a State Department ceremony, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that Israel and Lebanon had agreed to a U.S.-brokered framework he described as “the beginning of the beginning” toward a cessation of hostilities and the reassertion of Lebanese sovereignty in the south. The text envisages Lebanese Armed Forces units taking exclusive control in designated “security zones” and a phased reduction of Israeli forces from certain areas, under conditions that include an end to Hezbollah fire. Israeli officials say the deal is meant to push Hezbollah and Iran out of the border equation and open a path toward more durable arrangements between Israel and the Lebanese state.But the underlying gaps remain. Israel has resisted committing to a fixed timetable for full withdrawal, and its forces have continued to carry out airstrikes and drop evacuation leaflets in parts of southern Lebanon even as talks proceed. Hezbollah’s leadership has publicly rejected a framework negotiated without its participation and continues to demand an unconditional, fully scheduled Israeli exit from Lebanese territory.Meanwhile, in the hills above Kfar Tebnit, Israeli troops have surrounded a large underground Hezbollah complex that Israeli and Western officials say was built over decades with Iranian assistance. Hezbollah fighters are believed to be entrenched inside as the standoff drags on, their situation shaped as much by battlefield pressure as by whatever diplomacy produces in Washington.Ukraine drone strikesUkraine launched one of its largest drone strikes of the war overnight Thursday — 660 intercepted by Russian air defenses, surpassing the previous record of 556 set in May. Crimea declared a state of emergency. Gas stations there have run out of fuel. Summer camps canceled. Rolling blackouts. Bookings in Crimea for July and August down more than 30 percent. Zelenskyy announced a 40-day “influence operation” aimed at compelling Russia to end the war.Bolton pleads guiltyJohn Bolton pleaded guilty Friday to a single felony count of illegally retaining classified information — notes he compiled for his memoir excoriating Donald Trump. He faces up to five years in prison and a $2.25 million fine, which could claw back much of what he earned from the book. Sentencing is in October.The case began in the first Trump administration and gained momentum under Biden, after Bolton’s personal email — containing notes on national security matters he’d shared with his wife and daughter as though they were editors — was hacked by Iranian government operatives. A hacker taunted him: “Good luck Mr. Mustache.” His assistant reported it to the FBI. Investigators found the diary-like entries Bolton had been sending himself, essentially a running record of classified material from inside the Trump White House.JD Vance has thoughts about WatergateJD Vance said Thursday at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library that Watergate would have been “a 12-hour news story” today and that “the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” He compared the forces that removed Nixon to those that targeted Trump, called it the work of “the same institutions,” and noted the personal resonance: “Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media. It kind of sounds like JD Vance. I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.”Nixon resigned in disgrace after his administration orchestrated and covered up a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters and members of the president’s party told him he faced certain impeachment for obstruction of justice — paying hush money to the Watergate burglars and directing the CIA to shut down the FBI’s investigation — and abuse of power, including using the CIA, FBI, and IRS to harass political opponents.If Nixon was undone by the deep state, then the deep state was his mouth — the most damning evidence against him being a recording made six days after the break-in of Nixon directing his chief of staff to have the CIA tell the FBI to halt its investigation on national security grounds.Republican congressional leaders listened to the tape and told Nixon he had fewer than 15 votes in the Senate. He resigned the next day. JD Vance has said it takes made-up stories — Haitian immigrants eating pets — to get the media's attention. He called Renee Good and Alex Pretti domestic terrorists after federal agents shot and killed them, a designation so thin that six federal prosecutors resigned rather than sign on. A man with that record would naturally assume the historical record can be rewritten too. Still, it takes some nerve to wave away the case that gave the phrase "smoking gun" its name — because the evidence was that irrefutable — as a 12-hour story. And Vance took the same oath Nixon broke. When a constitutional officer applauds the abuse of the Constitution and compares himself favorably to the man who broke it, he's telling you what the oath is worth in his hands. It's like a newly ordained priest admiring the old pastor who ran off with the collection plate and the married 3rd grade teacher.Chat GPT needs government approvalOpenAI released its most powerful AI model Friday — GPT-5.6, called Sol — with a condition attached: the federal government decides who gets access. Only companies approved by the administration can use it. Individual users cannot.OpenAI said the arrangement is temporary while a longer-term regulatory framework is worked out, and made clear it isn’t happy about it: “We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them.”The administration that came to power promising to liberate AI from Biden-era restrictions has moved in the opposite direction. After Anthropic developed a model capable of finding vulnerabilities in critical software, the administration controlled which companies and nations could access it. Earlier this month it placed export controls on other Anthropic models after the company provided access to a South Korean firm suspected of ties to China. A former Trump AI adviser who is joining OpenAI next month: “In a matter of weeks, U.S. federal AI policy has gone from implausibly libertarian to increasingly draconian and opaque.”AI can read burnt scrollsA papyrus scroll carbonized when Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD has been fully read for the first time, without being opened. Researchers used CT scanning and AI-assisted ink detection to virtually unwrap PHerc. 1667, recovering nearly 1.5 meters of text across 20 columns — a philosophical discussion of ethics and human behavior reflecting Stoic thought, dated to as early as the third century BC, making it among the oldest in the collection. A second scroll yielded the title “Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8” — establishing for the first time that the work ran to at least eight books, when only one had been known. More than 600 scrolls remain unopened. The Vesuvius Challenge, which organized the effort, is offering $1 million to the first team to fully read any additional scroll, and is publishing all its data, models and code. The collection — the only large-scale library known to have survived from classical antiquity — was buried in a villa believed to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. The lead papyrologist on the project was speaking at a conference in Naples, across the bay from Vesuvius — the volcano that destroyed the library visible through the window — when she announced: “Literally last night, in front of Mount Vesuvius, everything changed.” Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for June 15 through June 19. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player. Thank you for those who have reviewed it on Apple Podcasts.Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering.The MOU with not much U, a G-7 that crosses a low bar, the UK bans social media for growing brains and one of its mayors may get an upgrade, Growing brains on SNAP have it tougher, Claude sounds French but being American is its problem. In France the high schoolers earn their berets and cigarettes, they must have given a mouse a cookie in Australia, and a heavy week of mourning for trees.Let’s take it day by day.Monday, June 15thMemorandum of MisunderstandingFor what purpose did this war in Iran take place? One of the goals of this here podcast has been to try to keep that question at the center of what we do, both with respect to the Iran war, but also in general. Trying to find the balance between keeping you updated on the latest developments while also keeping in mind the basic question: What is the point of this enterprise we are delivering you the latest news on?Don’t let the swarm of daily developments distract our focus from the key question.Events on Monday brought that question back to the center– that is, why this war had started– as the world evaluated the Sunday announcement by the president that a deal had been reached with Iran to end the war.What kind of deal was a secret on Sunday and Monday. But as the sun went down Monday night a few things were clear:The first was that the stated goals at the start of the war– regime change in Iran, unconditional surrender, verifiable destruction and ending of Iran’s nuclear program had all not happened. Sure, The regime had changed in the sense that the previous members of it were all dead, but the current members share the same ideological bent, and so for all practical reasons there has been no regime change.As to the details:The Strait of Hormuz will open—a critical waterway that only got a kink in it once the war started— and Iran will profit from oil sales in exchange for promising not to develop nuclear weapons. This core commitment echoes the famous line from the preamble of the 2015 JCPOA that President Trump cancelled in 2018. As Bloomberg noted of the new interim framework: “It seems the US president’s negotiators have solved only the problems Trump himself has created.”‘Memorandum of misunderstanding.’ That’s what Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called it. Because on some key details, the two sides said were saying different things. Take the situation in Lebanon. Iranian state media announced that the deal secureds a permanent ceasefire on all fronts, interpreting the agreement as a U.S. obligation to force Israeli troops out of Lebanon and end the bombing. But the view from Washington and Jerusalem wasis entirely different: the U.S. frameds the deal as a mechanism to neutralize Iran’s regional proxy warfare, while Israeli officials hadve already publicly declared that Trump’s agreement doesn’t bind them and their troops aren’t leaving Lebanon.Then there is the issue of transit. The Trump administration touted a completely open, toll-free international waterway, but Tehran told its domestic audience that the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened exclusively “under Iranian arrangements.”As Axios first reported, intercepted communications show Iranian officials telling one another they have zero intention of agreeing to a final deal on U.S. terms or allowing the physical removal of their enriched uranium stockpile. Instead, Tehran’s private strategy is to treat the 60-day interim window as a mechanism to immediately break the U.S. naval blockade and pocket early economic lifelines—like legalized oil exports—while dragging out technical talks and resisting any enforcement that actually reduces their nuclear capabilities.During Operation Epic Fury, the name the administration gave to the operation while it was in its heavy bombing phase, Trump administration officials and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent maintained that Iran would receive no sanctions relief or access to its estimated $100 billion in frozen foreign assets prior to completing verified nuclear concessions. Bessent explicitly stated that paying transit tolls to Tehran was illegal and warned that any damages inflicted on Gulf allies would be compensated using funds confiscated from Iranian accounts.Hot talk.Under the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) the U.S. granted immediate sanctions waivers for Iranian oil and fuel sales—alongside necessary banking, insurance, and transport services.$100 billion in frozen assets will be available to Iran if they play ball during the 60 day negotiations.Additionally, the text of the MOU includes a framework for a $300 billion international reconstruction and economic development fund for Iran. This erupted into a spat over whether the United States was paying off Iran. The administration said no, the performance-based money would be funded by the Gulf Coast Coalition rather than U.S. investment.Two notes: The concern with paying off Iran has always been that they will use the money to just rebuild their capabilities and these structured payments look an awful lot like the kinds of payments that were once savaged by Trump and others when the Obama administration was also releasing Iranian money frozen by sanctions.Judging by the details of the accord Israel who was in on the take off of this war– some would say Israel was flying the plane.-- was not there for the landing. As of Monday, Israel had neither been a party to the talks or seen a copy of the Memorandum of Understanding. That’s in part because it deals with almost none of Israel’s concerns.G-7: a fragile balancePresident Trump landed in France Monday for a summit America’s allies had spent months engineering around him.The Group of Seven met this year in Évian-les-Bains, on the French shore of Lake Geneva, with a host who pushed the summit back a day — France originally scheduled it for June 14, Trump’s 80th birthday — and who rescinded an invitation to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa after administration aides warned Trump would boycott the summit if Ramaphosa attended. The two countries had been at war over South Africa’s genocide suit against Israel at the International Court of Justice and a land reform law Trump called persecution of white Afrikaners. France denied acting under U.S. pressure. And Macron also arranged for Trump a private dinner at Versailles — among the gilded halls built for Louis XIV — a bauble to keep the American president from leaving early.The G-7 — a gathering of the world’s seven advanced economies — was built in 1975 precisely to limit this kind of diplomatic rushing around. French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing wanted a small, informal room where the leaders of the major democracies could coordinate without the carbuncular bureaucracy in the way.That architecture assumes the participants want the same basic thing, which was easier to assume after the Second World War.European leaders have largely concluded they can no longer count on that with the United States. After the tariff wars, lukewarm support for Ukrainian democracy, footsie with Russia and hostility toward NATO, the Greenland episode — at one point some European governments believed Trump was preparing to send troops to seize the island from Denmark — and the U.S. strike on Iran without allied consultation. You can see why the calculation has shifted.European leaders are now trying to ride two horses: building a structure that functions without the U.S. and not irritating Trump.None of the leaders gathered in Évian want an open rupture with Washington. The U.S. still provides the nuclear umbrella, the intelligence architecture, and most of NATO’s logistical backbone. Oh and its markets, access to capitol, customers and more are part of the global economy.A summit like the G-7 is always a collision between the calendar and the crisis — between the long-range problems that demand collective attention and the immediate emergency that actually has everyone’s focus. This one was no different. The formal agenda that France had carefully assembled — AI cooperation; critical minerals, the lithium, cobalt, and rare earths that China controls and the West needs for defense hardware, semiconductors, and batteries; and development partnerships, the loans and infrastructure financing meant to counter China’s influence in the Global South — was pushed to the margins by the Iran war’s aftershocks. Energy prices are elevated. Supply chains are rattled.DOJ Newsom snoopIn July 2019, Donald Trump pressed the Ukrainian president to announce an investigation into Joe Biden — who was likely to be his 2020 opponent — and find proof that Biden had done something– anything– illegal. The House impeached Trump for using his office for personal reasons and warping the obligations of national security. The Senate acquitted him, 52 to 48, with Mitt Romney the only Republican voting to convict.Two-term California Governor Gavin Newsom claimed Trump was running the same play on him. Newsom, who is widely believed to be running for president, announced Monday that the Trump Justice Department is investigating him and his wife.Federal agents have knocked on the doors of friends and former associates and subpoenaed documents spanning years, according to the governor’s office. Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, have not themselves received subpoenas.The scope is unclear. A person familiar with the matter — speaking anonymously to the Associated Press— confirmed multiple federal probes involving people around the governor, including one examining his wife’s finances, but told the Associated Press they were initiated by federal law enforcement in California after whistleblower complaints, not launched from Washington for political purposes.Siebel Newsom runs two nonprofits and a film production company. The California Partners Project, which promotes gender equity, has received $5.1 million in behested payments — donations that public officials direct to favored causes, which California requires them to disclose — including $1.8 million from a Native American tribe with a state casino agreement. Her film production company, Girls Club Entertainment, is also a paid contractor of her other nonprofit, the Representation Project, collecting $161,250 in 2024. Critics have raised self-dealing concerns for years. No public evidence of wrongdoing has surfaced.The investigation arrives in the wake of a related corruption case. Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, pleaded guilty last month to three felonies, including lying to the FBI about passing confidential state litigation information to a former business partner — information that touched a case involving Activision Blizzard, a client of Williamson’s consulting firm before she joined the governor’s office. Newsom has not been implicated.The new inquiries into Newsom’s associates began around the time Trump nominated Todd Blanche as attorney general. Blanche, who previously defended Trump in three criminal cases, has since pursued investigations or prosecutions against James Comey, Letitia James, John Brennan, and Jerome Powell, among others. He is now the acting attorney general and Trump’s nominee for the permanent post.Is habeas corpus a foreign word?Habeas corpus is the right, older than the Constitution, to make the government prove to a judge why it deserves to be able to lock you up. The framers considered it so foundational they put it in Article One, before they got to the president.The Trump White House spent the early months of 2025 debating whether to suspend that right.The story comes from a confidential memo obtained by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for their forthcoming book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.” The memo was dated April 29, 2025, and written by Will Scharf — the White House staff secretary, a Harvard-trained lawyer who had helped get Trump’s indictment for keeping secret documents at Mar-a-Lago thrown out and argued the presidential immunity case that won at the Supreme Court. He sent the memo to chief of staff Susie Wiles arguing the administration should not suspend habeas corpus.The idea had come from Stephen Miller — deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, not a lawyer, but the chief architect of the administration’s effort to remove people in the country illegally and to block entry to those seeking to come in legally who are not of the kind of heritage Miller prefers.The Supreme Court had ruled that migrants facing deportation under the Alien Enemies Act retained habeas rights — because the Constitution does not say those rights belong only to citizens. That ruling meant detained migrants could go to a judge and demand the government justify their removal, substantially slowing the deportation machinery. Miller’s solution: have Trump claim the power to suspend habeas corpus entirely for unauthorized immigrants. No hearings. No judges.Habeas corpus has been formally suspended four times in American history — after Pearl Harbor, during Reconstruction to stop Klan violence, in the Philippines during an armed rebellion, and by Lincoln at the start of the Civil War. Lincoln’s suspension was the most contested: Congress was in recess and couldn’t act, Chief Justice Taney ruled from the circuit bench that Lincoln had acted illegally, and Lincoln ignored him. Taney is also the author of the Dred Scott decision— the ruling that Black Americans could never be citizens. When people say history will judge you, they’re thinking of someone like Roger Taney. And that history is a far better judge than Roger Taney.But the larger point is that every suspension came during war or armed rebellion. Only Congress can do it legally. Courts have said so repeatedly.The word Miller kept using to justify suspension was “invasion,” according to the Times reporting — the constitutional trigger that might, in theory, unlock the power. Three federal judges had already rejected the argument that unauthorized immigration constitutes an invasion. Border crossings had fallen to multidecade lows. Miller kept using the word anyway.Some White House officials privately called the idea “insane.” The White House counsel was skeptical. After weeks of uproar the proposal faded — not abandoned, just set aside. The administration got much of what it wanted through a quieter method: ICE began treating immigrants arrested inside the United States as if they had just been stopped at the border, making them eligible for mandatory detention without a hearing.By November 2025, at least 225 judges — appointed by presidents of both parties — had ruled in more than 700 cases that the policy was a likely violation of law. The administration frequently ignored them.The Insurrection Act was Miller’s second lever. If habeas corpus let judges spring detainees, street protests were slowing the roundups themselves. The Insurrection Act would let Trump deploy the military to enforce immigration sweeps over the objections of governors and courts. Miller had been pushing it for months. In late January, after federal agents shot and killed two American citizens protesting deportation operations in Minnesota, Vice President Vance walked into Susie Wiles’s office and told the room they needed to invoke it immediately. (Worth noting for the “history will judge,” section of your Stack the Week educational supplement: A likely future presidential candidate choosing the most extreme option when two unarmed Americans were killed in the street.)The meeting ended without action.Why did the founders think habeas corpus was so important? They knew that the corrupting power of authority would always seek to trample individual liberty. No matter how virtuous the president or members of Congress. And if they lacked even one thin drop of character, whooo boy…In the 250th celebration of America’s founding, the administration is celebrating fundamental American ideas not so much by lifting them up but by imperiling them. Shooting fireworks at the Constitution not up in the air in celebration of it.Anthropic kill switchAnthropic makes the artificial intelligence that eight of the ten largest companies in America rely on. It is valued at nearly a trillion dollars and is preparing to go public. On Monday, it was still trying to figure out why the administration four days earlier had effectively told it to shut off its latest model.The model is called Fable 5. It is a public version of Mythos, an AI so capable at finding vulnerabilities in software that Anthropic announced in April it would share it only with a small group of vetted organizations — a story Stack the Week covered at the time and that allowed you to seem winning and knowledgeable at dinner parties.Fable 5 is a piece of software so good at the kinds of thinking humans do that the government decided it was dangerous because I don’t know if you know humans, but they can get up to some pretty rummy thinking and so duplicating that and putting it in charge might be dangerous.To understand exactly what happened though, you need to hold two stories at once. They look like the same story but they aren’t.The first is about artificial intelligence — about what these models can actually do, who should decide when they’re safe, and how you write rules for a technology advancing faster than the rule-writers can read and write, a task so difficult it would make you turn to AI for help, but you can’t because that would be circular and self-defeating.These questions matter regardless of who is in the White House — though a president and his or her team who had thought carefully about these questions beforehand might not be facing this crisis now at least in the acute fashion of its present form. One of the challenges at Stack the Week and in public conversation is attending to those things that are not immediately evidently urgent but are nevertheless important.The second story is about this administration and this company — a political and personal fight with its own history and its own cast of characters with grievances that predate any concern about national security.Here is what is not in dispute. The Trump administration ordered Anthropic on Friday to shut Fable down within 90 minutes. The tool the administration used was export control — a mechanism normally reserved for weapons and semiconductors — which made it unlawful for any foreign national to use Fable, including Anthropic’s own immigrant employees. Since there is no way to check a user’s passport at the login screen, Anthropic pulled it for everyone.The triggering event was a research paper by Amazon. Amazon researchers found that Fable, when prompted in a certain way, would identify vulnerabilities in software code — the thing defenders use AI to do. Amazon shared the finding with administration officials. The officials called it scary.I ran out of time before I could answer why Amazon, which has a $13 billion stake in Anthropic and supplies the chips that power its models, would drop the time on Anthropic. Even that loaded language might be cheap and wrong. So, I leave that question for you to work out in your reading.Anyway, this is the second time in six months the administration has reached for a blunt instrument against Anthropic. In February, after the company refused to approve its AI for use in mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, the Pentagon labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk” — a designation never before applied to an American company. Anthropic is suing over that one too.The White House has long viewed Anthropic with suspicion. David Sacks, the president’s former AI czar, called it a “Resistance organization” trying to “backdoor Woke AI” – which sounds like something from Stephen Miller’s magnetic refrigerator poetry.The administration is close to two of Anthropic’s biggest competitors: OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI. A source told Axios the dispute partly reflected Anthropic’s failure to appreciate the administration’s “ideological differences” — a phrase that has nothing to do with software vulnerabilities and why it should be considered as an AI story and an administration vibes story.The National Security Agency reportedly carved out an exception to its own supply chain risk designation so it could keep using Mythos. The administration wants the tool. It just wants Anthropic to play ball with the Pentagon first. That’s the administration story, not an AI story.UK social media banBritain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced Monday that the United Kingdom will ban social media for children under 16 — with the law expected to take effect in early 2027.Nine in ten British parents support the move.Australia introduced a similar ban in December. Six months in, roughly seven in ten children who had accounts before the ban still have them. No tech company has been fined for non-compliance, though several are under investigation.Starmer’s answer to the enforcement problem was that laws get broken and we pass them anyway. “They get around other laws, too,” he said. “We don’t say, ‘Oh, look, a teenager managed to get a drink somehow, so let’s not bother banning alcohol sales to children.’”Meta said bans risk pushing teenagers toward unregulated platforms with fewer built-in protections.Ian Russell, whose fourteen-year-old daughter Molly took her own life in 2017 after viewing suicide and self-harm content online, called it a “politically expedient blanket ban” — and said the real fix was forcing platforms to remove harmful content, not locking children out of the door.Forcing platforms to remove harmful content runs into a wall built by the platforms themselves — decades of lobbying have produced laws in the United States and elsewhere that shield them from liability for what their users post, and the companies have spent lavishly on lawyers to contest every regulation that has tried to go further.Lincoln “Witness” treeA witness tree is a tree that was alive during a significant historical event and still stands — a living filament back to a moment that is otherwise only available to us through documents and imagination. The Burnside sycamore in Maryland survived the 1862 Battle of Antietam. The elm at the Oklahoma City National Memorial absorbed glass and metal from the 1995 bombing and still grows.We find these things romantic because a physical object does something a fact cannot. It closes the distance between our earnest struggling efforts and those of our ancestors.The last witness tree at Abraham Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Illinois was damaged beyond saving last Thursday when winds gusted to sixty miles an hour and toppled its upper half. It was an American linden. It had been there when Lincoln bought the house in January 1844 and was still there when he left for Washington sixteen years later — having in the interim buried a child, built a law practice, served in Congress, and won the presidency.Part of what we try to do at Stack the Week is resist the flattening of time — the way the news cycle makes everything feel equally present and equally disposable. A witness tree is the opposite of that. It is time made physical.Australia mouse plagueIn Morawa, a town of 660 people in Western Australia, residents check their kettles for mice before making tea. They set traps at bedtime and clear the bodies each morning. When they drive at night, they can hear the tires pop on the scurrying gray hoards.A mouse plague is defined as more than 800 mice per hectare. In parts of Western Australia in May, there were 8,000 per hectare. Mice can give birth and fall pregnant again within days, which is why their rom coms are so predictable and it’s how a nuisance becomes a biblical event.The snakes, we should note, are fat.Grain grower Geoff Cosgrove described the smell that has settled over the region as a combination of urine, feces, and decaying bodies. One farmer spent $31,500 trying to control the mice on his property. A councillor has been pulling walls off his house to find the dead ones. At the height of the plague, mice ran along the shelves of the local grocery store, ate the labels off the liquor bottles, and nibbled the stock.In late May, students at a local agricultural college were sent home for two weeks after a stronger rodenticide — not approved for residential use — was accidentally spread on school grounds. Ninety-six birds were found dead or dying at a nearby golf course and school oval as a result.Scientists describe mouse plagues as uniquely invasive disasters because there is no refuge. With a drought, you can at least go inside. Same with a downpour. Mice follow you in — into your house, your bed, your food. There is no refuge.Australia and China are the only two countries where mouse plagues occur. Scientists are not sure why.Experts say there is a moment in every plague where the tide turns — the scratching in the walls stops and the mice vanish almost as suddenly as they arrived. Whether Morawa is approaching that moment or merely the halfway point is unknown.When I was on the Evening News, there would be little amusing stories at the end of a broadcast. You might think we’re replicating here at the end of every day, talking about trees and mice. No, these two stories at the end of Monday are related, which astute Stack the Week consumers already figured out. The tree is time made physical; the plague is the news cycle made physical — swarming, without refuge, impossible to get ahead of. The tree resists the flattening of time. The plague is flattening — it obliterates everything else. Do you feel like you’re being lifted up a marble staircase of philosophical connection? Connecting the DotsHere’s where we see the connections between these stories on Monday at Stack the Week: I used to put this kind of thing at the start of every day as a way to tease what was coming. But I think because Stack the Week has become a bullion cube of information, that the better thing to do is some bow tying at the end of each day. You let me know.Here are Monday’s bows:The gap between declared reality and actual reality (sometimes referred to as just “reality”):- The Iran deal says one thing in Washington and another in Tehran.- The G-7 communiqué will project unity that doesn’t exist.- The DOJ says the Newsom investigation wasn’t launched from Washington. It’s appearance amid a flood of Washington-launched political investigations suggests otherwise.- The Anthropic shutdown was framed as a national security measure, but the NSA kept using the model anyway.-Britain bans social media, but a similar ban in Australia still means seven in ten kids still have it.Has it always been this way? Have we always had these gaps? And we just haven’t noticed it because we didn’t have as much information as we do now? Or are we living in a hastened world where there are indeed more instances of the announced version of events and the operational version having almost nothing to do with each other.The enforcement gap:- Starmer’s “laws get broken and we pass them anyway.”- Judges ruling 700 times that ICE policy is likely illegal and the administration ignoring them.-Intercepted Iranian communications showing zero intention to honor the deal.-The Anthropic export control that can’t actually check a passport and makes the company shut down its model.We’re measuring the gap between measures taken and results achieved.What institutions are actually being used for:-The G-7 was built assuming participants want the same basic thing.- Habeas corpus assumes the government will answer to a judge.- Export controls assume foreign actors, not domestic AI companies, are the threat.Institutions in Monday’s digest are being used for something other than their original purpose, or breaking down because the conditions that made their formation sensible no longer hold.Tuesday, June 16Iran economic falloutTrump declared the Strait of Hormuz open Sunday. As of Tuesday, seven ships had passed through it. More than 580 were waiting in the Gulf. Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, said it was not rushing vessels back in.The obstacles are mines — Iran seeded the strait and nobody knows exactly how many or where they are — insurance rates that remain prohibitive because no insurance company wants to pay for ships at the bottom of the strait as a result of those mines, and a standoff over tolls. Iran says it will charge fees for passage. Trump says it opens toll-free. Those are not the same thing. Energy experts say it will take months for shipping volumes to return to anything resembling pre-war norms.As a reminder, the average price of regular gasoline hit $4.56 a gallon before Memorial Day — up roughly 50 percent since the war began in February. It has since eased to just above $4.Even if the strait reopens cleanly, gas prices will not fall like a rocket even though they went up like one.Refineries buy crude oil a month or more in advance, which means the gasoline being sold today was refined from expensive crude. Economists say meaningful relief is weeks away at minimum and possibly months. One analyst told the Atlantic that before the war, oil prices were headed toward $40 to $50 a barrel. Now, he said, getting below $70 would be miraculous — because every producer and shipper in the world now knows Iran can close the strait whenever it wants, and that risk gets built into prices permanently.By the way, if you’re totaling up the cost of the war and the new dynamic after the war: pricing in the risk that Iran might shut down the strait was not something that was done before the war at the high price it is now.How will this play out politically? Why don’t you just ask me to chew on aluminum foil, why doncha?Stack the Week listeners know the penchant to run all economic activity through the political lens is one of the great weaknesses of American journalism. But that’s the way the world is right now, so, with the caveat that the economy is a much larger thing than gas prices: the principal claim against the president and his party in this midterm is that they took their eye off the ball when it came to lowering high prices. The cost of gas is a convenient daily reminder that the president’s war of choice in Iran is consistent with that existing disappointment over his scattered focus, so even if prices go down some day, people are not happy. Polls show that Trump’s approval rating on the economy is bouncing in the low 30s.G-7 progress?The G-7 ended its first full day Tuesday with European leaders cautiously optimistic — not because anything was resolved, but because Trump didn’t blow it up. The American president accepted a soccer jersey from the German chancellor, an olive branch Trump accepted from Chancellor Merz who had called the Iran war “ill-considered” and said the Americans “clearly have no strategy,” remarks that earned him a Trump Truth Social attack and the withdrawal of 5,000 U.S. troops from German soil.And the president announced he would reimpose sanctions on Russian oil, which the administration had temporarily eased earlier this year to keep energy prices from spiraling further as the Iran war choked off global supplies. ( A reminder of one of the costs of the war in Iran: temporarily enriching Russia which made it easier for Russia to kill Ukrainians.)All of this collegial and alliance-like behavior may have been motivated by the president’s desire to get European help clearing mines from the Strait of Hormuz, which requires specialized slow-moving minesweeper vessels and weeks of painstaking underwater survey work before commercial shipping can safely resume.Ballroom shell gameTrump has been inconsistent about the price of his plan to demolish the White House East Wing and replace it with a ballroom and underground bunker — the number has moved from $200 million to $300 million to $400 million. On one thing he has been consistent: who pays. “This is taxpayer-free,” he told reporters in March. “We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents.”The Washington Post obtained the contractor’s internal estimate from that same month. It put the total cost at $600 million. More than half was expected to come from taxpayers.By the time Trump made his taxpayer-free claim, the federal government had already approved more than a dozen payments to the contractor, Clark Construction, totaling tens of millions of dollars in public funds. A White House lawyer had already sent an email to colleagues explaining that she was adding language to the contract to tie the project “more closely to security-related issues” — because the Secret Service was providing the funding. “We believe this edit is important to comply with fiscal law principles,” she wrote. The language was retrofitted to make the taxpayer money fit the project.The administration’s answer is that security enhancements are properly paid for by the Secret Service and the military. Three independent contracting experts who reviewed the documents told the Post that the argument doesn’t hold — you can’t disentangle the entertainment space from the security infrastructure. It is one structure, so saying that public funds are going to the security portion but it’s still true the ballroom isn’t being paid for with public funds is like saying the public is paying for the wheels of the car but the car is not being paid for with public funds.Anthropic alliesOn Tuesday, more than 150 cybersecurity experts signed an open letter to the Commerce Secretary and the White House cyber director demanding they lift the export control on Fable. Their argument: the capability the administration flagged as dangerous exists in OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, which faces no restrictions. Chinese models can do the same.An unnamed administration official told Politico that the longer the fight drags on, the more likely it becomes that the White House approach to AI turns into a de facto licensing model — where tech companies must seek Washington’s permission before releasing their most powerful tools. That would contradict everything the administration said it believed about regulating AI and with free market principles about non-interference in commerce. On the other hand, it would provide the President with an extraordinary bit of leverage over what arguably may be the most powerful industrial tool in American history. He won’t just get a soccer jersey from the richest companies in America seeking his thumb’s up.NYT look into Epstein death The New York Times published Tuesday the most exhaustive accounting yet of Jeffrey Epstein’s death in federal custody in August 2019 — drawing on tens of thousands of pages of newly released documents, Epstein’s own handwritten jail notes obtained by the Times, and interviews with dozens of people connected to the case.The official finding was suicide. The conspiracy theory — that Epstein was murdered by someone with an interest in his silence — has persisted for seven years, held by people who agree on little else. The Times found no evidence of a plot. What it found instead was a cascade of institutional failures so complete they look, at first glance, like something designed.It’s worth pausing here to grasp a lesson that perhaps can be applied more broadly, which is that If you are the kind of person who believes in conspiracies, an alternative might be to hook yourself up to a theory that has more plausible evidence in the world in which we actually live. Use your common experience with the human creature, including yourself, and reflect on how often it is that everything you plan in life goes exactly according to plan. And then add that to the idea that it is more plausible that a series of screw-ups can accumulate into what looks like a master plan, but that a master plan of that complexity has rarely been achieved on the planet on which you currently spin because it’s really complicated and humans rarely achieve 100 percent success on sweeping complex operations.Epstein wrote about suicide in his jail notes. His first cellmate, a man awaiting trial for four murders, told the Times he caught Epstein preparing to hang himself twice and reported both incidents to guards who laughed him off. A suicide note was found by that cellmate, hidden for years in sealed court documents, and only made public this May after the Times petitioned a judge to unseal it. His second cellmate, who died of COVID in 2020, told investigators Epstein said he knew he would never see the street again.On the day Epstein died, that cellmate was transferred to another facility. No one found Epstein a new cellmate to replace him, in direct violation of standing orders. The two guards on duty falsified their records to show they had conducted rounds they never made.The cell, when investigators arrived, was filled with linens Epstein was not supposed to have, and multiple nooses made from orange jail fabric. The wrong noose was logged as evidence. The scene was so contaminated that investigators didn’t collect DNA.Whether the medical evidence points to suicide or homicide remains genuinely contested among pathologists. The Times consulted nine of them. None was willing to rule either out based on the available evidence alone. What is clear, the Times concluded, is that a murder would have required an elaborate conspiracy involving multiple jail operations, precise knowledge of which security cameras were malfunctioning, and the willingness to risk the death penalty for killing a federal inmate — with no indication from scores of interviews and thousands of pages of documents that any such plot existed.So you’re saying there’s a chance?Working parentsA Pew Research Center survey of 2,242 working parents released Tuesday found that 70 percent handle parenting tasks during the workday and 59 percent handle work tasks during family time. Fifty-four percent say balancing the two is difficult. Sixty percent say they spend too little time with their children. Nearly half miss events their children are involved in.One mother in the survey put it plainly: “I’m supposed to work like I don’t have kids and supposed to parent like I don’t have a job.”Mothers carry more of it. Sixty-two percent of full-time working mothers say balance is difficult, compared to 47 percent of fathers.Though we know of course in our bones that mothers carry more of the burden than fathers, this finding could also suggest that fathers are just unconcerned about balance and therefore give pollsters answers that are a reflection of their muddled mind.In couples where both parents work full time, 52 percent say the mother does more parenting. Ten percent say the father does more.The parents who have it hardest are the ones with the least flexibility — low-income workers who cannot predict their hours, cannot work from home, and cannot afford to miss a shift. More than half of low-income working parents say they worry about losing pay if they have to take unplanned time off for a child. A third worry about losing their job.And as Stack the Week listeners know, this group is the one suffering the most in the current so-called K-shaped economy.Do we tell them again what K-shaped means? They should know by now. What if they’re new listeners? Then they should listen regularly. Also, there is a benefit to sending listeners and readers to engage with the news more deeply. Yeah, but I’ve kind of never really understood exactly how the K works in the K-shaped economy. So you’re saying that we should explain that when different groups recover along different trajectories — the top half of earners increasing wealth and income, while the bottom half falls behind– that’s where the K comes from: two lines diverging from the same point, one climbing, one sinking. Exactly. Yeah, I don’t think we should explain that again.Japan’s historic interest rate hikeJapan is the fourth largest economy in the world and holds more American government debt — about $1.1 trillion worth — than any other country on earth. When its central bank moves, the ripple reaches American wallets. On Tuesday it moved.Japan’s central bank raised interest rates to one percent — the highest level in 31 years — citing inflation driven by the Iran war’s disruption to oil supplies. Japan imports roughly 90 percent of its crude from the Middle East. Higher Japanese rates give Japanese investors a reason to bring money home rather than park it in U.S. Treasury bonds, which puts upward pressure on American borrowing costs — mortgages, car loans, credit card debt. The Bank of Japan’s deputy governor acknowledged that the U.S.-Iran deal had reduced risks, then added: “We don’t know what will happen next.”Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has spent her tenure pressing the Bank of Japan to keep rates low and the yen weak. The Bank raised rates anyway — a small act of institutional independence at a moment when central banks around the world are navigating the same pressure from their political leaders that the Federal Reserve has been navigating from the White House.South Korean Starbucks to close for history lessonClosed, for a history lesson. That’s the message South Koreans could face if they turn up at any of the 2,000 Starbucks in the country next week. This week the company announced they’ll temporarily shutter stores to give employees and executives mandatory sensitivity and history training after a disastrous, short-lived marketing campaign that was criticized for making light of an infamous massacre.Here’s what those employees are going to hear a lot about: On May 18, the anniversary of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising when a military dictatorship used tanks to crush pro-democracy protesters, Starbucks tried to sell tumblers with the tagline “Tank Day.” That was a bad idea. Backlash was immediate and Starbucks Korea fired its CEO that day. But in the weeks since, there’s been a persistently large downturn in business. Starbucks payment volumes in South Korea — the company’s third-largest market in the world — are still 25 percent below pre-scandal levels.Venus and SerenaSerena Williams will play Wimbledon for the first time in four years, teaming with her sister Venus in the women’s doubles as a wild card entry. Serena is 44. Venus is 45. Together they have won the Wimbledon doubles title six times. Between them they have won the singles title twelve times at the All England Club. If they win this one, they will shatter the world record for oldest combined age of a Grand Slam-winning doubles team. The previous record holders had a combined age of 74 years and 303 days when they won Wimbledon in 2023. Serena and Venus have a combined age of 89. They would shatter it by nearly 15 years. Wimbledon begins June 29.Wednesday, June 17Trump speaks at G-7The G-7 ended without Trump leaving early — which, given his history at these summits, counts as news. At the 2018 summit in Canada he left before it was over and pulled his signature from the joint communiqué by tweet from Air Force One. Last year in Alberta he left a full day ahead of schedule. This time, French President Emmanuel Macron sweetened the stay with a private dinner at Versailles, and Trump stayed through the closing curtain.He also signed the joint communiqué — the formal statement all seven leaders agree to at the end of every summit. Trump has walked away from these before when the language on trade or climate didn’t suit him. This one praised his Iran deal three times, calling it “historic” and crediting his “strong leadership.” It read, in places, as if his own staff had written it.Still, the summit’s underlying tension could not be entirely papered-over. It surfaced in a hot-mic exchange. European Council President António Costa turned to Trump between sessions and said, “We are friends again.” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — who had publicly criticized the Iran war and endured a public dressing-down from Trump in response — quickly interjected: “We have always been friends.” The room laughed.The Iran DealAt a press conference at the end of the G7, president Trump returned to January 2020, when he ordered the killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani at the Baghdad airport. Soleimani was the commander of Iran’s Quds Force — the architect of its network of proxy militias across the Middle East and, Trump said Wednesday, “the father of the roadside bomb.”“If I didn’t kill General Soleimani,” Trump said, “we probably wouldn’t be talking right now about this deal. He was a mad genius. They never were able to replace him.”Trump appeared to be taking credit for shaping the Iranian government that ultimately agreed to the deal, though the logic was hard to follow, because if Suleimani were still alive, he probably would have been killed in the strikes that decapitated the Iranian leadership in the early hours of this war. And if it was merely the lack of Suleimani that caused the deal to happen, then why didn’t Iran strike a deal before the bombs started falling, when the U.S. and Iran were negotiating before the war, since Suleimani was long dead?This might sound a little pedantic, and I apologize if it does. However, I’ll take the opportunity to make the claim that in order to really evaluate the outcome in Iran we have to look at three different kinds of measurement which take place across time and shifting circumstances.So basically what I mean is that the Iran deal that concludes this adventure has to be measured against either the JCPOA that the Obama administration negotiated or the status of U.S.-Iranian negotiations at the end of February before the U.S. decided to attack. In other words, what was possible then and how different is that from whatever is in the final deal at the end of this war. And then also, whatever the final deal is at the end of this war has to be measured against the claims made by the President and his aides at the start of the war to determine whether it was a success.The text of the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran was released Wednesday, after public outcry that nobody had seen it. A senior U.S. official read it aloud.Fourteen points. The broad outlines: Iran commits to allowing commercial vessels safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days at no charge. The U.S. begins lifting its naval blockade within 30 days. Iran commits, as it has many times before and did before the war started, to not developing nuclear weapons and to neutralizing its enriched uranium stockpile under IAEA supervision. The U.S. commits to lifting all sanctions — unilateral, UN, and IAEA — on an agreed timetable. The U.S. commits to working with regional partners to develop a reconstruction fund of at least $300 billion for Iran’s economy.At his press conference Wednesday, Trump was asked about the $300 billion reconstruction fund. He said it was “false.” Then he said other countries could invest if they wanted to. “What am I going to do, say no one is ever allowed to invest?” he said. “We’re not investing, we’re not putting up 10 cents.”It is Point 6 of the agreement his administration signed. The question is not exactly who pays the money, but that the money is being paid. In other words, it wasn’t the bombs, but the dollar bills that got the deal done. Dollar bills that presumably were available before you had to start dropping the bombs.Among the reasons most often cited for going to war was denying Iran the ability to threaten its neighbors with ballistic missiles. It was also considered one of the central weaknesses of the Obama deal. Asked about it Wednesday, Trump said Iran had to have some missiles because other countries have them. “What am I going to do?” he said. “Am I going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?” That is now U.S. policy.He was also asked whether the deal included immediate sanctions relief for Iran. He said “no.” Then, when asked again, he said: “They have to behave well.”If the Iranians do get money that was frozen as a result of sanctions, the payment mechanism will be nearly identical to the one that Trump criticized so heavily during the Obama administration.A reporter asked the most direct question of the afternoon: there is nothing legally enforceable in the deal itself, correct? “Doesn’t have to be,” Trump said. “I let them know — if you don’t adhere to the agreement, we’re going to bomb the hell out of you. What else am I going to do? Am I going to take you to court? Let me sue you.”Trump acknowledged Wednesday that the economic consequences of the war he launched shaped his decision to end it. He said he did not want to be compared to Herbert Hoover — the president whose name is synonymous with the 1929 crash and the Depression that followed.“He was always the one I didn’t want to be,” Trump told reporters. “I didn’t want to see an economic catastrophe.”The war Trump launched drove up global energy costs during a midterm election year, turned some of his own allies against him, and prompted accusations that he had abandoned the America First economic priorities he campaigned on. The stock market’s movements, Trump said, guided him as he worked toward a resolution. Every time peace seemed possible, he said, stocks went up. Every time it seemed to fall apart, they went down. He took that as counsel.Last month, when a reporter asked to what extent the financial pain Americans were feeling had motivated him to make a deal, Trump replied: “Not even a little bit.”Trump was less concerned about the other costs of war.On the first day of the war in Iran, a U.S. airstrike hit a school. More than 120 children were killed.Trump was asked about it Wednesday and he bristled. That was a long time ago, said the man still falsely adjudicating the 2020 election. “Mistakes are made,” he said. “A war is nasty.”That is accurate as far as it goes. Wars do produce mistakes. The question of what process existed to prevent this one, and what accountability follows from it, was not answered. The administration said the strike is under investigation. No one has been charged. No findings have been released. The president, asked whether anyone in his administration would be held accountable, said no.The school strike has received less sustained attention than almost any other significant event of the war. It happened on the first day, when the news was moving fast and the initial wave of strikes dominated coverage. It involves dead children in a country the United States was bombing. Those are not easy things to stay with. But 120 children is not a rounding error, nor are the 240 parents.Then Trump signed his copy of the memorandum of understanding at the Palace of Versailles before leaving France, a palace whose entrance gates alone contain 100,000 gold leaves, an attraction for a president who affixes gold applique to the Oval Office wall himself with super glue, according to the New York Times this week.Versailles is a peculiar place to sign a peace agreement. The last time a major international settlement was signed there, in 1919 at the end of the First World War, the terms were so punishing to Germany — reparations so enormous, territorial losses so vast, humiliations so deliberate — that historians have spent a century arguing about whether the Treaty of Versailles made the Second World War inevitable.Not everyone was celebrating. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana called the deal “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades” and said Ronald Reagan was “rolling over in his grave.” Former Vice President Mike Pence called it “Obama-style appeasement” on Fox News. The MAGA hawk revolt that had been building all week was now in the open — conservatives who had cheered the war’s opening strikes now arguing that the country that started the war was not the country that ended it.Trump blows up Clayton confirmationFrom the G-7 summit in France, in the middle of the night, Trump posted on social media that he was pulling his own nominee for national intelligence director from his confirmation hearing — hours before it was scheduled to begin.The president was in France trying to conclude a war that a majority of Americans oppose, that has driven up gas prices, that has rattled the global economy, and that his own allies have said he launched without a plan for getting out. The moment called for a display of national security seriousness. Instead he blew up his own intelligence nominee from a hotel room at 3 a.m.The nominee is Jay Clayton, a federal prosecutor with bipartisan support. The outgoing director is Tulsi Gabbard, whose term ends Friday. Trump’s interim pick to replace her is Bill Pulte, who runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has no known national security experience, and has used his current position to target perceived enemies of the president. Republicans and Democrats alike had been racing to confirm Clayton before Pulte took over.To put Clayton back in contention, Trump’s post added conditions. He wants the Senate to attach a voter ID bill to the renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — the law that allows the NSA to monitor the communications of targeted foreigners. Section 702 already expired. Republicans have said the voter ID measure does not have the votes to pass in the Senate, where it needs 60. Trump also said he won’t move Clayton until his replacement as U.S. attorney is confirmed, a process that will take weeks and faces Democratic resistance.Senate Majority Leader John Thune, asked Wednesday what Trump was trying to achieve, said: “Good question.”Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina called Pulte a “sycophant” and said Trump’s move was “undermining our ability to produce the results that he wants.” Senator Tom Cotton, who chairs the Intelligence Committee, postponed the hearing and called it “regrettable.”In the American system, Congress is a co-equal branch. Just a reminder.Section 702 is the legal authority that allows the National Security Agency to collect the communications of foreign targets — terrorists, spies, hostile foreign governments — from American technology companies like Google, Microsoft, and Verizon, without a warrant.It has been used to disrupt actual plots: the 2009 attempt to bomb the New York City subway, Iranian cyber operations against American infrastructure, Chinese espionage inside U.S. defense contractors. When intelligence officials say its lapse creates a national security risk, they mean the government loses the legal authority to compel American companies to hand over communications that may contain information about people actively trying to kill Americans. That law is now expired.Primary ResultsTrump’s preferred candidates won Senate primaries in Alabama and Oklahoma, and his last-minute endorsement of Representative Mike Collins in Georgia’s Senate runoff proved decisive. Collins defeated Derek Dooley, a former football coach recruited by term-limited Governor Brian Kemp — the same Brian Kemp who refused Trump’s demand to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results, a state Trump lost but has never conceded losing, even though he lost it as thoroughly as the San Antonio Spurs, who will not presumably be visiting the White House for a victory party on the theory that by scoring fewer points that they were victorious.Collins now faces Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff in what is expected to be one of the most expensive Senate races of the midterms. Ossoff is sitting on $32 million in campaign funds. Collins enters the general with less than $1 million after a costly primary. Ossoff, 39, is increasingly mentioned as a 2028 presidential prospect — which means Republicans understand that defeating him would do double damage, and Democrats understand that losing him would do the same.A billionaire health care executive with no political experience defeated Trump’s chosen candidate for Georgia governor Tuesday night.Rick Jackson spent more than $100 million, most of it his own money, to defeat Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones, whom Trump had endorsed more than a year ago and called repeatedly in the final days. It wasn’t enough. Trump posted Wednesday morning: “Congratulations to Rick Jackson, who very successfully campaigned on being ‘TRUMP,’ and won.”One more result from Tuesday’s Georgia primary night that got lost in the returns: Georgia Republicans, called into a special session by Governor Brian Kemp, backed down on a redistricting plan that would have redrawn the state’s political maps in ways critics said would hurt Black representation ahead of 2028. They said they didn’t have enough time to draw new maps.Rideshare prices investigationA Consumer Reports investigation released Tuesday found that Uber and Lyft routinely charge different customers dramatically different prices for the same ride, requested at the same time, on the same route. The median gap between the lowest and highest quoted fare across the routes tested was 50 percent. In Kansas City, 55 volunteers checking one route at nearly the same moment generated 29 different prices. In Austin, fares for one route ranged from $25 to $65 — a 160 percent difference.Uber and Lyft say the differences are explained by real-time marketplace conditions: driver supply, demand, traffic, GPS precision, the time it takes your app to load. Consumer Reports designed its tests specifically to eliminate those variables — volunteers checked the same route within the same minute, in many cases within the same second. The dramatic price differences remained. The companies’ explanation doesn’t hold up against the data.So what is driving the differences? That’s where it gets interesting and uncomfortable. Both Uber and Lyft have filed patents revealing the kinds of data their algorithms can use to build a profile of each customer. Uber has patented the ability to track your typing speed, your walking gait, the angle at which you hold your phone, and your full ride history. Lyft has patented something it calls a “willingness-to-pay score” — a prediction of the maximum amount you’d pay before you’d close the app. Neither company will confirm whether these tools are actually used to set prices. They won’t say what is driving the differences, and they won’t allow independent audits to find out. Opacity, in other words, is part of the business model.Consumer Reports also found that nearly 11 percent of all discounts advertised on both platforms appeared to be fake — what regulators call fictitious discounts, where the “original” price being crossed out was never the real price to begin with. You see a fare of $82, crossed out, with a new price of $65.95 below it. Forty other riders on the same route at the same time were quoted $65.95 with no discount at all. The discount was invented to make you feel like you were getting a deal.Uber now takes between 43 and 50 percent of each fare. In 2022 it was taking 32 percent. Drivers’ share has fallen accordingly. One driver in Portland, whose six test trips generated $126 in fares, took home $66.73. Uber took $58.41.Job insecurityGlobal unemployment has been near historic lows for three years. By that measure, workers should feel secure. They do not.Only 22 percent of workers globally say they strongly agree their job is safe from elimination, according to an ADP survey of more than 39,000 workers across 36 countries.In the United States the figure is 28 percent. In Japan it is 5 percent. No country in the survey had a majority of workers who felt confident. The survey doesn’t tell us whether that insecurity is new or longstanding. What it tells us is that a tight labor market, which is supposed to give workers leverage, isn’t making them feel safe.Sixty-two percent of workers worldwide said they put in up to five unpaid hours a week. Another 26 percent said they work six to fifteen unpaid hours without pay. The workers putting in the most unpaid time were also the most engaged in their jobs — and the most likely to be looking for another one. In other words: the hardest workers are the ones already planning to leave. That is not what employers want to hear, and it is probably not a coincidence. When you work that hard and still don’t feel secure, you start looking for the door.Warsh’s first Fed meetingKevin Warsh held his first meeting as Federal Reserve chairman Wednesday. The Fed left interest rates unchanged at 3.5 to 3.75 percent. Nearly half of Fed policymakers said they could support a rate hike before the year is out — a sharp change from March, when the committee as a whole forecast a cut. What changed their minds: inflation. The Iran war drove up energy prices, energy drives up the cost of nearly everything else, and the Fed’s job is to keep prices stable. When prices rise faster than the target, the Fed’s tool is to make borrowing more expensive — raise rates — so that people and businesses spend less, demand cools, and prices follow. That is where the committee is now pointing.Warsh’s fingerprints were visible in two ways. The post-meeting statement shrank from 341 words to 130. That matters because every word in a Fed statement is parsed like a legal document by traders, analysts, and economists trying to figure out whether interest rates — the price of borrowing money — are going up or down. A single changed phrase can send markets moving. Warsh has argued the Fed talks too much, gives too many signals, and paints itself into corners it then has to escape. He took a hatchet to the statement.The second fingerprint: one dot was missing from the Fed’s “dot plot” — the anonymous grid showing where each of the 19 policymakers expects rates to go. Fed watchers widely expect the missing dot is Warsh’s. He has previously criticized the dot plot for the same reason he hates the long statements: it locks the Fed into positions before anyone knows what conditions will actually require.The statement that remained said inflation “remains elevated relative to the Committee’s 2 percent goal, in part reflecting supply shocks that have driven price increases in certain sectors, including energy. The Committee will deliver price stability.” Inflation is currently running at 4.2 percent annually, its highest level in three years, driven largely by the Iran war’s disruption to energy markets.Trump has demanded rate cuts. He has also, in recent weeks, said he wants Warsh to be independent. The Fed did not cut rates. Jerome Powell, whose term as chairman ended last month but who remains on the board as a governor, voted with the majority.700,000 fewer kids on SNAPMore than 776,000 children have lost access to food stamps since Congress passed changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program last year, according to a ProPublica analysis of data from 12 states that break down participation by age. A separate analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put the number at 700,000.When the bill passed, Republican backers said repeatedly that children would be unaffected. “If you have young children at home, your benefits are unaffected by this bill,” said Representative Dusty Johnson of South Dakota on the House floor.Arizona has seen the largest decline — 205,000 children no longer receiving benefits, a 55 percent drop. St. Mary’s Food Bank in Phoenix has seen a 15 percent increase in need this year, translating to 300,000 more visits.Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the 700,000 figure was “not correct” and that most people removed from the program were “fraudulent.” ProPublica independently verified the figures reported by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.The children were not the intended target of the law’s changes, which imposed new work requirements on adults and shifted more administrative costs to states. But as states struggle to comply with new paperwork requirements under staffing constraints, families are falling through the gaps. In Massachusetts, the share of SNAP applicants who called an assistance line and couldn’t reach a worker rose from 61 percent in November to nearly 81 percent in March.The great hydration break debateFIFA introduced mandatory three-minute hydration breaks at the midpoint of each half of this summer’s World Cup, citing player welfare in summer heat across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Critics have noticed something else: every major broadcaster cuts to commercials the moment play stops. Fox goes to ads immediately. A 30-second spot during early group-stage matches runs roughly $200,000. When the U.S. plays, it runs $750,000.The breaks have also changed games. In eight of the first 16 matches, goals were scored within ten minutes of a hydration break. Curaçao, the smallest nation by population ever to qualify for the World Cup, equalized against Germany in the 21st minute. The hydration break came 30 seconds later. Germany scored twice before halftime and won 7-1. “I actually felt sorry for them,” former England striker Alan Shearer said. “They scored and then it was maybe 30 seconds after that it stopped. So it’s killed their momentum.”Coaches have embraced the breaks as tactical timeouts. Netherlands coach Ronald Koeman said he was using them to pass instructions he wouldn’t otherwise be able to give mid-half.The breaks are mandatory at every match regardless of conditions. Spain played Cape Verde in Atlanta — indoors, air-conditioned — and the break happened anyway. FIFA says uniformity requires it. Medical experts say three minutes is not nearly long enough, and that five to six minutes would be necessary to meaningfully reduce heat risk.FIFA has not said whether the breaks will become permanent. Given that they generate premium advertising inventory at the world’s most-watched sporting event without requiring any structural change to the game, the answer is probably one you don’t need a three minute break to ponder.Thursday, June 18SCOTUS on guns and potThe Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday that the federal government cannot automatically strip gun rights from anyone who uses marijuana.The law at issue was the Gun Control Act of 1968, passed after the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. It bars gun ownership by anyone who “is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.” For decades it was used sparingly. More recently, as marijuana use has spread — it is now broadly legal in roughly half the states — federal prosecutors began using it to charge people who had guns and smoked pot.The court said that went too far. The original law was meant to keep guns away from people who were dangerous. A recreational marijuana user is not automatically dangerous. The government tried to argue that historical laws barring “habitual drunkards” from owning guns provided the relevant precedent. The court rejected that analogy. “The federal government has not just tolerated” the spread of marijuana use, Gorsuch wrote — it helped fuel it.The case involves Ali Hemani, a Texas man whose home was raided by federal agents in 2022 after his family came under suspicion because of ties to Iran. Agents found a handgun in a safe and about 60 grams of marijuana. No other charges were ever filed.The ruling drew an unusual coalition. On Hemani’s side: the NRA and the ACLU. Against him: the Trump administration and Everytown for Gun Safety, the Bloomberg-backed gun control group. Justice Samuel Alito — one of the court’s most conservative members — joined with liberal Justice Elena Kagan to write separately that marijuana today is essentially what alcohol was at the founding: widespread, increasingly tolerated, and a thin basis for stripping a constitutional right.The decision left one door open. People addicted to drugs — not just users — can still be barred from owning guns under the law. That distinction mattered in the Hunter Biden case: Biden was convicted not of being a marijuana user but of buying a gun while addicted to cocaine. His father pardoned him before he could be sentenced. Thursday’s ruling does not disturb that part of the law.Obama Presidential Center openingThe Obama Presidential Center opened Thursday in Chicago’s South Side, drawing four former presidents, Bruce Springsteen, Bono, and Jennifer Hudson — and conspicuously not drawing the current one. Trump was not invited. He has called the center “not too pretty,” “a total disaster,” and posted manipulated images depicting it as a giant trash can.The $850 million campus — 19 acres in Jackson Park near the University of Chicago — is the most expensive presidential library in American history. It is also, by design, not quite a presidential library. Obama’s papers will be stored digitally by the National Archives. The foundation will run the physical campus itself, without government oversight, which gives Obama more control over his legacy and less accountability to outside review. Previous presidents who controlled their own exhibitions have used that latitude in ways historians later found embarrassing. Nixon helped curate the original Watergate exhibit at his library. It was later replaced.Presidential libraries are a peculiar institution. Most democracies don’t have them. The United States enshrines in law the right of its former presidents to a federally supported archive — and then allows private donors to build increasingly elaborate monuments around it. The cost of building them has been rising for decades. Reagan’s featured a decommissioned Air Force One. Trump’s proposed Miami skyscraper, 47 stories tall — the height chosen to evoke his status as the 47th president — would include a hotel, a replica of the Oval Office, and space resembling his planned White House ballroom. A lawsuit has been filed alleging he is seeking to profit from land gifted to him by state officials.Obama has described his own building as a community hub first — a basketball court, a public library, a sledding hill Michelle Obama insisted on because she never had one growing up nearby, a vegetable garden on the roof. Tickets are $30. They are already sold out through November. The neighborhood surrounding it, which experiences frequent gun violence, is watching to see whether the investment generates opportunity or just raises rents. The entire project harkens back to Obama’s start as a community organizer.Franklin Roosevelt, who started all of this in 1939, said at the dedication of his library that a nation must believe in the past, believe in the future, and believe in its people’s capacity to learn from one and create the other. He donated his papers to the government and pledged part of his estate. He did not build a hotel.In related Presidential monument news, the reflecting pool on the mall has turned into a kind of mess. When I was a kid we used to take an enormous jar and fill it with every liquid in the refrigerator and spice in the cabinet. Then we’d dare each other to drink it. It looked exactly like the reflecting pool does now. Algae has taken over the pool so that we cannot enjoy the brand new blue paint job. However on Thursday, that pleasure was returned to us because the paint became visible. The rushed application and maybe the hydrogen peroxide poured in to kill the algae was lifting it off the floor.So, after all the controversy, one thing Americans can algae on is that the reflecting pool is a peeling.Anthropic allies in CongressA bipartisan group of House lawmakers sent a letter Thursday to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick demanding an explanation for the export controls the administration imposed on Anthropic’s AI models. The letter was signed by two Democrats and two Republicans, including Jay Obernolte of California, one of Congress’s leading Republican voices on AI.Their core question was the one that has been hanging over this fight all week: why Anthropic and not anyone else? OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 can do the same things Fable 5 was accused of doing. It faces no restrictions. Chinese models including Kimi 2.7 can do the same things. They face no restrictions either.The letter asked the Commerce Department to explain what principled distinction it was drawing and what guidance AI developers could rely on to know whether their own models might be next.Ukraine drone attackUkraine sent nearly a thousand drones into Russian airspace Thursday — the largest such attack of the war — and Moscow felt it. Airports closed. A refinery supplying 40% of the city’s gasoline caught fire, sending black smoke and what residents described as oil-slicked rain across southeastern neighborhoods. Part of the highway ringing the capital shut down. No deaths reported, but 17 injured.Volodymyr Zelensky, in a voice memo to journalists said: “If Ukraine burns, then your Moscow will burn as well.” He framed the strikes as retaliation for a Russian attack on one of Eastern Orthodox Christianity’s holiest sites in Kyiv — Russia claims it was an errant Ukrainian missile.For three years Putin kept the war abstract for most Russians. That’s cracking. Fuel rationing has spread across dozens of regions. A man in a working-class neighborhood southeast of the burning refinery told the New York Times his neighbors wandered outside asking, “How is that possible?” Most still can’t connect the attacks to the invasion their government launched. “It’s like they were told for a long time not to look up,” he said, “and now it’s as if they have lifted their heads for the first time.”Gas pricesGas prices fell below $4 a gallon on average Thursday for the first time since March, according to AAA. The national average is $3.999. The drop followed the signing of the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding and a 15 percent decline in the price of crude oil this month.The range across the country remains wide. In South Carolina the average is $3.58. In California it is $5.64 — a gap that reflects state taxes, refinery capacity, and the particular cruelty of California’s relationship with gasoline prices.The cautions from earlier in the week still apply. Oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz again does not mean gasoline gets cheaper tomorrow. Refineries buy crude a month or more in advance. Ships are still waiting. The strait still has mines. The long-term price floor has moved up permanently, because every producer and insurer in the world now knows Iran can close the strait whenever it wants.The sauerkraut dietAnd in another story about the price of gas, a fermented cabbage diet is sweeping through the Trump cabinet.Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Vice President JD Vance have all adopted a regimen built around sauerkraut, kimchi, grass-fed steak, and a strict ban on alcohol and sugar. The diet was designed by Dr. Sean O’Mara, a physician who specializes in visceral fat — the kind that wraps around organs and raises the risk of diabetes, heart disease, and metabolic syndrome.The science behind the diet is real in outline and contested in specifics. Fermented foods contain live bacteria — probiotics — that can support gut health, and there is legitimate research suggesting that a healthy gut microbiome is connected to immune function, digestion, and possibly mood. Cutting alcohol and sugar and eating more protein are also broadly supported by nutritional science.What is less established is whether eating sauerkraut specifically produces dramatic results, how much of any benefit comes from the fermentation versus the overall dietary changes, and whether the improvements people report are caused by the diet or by the fact that wealthy, motivated people who spend $8,000 on a consultation tend to make a lot of changes at once and pay close attention to how they feel afterward. O’Mara’s claims — that the diet reduces visceral fat, improves skin, eliminates atrial fibrillations, and produces “glowing” results within weeks — go beyond what the published research currently supports.A consultation with O’Mara starts at $8,000. A direct session costs $18,000. He will accompany clients to the grocery store to explain where the best sauerkraut is kept — toward the back of the refrigerator section, away from the light that could degrade the live microbes.Kennedy said he lost 20 pounds in 30 days. He travels with a personal stash of sauerkraut. His wife, actress Cheryl Hines, noted that he has asked her to carry it in her good handbag. She has declined.Vance committed to the diet for Lent and has continued. On Air Force Two he eats grass-fed beef jerky or a hamburger with cheese, no bun, and a side of fermented vegetables.The president has held the line. At the NBA Finals earlier this month he ate pizza, french fries, and drank Diet Coke. He loves a well-done steak with ketchup which, according to senior officials in multiple administrations is not the way to eat steak at all.Major oak tree of Robin Hood diesThe Major Oak of Sherwood Forest is dead.The tree was between 800 and 1,200 years old — alive when the Black Death swept England, when the Wars of the Roses tore it apart, when six kings named Henry sat on the throne. Its trunk measured 36 feet around. Its canopy, at its widest, spread 91 feet. Legend held that Robin Hood hid himself and his loot inside its hollow core.This spring, for the first time, no buds appeared. No leaves. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which manages Sherwood Forest, declared it dead Thursday.There was no single cause. There never is with something that old.Millions of tourists came to see the tree over the decades. Their footsteps compacted the sandy soil around its roots to a depth of nearly four feet, making it rock solid, cutting off water and nutrients. People tried to save it: iron rods were bolted to support the canopy, lead sheets fitted to seal wounds, fiberglass added later, concrete bases poured.By the time modern conservationists understood the damage, the rods couldn’t be removed. Wood chip mulch spread to rehabilitate the soil bred a tree-killing honey fungus instead. Then came five consecutive hot, dry British summers — the kind that didn’t used to happen — and the tree, already weakened, could not recover.“The climate is changing so fast in front of our eyes that these very old trees don’t seem to be able to keep up,” said Reg Harris, an arborist who had been monitoring the Major Oak for nine years.The tree will stay in place. As it decays over the coming decades it will become a habitat — home to insects, fungi, birds. Its acorns have been planted across Britain. One sapling went to Dame Judi Dench, who planted it in her garden. Because legendary monuments that seem to have endless seasons should be in each other’s company.Friday, June 19Iran deal wobblesThe next round of talks nearly happened. Vice President Vance was set to fly to Switzerland to begin negotiating the implementation of the permanent nuclear deal following Trump’s initial signing of a 14-point memorandum of understanding on Wednesday. But by Thursday night, the trip was abruptly postponed. The White House blamed “difficult logistics,” but regional networks reported Iran refused to send its delegation after a fresh wave of Israeli strikes in south Lebanon and Hezbollah retaliations left at least 21 dead. Netanyahu has made clear he doesn’t consider himself bound by the deal’s call for a multi-front ceasefire, while Iran warns that continued fighting in Lebanon could collapse the entire framework.The episode is sharpening a strange new dynamic. Trump this week criticized Israeli strikes for killing civilians at the G7 summit in France—”you don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody,” he said. Vance warned Israeli cabinet members to stop attacking “the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.” These are the kinds of things Iran’s allies say about Israel. That they’re now coming from the American president and vice president gives the broader critique of Israel a legitimacy it has never had from Washington, and suggests the war has reshuffled something more fundamental than just a peace deal.Meanwhile, Iran made clear it intends to treat the Strait of Hormuz as its own. A new Iranian authority—the Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA)—issued guidance requiring all ships to register with it and reserved the right to introduce mandatory “insurance fees” after the 60-day toll-free window closes. U.S. allies, led by the U.K., are pressing Washington not to accept it. Shippers aren’t waiting to find out—visible tanker traffic has been volatile, and Oman’s Maritime Security Centre issued an official warning to mariners after spotting a suspected floating sea mine just west of the strait.Fallout after G7During the G7 summit, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told Donald Trump they “have always been friends.” By Friday, that friendship bracelet was at the bottom of the Atlantic.The American president told an Italian television channel that Meloni had “begged” him for a photo at the summit. “I wouldn’t have done it, but I felt sorry for her,” Trump said. The Italian prime minister’s reply, posted to social media: “Italy and I never beg.” She went on to accuse Trump of showing more deference to America’s enemies than its allies, and Italy’s foreign minister canceled a planned U.S. visit in solidarity.The break had been coming. The war with Iran soured Italian public opinion on Trump, putting intense political pressure on Meloni, who faces a national election next year. She originally broke with Trump when he attacked Pope Leo for condemning the war, and her government later denied U.S. military planes carrying weapons access to Sigonella, a key NATO airbase in Sicily. Trump told her directly at the G7 summit that he felt “abandoned.”It’s the second major story this week of Trump claiming foreign leaders grovel before him. A new report by veteran journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan details the president showing off fawning text messages from tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos to anyone who would look. The pattern is consistent: to Trump, friendship means genuflection. Honest disagreement, even from an ally who has worked hard to maintain a close relationship with his movement, registers as betrayal.Andy Burnham would not go to Dunsinane. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer won a landslide election just two years ago. Now, his own cabinet ministers are privately telling him it’s over.The man positioned to replace him is Andy Burnham, the 56-year-old high-profile mayor of Greater Manchester. Burnham spent nine years transforming that city—taking a patchwork public transit system under public control, branding it the “Bee Network,” and championing the north of England so loudly against London’s centralized power that he earned the nickname “King of the North.” On Thursday night, Burnham won a special parliamentary election in a working-class district called Makerfield by 55 percent. It was an emphatic margin that doubled his predecessor’s majority and comfortably beat out the right-wing, anti-immigration parties. Crucially, the victory gives Burnham the seat in Parliament he legally needs under party rules to challenge Starmer for the Labour Party leadership.Why is the prime minister so vulnerable? Starmer’s Labour Party is polling at just 19 percent nationally, trailing the surging Reform UK party. While Starmer has pushed through the renationalization of the railways and slowed Channel border crossings, the British economy remains deeply sluggish. After a recent backbench revolt defeated proposed welfare cuts, Starmer has struggled to articulate what he actually stands for. One adviser put it this way: the prime minister simply doesn’t seem to enjoy the job.Burnham does. He campaigns casually in jeans and open shirts to a soundtrack of 90s rock bands like Oasis. His campaign posters in Makerfield featured his name prominently while entirely omitting the Labour Party logo. By Friday, British media reported that roughly 200 Labour lawmakers were already prepared to sign his nomination papers to trigger a leadership vote. As one cabinet source put it: “Everyone thinks it is over and everyone wants it to be a dignified, orderly exit.” Starmer, however, insists he is not walking away and will fight to retain his crown.Dad jokes studyThey make you groan. Sometimes they make you laugh despite yourself. And according to a new study, that might be exactly the point.A psychologist at the University of North Carolina analyzed 32,000 dad jokes posted to a Reddit community and found that the best ones share three qualities: puns, literalization — turning a common phrase into a physical reality (”I’m worried about the calendar. Its days are numbered”) — and pedantic misdirection, where the setup promises one thing and delivers something bluntly literal instead (”What’s blue and smells like red paint? Blue paint”). Question-and-answer format lands better than statements. Jokes featuring family members — moms, dads, grandparents, animals — connect more than ones about politics or money.Why do they work at all? A clinical psychologist at Pepperdine who studies therapeutic humor says even a joke that doesn’t make you laugh produces what he calls “mirth” — a low-grade emotional uplift that still does something real for the people in the room. Dad jokes, he argues, strengthen the bond between fathers and children the way peekaboo does for infants: a shared, slightly absurd ritual that says I’m here and I’m safe and we’re in this together.The Washington Post asked readers to submit their favorites. One entry: “I was wondering why the Frisbee kept getting bigger and bigger. Then it hit me.”French kids ponderThe sun has been out in France this week, glittering off the Seine. But hundreds of thousands of French high schoolers were bound to their desks, spending four hours answering questions like: Can one be happy when others are not? and Do we have control of our words?This is the philosophy exam — the bac — and the French have been doing it since Napoleon introduced philosophy to high schools in 1809. Every student not in a vocational program takes a full year of philosophy before sitting down for four hours to write their answers. The average grade last year was 10.8 out of 20. They are not handing out A’s.But to the French it’s a rite of passage, not a punishment. The idea, as an editor of Philosophie Magazine told the Times, is that “you have to go through this collective reflection on values — on justice, on freedom, on what is a state, on democracy — to become a good citizen.” Radio stations invite philosophers on air to work through their own answers. The education minister visits a high school on exam morning to hand out papers on camera. France’s current education minister said the exam was a revelation for him. His press secretary noted the minister graduated with an eight. The police officer standing outside said she’d failed it too, which is why she went into policing.In case you’d like to spend your weekend as a French teenager, here are a few questions from past exams: Is the only purpose of working to be useful? Are we prisoners of the past? Do technological developments threaten our liberty? Is man condemned to create illusions about himself?Bon week-end. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for June 8 through June 12. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player. Thank you for those who have reviewed it on Apple PodcastsThank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering.Declarations that the war is over aren’t over. Inflation isn’t over either. Xi shows even autocrats can be good neighbors. A semitrailer of bourbon vanishes in daylight. Epstein reaches the Situation Room. Ukraine outlasts the Great War. The cost of kicking it on the South Lawn, and solar power passes coal. The bears come down the mountain.Let’s take it day by day.Monday June 8Iran and IsraelLast week Donald Trump called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu crazy and swore at him. It was notable not only that he was swearing at America’s ally, but that so many people in the White House were anxious to tell reporters that this had taken place.This week started on a similar sour note. The two launched the Iran war together a hundred days ago, boasting of “unprecedented ‘shoulder to shoulder’ cooperation.” Monday they were fighting each other in public — Trump saying Netanyahu doesn’t get a vote on how the war ends, Netanyahu saying in an on camera rebuttal that he does.The spat was set off by a chain of events that went back a week. On June 3, the U.S. brokered an Israel–Lebanon ceasefire in Washington. The next day Hezbollah rejected it and fired rockets at Israel. Sunday Netanyahu ordered a strike on Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut. That same day, Iran fired ballistic missiles at northern Israel in support of Hezbollah — the first Iranian fire since the April 8 ceasefire.Enter Trump. On Sunday, he tried to stop Israel’s retaliation for the Iranian attack. He told Fox News he’d tell Netanyahu not to hit back, and urged Iran to the table: “You’ve shot your missiles, that’s enough. Get back to the table and make a deal.” He also told Fox he hadn’t known about Israel’s Beirut strikes and was angry about them.He then told Axios he would call Netanyahu “right now and tell him not to strike back,” and that the U.S. is “very close to a final deal with Iran… I don’t want it to blow up because of what is happening now.”In a phone interview with the Financial Times the same night — referring to Netanyahu’s say over any U.S.-Iran deal — Trump said: “He won’t have any choice. I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots.”At this point you need to evaluate whether people who say they call the shots really call the shots.Remember a few weeks ago when I said this entire war is taking place in real time and in public? I’m sticking to that.Israel ignored the U.S. president and approved its biggest wave of strikes on Iran since April at around 4:30 p.m. Sunday. Trump called Netanyahu shortly after and told him to halt it — Trump’s second call to Netanyahu in under 24 hours. Israel then struck Iran anyway. Trump posted on Truth Social that both sides should stop “immediately.”Netanyahu waited nearly a day, then posted a two-minute prerecorded video: “Israel has every right to self-defense, and we will exercise that right whenever necessary” — said “with appreciation and respect… to my friend President Trump.”Netanyahu is reading the battlefield and domestic politics. He’s trailing in the polls with a hard re-election ahead. A New York Times analysis suggests striking Hezbollah let him show his base he’d stand up to Trump, who’d just scolded him over Beirut. But the Times of Israel reports Netanyahu actually resisted far-right pressure to defy Trump on the Iran strikes — “Why should we pick a fight with him?”Hold this in your brain too. It could be all theater. The Financial Times separately reported Trump knew Israel’s plans all along — good cop talks, bad cop strikes, by design. A former official: if Israel does the dirty work the U.S. wants done, Trump’s “happy with that.” We’ve heard that before in this war. The U.S. let Israel kill all the Iranian leaders at the start of the war. Let is a funny word in that context because the U.S. lives with the consequences.Weaponization fund not deadWhen we ended Stack the Week last week, Anne correctly asked whether the fund was dead or not. I couldn’t give her a good answer. First, because it was unclear: the acting attorney general said the weaponization fund was dead, but since Todd Blanche has been actively carrying out the president’s wishes against the norms of the office and the legal profession, a discerning listener could be suspicious. And the president’s answer last week to Kaitlan Collins’ basic question about whether the fund was dead betrayed such irritation that it lined up with what we know: when the president is angry in public, he’s putting pressure on his aides to give him what he wants. I hadn’t conveyed that full picture.Sunday the picture got more color. Trump sat for an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and when Kristen Welker asked the same question—was he backing off the fund completely, as Blanche had said, or looking for another way to revive it—he didn’t answer it. He defended it. People had been destroyed by what he called a fake weaponization of government, he said; lives ruined, jobs and families lost, suicides. “If it was up to me, I’d pay them the kind of money that they deserve.” He called the fund a great idea, said other Republicans agreed, and allowed only that approval was someone else’s job: if it passes, great; if not, he’d be disappointed.So Blanche’s “dead” and the president’s “great idea” are not the same position.Then Welker asked whether anyone who attacked police on January 6th should get taxpayer money. Trump wouldn’t rule it out—he said he’d have to see it, then pivoted to the claim that 97 percent of those people were set up by dirty cops and a crooked FBI. Welker noted there’s no evidence the FBI ushered rioters inside or any of the other claims the president made.Which, I hate to be gauche, means that the president who raises his hand to protect the Constitution is lying with the wide sweep of his hand in order to pretend that people who tried to undermine that Constitution through force on his behalf had been tricked into it by the FBI which is in the executive branch he leads.I belabor this because if, in the middle of a tennis match, one of the players started eating the tennis balls, it would be worth noting. Is that analogy apt? It doesn’t track, but it might have caused you to pay attention to a development that might just seem like the way things go, given all that this president has done, so if I knocked you out of complacency then it did a useful journalistic thing, which is to put an event into context when the very idea of context is under assault.Now back to that Meet the Press interview. It went the way these things go. Trump called the 2020 election and last week’s California primary rigged—Welker said there was no evidence—and Trump provided none, attacked NBC, unclipped his microphone, and walked off. “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough.”The Ring of FireThe earth’s surface is a cracked eggshell — a dozen rigid pieces sliding slowly on hot rock underneath. All the action — earthquakes and volcanoes — happens at the cracks. It feels like the continental coastlines should line up with these cracks, but they usually don’t. The Atlantic seafloor and the Americas sit on the same piece, moving together like two cars side by side at 65 — no collision, nothing to rupture.The Pacific seafloor is the exception: its own separate plate, ringed by cracks that run exactly at the coastline. All the way around the edge, the Pacific plate is ramming into the plates carrying Japan, Alaska, California, Chile, Indonesia. And because ocean crust is denser than continental crust, the seafloor loses every one of those collisions: it bends and dives underneath the continent, like one car getting forced under another in a head-on crash. The plates stick, strain builds for decades, then slips all at once. Draw a line connecting every place this happens around the rim of the Pacific and you get a 25,000-mile horseshoe called not the horseshoe of fire but the ring of fire. This is not Johnny Cash’s fault. Nine of every ten earthquakes on Earth happen along it, and three of every four active volcanoes sit on it.The Philippines and its 7,000 islands sit on that horseshoe and on Monday were hit by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake offshore, at 7:37 a.m. — the hour children were arriving for the first day of school after summer break, fresh uniforms, waiting for the flag raising that starts the day. At least 35 people are dead and about a dozen still missing, with more than 200 injured, most of them in buildings that came down. In Glan, the shaking brought a mountainside down on the houses at its foot, killing 13 people at once. A meter-high tsunami came ashore.Ebola spreadThe Ebola outbreak could be the worst ever. And we’ll get to the mayhem in a second, but since we’re not in the business of freaking you out until you’re scratching at the liquor cabinet with an allen wrench to break the lock, there is some moderation in order. Some experts believe the strain of Ebola circulating might have a slightly lower mortality rate than other common variants. So far 12 patients have recovered from their Ebola cases. And the outbreak, of the Bundibugyo species of Ebola, has an estimated case-fatality rate of 17.4% so far according to the WHO—compared to an average of 50% during past outbreaks. The 2014-2016 outbreak was the worst in recorded history, with more than 28,000 reported cases and about 11,300 deaths. Right now there are over 515 cases and 100 deaths.Okay, but here’s the problem. The doctors fighting it are spooked by the speed. Dr. Alan Gonzalez of Doctors Without Borders said in a statement Monday: “Never before has an Ebola outbreak recorded so many cases so soon after its declaration.” Some of that jump is just better testing, which is the good kind of bad news. The bad kind is the open question underneath it: are exposed people staying home? That’s the whole game in stopping Ebola, and the numbers aren’t reassuring. Health workers are tracing the contacts of only about 40 percent of confirmed cases in Ituri, NPR reports, and dozens of people have walked out of treatment centers and gone back to their communities.AI job cutsThe line is blurring between genuine disruption in corporate America and the theatrical need to name an outside force as a pretext for firings.On one hand, the traditional entry-level ladder in finance and tech is being systematically dismantled; the massive “human assembly line” of junior analysts and developers who once spent their nights formatting spreadsheets and fixing basic code is being replaced by automation, forcing college graduates to compete for a radically smaller pool of highly specialized AI roles.On paper, it looks like a textbook example of creative destruction. One job category dies, a more productive one takes its place, and the economy moves forward. In a vacuum, there’s nothing wrong with that.But AI isn’t trading old jobs for new ones at the same rate—companies are eliminating three entry-level positions and only hiring one specialized tech worker to replace them. This creates a giant “judgment gap,” because if young graduates only learn how to code the AI rather than learning the actual business from the ground up, there won’t be anyone trained to step into senior leadership roles a decade from now.U.S. employers announced just over 97,000 job cuts in May 2026, according to a report released last Thursday by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. According to the report, employers cited AI as the primary reason for almost 40% of May’s announced job cuts, up from 7% in January, 10% in February, 25% in March and 26% in April.On the other hand, the term “artificial intelligence” has become an incredibly potent shield for management teams, argues the New York Times. Because Wall Street instantly rewards any company that mentions automation and margin efficiency, executives are eagerly using AI as a convenient smoke screen to sweep away old hiring mistakes, mask lost market share, and fatten their profit margins without enduring the typical investor backlash that accompanies a standard corporate slowdown.So what we don’t know is whether the move to AI is a smart pivot or whether AI is being used to pass off a stumble as a pivot.11,000 bottles of bourbon11,000 bottles of bourbon on the wall, eleven thousand bottles of bourbon, take 11,000 down and drive away in a semitrailer, no bottles of bourbon on the wall.This is what happened in Philadelphia, according to the New York Times. A semitrailer driver impersonating a legitimate employee got away with 18 pallets of Noble Oak bourbon, containing 10,800 bottles in a “coordinated cargo theft operation carried out in broad daylight,” officials announced. The haul from the warehouse was worth about $500,000.Losses attributed to cargo thefts nationwide jumped to about $725 million in 2025, a 60 percent increase from 2024, according to CargoNet, a business focused on theft prevention and recovery for the insurance industry.Why is this happening?Original sin, obviously, but the modern surge boils down to a mix of basic economics, clever hacking, and the nature of the goods themselves.First, think about the inventory. Thieves have realized that stealing electronics like iPhones or laptops is a bad business model today—they have unique serial numbers, GPS trackers, and can be remotely locked the moment they go missing. Food and alcohol are the exact opposite. Fruit, frozen chicken, and premium bourbon don’t carry unique digital serial numbers or barcodes that can be tracked by police. Once those 10,800 bottles of bourbon leave the warehouse, they look exactly like every other bottle of Noble Oak on the market. Food and drinks can be offloaded to shady distributors or small grocery stores incredibly quickly, and it’s largely untraceable.Second, the legal system actually works in the thieves’ favor here due to safety laws. If the police do manage to recover a stolen shipment of frozen beef or seafood a few days later, the “cold chain” has been broken. Because authorities can’t prove the food was kept at the right temperature, the insurance company mandates the entire shipment be destroyed. The evidence literally gets thrown away.Finally, the method of stealing has gone digital. Thieves aren’t cutting fences in the middle of the night anymore; they are using “strategic theft.” Criminal syndicates use phishing scams to hack into shipping networks and load boards. They find out exactly what high-value items are being shipped and when. Then, they create fake identities or buy up small, real trucking companies with clean records, show up at the warehouse in broad daylight with fake paperwork, and just drive away with the goods before the real driver even shows up.That’s how you get the massive wave of holiday heists we saw in December alone:Beef in Texas: valued at $161,000Chocolate in New Jersey: valued at $150,000Blueberries and kiwis in New Jersey: valued at $160,000Processed lobster meat: valued at $400,000, which completely disappeared after being picked up from a warehouse in Taunton, Mass.Tuesday June 9Apache downAt 3:30 a.m. Tuesday, an Army Apache gunship went down off the coast of Oman.This brought the president into the mire. While CENTCOM spent Tuesday morning doing the typical, cautious military dance—issuing dry statements that the crash was “under investigation” and refusing to rule out mechanical failure—Trump completely bypassed them. At about 12:30 he accused Iranians of shooting down the chopper and declared the U.S. “must, of necessity, respond.” Within hours, CENTCOM launched retaliatory air strikes lighting up Iran’s southern coast.The split-screen from Monday made the Israeli Prime Minister look isolated and defiant. But by Tuesday night, Iran’s aggression forced the U.S. to do exactly what Netanyahu had wanted all along: engage Iran directly. The narrative that Trump was “calling all the shots” to wind down the war collapsed the moment an Iranian drone collided with an American helicopter.Airline profits crash from warThe 102-day-old war has changed the economics of flight. Some catch-up first: in the early fuel freak-out, carriers like Ryanair predicted they’d run out by the end of May. That didn’t happen. The Strait of Hormuz carried about 400,000 barrels of jet fuel a day before Iran’s blockade, and Europe has replaced much of that lost supply with cargoes from the U.S., Nigeria, and India — fuel now traveling record distances to reach the planes that burn it. So the industry isn’t grounded by a lack of fuel. It’s being re-sorted by who locked in their fuel prices before the war and who didn’t. Airlines can buy fuel years in advance at a fixed price — a hedge, in industry terms — which costs extra when oil is cheap but means that when war sends prices soaring, you keep paying the old price. Ryanair and Europe’s legacy carriers hedged. They’re passing the smaller blow to passengers anyway: the average domestic round-trip hit $358 this spring, up 18 percent year-over-year, per Kayak booking data analyzed by Deutsche Bank, and Delta, American, United, JetBlue, and Alaska have all raised checked-bag fees — revenue their executives concede will outlast the war. The airlines that skipped the insurance are paying the war price for every gallon. United, largely unhedged, has seen its average advance-purchase fares spike more than 90 percent. Spirit, unhedged and already broke, is being wiped off the board.This week the International Air Transport Association, the industry’s top global trade group, projected that airline profits will fall by half in 2026. Jet fuel was up 62.4 percent year-over-year for the week ending June 5, per IATA. U.S. airlines spent more than $6 billion on fuel in April — 78 percent more than a year earlier, while burning slightly less of it, according to Bureau of Transportation Statistics data released Monday.Platner AdvancesUnsurprisingly, Graham Platner took the Democratic nomination in Maine — roughly 78 percent to 17 for governor Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April but stayed on the ballot. If Democrats are going to win back the Senate, they almost certainly have to beat the Republican incumbent Susan Collins. Platner is now the instrument.The record being weighed: unearthed social media posts with offensive comments about women and rape; a tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol, since covered with new ink; reports that he sent sexually explicit messages to several women early in his marriage, and accusations from ex-girlfriends of toxic behavior.His candidacy is a test of what Democrats think about men who mistreat women in word and deed. Al Franken was run out of the party over one photo and eight women’s accusations of unwanted touching. Has Platner done worse? Franken’s resignation cost the party nothing — Minnesota’s Democratic governor would name his replacement. Tolerating Platner is the price of the seat that may decide the Senate. Which suggests the standard was never independent of what it cost.Tuesday night. Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who had initially backed Mills, declared in a joint statement with New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (who had helped run out Franken): “In November, Maine voters will elect Graham Platner, and we will win a Senate majority.” No agonizing, no asterisk.Platner is not just key to winning back the Senate, he is also an avatar of a populist movement on the left that is the energetic center of the Democratic Party. Has the political process in both parties reached a new accommodation: that the problems Americans face are so in need of remedy that imperfect lawmakers, perfectly aligned on core issues, are acceptable — and at what point does the accommodation stop being new and start being the standard?In South Carolina, Congresswoman Nancy Mace lost her bid for governor, finishing behind the Trump-backed Lt. Gov. who advanced to a runoff. After years of trying on and off to align herself with Trump, Mace aggressively pushed for release of the Epstein files — and lost the president’s favor. Sen. Lindsey Graham, never beloved by the MAGA base but armed with Trump’s endorsement and millions in spending, held off challenger Mark Lynch to make the November ballot.Artemis III crew announcedNASA officially named the four-person crew for its mid-2027 Artemis III mission on Tuesday. They won’t go to the moon, but perform a high-risk tech rehearsal in low-Earth orbit. For roughly two weeks, the crew will test rendezvous and docking maneuvers with mock-up or operational lunar landers built by private contractors. Troubleshooting will prepare for the same activity in 2028 a quarter-million miles away on the moon mission.That timeline is looking shaky. To get astronauts from orbit down to the lunar dust, NASA is entirely dependent on private vehicles from SpaceX (Starship) and Blue Origin (Blue Moon). Neither vehicle has finished development, nor are the heavy-lift rockets meant to haul them into space anywhere near ready. SpaceX’s Starship has repeatedly failed during critical test flights, and Blue Origin is still recovering from a catastrophic New Glenn rocket explosion on May 28 that severely damaged the company’s only launchpad but was good news for the writers searching for good metaphors of failure without using AI. “Launchpad disaster” has now been refreshed in the lexicon.China hopes to land astronauts on the moon by 2030 and the race is on, not just to plant a flag on the lunar south pole but also to establish the baseline legal, commercial, and economic framework for the next century of space development.The look of the crew drew comment. The roster includes an African American, the first astronaut of Salvadoran descent, and a famed Italian test pilot who survived a twenty thirteen spacewalk mishap when his helmet rapidly filled with leaking cooling water. Yet for all of its international and ethnic diversity, the crew is entirely male.NASA previously had a prominent, explicit pledge on its website committing to land “the first woman and the first person of color” on the lunar surface. That language was quietly expunged weeks after the administration initiated a federal crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives early last year.Xi goes to PyongyangMonday in Pyongyang, children hopped and waved balloons, a military band played two national anthems, a 21-gun salute boomed across Kim Il-sung Square, and buildings draped in Chinese and North Korean flags carried banners reading: “We warmly welcome Comrade Xi Jinping.” The Chinese president had come to North Korea for the first time in seven years. Kim Jong Un called him “the greatest state guest,” per North Korean state media, and declared friendship with China “the most important top-priority strategic work.”Over two days the leaders planted a fir tree, toured a Workers’ Party cadre school where the party’s managerial staff are trained, and laid tribute at the tower honoring Chinese soldiers who died fighting alongside the North in the Korean War.When Xi last visited in 2019, he said Beijing would play a constructive role in denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. Once a topic that Donald Trump cared about. After his 2018 Singapore summit, Trump famously declared on Twitter that there was “no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea” and told Americans to “sleep well tonight.” His Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, swatted away skepticism over the vague deal, telling reporters the U.S. fully expected the regime to take “major” disarmament steps within two years.President Trump’s claims about ending the North Korean nuclear program didn’t come to pass. Probably worth keeping in mind when evaluating claims about the nature of the Iranian nuclear program.This time the word nuclear appeared nowhere — not in the Chinese readout, not in the North Korean one. The week before Xi landed, Kim unveiled a new plant for producing nuclear material and ordered his arsenal expanded “at an exponential rate.” His sister, Kim Yo Jong, called American denuclearization hopes an “anachronistic dream” — and called “false” the White House claim that Xi and Trump had affirmed the goal at their Beijing summit last month.So as this meeting wrapped up on Tuesday, we wondered, what’s the relationship between the two countries anyway? That could be a great transition or the best I could do in a rush. There is no secondary betting market so your wagers on which it is will have to be for bottlecaps or something.North Korea is China’s only treaty partner, but Kim has spent recent years playing autocrat’s footsie with Moscow — more than 10,000 North Korean troops sent to fight in Ukraine, a mutual defense pact signed with Putin in 2024. A new relationship with Moscow that can provide cash for the starving North Korea allows its leader to go around China possibly and develop its nuclear program.Xi doesn’t really want a nuclear armed neighbor who’s not on deeply friendly terms, so he came bearing what China can offer that Russia can’t: reopened border crossings, resumed flights and trains, trade back at pre-pandemic levels, and — analysts told the AP — likely rice, fertilizer, and Chinese tour groups. Kim paid in the currency Beijing values most, publicly endorsing the One China principle on Taiwan.So the trade, as Reuters’ analysts read it: Kim backs China’s claim to Taiwan; China stops mentioning Kim’s bombs. “Beijing has very clearly moved on from that issue and now tacitly accepts North Korea as a nuclear state,” said Jeremy Chan of the Eurasia Group. Those bombs are accumulating. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung told reporters Monday that the North now produces enough nuclear material annually for 10 to 20 weapons and is close to perfecting an intercontinental ballistic missile.Social Security shortfallSocial Security is not a savings account with your name on it. The money taken out of your paycheck this Friday goes almost immediately back out the door as a check to somebody’s grandmother. Today’s workers pay today’s retirees. Last year, 185 million Americans paid in and 70 million collected — retirees, disabled workers, and the survivors of workers who died. It’s a bucket brigade, not a piggy bank.For decades the brigade collected more water than the fire needed, because the baby boomers — the biggest generation in American history — were all working and paying in at once. But here’s the part most people don’t know: the surplus was never set aside as cash. By law, Social Security lent every extra dollar to the U.S. Treasury, which spent it on everything else — wars, highways, tax cuts — and handed back IOUs in the form of special Treasury bonds. Those bonds are legally binding and earn interest. But they’re a claim on future tax dollars, not money in a drawer. The trust fund is less a piggy bank than a loan Social Security made to the rest of the government, which is now due.The repayment began in stages. In 2010, the boomers’ retirements started outrunning their replacements’ paychecks: for the first time in a generation, payroll taxes alone no longer covered the benefits going out. But for a decade, the interest paid by the federal government on those Treasury IOUs covered the gap. Then in 2021 even the interest wasn’t enough, and the system started cashing in the bonds themselves. Every redeemed bond is money the Treasury must now raise — through taxes or fresh borrowing — to pay back what it spent decades ago. Last year the gap was $160 billion.Remember who owes the money. The same Treasury that must redeem Social Security’s bonds is already running deficits of nearly $2 trillion a year, on top of a national debt approaching $38 trillion. So when Social Security cashes an IOU, the government doesn’t reach into savings — it has none. It borrows the money from new lenders to repay the old loan, at today’s interest rates, while paying interest on everything it already owes.Now the news: The government’s trustees reported this month that the bonds run out in the fourth quarter of 2032 — three months sooner than last year’s projection. When that happens, Social Security does not go bankrupt. Workers keep paying in every Friday; that money still flows straight out. It’s just only enough to cover 78 percent of promised benefits, and the law doesn’t let the system borrow the difference. Checks automatically shrink 22 percent. A $2,000 monthly check becomes $1,560 — for everyone, all at once, no vote required. And the hole keeps deepening: by 2100, incoming taxes would cover only 62 percent.The biggest reason is the most human one: Americans are having fewer babies than the government’s accountants assumed. The trustees cut their long-run forecast from 1.90 children per woman to 1.75 — and in a bucket brigade, fewer children today means fewer hands passing water in 2055. That single revision did more damage to the long-term math than anything Congress passed. Second, last year’s tax law: some retirees pay income tax on their benefits, and that money cycles back into the fund; the law cut those taxes, so less cycles back.Third, immigration fell — and immigrants are quietly one of the system’s better deals, since millions pay payroll taxes that some can never legally collect as benefits.You may have noticed that we started that item not by giving you the news, but a little refresher on social security. Here at Stack the Week we believe some news lands better on prepared ground. The alternative is to tell you the news first, then explain the system, and hope you can fit the news inside the explanation — except by the time you’ve relearned the system, you’ve forgotten the news.iPhones InterruptusFor twenty years, demographers have hunted whatever has been quietly switching off America’s maternity wards. The fertility rate has fallen every year but two since 2007, hitting another record low in 2025 — 53.1 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age, per federal data released in April, and total births were down to about 3.6 million. For comparison, the fertility rate at the height of the Baby Boom in 1957 was 122.9 births per 1,000 women, and the fertility rate in 2006 was 68.5 births per 1,000 women. The suspect lineup has included the Great Recession, contraception, abortion access, rising female education, and, in one earnest academic effort, the MTV show “16 and Pregnant.” Now two new papers point at the device most readers are holding while they hear this: the fertility rate began falling in 2007, the year the iPhone was born.The question is how you prove a phone prevents a pregnancy. No ethics board lets you randomly assign teenagers smartphones and count the babies. Economist Caitlin Myers of Middlebury College and her student Ezekiel Hooper found that history had run the experiment for them. From its 2007 launch until February 2011, the iPhone worked only on AT&T’s network, and AT&T’s coverage was spotty — so some American counties got the iPhone era on schedule while otherwise identical counties waited. Births fell in both. But they fell faster where the iPhone was: by that measure, the device caused as much as half of the national fertility decline from 2007 to 2011, with the sharpest drop among 15-to-24-year-olds.In the second study economists at the University of Cincinnati analyzed 128 countries and found that teenage fertility declines accelerated once smartphones became a mass phenomenon — in Iran and Costa Rica, Guatemala and Turkey, countries that share no health care system, welfare state, abortion law, or religious tradition. “Whatever caused it was something global,” they wrote — “something that arrived in roughly the same form in all of these places at roughly the same time.” Back home, they confirmed it with American data: teen fertility fell fastest in counties with the best broadband and 4G.As for the mechanism, Myers offers three candidates, in descending order of innocence: young people socializing on their phones instead of in person, and therefore not in the back seats where pregnancies historically began; phones delivering better information about contraception; and phones delivering pornography as a substitute for the real thing.Booze by the thimbleIf you’re enjoying the Stack of the Week with a cocktail this fine Friday we are at a philosophical crossroads. Either plug your ears for about 10 seconds or make sure your cold glass is full up to the collar because you might need it to get through this item. You can pause the machine while you wrestle with this question or the top of the bottle. Okay, here is the item:People who have even one drink per day face a slightly increased risk of premature death from illness or injury directly attributable to alcohol, researchers found—affecting one in 1,000 people. Two drinks a day—a level long considered safe for men—and that risk rises to one in 25. That’s according to a federally funded study published independently Tuesday in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.The Trump administration chose not to incorporate that information in new dietary guidelines released earlier this year, which suggested limiting alcohol consumption but excluded a specific recommendation of a daily limit, as they had before.The study was one of two commissioned during the Biden administration to inform those guidelines. The other report concluded the opposite—that moderate drinking was healthier than not drinking at all. Some of its panelists had financial ties to the alcohol industry.Robert M. Vincent, the former government official who commissioned the study warning of alcohol’s risks, claimed in an editorial accompanying it that he was fired last year because it produced evidence “at odds with commercial interests.” Vincent also says that while serving in the Trump administration he was “asked to kill the study.” He didn’t.The alcohol industry had sought to keep the study in the icebox since a draft version circulated last year, claiming the research was ideologically driven and flawed.The industry is losing ground with the American public. Last year, for the first time in over 20 years of surveys, a majority of Americans, 53%, told Gallup that drinking “one or two drinks a day” was bad for one’s health—up from 28% as recently as 2018. But 43% of Americans said they believed moderate daily drinking made no difference on health or was even beneficial. Fewer are drinking at all: 54% of adults say they consume alcohol, the lowest share in nearly 90 years of Gallup polling. But excessive alcohol use is still responsible for the deaths of 178,000 Americans a year according to the latest CDC numbers from 2021, a 29% increase from 2017.Japanese bear marketA bear walked into downtown Utsunomiya this week — past the shopping district’s security cameras, onto the grounds of a junior high school — and a Japanese city of half a million closed every public elementary and junior high school, indefinitely. Police and the local hunting association patrolled the streets. Officials couldn’t say whether they were hunting one bear or several. On Wednesday came a resolution of sorts: a veterinarian brought down one black bear with two tranquilizer darts.Japan’s environment ministry counted 238 bear attack victims in 2025, a record, including 13 deaths. The crisis grew bad enough last fall that the government deployed military troops to hard-hit regions and foreign governments issued travel advisories — for Japan, a country whose principal dangers had previously been earthquakes and overwork.Winter brought a lull…. because….?….that’s when the nonfiction Dad books are published and bears are voracious readers.Also, they hibernate in the winter.They’re up now and don’t bother with light summer pulp reads. Between April and June 2, bears killed three people and attacked 20 more across at least nine prefectures. Last week, a bear injured four people at a steel factory in Fukushima — where, the mayor reported, it was also seen drinking from a tap it may have turned on itself. He called the animal “extremely intelligent,” a compliment no one wanted.What’s driving bears into the cities is, in part, what’s draining the people out. Japan’s population is aging and shrinking, fastest in exactly the rural towns that once formed a buffer between mountain and metropolis. Fewer residents, fewer farmers, and far fewer hunters — a graying profession few young Japanese are entering — mean the bears, now estimated at 57,800, simply walk through where a town used to be. Climate change supplies the motive: poor harvests of the nuts and berries bears live on send them foraging downhill. Japan spent decades worried about its empty villages. The villages are filling back up, but the villages can’t bear it.Is he really going to let that stay in the edit? Yes, he thinks it’s charming.Wednesday June 10Inflation is upInflation was up but it’s more complicated than that.First, the numbers: U.S. inflation accelerated for a third-straight month in May, to 4.2 percent — up from a 2.4 percent annual rate before the conflict with Iran started in February, and the fastest pace since April 2023. Energy prices drove the bulk of the increase — gasoline alone is up 40.5 percent from a year ago. Strip out energy and food and the “core” index rose 2.9 percent over the year. Core was 3.3 percent when Trump took office, so those prices are rising slower than when he arrived — though core did tick up from April’s 2.8.Economists look at this reading and conclude that this is as bad as the Iran shock gets. The oil shock has not embedded in the larger economy. That is not a verdict, it’s a guess that war prices stay war prices and don’t become everything prices.Meanwhile, paychecks keep shrinking in real terms: inflation has outpaced wage gains two months running.The president responded: “I love the inflation. No, I love it, the numbers were great.” He meant, presumably, that he loved that the number wasn’t worse.This got a lot of comment, mostly as a political thing. Ooooh, the president said something he wasn’t supposed to say in an election year. Fine. But here at Stack the Week we get fussy about measuring economics through politics. It’s lazy. The job is to figure out what is happening in the economy, who it affects, why it’s happening. If a politician says something, it should be measured against reality. Instead, none of that happens. It’s all vibes. A president says something and that’s compared to polling where people have a different feeling. Okay, but you haven’t told me anything about the actual economy. It’s like covering a baseball game by pointing the camera at the crowd. You learn who’s booing and who’s doing the wave. You never learn the score.So, are prices going to go down once the war stops? Yes, but how much, we don’t know. To suggest that everything was doing just great before the Iran Waris not so. Inflation before the war was worse than inflation when Donald Trump took over. And inflation and its effect on the American household is not fully measured by the Consumer Price Index, which we’ve been talking about. There are other reasons people feel the pinch.Household money worries at 4 year highThe Federal Reserve Bank of New York surveys about 1,300 people, each the main earner in a household, and asks two things: how are your finances now, and where are they headed? In May, the answers were the darkest in years.One in eight households is much worse off than a year ago, by its own accounting. That’s the largest share since the summer of 2022, when inflation hit a four-decade high. Add the people who feel somewhat worse, and nearly half of everyone surveyed says their finances have slipped — the gloomiest reading since January 2023. A year out, more expect things to get worse (36 percent) than better (22.9 percent), the widest gap between worry and hope since October 2022.People are worried about the basics. They expect rent to rise 7.4 percent over the next year, groceries 5.8 percent, home prices 3.5 percent — rent and groceries both faster than the 4.2 percent headline. This is why, when the president frames inflation as the choice between three dolls or four, as he has, he makes household pain sound like skipping an indulgence rather than losing a necessity. Nobody rents a doll.When money runs short, people lean on credit — and they expect borrowing to get harder. They’re already bracing to fall behind: the average person now puts the odds of missing a minimum debt payment in the next three months at 12.6 percent. The rise came almost entirely from households earning under $100,000 and people without a college degree — the ones with the least room to absorb a missed paycheck.None of this matches the jobs reports, which have been strong. So why the fear? Because a job feels safe only when you believe you could find another — and that belief is slipping. The odds people give themselves of landing a new job after a layoff fell to 43.7 percent, down from the 12-month trailing average of 46.8 percent and the lowest since late 2025. The fear of losing the current job rose to 15.1 percent.Epstein in the Situation RoomThere was more Epstein fuss, a word I apply because Epstein is in danger of becoming a fuss donut, a story where there is a lot of noise about it but the core issue gets lost. That’s the hole in the donut analogy.Here is the core of it: citizens simply want the administration to do what it promised to do, and what the law expects. It is not doing that. Instead, officials are performing immense institutional gymnastics to protect the president’s political fortunes and shield his wealthy, connected associates. In this, the administration’s actions—protecting the comfortable at the expense of the victims—become a dark echo of the underlying crime itself, where a man of vast connection and wealth destroyed the lives of young women while a protective web kept him invisible.First, what remains hidden. The public and members in both parties want the missing 2.5 million pages. While the Department of Justice declared its production “complete” in early 2026, investigative reports and members of Congress point out that the full government archive exceeds 6 million pages. The remaining, unproduced trove needs to be cleared and published. Specifically, there is an intense demand to see the unredacted context behind the raw, unverified personal allegations against Trump and other elites that the FBI collected over the decades—information that is currently obscured by heavy redactions.The core accusation here is corrupt obstruction: the abuse of executive power to safeguard Donald Trump’s personal and political reputation. This accusation received fresh fuel this week with a bombshell New York Times report detailing internal West Wing panic. Senior Trump officials were so alarmed by the contents of the files that they held a strategy meeting in the Situation Room—a space legally and historically reserved for national security crises, not partisan damage control. The Times also revealed that the president explicitly ordered the issue “buried,” snapping at anyone who brought it up.By law and custom, the administration’s sole duty is to disclose the truth and seek justice for the victims. Instead, all executive energy is blowing in the opposite direction—squandered on PR gambits to exonerate the president and political operations to punish the rare Republicans who advocate for transparency. The administration did not treat these files as a matter of public interest or statutory compliance, but as a radioactive public relations disaster to be contained and suppressed by the full apparatus of the federal government.Iran escalation The war with Iran escalated sharply on Wednesday, following days of heavy fighting that nearly pulled both nations into full-scale conflict.U.S. Central Command launched a much heavier second wave of reprisals for the Apache downing on Wednesday, hitting Iranian air defenses, radar networks, drone command units, and targets near Tehran. Simultaneously, U.S. forces disabled a tanker to enforce a maritime oil blockade. Iran retaliated, launching ballistic missiles and drones at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Jordan, and Bahrain. While military damage was limited, the strikes shook energy markets and caused a civilian casualty at a Kuwaiti airport.On Wednesday, The New York Times indicated U.S. forces used a precision-guided GBU-39 bomb to directly target and destroy two concrete water-storage reservoirs. This severed the drinking water supply for more than 20,000 civilians across ten villages during a historic drought and local temperatures exceeding 100°F. Under Article 54 of the Geneva Conventions, civilian drinking water installations are granted absolute protection; attacking them is strictly prohibited unless they serve a direct military function. Because the reservoirs were isolated in a remote area with no military infrastructure nearby, international lawyers state the likelihood of a targeting error is virtually nonexistent, leaving the Trump administration facing severe accusations of intentionally deploying state terror against a civilian population.Billionaire Wealth Keeps boomingSometimes the news is too big for one broadcast. Is this a broadcast? Let’s say it is for the purposes of the previous sentence. The news is too big either because we have busy lives or because the weight of things means you’ve already got big rocks in your cognitive and emotional basket and you can’t take a boulder the size of a VW Bus. On the other hand, the big currents stirring our world must be attended to so that we understand where we are and, for those interested in trying to change the state of things, know which wheel to put their shoulder to — or, in this case, which cliché to embrace. (Yes, I know I switched from rocks to currents there, but in a world where our reflecting pools are taller than skyscrapers, our boulders and currents are the same).Why that preamble? We’re always trying to find new ways into stories here at Stack the Week, and this is the way I’ve chosen to talk about the massive wealth inequality tilting our world.On the one hand, American households feel gloomier and more stretched than at any point in years — see the item above. On the other hand, the combined wealth of the world’s billionaires totals $20.1 trillion.Why does this matter? A billionaire has the answer. Dario Amodei, the billionaire chief executive of Anthropic, the maker of the chatbot Claude, wrote this year: “We are already at historically unprecedented levels of wealth concentration,” adding that “the thing to worry about is a level of wealth concentration that will break society.”How would it break society? At some point wealth stops buying things and starts buying rules. Consider DOGE: Elon Musk was handed so much power over the federal government, and used it with so few checks, not because voters chose him but because his fortune put him in the room. And in a system where most congressional seats are safe, the threat that disciplines a legislator isn’t voters in November, it’s the primary — a small, cheap election where a donor’s dollar goes further than a voter’s ballot.Donald Trump, a wealthy fellow, has increased the power of loyalty-based partisanship in his party, making it more money-centered because primaries are more important. This is just one of the many ways he has concentrated power where the dollars are.Fifteen years ago, the world’s billionaires collectively had $4.5 trillion. By 2024, that had more than tripled to $14.2 trillion. Now it’s $20.1 trillion — and the latest leap is largely the artificial intelligence boom, which has funneled trillions into a small clutch of tech companies. Watch it happen in real time with SpaceX’s public offering — set to be the biggest in history. The Day 1 valuation targets $1.77 trillion when shares begin trading on Friday. With 42 percent of the stock, Mr. Musk would be an instant trillionaire. Only 21 of the world’s roughly 195 countries produce a trillion dollars of output in a year.Who collects when markets boom? The top 1 percent of Americans own half of all stock, according to the Federal Reserve. The top 0.1 percent — about 135,000 households — own $13.7 trillion of it. That is nearly double the $7.1 trillion owned by the bottom 90 percent. And tax policy keeps the wheel turning. The 2017 corporate rate cut fattened profits, and companies spent the windfall buying back their own shares — the one use of cash that rewards everyone who decides: it lifts the stock price that is the basis of executive compensation and hands shareholders their gains as paper, untaxed until sold. The richest never sell. They borrow against the shares and let it compound.Where does this leave us? I could unleash a thousand questions, but this item is already getting long. Look for the questions on the substack tomorrow.The pope and the high church.The cathedral effect is the finding that ceiling height shapes the kind of thinking people do. High ceilings prime abstraction — people in tall spaces think more freely, make broader associations, solve problems more creatively. Low ceilings prime confinement and focus — better for detail work, line editing, anything requiring concentration on the concrete.Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday inaugurated the 566-foot Tower of Jesus Christ, which is the world’s largest church. The intricate sculptural compositions and natural motifs are a stone embodiment of the Bible.The Pope’s visit took place on the anniversary of the mastermind behind the basilica’s design, the legendary Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. 100 years ago Gaudi was hit by a tram in a story which is so allegorical it requires treatment in a separate item, which I will post shortly. “Nature is my teacher,” Gaudí once said. “Everything comes from the great book of nature, always open that we must read.”In November, Lego will be releasing a 12,060-piece version of the basilica for $800, the largest lego set ever made.The “Paradise Lost” influencerInfluencers in your instagram feed have a lot of suggestions about exercise regimens and self-improvement habits. How about memorizing seven lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost on the exercise bike, then lifting weights while you go over the 14 previous lines you’d studied. At the end, you’ve got rock hard abs and you’re on your way to achieving what John Basinger (pronounced Bay-singer) did using that regimen. He memorized all of “Paradise Lost” — 10,565 lines, more than 60,000 words, Milton’s complete account of the fall of man. He started in 1993, after retiring from teaching.Basinger, who died recently at age 92, was a man who did interesting things. He walked from New York to San Francisco as a young man. He moved to Kenya on a whim and taught at a rural boys’ school for five years, picking up fluent Swahili. He spent decades writing for and performing with the National Theater of the Deaf — he wasn’t deaf; he just learned sign language and made himself indispensable. The Milton feat became a one-man show and inspired actual memory research, which suggests scientists found him as improbable as everyone else did.Thursday June 11Iran: The “Great Settlement”Wednesday’s fighting turned out to be the climax. Thursday, President Trump announced a “great settlement” reached through Qatari mediators — a draft framework opening a 60-day window for comprehensive nuclear and maritime negotiations. Global markets surged on the news. Whether a 60-day window produces a deal or just a 60-day countdown is the question the markets aren’t pricing. .Trump’s new DNITrump Pultes the Ripcord: After lawmakers revolted over the president’s selection of Bill Pulte as interim Director of National Intelligence — a man with no relevant intelligence experience, known mostly for achieving excellence in using government powers to pursue the president’s perceived enemies — Trump nominated Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. Clayton’s résumé includes prosecuting Nicolás Maduro (captured by U.S. forces in January). Clayton’s résumé outside the job: frequent golf with the president at Mar-a-Lago, and a CNBC appearance this week echoing Trump’s California fraud claims.The reversal came too late to spare a casualty. Congress left Washington Thursday without extending one of the government’s most powerful surveillance authorities, all but assuring it expires Saturday. Democrats — including those pushing for renewal — refused to act until Trump dropped Pulte or named a suitable permanent pick. The lapsing law lets the government collect, without a warrant, the communications of foreigners abroad from U.S. companies like Google and AT&T. A core tool for tracking foreign threats, lost to a staffing dispute.Ukraine outlasts the Great WarOn Thursday the war in Ukraine reached 1,569 days — four years and three months — making it longer than World War I, the war French soldiers called “the last of the last.”Putin planned on days.The answer to who is winning has started to move. Some analysts argue the tide is shifting toward Ukraine because of its dominance in drone use. Ukraine’s factories now produce enough of them to launch more than 5,000 strikes a month at targets well behind the front, according to Ukrainian officials.The defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, said strikes beyond 30 miles doubled from April to May.The targets are the roads and railways — some more than 100 miles back — that carry Russian troops, fuel, and ammunition toward the fight.Kyiv calls it a “logistics lockdown”: hit the unarmored trucks and trains, and the front starves.The Times reports it is working, at least until Russia adapts — fuel shortages, snarled troop rotations, less Russian activity at the front line.The drones themselves measure how the war changed Ukraine: in the first year, nearly all of them ran on Chinese components; by last year that share had fallen to about 38 percent, Ukrainian manufacturers filling the gap, per the Council on Foreign Relations.Russia still occupies roughly 20 percent of Ukraine, and it gained almost 5,000 square kilometers last year — an area about the size of Delaware. In February, Ukraine took back 78 square miles in five days — the drones again — and has kept gaining through its fifth spring offensive.Britain’s largest spy agency estimates almost 500,000 Russian soldiers killed since 2022.Ukraine, by its own count, has lost 55,000.The cost in money: a single day of full-scale war ran Ukraine an average of $172 million last year, per the head of its general staff — more than $60 billion a year.Since 2022, the United States has sent about $188 billion in aid and the European Union $197 billion.The Financial Times reported the Kremlin will overshoot its budget by at least $28 billion this year, even with the Iran war pushing oil above $100 a barrel for the first time since 2022 — a windfall that won’t cover the gap.Zelensky’s office published a letter last Thursday asking Putin for a face-to-face meeting in a third country, with a date attached. Putin said there was “no point.”22 SpecialistsHow many medical specialists does it take to assess a president at a checkup? For Donald Trump: 22, up from 14 last year. The White House won’t say why or name the specialties. After the May exam at Walter Reed, Trump posted: “Everything checked out PERFECTLY.”UFC in DCStaging a cage fight on the South Lawn costs at least $60 million, a figure that became public because two Virginia residents sued to stop it. The suit, filed by the Public Integrity Project, says National Park Service rules prohibit sporting events of any kind on the South Lawn, and that the towering arch built over it required an act of Congress and an environmental review. It got neither.The White House answer is about money, not permission. “UFC is funding and paying for this entire event,” a White House official said in a statement, adding that no taxpayer dollars are involved beyond employees’ normal duties. For scale: a tented White House dinner runs about $1 million, Martin Mongiello, a former White House executive chef who worked under seven administrations, told the BBC. This event costs sixty of those.Why would a company spend $60 million on a fight it expects to lose $30 million on, even with Ram Trucks, Crypto.com, and Monster Energy as sponsors? Mark Shapiro, president of UFC’s parent company TKO, told Wall Street analysts in February: “We will not profit from the White House event independently.” The South Lawn is an ad. He called it a strategic investment in Paramount+ subscribers and “Super Bowl-like earned media across the globe.”The venue was the president’s idea. At UFC 309 in November 2024, Trump leaned over to Dana White ,the UFC’s CEO and suggested a White House fight. White told The Hollywood Reporter he assumed Trump meant a room inside. “He’s like, ‘No, we’re gonna do it outside on the South Lawn.’”Tickets are invite-only. White says Trump holds about 1,200, White has 300, Ari Emanuel, whose company TKO owns the UFC, has 400, and the rest go to members of the military.When it’s over, UFC will pay $700,000 to put the grass back.Knicks do wellWe all know the real reason you come to Stack the Week is for our scintillating sports coverage. Here’s a recap of game 4 of the NBA finals from Annie Cohen, who doesn’t know the first thing about basketball and didn’t watch the game but has gotten swept up into the Knicks fever taking over New York City and saw the highlights on social media.*“The Knicks were behind by a lot of points at halftime. They did better in the second half, but with 5 seconds on the clock they were still a point or two behind (I can’t remember exactly) but then a Knicks player shot a basket from far that looked like it was going to miss, but then another Knicks player tipped it in and they won with like a second on the clock, which was thrilling. Also Taylor Swift was courtside wearing a shirt that said “Stevie Knicks.”World Cup kickoffThe biggest World Cup in history opened Thursday: 48 teams (up from 32), three host nations for the first time, final in New Jersey July 19.If the U.S. and Iran each finish second in their groups, they’ll meet in Dallas on July 3 — the day before the country’s 250th birthday. This is the first World Cup in which a host nation is at war with a participant.A Category 1 final ticket ran $10,990. That’s the best non-hospitality seat FIFA sells to the general public for the final. These seats are generally along the sidelines at midfield, roughly between the penalty areas, in the lower and mid bowls. For regular matches, locals could win lotteries for $60 seats, about two percent of inventory per match.Macquarie projects more than $50 billion in global wagers — likely the biggest betting event in history, up from $35 billion in Qatar in 2022. The extra $15 billion: 16 more teams, and a U.S. where 65% of the population can now legally bet on sports, up from 40% four years ago.Scotland’s Craig Gordon, 43, is the oldest player on the pitch and second-oldest in World Cup history. Mexico’s Gilberto Mora, 17, is too young to get a tattoo without a parent’s permission. And Spain’s Lamine Yamal, 18 — who debuted for Barcelona at 15 — arrives at his first World Cup already considered one of the best players alive.As The Atlantic writes: “Every time America hosts international soccer, the world’s best players unite to complain about the fields” — Argentine keeper Emi Martínez called Atlanta’s 2024 Copa América surface “a trampoline” and “a disaster.” FIFA bans synthetic turf, but big American stadiums are built for the NFL, so groundskeepers grow sod on plastic tarps over two inches of sand, which forces roots sideways instead of down. This time the grass has been studded with plastic fibers every five millimeters by a machine resembling a Zamboni, under giant hot-pink Dutch grow lights.Belfast riotsAnti-immigrant riots roiled Belfast Thursday after a knife attack Monday night left a man in his 40s with slash wounds to his face, back, and eyes — bystanders, one wielding a hurling stick, were credited with saving his life. Word spread on social media that the attacker was foreign-born; the suspect, a Sudanese national, was charged Tuesday with attempted murder. By Tuesday night, men in balaclavas were torching cars and homes in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, shouting “foreigners out.” Two hundred backup officers from elsewhere in the U.K. arrived Thursday.The Belfast riots are the latest upheaval in a prolonged crisis over race and immigration in Britain. Last June, Northern Ireland endured two weeks of anti-immigration rioting triggered by an alleged sexual assault in the town of Ballymena, which drove much of the town’s Roma population– once called gypsies– to flee.More recently, violent protests erupted in May after a Sikh man was convicted of murdering an 18 year old student in December 2025.The $100,000 StickerSixteen colleges — Duke, Georgetown, NYU, and the University of Chicago among them — now post total annual costs above $100,000 for 2026-27, per Princeton Review data. Brown, Northwestern, and Pepperdine sit above $99,000. The buffer: at the six-figure schools, average need-based grants for first-years run $42,000 to $79,000.68 Quadrillion Miles of FungiPick up a handful of dirt and you’re holding a piece of the planet’s most extensive infrastructure — and you can’t see any of it. Beneath the surface runs a circulatory system of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi: networks that attach to plant roots and thread filaments through the soil, ferrying water and nutrients up to the plants and pulling carbon down out of the atmosphere.A paper published Thursday in Science put a number on the network’s total length: 68 quadrillion miles, enough to reach the sun and back 730 million times. The filaments hold roughly 300 megatons of carbon — four to six times the carbon stored in every human being alive. A single teaspoon of soil can contain 32 feet of it.You can’t see the threads because they’re microscopic. The filaments — called hyphae — run 2 to 20 micrometers wide; a human hair is about 70. These fungi grow no mushrooms, produce nothing aboveground, and spend their whole lives out of sight, some of it literally inside the cells of plant roots.So how do you measure 68 quadrillion miles of something invisible? Researchers count and measure hyphae in tiny soil samples under a microscope — say, ten meters of thread in a gram of dirt. Then they pooled 16,000 such samples from hundreds of studies worldwide, building a library of fungal density across forests, grasslands, and deserts. They fed that to a machine-learning model along with the local conditions at each site — temperature, rainfall, soil pH, vegetation — and let it learn the pattern: this climate, plus this soil plus this plant life, yields roughly this much fungus. Then the model filled in everywhere nobody had dug.The problem is what happens when we dig anyway. Wild grasslands hold an estimated 40 percent of this fungal biomass, most of it legally unprotected, and they’re being plowed into farmland at a fast clip. Tear up the grassland and you tear up the grid — and the carbon it was holding down.Friday June 12IranThe peace deal exists mainly in the telling. President Trump said Friday it was “in pretty final shape.” Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman told the state broadcaster “nothing has been finalized.” As of midday, neither government had said publicly what the deal contains. But Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said a U.S.-Iran deal “has never been closer.” There was even talk of a signing ceremony as soon as Sunday (Trump’s 80th birthday) in Geneva ahead of next week’s G7 summit.Israel ended the week as it began, striking southern Lebanon, where the fight with Hezbollah shows few signs of letting up.SpaceX IPOFor every share SpaceX sold Friday, four buyers wanted it. The company set aside a fifth of the shares for ordinary people buying through brokerage accounts — an unusually big slice — and they put in $100 billion in orders, per Bloomberg. Big money managers like BlackRock and the investment funds of foreign governments took the rest.The fight is over what the company is actually worth. At $135 a share, buyers are paying nearly $100 for every $1 SpaceX takes in each year — far more than is typical for rocket, satellite, or AI companies — and the company lost $4.3 billion in the first three months of this year. Skeptics point to Musk’s record of promising more than he delivers: he bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, its ad business shrank 65 percent last year, and he folded what was left into his AI company, which is now part of SpaceX.The believers are betting on three things. First, Starlink — SpaceX’s network of thousands of small satellites flying low over the Earth, beaming internet down to anyone with a pizza-box antenna. No cables, no cell towers. That matters because most of the planet — ships, planes, war zones, farms, whole countries without fiber — still can’t get fast internet any other way, and so far nobody else has caught up.Second, data centers in space. The computers that run AI are warehouses full of chips, and those warehouses are hitting a wall on Earth: they need staggering amounts of electricity and water to keep cool, and towns are starting to say no to them. In orbit, the sun shines all the time, solar panels work better than anywhere on the ground, and there are no neighbors. The bet is that SpaceX — the only company that can launch cheap and often — puts the warehouses up there.Third, Musk’s AI models catch up to the leaders, Anthropic and OpenAI.Musk ended Thursday worth $794.6 billion, per Forbes. If the stock climbs enough, he becomes the first trillionaire — about 110 years after a jump in Standard Oil stock made John D. Rockefeller America’s first billionaire. That made the front page on September 29, 1916.Europe locks the doorsA decade of argument over migration became law across the European Union on Friday. The new pact — adopted in 2024 under pressure from far-right nationalist parties — brings stricter border controls, faster case processing, digital tracking of asylum applications, and more deportations.The countries where migrants land — Greece, Italy, Spain, Cyprus — no longer carry the load alone. Every other member must either take a share of asylum seekers or pay €20,000 for each one it refuses; this year’s pool is 21,000 relocations or €420 million. Poland, Austria, Belgium, and Sweden say they will take no one. Poland continues to suspend the right to asylum altogether, citing Belarus weaponizing migration at its border. Hungary’s new prime minister, Péter Magyar, has kept his predecessor Viktor Orbán’s hard line, including a refusal to accept migrants.The rules arrive as the pressure eases. Irregular arrivals fell 26 percent last year to their lowest level since 2021 — largely because Europe got tough before the law did, hardening its borders and paying transit countries like Turkey to stop the boats before they launch. The worry is the war. The Times reports EU and Turkish officials are already in back-channel talks about heading off a new refugee wave from Iran; Turkey is the buffer more than a million migrants crossed a decade ago. Officials remain scarred by the 2014–16 surge from Syria and Afghanistan — the wave that built the far right in Germany, Austria, and France before the walls went up. This time they are planning for the wave before it forms.David Hockney“I am no good at science but I can draw,” David Hockney wrote on one exam when he was younger. The painter died Thursday at his home in London. He was 88. His figurative, suavely colored pictures pulled attention back to people and places after decades when abstraction ruled.He painted gay life while it was still a crime. We Two Boys Together Clinging, from 1961 and named for a Whitman poem, depicted that life with an openness Britain would not legalize until 1967.Born in Bradford in 1937, one of five children in a tiny terrace house, he hid under the stairs clutching bibles during the bombing raids; wartime paper shortages confined his drawing to the kitchen floor and the hymn books at church.According to the BBC: “In 1964 he flew to Los Angeles chasing the light and the bronzed bodies he’d seen in American magazines, and as the plane descended he saw hundreds of swimming pools glittering in the valleys below. Britain had only just come off rationing; in California a pool wasn’t a luxury, just a way of life. The pools became his great subject.In a Bigger Splash, his best-known work, he painted the angular buildings and cloudless sky with a roller, then took a brush to make a disturbance in the water from a diver you never see.Solar power upFor the first month on record, American solar made more electricity than coal. In May, solar supplied 12.8 percent of the country’s power. Coal supplied 12.2. Five years ago, coal supplied nearly 20 percent.The crossover came despite a government campaign against it. Congress phased out the federal tax credits for solar and wind last July. The Interior Department then required that project decisions on federal land — approvals career staff used to handle — go through Secretary Doug Burgum’s office personally; more than 60 large projects stalled, per the Times. The courts have started pushing back: a federal judge in Boston blocked several of the policies in April, and on Monday another judge threw out a Treasury rule that made the subsidies harder to claim.Solar grew anyway. May’s output was a record and ran 17 percent ahead of a year ago, with the summer peak — June and July, when solar does its best work — still ahead, per Ember, a clean-energy think tank. A second report this week, from the solar industry’s trade group and the analytics firm Wood Mackenzie, measured the pace another way: in the first three months of the year, the country added enough new solar to power roughly 1.3 million homes, and the six millionth individual system — rooftops on houses counted alongside desert arrays — came online. In 2025, a new solar project went up somewhere in America every 59 seconds. Ember’s data puts solar where coal used to live: the third-largest source of power in the country, behind natural gas and nuclear, and the fastest-growing. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for June 1 through June 5. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player.Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering.A chirping of hacks. A crazy partner in a war of moderate ceasefiring. A powers vote with no power. A slush fund still slushing. An enforcement bill that outlasts the revolt. A jobs number nobody saw coming. A Manhattan of bees underground, a ghost up on the mountain, and the screwworm is back thanks to the world’s first trillionaire.Let’s take it day by day.Monday June 1Monday was about leverage and who actually has it — a president learning that more bombs don’t buy more obedience, neither does allyship with Israel, a slush fund his own party wouldn’t swallow, ten thousand government lawyers who decided the work wasn’t worth their names, and five and a half million bees who’ve held the same patch of cemetery since before any of them were born.BoredThe president of the United States occupied many parts of the register Monday on the war he started in Iran.He told CNBC’s Eamon Javers he’d lost interest.“If they’re over, honestly, I don’t care,” he said, referring to peace talks. “I could care less. If they’re over, they’re over. If they’re not, you know — I think they took too much time. Frankly, I thought they started to get very boring.”(Isn’t that the metric you want for peace talks? Boring? War is exciting. Peace talks you want to be boring.)The president criticized Republican “hacks” for “chirping” about his handling of the war.Wait till he learns what happens to him at the hands of his own party later in the week!And on Truth Social he claimed credit for stopping something: that he’d personally kept the Israelis from striking the southern suburbs of Beirut.The public posture was boredom.The private posture, according to two U.S. officials and a third source briefed on the call, was rage.This is all Axios reporting.Summarizing the president’s remarks to Benjamin Netanyahu, one official said Trump told the Israeli leader:And you’ll want to cover the ears of young ones:“You’re f*****g crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”A second Axios source said Trump at one point yelled, “What the f**k are you doing?”This does not sound like the transcript of a victory party.Remember, the public posture from the president is that the United States has “met and exceeded all military objectives” and achieved “total and complete victory” in the war in Iran.Netanyahu’s office disputes the personal remarks.The deal the president said was close last Friday wasn’t close.After a Situation Room meeting, he sent the preliminary framework — a 60-day extension of the April 7 ceasefire — back for changes.He wants tougher language and more promises from Tehran before any of its frozen funds are released.As a candidate, Trump hammered Barack Obama for unfreezing Iranian money under the 2015 nuclear deal.Now that he can launch the bombers and has, he is discovering what Obama discovered: bombs only get you so far.The Strait, slightly ajarBefore the war, more than 100 commercial ships a day passed through the Strait of Hormuz.They carried everything from the fertilizer that helps feed corn crops to the helium that goes in MRI machines.These are container ships about 1,000 feet long — half the size of the reflecting pool in Washington, this week’s most popular unit of measurement.Over the last three weeks, the U.S. has guided about 70 through total. An average of three a day.To make the passage, most ships are turning off their Automatic Identification Systems and running dark.A Greek supertanker carrying two million barrels of crude crossed that way last week. So did a Chinese-owned vessel loaded with fertilizer.This pokey pace won’t refire the global economy.But it might mean that whatever is being learned moving these ships through can be scaled up later.The painstaking work reminds us how ridiculous it was for some — including the president — to suggest that countries who rely on the strait should just hop in and escort their own ships.They didn’t start the war, so it was a tough ask in the first place.And given how hard this has been even for the U.S. military, it puts the lie to the armchair pundits who said other countries could just snap their fingers and watch the traffic come roaring back.Cord cutters in the Strait.A few weeks back we wrote about Iran’s idea of charging a toll for the internet cables under the Strait of Hormuz.On Monday, DealBook reported that Silicon Valley has concerns about this.In early May an Iranian military spokesman said the country might demand license fees from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta to use the cables they operate under the strait — and hinted the cables could be cut.So the tech giants are running what one adviser called “intensive back-channel engagement” to protect their subsea networks.Usually we don’t go in for that kind of jargon here at Stack the Week.What the hell does “intensive back-channel engagement” mean anyway?But we’ve been unable to learn anything more. It sounds kinda weak.Iran’s own news agency puts the traffic at about $10 trillion a day.The cables carry roughly 99 percent of the world’s internet, according to the International Telecommunication Union.And there aren’t many people who can fix a cut.Four companies lay undersea cable.Maybe twenty repair ships exist, most of them weeks from the Middle East.In 2024, a single cut in the Red Sea took down a quarter of the region’s internet for weeks.It took months.But let’s not make this sound like a fella could dive in the water with a kitchen knife in his teeth.Combat divers, the most effective way to cut the fiber optic cables in the Strait, would have to use specialized equipment, because modern fiber-optic cables are protected by dense engineering armor comprising galvanized steel wires and insulating materials.The slush fund goethThis next story about the president’s slush fund is going to change by the end of the week.But here at Stack the Week, we have a theory: that walking through the news day by day adds context a Friday summary can’t.A story delivered all at once on Friday flattens things.It front-loads the latest and the loudest, and that can bruise your understanding.We might be wrong. So weigh in, if you have a view.Monday, the Trump administration said it would pause the $1.8 billion fund built to compensate the president’s allies.It was complying with a court order — and bowing to a revolt among Republicans.The fund would have paid people who said the federal government wrongly targeted them.In practice, that meant January 6th defendants and Trump associates.Majority Leader John Thune said Monday he hoped the White House would shut it down on its own.His words: “The best way to handle it is if the administration decides to shut it down themselves.”A pause is not a death. So this will likely go a few more rounds.But even if the fund disappears, don’t reach for the eraser to update your commemorative Stack the Week Destruction of Norms tracker.The norms are broken even if the fund never pays out a cent.Because in defending the fund the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and the acting attorney general would not rule out that the money might go to convicted defendants — people who assaulted police officers.Ten thousand lawyersOne in five lawyers who worked for the federal government at the end of 2024 had left by March 2026.That’s an exodus of more than 10,000 attorneys, according to a New York Times analysis of federal employment data.Some retired. Some were cut. Some quit over the administration’s policies.The effect is the same: the federal government is no longer the place an ambitious public-interest lawyer wants on a résumé.Many are taking their experience to Democratic state attorneys general and the nonprofits suing the administration.George Washington University’s law school is a fifteen-minute walk from the White House.It’s now steering public-service students toward state legislatures and city councils instead.Scott Bourque, who just finished his first year at Georgetown Law, turned down a Justice Department internship.“A lot of people I’ve spoken to just in the last few months have said that they would look down on a person if they had a federal job on their résumé that they started during this administration,” he said.“Some people have explicitly said they would see a person willing to go to work at this D.O.J. as somebody they couldn’t trust.”Graham Platner’s accountingThe Republican party transformed itself for Donald Trump, changing its once-ironclad views on personal morality, trade, and democracy abroad. Democrats, whose party did a smaller-bore version of morality-tailoring to defend Bill Clinton, now face the question again: what conduct is so inconsistent with party values that its worth risking the party gaining power?Graham Platner is a Marine veteran with no political experience who has surged ahead in Maine’s June 9 Senate primary, drawing big crowds and endorsements from Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego. He has also weathered, in order: a Reddit history denigrating women; a tattoo recognized as a Nazi symbol, which he has since covered; and now the texts.The New York Times and Wall Street Journal report that shortly after Platner launched his campaign last year, his wife, Amy Gertner, flagged to staff that he had exchanged sexual messages with other women. Gertner said Saturday she was “deeply hurt,” and accused a former campaign confidante of betraying her by making the messages public.The race is a toss-up, and control of the Senate may run through it — which is the whole problem. Platner led Susan Collins by nine points in a University of New Hampshire poll last week.So the question Democrats are asking is whether anything is disqualifying anymore — or whether Trump, who survived scandals that ended other careers, has reset the floor. “I find that tattoo and his commentary about it to be personally disqualifying,” Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts said on CNN. Senator Cory Booker, asked about the texts: “Yeah, I have concerns. That guy has questions to answer, and that’s what campaigns are for.”The biggest concern at the start of the week was whether there were more shoes to drop about Platner’s past.Trapped before you start and before 40Two new studies, released Monday, reveal a harsh reality about the modern career: the first five years matter more than ever, but a structural trap in the office is making them much harder to navigate.The first study, from the New York Fed, looks at the starting line. It found that young college graduates are struggling to get hired because of a fundamental breakdown in how offices work now.Young grads actually want to be in the office to learn, but they are being forced into remote work by default because the people who are supposed to train them aren’t there. Senior managers and experienced staff now have the leverage to work from home, leaving the physical office empty.When companies try to solve this by letting the new hires work from home too, they hit a wall: it is incredibly difficult to train and mentor an inexperienced worker entirely over a screen. Because both sides are rarely in the same room, companies have simply grown wary of hiring the inexperienced at all. In fact, the Fed estimates this empty-office mismatch—not generative AI—explains 64 percent of the recent rise in unemployment among young graduates.The second study, from the Burning Glass Institute and NYU, shows why this matters long-term. Tracking 1.3 million careers since 2000, researchers found that roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a career wall before age 40, going five or more years without a raise or promotion.While the study attributes these stalls to rigid career fields–some jobs just don’t have good advancement ladders– and low-value “paper” certifications– you go to school to train and then it doesn’t pay off in the real world– the most critical factor is early momentum. A mid-career plateau isn’t a sudden event; it is decided in the first few years on the job.The Core Takeaway: The two findings form a troubling loop. Because senior mentors are working from home, young grads are either left sitting in an empty office or isolated behind a screen. This deprives them of the intense, in-person mentorship required to build early momentum—making them far more likely to hit a career ceiling before they turn 40.The pancreas, cracked An experimental pill nearly doubled survival time for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer — one of the deadliest cancers there is.The drug, daraxonrasib, blocks a mutated protein that drives tumor growth in more than 90 percent of pancreatic cancer cases, a target that eluded treatment for decades. In a trial of 500 patients whose metastatic cancer had stopped responding to other treatment, the daily pill roughly doubled survival time with fewer severe side effects. +The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is about 13 percent. It’s on track to become the second-leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. by 2040.A trillion-dollar offeringThere are many ways to measure the race for AI dominance: the size of the model, the chips you can get your hands on, and the money you can raise to pay for both. On Monday, Anthropic — whose chatbot, Claude, thinks this lede is doing real work — told regulators in an unsigned, two-paragraph blog post that it’s seeking an initial public offering.It’s being referred to as a “trillion-dollar offering,” which is not official, but instead the loose, breathy journalistic shorthand for the possible valuation, not the literal money changing hands. A valuation is the number of shares times the stock price of each share.Anthropic is racing primarily with Open AI and SpaceX.Most of the money goes to “compute” — the raw computing power the models run on, which Anthropic rents from Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.In practice that means warehouse-scale buildings packed with specialized chips called GPUs, the processors Nvidia built for graphics and now sells for AI.Thousands of them are wired together to work as a single machine — Nvidia’s CEO calls a data center one “unit of compute.” A single rack of these chips draws more than ten times the power of an ordinary server rack, enough heat that air can’t cool it and chilled water has to be piped directly to the chip.The chips themselves run two to four times hotter than the processors in a normal computer. The constraint isn’t ideas. It’s silicon and electricity — there aren’t enough chips, and where there are chips there often isn’t enough power to run them.The dead hangHow long do you think you could hang from a pull-up bar?An 81-year-old arthritic widow set the Guinness World Record for the longest dead hang by a woman over 80, holding on for three minutes and three seconds. She took up dead-hanging to cope with grief after losing her husband of 60 years.Most healthy adults manage thirty to sixty seconds. Grip strength, it turns out, is one of the better predictors of how long a person lives — possibly because a strong grip is a sign of overall strength, possibly because a weak one is a symptom of cells aging faster than they should.Five million bees A cemetery in Ithaca, New York, holds one of the largest and oldest known colonies of ground-nesting bees ever documented — an estimated 5.5 million of them packed into an acre and a half. That’s more than three times the human population of Manhattan, living under a single graveyard.And their lives are much like those of us who live in Manhattan, they’re always confused by the constant breakdowns and shifting schedule of the C train. No, they are like city dwellers in that they are autonomous, not members of a hive.They’ve just chosen to live in the place because it suits their lifestyle. They are born, go out into the world and collect food for their offspring and do that until they die. The children essentially choose to live near where they were born. They’re just like us! Nearly six in 10 young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up, and eight in 10 live within 100 miles.They’re a solitary mining bee, Andrena regularis, the kind that nests underground rather than in hives — which describes about 75 percent of all bee species, a fact that surprises most people who only think about honeybees who somehow get into the office even though I’ve got the windows closed.The bees have been at East Lawn Cemetery since at least the early 1900s. The cemetery dates to 1878. The bees, in other words, have outlasted nearly everyone buried above them.The discovery came because a Cornell lab worker named Rachel Fordyce used to cut through the cemetery on her way to work. One spring morning in 2022, she noticed the ground was moving. She caught a few in a jar and brought them to her supervisor.They don’t sting.Bespoke flourIt used to be that when a wealthy urban striver carried a bag of white powder around, they were looking to party. Now they’re looking to bake. Premium millers are riding a convergence of health trends — fiber-maxxers, GLP-1 users, and the Make America Healthy Again crowd all hunting for food that’s less processed and more nutritionally dense.A five-pound sack of Cairnspring Mills’ Sequoia T85 all-purpose flour runs $18, against about $5 for the supermarket brand. The Oregon company’s CEO, Kevin Morse, wants to “do for flour what Blue Bottle did for coffee” — build a premium-but-reachable middle tier in a business that’s all giants at the top and tiny independents at the bottom.Still, for fluffy biscuits nothing really can replace the cocaine Mom used to use.Tuesday June 2Tuesday asked what a job is even for: a spy chief who knows real estate, a press office sealed shut to keep information in, a list of admirals scrubbed of women and Black men in a Navy full of both, and a retirement that didn’t fit.Massive Kyiv AttackRussia launched one of its deadliest attacks in months early Tuesday — about 600 drones and dozens of missiles on Kyiv and the central city of Dnipro. At least 22 people were killed and more than 100 wounded.Russia warned a week ago that it would hit the capital, and then made the city wait. For days it launched planes in patterns that mimicked a large attack, setting off alarms and wearing people down. Families slept in subway stations and parking garages for nights on end — tents and yoga mats on the station floors, dogs barking, children unable to sleep. More than 41,000 people, including nearly 4,500 children, sheltered in the Kyiv metro overnight, a record in recent years.A BBC reporter two floors underground felt the explosions through the building: missiles, then drones, then more missiles. People came up to find their neighborhoods rearranged — windows gone, cars turned to twisted, black popovers of metal.Russia called it retaliation for a Ukrainian drone strike on a dormitory in Russian-held Luhansk that it said killed 21 students; the toll couldn’t be verified.Ukraine has had the better of the war lately, hitting Russian oil facilities and reaching Moscow itself with long-range drones while the front line stays frozen.No Experience necessary President Trump named Bill Pulte, the 38-year-old head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, acting Director of National Intelligence — a job that coordinates 18 intelligence agencies and oversees the President’s Daily Brief.Pulte has no known background in intelligence, defense, or national security. He is a real-estate scion and Trump loyalist who, even in his housing job, found ways to pursue the president’s enemies: he referred Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and New York Attorney General Letitia James for prosecution over mortgage-document errors so ordinary that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had made them too.He replaces Tulsi Gabbard, who resigned last month after her husband’s cancer diagnosis. Trump announced it on Truth Social and praised Pulte’s grasp of “the safety and soundness of the Markets.”The skepticism on Capitol Hill crossed party lines. “We don’t need a weaponized D.N.I.,” said Majority Leader John Thune. “We need professionals there.” He added that if Trump wants Pulte in the job permanently, “he’s got a lengthy road ahead of him” — a reminder that this is an acting appointment, which avoids a confirmation vote and runs, by law, about 210 days.The job was created in the wake of the attacks of 9/11 to coordinate the government’s vast information-gathering capabilities because, to use a phrase popular after those attacks, the dots had not been connected between the various silos gathering intelligence.The job has very little real estate dealings.The audit shield livesActing Attorney General Todd Blanche told House appropriators Tuesday that the administration is permanently scrapping the $1.8 billion fund meant to pay people who claimed the federal government wrongly targeted them — mostly January 6 defendants and Trump associates. A federal judge had blocked it, a bipartisan revolt had stalled the GOP’s own immigration bill over it, and a second judge threatened to investigate whether the president’s lawyers had abused the courts.But the acting attorney general would not agree to put it in writing, as he did with the formation of the fund.What does survive is a provision authored by Blanche shielding Trump, his family, and his businesses from IRS audits. Senator Thom Tillis flagged it, noting that the family’s net worth has nearly doubled in eighteen months since Trump took office.AI’s 30-day windowPresident Trump signed an executive order Tuesday asking technology companies to voluntarily give the government a look at new AI models before releasing them — up to 30 days — a turn for an administration that had mostly taken a hands-off approach to AI meddling. “Excessive regulation of the A.I. sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off,” JD Vance had said last month. “The A.I. future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety. It will be won by building.”That’s changed now.The order also asks the Treasury secretary to build an AI “cybersecurity clearinghouse” to review vulnerabilities the models find.Last month Anthropic announced a model called Mythos, so good at finding security flaws in software that the company warned it could trigger a cybersecurity “reckoning” and declined to release it publicly.The NSA has used Mythos to probe the U.S. government’s own software. The White House, people in the industry and the administration said, wants to avoid the blame if an AI-enabled attack ever lands.The 30 days started as 90 — the president scrapped the stricter version hours before a signing ceremony with executives already invited.The final language closely resembles the voluntary deals the Biden administration struck with OpenAI and Anthropic in 2024, the ones this administration had trashed.Crossed off Hegseth’s list Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blocked the promotions of nine Navy officers that a board of senior admirals had already selected — three of them women, two of them Black men.The result is a slate of 22 nominees for one-star admiral that looks little like the Navy it will help lead. No women made the new list, though women are about 21 percent of the active-duty Navy. Only two nonwhite officers made it, though racial minorities are about 38 percent.Pentagon rules say a defense secretary is supposed to pull officers from a promotion list only for moral, mental, physical, or professional failings — not for who they are.Five current and former defense officials, speaking anonymously, described the intervention as driven by Hegseth’s anti-diversity politics.In his life before this job, Hegseth was on record opposing women in combat. Nearly 60 percent of the senior officers he has fired are female or Black, according to Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.Glamour, the shopping listFor nearly 90 years, Glamour mixed fashion and beauty with award-winning journalism — it won a National Magazine Award in 2023 for coverage pushing for federal paid family leave. That era is over.Condé Nast is refocusing the publication on shopping posts — “Granny Sandals Are the Secret to a Stylish Summer Look,” “The Best Spray Sunscreens for Easy Reapplication” — built to earn commissions when readers click through to Amazon and Nordstrom.The company cut much of the already-thin U.S. editorial staff in April and parted with editor-in-chief Samantha Barry without a plan to replace her.The bet is that display ads and affiliate links can carry the site without the cost of making the fussy journalism.Fortunately women looking for an editorial voice to match their intelligence can find it in newsletters and podcasts.Serena, on grassSix months ago Serena Williams posted, “Omg yall I’m NOT coming back.” OMG y’all, she’s coming back.Thursday she accepted a doubles wild card for next week’s HSBC Championships at Queen’s Club in London — the grass tune-up for Wimbledon, where she’s won seven singles titles.It’s her first competitive match in nearly four years, since she “evolved away” from the sport after the 2022 US Open. Whether Wimbledon itself is next, she didn’t say.She is 44. Her partner, the Canadian Victoria Mboko, is 19 and already ranked ninth in the world — a quarter-century between them on the same side of the net.Williams won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, one shy of Margaret Court’s all-time record of 24, a number she’s been parked next to since 2017.But every match she plays at 44 nudges a different record: the oldest woman to win a Grand Slam. The youngest players she’d have to get through weren’t born when she won her first.Wednesday June 3Coping to crazy, ballroom dancing, a tariff backdoor, showing bureaucrats the door, and the bathtub analogy that might explain next year.Crazy, on the recordThe president confirmed what Axios reported Monday — that he’d called Benjamin Netanyahu crazy on the phone — and said out loud that Israel is complicating his peace talks with Iran. The private fury became public acknowledgment in the space of two days.It came with a result. Israel and Lebanon agreed Wednesday to renew their fragile ceasefire and to set up a number of “pilot” security zones inside Lebanon, areas from which Hezbollah fighters would be banned.In an oval office availability with reporters the president displayed a chart he had asked for. It’s title: “Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers.” It showed the reflecting pool, which the president has ordered renovated, compared to the size of the Empire State Building, World Trade Center, Sears Tower.“In that part of the world, ceasefire is when you’re shooting in a more moderate manner,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday. He said the current situation was under control and peace talks with Iran were advancing.CA Gov. California’s top-two primary sent a Republican and a Democrat to a November runoff for governor: Steve Hilton, the British-born former Fox News host Trump endorsed, and Xavier Becerra, the former HHS secretary and state attorney general.Becerra held second place ahead of Tom Steyer — the billionaire climate activist who spent more than $200 million running to the left of the field.Becerra’s path opened only when Representative Eric Swalwell’s campaign collapsed in April amid sexual-assault allegations, and when Democratic voters — who’d spent months splitting among candidates they found uninspiring — finally consolidated.That splitting was the danger: polls had shown two Republicans might sweep the primary in one of the bluest states in the country, because Republicans had lined up behind Hilton while Democrats hadn’t lined up behind anyone.The fear was real enough that it launched a spring campaign to repeal the top-two system California has used for fifteen years.Senate drops ballroomSenate Republicans pulled up to a billion dollars in Secret Service funding for President Trump’s ballroom out of their immigration enforcement bill Wednesday.Two things killed it. First, the rules. The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, ruled the ballroom money didn’t belong in a bill Republicans were trying to pass on a simple majority — it had nothing to do with immigration, which was the bill’s whole point. Keep it in, and Democrats could have filibustered the entire package.Second, the politics. Several Republican senators said out loud they didn’t want to fund a ballroom in a bill about border enforcement. And the mood soured further after Trump endorsed Ken Paxton over sitting Senator John Cornyn in the Texas primary runoff. Funding the president’s ballroom while he’s picking off your own colleagues is a hard sell.Trump called Majority Leader John Thune and urged him to fire her, claiming she was put there by Obama. Senate parliamentarians are chosen by the Senate, not the White House, which he knows, so this was a lie.Speaking of which.Trump said he’d cover the cost himself. When it was announced in July at $200 million, he said it would be private — “some donors or whatever.” By late March, with the price doubled to $400 million, he was still insistent: “This is taxpayer-free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents.” Then, after the April attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner, some Republicans cited security and proposed public money.Taxpayer-free became a billion-dollar federal line item — and now, not even that.Schedule F is for firing.For most of the 19th century, federal jobs were handouts, given to the president’s friends and supporters, which bred corruption and incompetence. Then in 1881, a man who’d been denied a government post shot and killed President James Garfield. You can watch a very good account of this on Netflix. Death by Lightning. After that, Congress began building the protections — a series of laws meant to shield government workers from being fired for politics, so the work would carry from one administration to the next regardless of who won.Wednesday, President Trump signed an executive order stripping civil service protections from roughly 8,000 senior career federal workers. Division heads, IT chiefs, the people who write regulations, the analysts who tell agencies what the evidence says like toxicologists and epidemiologists. The people who track what’s making us sick. They are now at-will employees. They can be fired without a reason.To keep your job in one of these positions now, the practical test shifts from doing the job well to staying aligned with the president’s agenda.The administration says that’s the point — and frames it as accountability, not politics. Every other organization, for-profit or nonprofit, is run by a CEO who sets priorities and hires people accountable to them. Members of both parties have complained about this constraint for years.Everett Kelley, head of the American Federation of Government Employees, says the practical effect is fear: workers who once reported waste, fraud, and abuse because they were protected from retaliation will now think twice before speaking up. When the order was first proposed, more than 40,000 people filed public comments. About 94 percent opposed it.The press office becomes a cone of silenceThe Pentagon on Wednesday locked up the press room even tighter. It designated its public-affairs office a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility — a SCIF, a secured classified space — and barred reporters from it. The stated reason: speechwriters handling classified material now share the room.The practical effect is that the Iranian nuclear program is in better working order than the accountability in the American form of government. By converting a public-facing office into a literal vault, reporters are physically locked out.Even journalists with permanent building badges can no longer walk in to ask a question. And that press corps was already thinned out.After the administration forced reporters to sign a loyalty pledge against gathering “unauthorized” information, legacy media walked out.They were replaced by handpicked partisan cheerleaders. Now, even the pom-pom shakers are locked out.Musk sets a record not on his listSpaceX set the terms of what would be the largest public offering in history: a target valuation of about $1.75 trillion. The valuation would make SpaceX the seventh-largest company in America, above Tesla, and the offering more than triple the size of the largest U.S. IPO before it.It also puts a number on Musk’s path to becoming the first trillionaire.Ahead of SpaceX’s planned initial public offering this month, a New York Times analysis of Elon Musk’s public claims over the last 15 years reveals a massive gap between his rhetoric and reality.Of more than 600 goals Musk laid out across his businesses, he delivered on time just 19 percent of the time. The rest? He was late or failed to deliver 35 percent of the time, and left another 33 percent too vague or abandoned without a public update.Nowhere is this “Musk Time” math clearer than in his grandest obsession: colonizing Mars. Founded in 2002 to make humanity “multiplanetary,” SpaceX has seen its Martian timeline constantly shift:* 2011: Musk claimed SpaceX would reach Mars in 10 years, or “worst case, 15 to 20 years.”* April 2024: He told employees he expected one million people to live on Mars in 20 years, quietly directing staff to sketch out blueprints for a Martian city.* February 2026: Musk moved the goalposts yet again, admitting a Martian city would take “20+ years.”Instead, he announced a pivot: SpaceX would focus on colonizing the moon first. Shoot for Mars; if you miss, you might land on the moon.Tariff wall workaroundIf you had to guess, would you say that president Trump is deeply concerned about forced labor overseas?He is now.The administration proposed new tariffs on 60 countries, citing forced labor. After an investigation under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, the U.S. Trade Representative found that none of the 60 countries adequately enforces a ban on goods made with forced labor, and proposed duties of at least 10 percent — with China, India, Japan, and about 40 others facing 12.5 percent.It’s the biggest effort to rebuild the tariff regime since the Supreme Court struck down most of the “Liberation Day” levies in February. The court ruled the administration had overreached its emergency powers, and Section 301 grants explicit statutory authority instead — far harder to overturn.A European Union official called the forced-labor finding “utterly absurd.” The EU has some of the strictest labor and supply-chain laws in the world, and being swept in with the other 59 reads to Brussels as a pretext — a way to push tariffs back above the 15 percent rate Europe had already negotiated in exchange for lowering its own duties.They might find the timing suspicious too. The new duties are timed to take effect as the temporary 10 percent global baseline tariff expires in late July. It’s basically the old plan by another route.Super El Niño possibly developingImagine the Pacific Ocean as a giant bathtub with the wind blowing across the top of it. Most of the time, that wind blows steadily from the Americas toward Asia, and it pushes the warm surface water along with it — so warm water piles up on the Asia side, and cold water from way down deep rises up to fill in along the South America side.In an El Niño, the wind gets tired and stops pushing. So all that warm water that was piled up on the far side comes sloshing back toward the Americas, like water in a tub when you stop pushing the scalding water from the tap away from you and it rolls back at you. Now there’s a huge stretch of ocean that’s way warmer than it should be.That’s what we can expect if forecasters are right and a strong — possibly “super” — El Niño is on the way. The UN’s weather agency puts the odds at 80 percent before September, 90 percent before November, with most models calling it at least moderate and some saying it could be the strongest this century.All that ocean heat in the Americas doesn’t stay in the water; it bleeds into the air, which is why an intense El Niño nearly guarantees a record-hot year.And it doesn’t stop at temperature — it rearranges the weather for the whole planet at once. Warm ocean throws more moisture into the sky and bends the jet stream, the high-altitude river of wind that steers storms. Where the storms get steered toward, it floods — the U.S. Gulf Coast and Southeast usually catch the wet end.Where the storms get steered away from, the ground dries out and burns; that’s the story across much of the Pacific and into the drought-prone tropics. Harvests fail in the dried-out places.And the same heat that’s warming the air is cooking the shallow water where coral lives, until the coral starves and bleaches white — which collapses the reefs that a quarter of all sea life depends on for food and shelter.The “El Niño of the Century” in 1997–98 — the one forecasters are using as the model for this one — did damage measured in the trillions. And it doesn’t end when the water cools: a 2023 study in Science found El Niño can drag down a country’s economic growth for years afterward.El Niño isn’t caused by global warming — it’s a natural cycle that’s been swinging for thousands of years. But it now swings on top of a hotter baseline created by global warming. Each El Niño briefly releases a load of stored ocean heat into the air, and when that spike lands on an already-warmer planet, it tends to set the global temperature record — which is why forecasters are watching 2027.Americans soften support of LGBTQ+ issuesAmerican support for LGBTQ+ rights has stalled and begun to slip after two decades of climbing, according to a new Gallup survey.Support for same-sex marriage has dropped six points from its recent peak to 65 percent, while moral acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships has hit a decade-long low at 62 percent. And the share who consider changing one’s gender morally acceptable has fallen eight points in five years, to 38 percent.Between 1996 and 2022, support for same-sex marriage rose 44 points, from 27 to 71 percent. Gallup ties the decline to the conservative pushback against diversity programs built to foster acceptance.National park fees for July 4 celebrationThe administration is taking money meant for the national parks and spending it on the Fourth of July in Washington.At least $90 million in park entry fees — money paid at the gates of places like Yellowstone and Yosemite — is being routed to the capital. That’s according to internal Park Service documents obtained by the Washington Post.Some of it pays for fireworks — a $1.6 million display, more than five times the usual. Most of the money — $76 million — goes to fixing fountains, including the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.Meanwhile, the parks that money came from are sitting on a $24 billion repair backlog.Retro tech comebackUnlike bucket hats and baggy jeans, clunky tech is a 90s relic coming back that serves a purpose other than to embarrass the user.The companies building artificial intelligence need somewhere to put it. AI doesn’t run on a phone or a laptop — it runs in data centers, warehouse-sized buildings packed with computers, and those buildings have to be built and filled.That means somebody has to make the unglamorous guts: the servers that do the work, the chips that store the memory, the cables and gear that wire it all together.For years almost nobody invested in making more of that stuff, because demand was flat. Now demand is exploding, and there isn’t enough to go around.So the companies that make the guts are suddenly worth a fortune — and a lot of them are names you’d have called washed-up. Dell, Nokia, Lenovo, Cisco, Intel — the giants of the 1990s tech boom, the ones that faded when the dot-com bubble burst and a flashier generation took over. They’re back, because the AI boom needs exactly the boring, physical, deeply unsexy things they’ve always made.The numbers are staggering. Seven of these old-guard companies are up an average of 158 percent this year — meaning if you’d held their stock since January, your money would have more than doubled. Together they’ve gained $1.7 trillion in value. Dell rose 33 percent in a single day, the biggest one-day jump in its history. Nokia is up 124 percent on the year. Lenovo had its best month in more than 25 years.Churchill and his brushesA London museum, the Wallace Collection, has mounted the first major British retrospective of Winston Churchill’s paintings in more than 65 years — and makes the case that he was no weekend hobbyist but a painter worth taking seriously, and a leader whose vulnerabilities show on the canvas.He started in 1915, in his early forties, at the lowest point of his career: blamed for the catastrophic failure of the Gallipoli campaign and demoted. He took a command post on the Western Front and brought his easel; one early canvas showed a bombed-out battalion in a Belgian village.He later called painting a kind of therapy. “Painting is complete as a distraction,” he wrote in 1921. “I know of nothing which, without exhausting the body, more entirely absorbs the mind. Whatever the worries of the hour or the threats of the future, once the picture has begun to flow along, there is no room for them.”He produced more than 500 canvases before he set the brush down in 1962, in his late eighties.How many world leaders were painters on the side?: Artnet has a list of 10 famous politicians who painted. George W. Bush, Ulysses S Grant, Jimmy Carter, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Hitler, also, famously.Thursday, June 4The war powers vote has no power, neither do GOP slush fund scolds, oil’s nearly at bottom, but the AG is on the rise, more Platner shoes fall as does John Bolton.House votes to limit Trump’s war powersThe Republican-led House did something this Republican-led House doesn’t do: praise the police who protected them on January 6th? No, nothing so grave as that. What the chamber did on Thursday was pass a war powers resolution directing an end to U.S. military engagement in Iran. Four Republicans crossed the aisle.The resolution does not stop the war. It heads to a Senate where its path is unclear, and the president can ignore it.What it does is put on the record that a chamber his party controls no longer trusts him to manage the fight.The president treated it as betrayal: “Who would do such an unpatriotic thing, right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the War with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”The four Republicans split two ways: two are libertarians who oppose foreign wars on principle, one of them a longtime Trump antagonist already beaten in his primary by a Trump-backed challenger. The other two are mainstream Republicans from competitive districts where a war polling this badly is a liability — one of them a freshman and former Army helicopter pilot who’d voted with Trump on nearly everything, including the first two Iran votes, before switching in May.We were struck here by someone from the other body: Republican leader John Thune said his members were “asking the right questions and trying to figure out the strategy going forward.” It read as anodyne when I first came across it in the Washington Post. But it was not. The president’s own allies in the Senate are saying, on the record, that they don’t know what the strategy in Iran is.The ceasefire that didn’t last the dayThe Trump administration announced an Israel–Lebanon ceasefire on Thursday, brokered in Washington and pitched as a possible first step toward winding down the three-month war on Iran. It did not survive the announcement.Within hours Israel was hitting southern Lebanon with rounds of strikes, the leader of Hezbollah — who had not been at the table — rejected the deal outright, and his fighters fired rockets at Israeli forces inside Lebanon.The collapse was written into the setup. You cannot end a war by signing a paper with everyone except the people doing the shooting. Hezbollah wasn’t a party to the talks, so the talks bound Israel and Lebanon’s government to a quiet that Hezbollah had no reason to keep.The fund with no name.The Senate spent Thursday morning stuck on a single fight inside a $70 billion immigration enforcement bill. The fight was over the $1.8 billion Justice Department settlement pot we told you on Monday was dead.How it failed is the part worth understanding. Republican leaders had the votes to save the fund. But a straight party-line vote would force their most vulnerable members — senators up for reelection in states where a slush fund for people who beat up police officers is a loser — to go on record protecting it.So leadership arranged the math. They leaned on a senator from a safe seat to vote no, locking in the outcome before the endangered senators ever voted. That freed the vulnerable ones to vote yes, against the fund, knowing their votes couldn’t actually kill it and spark the ire of President Trump.A vote is supposed to be the moment a politician is accountable: you’re for the thing or against it, and the voters find out. This one was built so the accountability and the outcome came apart. The senators who’d pay a price at home got to look like they fought the fund. The fund survived anyway.The president didn’t act like a man whose fund was in danger. Asked about it by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, he said he’d check with the lawyers, then praised it. He did not praise Collins. He told her to smile and complained that she didn’t smile — performing, in a rambling press availability, the exact leering behavior our mothers had to endure and that the rest of us thought had been shamed out of public life.Tank bottomFour executives told POLITICO that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has drained the world’s petroleum inventories toward levels that will send energy prices surging within weeks.Global stocks now hold about 7.5 billion barrels, down roughly 500 million since the war began. That sounds like a cushion, but most of it already has buyers, and a chunk of the rest can’t actually be used — it’s the oil that has to stay in the pipelines and the bottoms of the tanks just to keep crude moving. Strip that out and the usable supply is thin. In some regions it’s nearing the point where there’s no spare barrel left to absorb a shock — which is exactly when prices spike.“I’ve never seen inventory numbers fall so much so quickly,” said Jim Burkhard, who runs crude oil research at S&P Global. “It is stunning.”Hold that in your mind. If you’re on a jog and you missed it, hit the ten second rewind. Now…In late April the president said gas would “drop like a rock” the moment the war ended — “there’s so much of it, it’s all over the place, sitting all over the oceans of the world.” On May 5 he said it would “come crashing down.” Back in March, asked on Meet the Press whether gas would be under $3 a gallon by summer, the energy secretary allowed it was “a goal of the administration and very possible.”A phoenix from under the busLast week, former Attorney General Pam Bondi threw her own deputy under the bus. The colossal mishandling of the Epstein files — the release that named victims and redacted the names of the men accused of abusing them — was, she said, Todd Blanche’s fault.This week the deputy rose from under the Greyhound. At a Rose Garden dinner Thursday, the president announced he’ll nominate Blanche — the acting attorney general, and before that his own personal defense lawyer — to run the Justice Department for good.Blanche is the man who set up the settlement fund. He’s also carried out a string of the president’s moves against the people he holds grudges against.Blanche must be confirmed by the Judiciary Committee and then the whole Senate.. Democrat John Fetterman has already declared himself a no. Republican Thom Tillis tied his own vote to the settlement fund — the one Blanche built — warning that until the Senate deals with it, Blanche is “not going to have a very good time in Judiciary Committee.”The president predicted the process would move “very quickly,” which has become an indication in this White House that in fact the opposite will take place.The president has a habit of declaring a thing done before it’s done, to make it harder to undo — the way he kept announcing, during the war, that Iran had agreed to a deal, or wanted one, before Iran had said any such thing. Say the outcome out loud, often enough, and resistance starts to look like obstruction. “Very quickly” isn’t a prediction. It’s pressure.The blunt instrumentThe Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank, delivered a report Thursday on the National Guard in Washington.First: the deployment “was not a waste. It produced a significant reduction in property crime, and it did so quickly, which matters when residents and businesses are demanding visible action.”But: it was “an expensive tool deployed in the wrong places for the wrong types of crime, at a daily cost per person 60 percent higher than an MPD officer,” with a hidden drag on the civilian economy — soldiers pulled from regular jobs to stand on corners.Then the alternative: a well-designed deployment of city police at the same cost, “targeted to D.C.’s documented hotspots and oriented toward the violent crime problem that the Guard did not touch, would be expected to produce social benefits an order of magnitude larger.”That gap — between what the Guard delivered and what smart conventional policing could deliver — is the case for treating where you put officers and what you point them at as the real levers of public safety, rather than the blunt instrument of military-style presence or sheer headcount.What that means in practice: ten cops sent to the three blocks where the shootings actually happen will do more than a thousand soldiers spread across the city to be seen. The Guard cut “opportunistic” crime — property theft, car break-ins — by 24 percent. On violent crime, robberies and assaults, it had no measurable effect, and robberies were already falling before Trump returned to office.John BoltonJohn Bolton, the national security adviser Trump hired and then turned on, agreed Thursday to plead guilty to a single count of illegal retention of classified information — down from eighteen counts. He will pay a $2.25 million fine and could face up to five years in prison.The charges grew out of diary entries Bolton kept during his time in the first Trump White House and stored at home, and from more than a thousand pages about his daily activities that prosecutors say he shared through a personal email account with two people not authorized to see them — his wife and his daughter, according to CNN’s reporting.Another Platner shoeThe NYT on Thursday published a piece titled “Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior.” It included the accounts of six women who had been romantically involved with Platner and alleges a range of upsetting and inappropriate behavior, including one account of physical violence. Platner appeared on MSNow Thursday evening and denied that particular account while admitting that in the Times piece, “there’s a lot about my struggling, not being a good boyfriend, certainly self-medicating with alcohol. And I have been very upfront since the beginning of this campaign that that was a pretty dark period of my life after I came back from my combat service.” Platner has vowed to remain in the race.The screwworm crosses A flesh-eating parasite that the United States spent decades keeping out has turned up in a Texas calf. The USDA confirmed Wednesday — a day after saying there were no U.S. cases — that a three-week-old calf in Zavala County had New World screwworm, larvae found in the animal’s umbilical area. It is the first detection in U.S. livestock since the 1960s.The screwworm is exactly as bad as its name. Females lay eggs in any open wound on a warm-blooded animal — a scrape, a fresh brand, a healing ear tag. The larvae hatch and burrow into living flesh with sharp mouth hooks, feeding and widening the wound until, untreated, the host dies.The U.S. eradicated it once, in the 1960s, with an elegant trick: release millions of sterilized male flies, let them mate with wild females, and watch the population breed itself into infertile eggs.The trick still works, but last year, the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency cut funding for a USAID-backed program that monitored and contained the screwworm in Central America. The cut came days before the U.S. lifted a temporary pause on cattle imports from Mexico — so livestock crossed the border with the surveillance gone. The pest then moved north past barriers that had held for decades.Texas’s cattle industry is worth $15 billion, and beef prices are already at records with the U.S. herd at a 75-year low. The eradication tools are being scrambled now. As a result of a thoroughly predictable outcome from throwing the baby out with the bathwater, DOGE’s unofficial slogan.Coal comes backThe administration is directing roughly $700 million toward reviving coal power, funding the construction of two new generating units. To put the number in context: the last new coal plant in the United States came online in 2013.The industry’s decline was not chiefly a matter of regulation — it was that natural gas and renewables got cheaper. Reversing that with federal money is less an energy policy than a wager that the government can pay to make an old fuel competitive again.It’s also the dirtiest bet on the board. Burn coal to make a unit of electricity and you put out about twice the carbon dioxide that natural gas does.During The Oval Office press availability to announce this move, the president appeared to nod off while his director of the Environmental Protection Agency was making the case for this policy.Jan. 6. second offensendersA Lawfare study found that out of the more than 1,500 people granted clemency for the January 6 attack, at least 97 have since been arrested, charged, or convicted of separate crimes — roughly one in sixteen.Some of those later offenses were made possible by the pardons themselves, which restored gun rights and erased the supervision that might have caught the next crime earlier.In Denmark a cabinet majorityDenmark has a cabinet where women outnumber men for the first time. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen — herself the first woman to win a third term — named eleven women and ten men, putting female representation at 52 percent.For comparison, the closest the United States has come was Joe Biden’s cabinet, where women held 12 of 25 seats. That’s 48 percentDrama thatchersShould traditional long straw or the more modern water reed be used in making thatched roofs? Are you stick of talking about this? Influencers clogging your feed going on about it?Well, this is a very heavy and hot question among English master-thatchers, of whom there are roughly 800. Britain has about 60,000 thatched homes left, two-tenths of one percent of its housing.The purists hold that the only true thatch is long straw — wheat stalks, threshed of their grain, the roof historians believe England started with. The modernists prefer water reed, which lasts longer. The catch is where the reed comes from. Before 1800, straw covered ninety percent of England’s thatched roofs. That ratio has now flipped to reed — except the reed isn’t pulled from the local river anymore. Much of it ships in from Eastern Europe and China.A thatchers’ conference in Oxford in the late 1990s nearly came to blows, the academic chairing it threatening to adjourn if the feuding artisans wouldn’t settle down. One thatcher, who’s witnessed at least four brawls, offered an explanation: the work is solitary, done alone at the top of a ladder, and it draws a certain kind of person. “I’ll use the word ‘cantankerous,’” he said. “We know our own minds and we stick to things.”Friday, June 5The jobs number beat the forecast, immigration funding beat the blockade, the ceasefire kept shooting, Hollywood proves it can succeed without its superhero addiction, but one shows up on the mountain.May jobs reportJob growth surged in May, and economists did not see it coming. Nonfarm payrolls rose a seasonally adjusted 172,000— down a hair from April’s upwardly revised 179,000, and more than double the 80,000 Wall Street expected. Unemployment held at 4.3 percent.Leisure and hospitality led every sector with 70,000 jobs, five times its average monthly gain over the past year. Local government added 55,000. Health care, the steady engine of the past two years, added 35,000, about its usual pace. Social assistance added 12,000.The leisure-and-hospitality spike is the part nobody fully expected, and the New York Times floats an explanation: the World Cup. Cities across the country are staffing up for the tourists coming to watch it. That means the jobs aren’t durable.Air transportation shed about 9,000 jobs, the wreckage of Spirit Airlines folding and leaving 17,000 full- and part-time workers without a job.Immigration enforcement passes SenateThe Senate pushed through a $70 billion bill early Friday to fund President Trump’s immigration crackdown through the rest of his term, then sent it to the House, which was expected to pass it fast. The vote was 52 to 47.All the talk earlier in the week that Senate Republicans didn’t like this or that thing from the President didn’t amount to very much. Some voted with the Democrats to do things like shut down the President’s slush fund, but in the end all those amendments failed.$1 billion May at the box officeThe domestic box office cleared $1 billion in May for only the ninth time in movie history — and for the first time, it did it without a Marvel movie carrying the month.The other eight billion-dollar Mays all leaned on a superhero. May 2026 got there on a different roster: Michael at $210 million, The Devil Wears Prada 2 at $209 million, The Mandalorian and Grogu at $137 million, Obsession at $104.7 million, and Backrooms at $81 million. A biopic, a sequel two decades in the making, Baby Yoda, and two horror movies.Sherpa found aliveA Sherpa guide given up for dead on Mount Everest was found alive Thursday after six days alone on the mountain with no food and no bottled oxygen.Hillary Dawa Sherpa, 52, was last seen May 29 resting above Camp 3, at around 7,500 meters — the altitude where the air is too thin to expect a person to last long. He got separated from his client and team, who had already descended with the last group of the season. The ladders across the Khumbu Icefall, fixed by Sherpas to get climbers through the most dangerous stretch of the route, had already been taken down. His family had begun his funeral rites.Then a cleaning crew spotted him crawling through the icefall — frostbitten, exhausted, alive. His daughter, Mendo Lhamu, told the Associated Press the family asked for photos before they could believe it was him.How he survived comes down to who he is. “Sherpas are built tough growing up in the mountains,” said Ang Tshering Sherpa, a leading figure in the community. “If there was someone else in his place they might not have survived.” From his hospital bed Friday, the man himself was plainer about it. He told BBC News Nepali he ran out of oxygen and got left behind, ate ice every day and the chocolate in his pockets, and didn’t think he would make it.The rescue closed the busiest season Everest has ever seen — more than 1,000 climbers summiting the south side, a record 274 of them on a single day, May 20. Five people died this season. He was not one of them.Health misinformation fuels Ebola outbreakIn the Democratic Republic of Congo, at least 63 people have died of Ebola out of 397 confirmed cases. A big challenge has been that many of the people in the outbreak’s path don’t believe the outbreak is real.Residents of Ituri province have launched at least three attacks on health centers, demanding the bodies of the dead. During the attacks, some people believed to have Ebola walked out, and health workers lost track of where they went. The mistrust is not new. This is Congo’s 17th Ebola outbreak since the virus was first identified there in 1976, and resistance to public-health protocols has come with nearly every one.Residents of one province were so doubtful that when a local religious leader died of Ebola, his parishioners– distrustful of the government and the hospitals– wanted to open the coffin and look. Ebola is contagious even in death.As WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus put it Friday, launching a response plan with the Africa CDC: misinformation is almost as dangerous as the virus, and it travels just as fast.60 MinutesThe news at 60 Minutes was not a drama we thought would benefit from a daily blow by blow so we’re going to wrap it all together for you Friday.By Friday the survivors had planted a flag at 60 Minutes, the most decorated news program in television history.Correspondents Leslie Stahl, Bill Whitaker and John Wertheim announced they were staying. The show would have died if they’d left, they said. That’s because after this week, they were the last correspondents standing.Three days earlier, on Tuesday, CBS fired Scott Pelley the day after he confronted the show’s new executive producer, Nick Bilton, in front of the entire staff on Bilton’s first day.Pelley accused CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” the show by ousting executive producer Tanya Simon, Simon’s deputy, a few producers and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega the week before. Last season the show grew its audience nine percent. He grilled Bilton, a technology journalist and best-selling author Weiss had installed, on running a legacy newsmagazine he’d never worked in and Bilton and Weiss’s qualifications given that they had never run organizations approaching the size and complexity of the ones they were now renovating.Bilton responded: “I have been a journalist for 25 years, Scott.” The staff applauded Pelley.Bilton fired him “for cause” the next evening, calling the confrontation a “performative display of hostility.” Then Pelley went public. He said management had told him to “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” and to include unverified claims — instructions which echo claims made by ousted correspondents Vega and Alfonsi, but which Pelly said he’d refused.He said politicians were now being invited to pick which correspondents would interview them. Weiss denies the charges. When she told staff she’d tried to “find a way back” with Pelley, he called that false: no one, he said, had offered a way back at all.Pelley tied it to the owners. Paramount Skydance’s David Ellison installed Weiss, encouraged her to shake up CBS News, and signed off on the firing. The legend of 60 Minutes, Pelley said, was being discarded “to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.”Paramount, whose purchase of CBS was approved after the network settled a lawsuit brought by the president, is currently awaiting crucial Justice Department antitrust clearance and an FCC foreign-ownership waiver for its proposed $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.Pelley spent 37 years at CBS. He reported from wars, covered the White House, anchored the evening news, and filed for 60 Minutes from places where the work could get you killed. His departure statement thanked the people who “encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives.” When he anchored the Evening News, Pelley kept photographs on the set of the CBS correspondents and crew killed in the line of duty, so he would not forget them.You can read many more details elsewhere. It’s been covered a lot, as has Pelley’s extraordinary CBS career, perhaps the most decorated in broadcast television. It’s said it is better to live by what they’ll say in your eulogy than by what it says on your resume. Pelley doesn’t have to choose.When his time at CBS came to an end, it was greeted with a flood of testimonials to the character and dedication he showed nurturing talent, providing a model of excellence, and stewarding the values that gave meaning to the daily labors of tens of thousands of people at CBS over the years, including your correspondent.That’s it for Stack the Week. Thanks so much for listening. Your fortitude is a credit to you, and we are grateful for it. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for May 25th through the 29th. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player.Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering.A war plays out in press releases, a Pope puts down a marker, January 6 records are unmarked, but the acting AG has tire marks thanks to his predecessor. Everything is bigger in Texas but the electorate, but CEO pay is bigger than the lone star state, one sign of a strong economy where more people go hungry, stay out of the car and break the piggy bank. Gen Z is tan and unemployed. The markets think Anthropic has a plan Tony Blair doesn’t think his party does. Sonny Rollins was the last man on the stoop and the beer that made Milwaukee famous, poured out for good. But time has not caught up with the Floppy disks holding the planes apart. We’ll spell it out like bromocriptine but with typos so you’ll believe us.Let’s take it day by day.Monday May 25Monday’s stories all seemed to circle the idea of memory. The memory stored in institutions, the memory carried by experts, the memory that disappears when the last person in a photograph dies, and the hidden memory written into our own lives– by the worship of the sun or profit– by choices whose consequences may not arrive for decades. The future, as it turns out, spends a lot of time in conversation with the past.Iran: One Foot on the Gas and BreakGraham Wallas, the British political thinker, wrote a book exactly a century ago called The Art of Thought. We here at Stack the Week go in for that kind of thing because, as I will detail in a longer note later, part of this experiment is not just to come up with a way to deliver the news but how to think about how we think about delivering the news. More on that later, but Wallas writes that mankind had increased its power over nature without increasing its control over that power through thought. Chemists and engineers could devise methods of destruction beyond anything previous generations imagined. Statesmen, meanwhile, still struggled to cooperate much as tribal leaders had in the stone age.This was on my mind Monday when President Trump described negotiations with Iran as proceeding in an “orderly and constructive manner.” The same day the U.S. military announced strikes on Iranian missile sites and boats laying mines.The weapons have changed. They are advanced in ways that would have seemed like sorcery in 1926, but the political problem has not. Modern militaries can strike targets hundreds of miles away with extraordinary precision. Their countries still depend, however, on negotiations conducted by fallible human beings carrying rival interests, fears and ambitions.K-shaped Gas Prices ImpactSince the Iran war began driving up energy prices, the burden has fallen unevenly. For households earning roughly $40,000 a year or less, commuting fuel costs now consume about 4 percent of income, according to a Washington Post analysis, up from 3 percent last year. For households earning $100,000 or more, the figure remains below 1 percent.The difference is not simply income; it is flexibility. Lower-income workers are more likely to live farther from work after being priced out of expensive urban areas, more likely to have fixed schedules, and less likely to have alternatives to driving. Research from the New York Federal Reserve found that after the Strait of Hormuz closure pushed energy prices higher, households earning under $40,000 cut gasoline consumption by about 7 percent, while higher-income households changed little.But cutting gasoline consumption is not like cutting back on luxury purchases. It often means skipping a doctor’s appointment, delaying errands, seeing family less often, or missing church. The cost shows up not just in a household budget, but in the routines and relationships that hold a life together.Pope and AIMaybe it was the Pope who had us thinking this week about the pace of technology and the pokey pace of the human race.On Monday, Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas — “Magnificent Humanity” — his first encyclical, a roughly 42,300-word letter on how Christianity should guide the development of artificial intelligence. Its warning rested on two biblical images: the Tower of Babel, as a symbol of technological hubris, and Nehemiah’s rebuilding of Jerusalem, as a model of collective human restoration.Leo signed the document on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical by Leo XIII that became the foundation of modern Catholic social teaching on labor and industrial capitalism.That document met the upheaval of factories, child labor and urban squalor by calling on governments to “save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed.” Leo XIV is claiming the same moral jurisdiction over a transformation whose final shape no one can yet describe. (And he also reminded us that greed and its clash with the human condition is a permanent part of that condition, just as power and ego is a part of our politics today in a way that it was when America was founded. Both are an argument that old books and ideas can teach us new lessons.)The more unusual signal came from Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, one of the major artificial intelligence companies. Speaking at the Vatican presentation, Olah said, “We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.” That is an extraordinary concession from inside the industry: someone building the technology acknowledging that the market’s incentives alone will not produce moral outcomes.Leo called for government regulation of A.I. companies; protection and retraining for threatened workers; education that teaches students to think critically about the technology; stronger defenses for children against violent, sexualized and fake material online; and human responsibility over every decision involving weapons.That last point connects to the warning at the start of our stack this week. “The growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed makes war more ‘feasible’ and less subject to human control,” Leo wrote.The message was not anti-technology. Leo described A.I. as a “profoundly human reality” that could relieve dangerous work, improve medical diagnosis and expand personalized education. But only if it serves human agency rather than replacing it.At the core of the encyclical is the claim that work is not merely income but identity — “a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfillment.”The predictable question is whether Silicon Valley will listen. But encyclicals rarely work by converting the powerful on first reading. Rerum Novarum did not persuade factory owners to raise wages.It gave Catholic trade unionists, politicians and intellectuals a moral vocabulary for the labor fights that followed.The question is not whether anyone reads all 42,300 words. It is whether the document gives people already uneasy about A.I. a sturdier language to encourage everybody to slow down and think what they’re doing.Teen Summer Job MarketDuring my high school summers, I worked at the concession stand of a semi-pro basketball league, kept the books for that league, and spent two summers in a computer store selling and repairing computers. The jobs taught me how to deal with adults, show up on time, handle criticism, and generally keep from wandering off into the street.Those jobs are becoming less common. The Wall Street Journal reports that teen summer hiring is on track for its worst season since 1948, when Americans were still celebrating victory in World War II. Inflation and fuel costs are squeezing the small businesses that traditionally hire young workers. Resorts, hotels, amusement parks and other leisure employers are cutting seasonal hiring. Many teenagers are choosing something else entirely: college preparation, sports, extracurricular activities or online ventures.More than half of American teenagers worked in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, only about 35% do.One exception stands out. Lifeguards remain in short supply. Job postings are up 78% from a year ago, according to Indeed. The work requires certification, however, and employers say low pay and difficult conditions make recruiting difficult.What disappears when you don’t have to steal your Dad’s tie and sweat at the bus stop to make it on time to your summer job? For generations, entry-level work taught punctuality, responsibility, customer service, workplace conflict management and the simple experience of earning a paycheck. A first job often introduced teenagers to people outside their families, schools and friend groups. At a moment when concerns about adolescent loneliness and isolation already run high—with a Washington University study finding that nearly 1 in 2 young adults aged 18 to 24 now report chronic loneliness—one of the ways of mixing in a community is withering..Jan. 6 Memory HoleIf the Capitol of the world’s most successful democracy is stormed by a mob and there isn’t a web page about it, did it even happen?The Department of Justice has removed webpages detailing charges, convictions and case information related to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. When the Washington Post reported that the department was quietly deleting information about the cases, the DOJ’s Rapid Response account replied that there was “nothing ‘quiet’ about it.” The department said it was “proud to reverse” what it called the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of justice. It described its own prosecution records as “partisan propaganda” and pledged to help make whole those it says were persecuted for political reasons.The records documented one of the largest criminal investigations in American history. More than 1,500 people were charged. Roughly 1,000 pleaded guilty or were convicted. The cases arose from the January 6 attack by Trump supporters that halted Congress as lawmakers met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election which Donald Trump lost.President Trump has now pardoned or commuted the sentences of most January 6 defendants. He continues to say he won the 2020 election.That claim survived neither evidence nor scrutiny. More than sixty courts rejected challenges to the election results. Eighty-six judges rejected them, including many appointed by Trump. His attorney general rejected claims of widespread fraud. His campaign’s own data operation found no path to proving the election had been stolen. His director of election security called the election the most secure in American history. So, if you were looking for an analogy to explain the president’s position, this would not just be like a president saying the moon is made of cheese, but it would be like a president insisting that he’d had a grilled moon cheese sandwich that afternoon for lunch.The fight is larger than a set of archived webpages. Democracies depend on public records because memory fades and political incentives change. Historians, students and citizens rarely agree about what an event means. They can at least begin with the same evidence.The question raised by the deletions is not whether January 6 happened. The videos, court records and news coverage remain. The question is who gets to decide which parts of the historical record the government preserves, and which parts it treats as propaganda.Gen Z TanningAn entire generation is trusting influencers over institutions on a subject where the damage won’t show up for twenty years.Only 25 percent of Gen Z respondents in a new American Academy of Dermatology survey expressed concern about developing skin cancer, compared with 39 percent of the general population. One in five said having a tan matters more than preventing skin cancer. A quarter previously told researchers that looking good now was worth looking worse later. And by worse we mean like a satchel you might find stuffed under a table at a flea market.Part of the problem may be where people are getting their information. Thirty-six percent of Gen Z respondents rely primarily on TikTok and Instagram influencers for skincare advice, nearly double the rate of the general population.One-third scored a D or F on a basic sun-safety assessment. Sixty-five percent believe a “base tan” protects against sunburns or lowers cancer risk, though a tan is actually evidence of DNA damage. (So this is like saying a few shots does not contribute to drunkenness). More than half wear sunscreen only when it’s hot and sunny, even though most ultraviolet radiation passes through cloud cover.Influencers often portray commercial sunscreens as toxic and falsely claim they cause cancer. The dermatology academy says 16 million American adults have reduced or stopped using sunscreen because of unverified online claims.The dispute takes place in the same register as the ones we had during the era of Covid-19. Dermatologists are trying to persuade people with expertise. Influencers are persuading them with social proof. The dermatologist says, “Trust me because I know.” The influencer says, “Trust me because you know me.”The trouble is that skin cancer operates on a long delay.A bad financial tip may empty your wallet by next month. A bad skin-care tip can sit quietly for decades. Melanoma is already the third most common cancer diagnosed in Americans between 25 and 39. Indoor tanning before age 30 increases melanoma risk by 75 percent. Five or more sunburns doubles the risk.Many of today’s tanning decisions will not be judged by next summer’s beach photos. They will be judged years from now in dermatologists’ offices, when someone notices a changing mole, schedules a biopsy and discovers that the skin — while it was looking great on your TikTok account — was also keeping score the whole time.Sonny RollinsSonny Rollins spent six decades proving that the purpose of mastering the rules was not to follow them forever.The tenor saxophonist died Monday at his home in Woodstock, New York. He was 95.Rollins came up in the bebop era alongside John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, learning jazz’s underlying architecture: chord changes, harmonic structures and the disciplined vocabulary of improvisation. Most great musicians spend their lives refining those skills. Rollins used them as a starting point.He became one of the pioneers of free jazz, following fragments of melody wherever they led. A performance might begin with a familiar song and end somewhere entirely different. All jazz musicians improvise. Many improvise within established patterns, the way a speaker works within a language. Rollins improvised the way someone invents a language while speaking it.The paradox was that this freedom required extraordinary discipline. Rollins once spent nearly two years in self-imposed exile from performing, practicing alone on the Williamsburg Bridge because he felt he had more to learn.“You can’t think and play at the same time — believe me, I’ve tried it,” he once said. “I’m not supposed to be playing, the music is supposed to be playing me. I’m just supposed to be standing there with the horn, moving my fingers.”It sounds mystical until you realize how many human pursuits work the same way. The experienced driver is not consciously calculating every movement of the wheel. The skilled interviewer is not reciting a checklist of questions. The writer is not diagramming every sentence. Mastery begins with rules. Sometimes it ends by making them disappear.Rollins was also the last surviving person in A Great Day in Harlem, the famous 1958 photograph that gathered 57 jazz musicians on a Harlem stoop.Schlitz FarewellSchlitz, the beer that made Milwaukee famous, is disappearing just as the fastest-growing part of the beer business no longer contains beer.Pabst Brewing announced it will discontinue the 175-year-old brand. Wisconsin Brewing Co. brewed one final batch Saturday in Verona. Dozens of locals showed up to watch. Milwaukee-area liquor stores quickly sold out of what remained.At the turn of the twentieth century, Schlitz was the best-selling beer in the world. It got there through catastrophe. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed much of the city’s brewing infrastructure, Joseph Schlitz loaded steamships with beer, crossed Lake Michigan and established distribution points throughout the devastated city. The effort won customers, broke local monopolies and helped transform Milwaukee into one of America’s brewing capitals.The company’s famous slogan — “The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous” — was less a claim about taste than a claim about economics. Schlitz spent decades buying Chicago real estate and constructing ornate corner saloons that sold its beer exclusively. The company wasn’t simply producing a drink. It was helping build the places where people gathered after work, traded gossip, argued politics and met their neighbors.That world appears to be fading. The overall beer market shrank last year. Non-alcoholic beer grew 8 percent. The category now generates roughly $25 billion globally and analysts expect it to double by the mid-2030s.One way to read those numbers is as a health story. Americans want fewer calories, less alcohol and fewer hangovers.Another way to read them is as a story about changing habits. The beer that made Milwaukee famous grew alongside crowded saloons and neighborhood gathering places. The industry’s future may belong to people who still want the taste but increasingly organize their lives around work, fitness, wellness and activities that begin not at the end of the day but the next morning.Tuesday May 27 Tuesday’s stories were full of things that revealed their true value only when they disappeared. The internet after an eighty-eight-day blackout. Competitive elections after power migrates to primaries. Transparency after governments tighten control of information. Even typos, which turn out to matter once machines stop making them.IranOn Tuesday the United States struck Iran for the second day in a row, hitting missile sites and minelaying boats, and again called the attacks acts of self-defense carried out with restraint. Tehran called them a flagrant violation of the ceasefire, proof of “bad faith and unreliability,” and warned that Washington would answer for all consequences. The talks President Trump had called orderly and constructive on Monday were, by Tuesday, being conducted by press release and ordnance.When the House debated a War Powers vote earlier this year, the Speaker argued there was no kinetic activity underway, so no vote was needed. The resolution does not say that. It speaks of situations where hostilities are imminent — exactly the condition a second day of strikes appears to describe, long after the 60 day triggering threshold for the War Powers Act has passed.Nevertheless, the “ceasefire” remains in effect. But if attacks can still take place during a ceasefire, that seems a pretty weak word to use. What is meant by it, apparently, is not that the firing has ceased but that it has not yet become full-scale carnage.The gap between words and reality showed up elsewhere in Iran this week.For eighty-eight days an Iranian shopkeeper could not take a payment, a student could not reach a server, a family could not call out, and a business could not reliably do business. The government imposed what became the longest internet blackout ever ordered by a country. Tens of millions of people were cut off from the outside world because their leaders feared what citizens might learn, organize or communicate more than they feared the cost of silence.Eventually the costs won. Students needed to take exams. Businesses needed to function. Even some officials reportedly wanted the networks restored before the economic damage became politically damaging too.After eighty-eight days, internet service began returning, though only partially.One Iranian man told the BBC that the restoration felt “exactly like a prisoner being released after three months of imprisonment and seeing the sky for the first time.” When websites finally loaded again and messages began flowing through WhatsApp and Telegram, he said he was nearly brought to tears.Politics: TexasOnly 7.4 percent of Texas’s registered voters participated in the Republican Senate runoff. That small slice of the electorate is what made Ken Paxton the Republican nominee for Senate. Increasingly, that is how American politics works: in many places, the voters who decide elections are not the broad public in November but a narrow, highly motivated minority in low-turnout primaries.Paxton, indicted on securities fraud charges and impeached by his own party’s legislature, defeated Senator John Cornyn. Cornyn voted with Donald Trump 99.2 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight’s historical tracking.A party that rejects a 99-percent loyalist over the other one percent is sending a signal. Cornyn’s greatest offenses were not policy disagreements. He certified Joe Biden’s 2020 victory rather than challenge the result based on unproven allegations. After the Uvalde school shooting, he helped negotiate the first federal gun-safety legislation in three decades with Democrats. In both cases, he chose the institution over the movement.When a general election becomes noncompetitive, power migrates to the primary. When power migrates to the primary, it migrates to the most motivated voters. Politicians adapt accordingly. They become trained in resisting compromise and engaging in showy acts of loyalty, which usually means attacking the other party, further eroding the chances for the compromise necessary to pass actual legislation.It was the most expensive Senate primary in American history, with more than $120 million spent on advertising and campaigning. Cornyn spent the closing weeks of the race trying to prove he could be every bit as loyal as his challenger. It did not work.The party establishment understood the risk. For more than a year, the National Republican Senatorial Committee ran advertisements calling Paxton “Crooked Ken” and warning he could hand the seat to Democrats. Within hours of his victory, those attacks disappeared.Republicans currently hold the Senate 53-47. Texas was supposed to be a safe Republican seat. The day Paxton won, the Cook Political Report shifted the race from “Likely Republican” to “Lean Republican” — not because Texas changed, but because Republicans selected a nominee many analysts consider weaker in a general election. Democrats hope to capitalize on that opening with State Representative James Talarico.South Carolina and Alabama Gerrymanders blockedThe mid-cycle redistricting frenzy of 2026 — a partisan land grab sparked by the president and accelerated by recent court rulings — just ran into something stronger than party loyalty: self-preservation.Wait, didn’t we just spend the last item talking about how Republicans are increasingly required to be loyal to Donald Trump? Yes. But politics is a competition among incentives, and this week some Republicans decided that keeping their seats mattered more than pleasing the president — deciding the Democratic anger about removing all districts that represented Black voters would be greater than the retributive anger of Donald Trump for not following his wishes.In South Carolina, Governor Henry McMaster called a special legislative session under pressure from Trump and the White House to redraw the state’s congressional map and eliminate the lone Democratic district held by Representative James Clyburn. Early momentum suggested Republicans might succeed.Then the math kicked in.The problem was that Democrats removed from Clyburn’s district would have to go somewhere. That somewhere was neighboring Republican districts. A plan designed to create a cleaner 7-0 Republican delegation could instead weaken surrounding GOP seats and turn a stable 6-1 map into a more vulnerable 5-2 map in a bad election year where Black voters were newly infuriated by being railroaded by the political process. There was also a practical complication: overseas absentee ballots had already been printed.Alabama produced a different kind of resistance. A three-judge federal panel blocked an attempt to revive a disputed congressional map, writing that it could not require voters to cast ballots under a plan “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination.” The judges concluded that state lawmakers had deliberately defied earlier court orders requiring a second district in which Black voters could elect their preferred candidate.The court also invoked the Purcell principle, the doctrine holding that election rules should not be changed too close to an election because doing so risks voter confusion and undermines confidence in the process.Together the decisions slowed what had become a nationwide redistricting arms race. Eight states have already adopted new congressional maps. Three others remain in active litigation. President Trump hopes the redraws will create a Republican bulwark against a potential Democratic wave fueled by his low approval ratings.President to Walter ReedPresident Donald Trump visited Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Tuesday for a routine medical and dental checkup, according to a White House official. While the President routinely asserts that he remains in “excellent health”—most recently declaring on Truth Social after his last physical that “Everything checked out PERFECTLY”—the checkup arrived amid persistent public rumors regarding visible symptoms, including swollen ankles and consistent bruising on his hands.It marked the president’s third visit to Walter Reed in just thirteen months, a frequency that breaks from the standard modern presidential precedent of a single, comprehensive annual physical at the facility. For a typical individual turning eighty next month, medical guidelines recommend at least one to two primary care checkups a year to monitor age-related risks, though frequent visits are common when managing chronic issues like the chronic venous insufficiency the White House previously confirmed. Ultimately, the visit draws heightened national attention as Trump prepares to enter his ninth decade, on his way to becoming the oldest person ever to occupy the presidency.NDAs for Federal WorkersHave you ever tried to get a straight answer out of a massive corporate bureaucracy? Everyone is terrified of public relations problems, nobody wants to speak on the record, and every answer seems to pass through three lawyers before it reaches you.Now imagine applying that model to the federal government.The Office of Personnel Management has proposed requiring current and future federal employees to sign broad non-disclosure agreements intended to reduce leaks to the press. The draft policy takes an expansive view of what counts as confidential, covering internal operations, personnel matters, procurement decisions, and a wide range of non-public deliberations.Supporters argue the government has a legitimate interest in protecting sensitive information and ensuring employees work through proper channels. Critics respond that many important stories about waste, incompetence, misconduct, and corruption reach the public only because someone inside government was willing to speak.The president of the American Federation of Government Employees argues that public servants do not surrender their First Amendment rights in exchange for a government paycheck. The broader concern is that the proposal could discourage employees from sharing even unclassified information that might embarrass an agency or administration.The debate reaches beyond one personnel policy. Modern governments generate enormous amounts of information, much of it hidden from public view. Citizens depend on inspectors general, whistleblowers, watchdog groups, congressional oversight and journalists to understand what is happening inside institutions they cannot directly observe.Every administration dislikes leaks but those who serve in administrations seeking to maintain democratic norms understand that a press that investigates what is being done on the people’s behalf is a necessary part of a democracy.American Airlines Goes StarlinkDo you purchase Wi-Fi when you’re flying?I’m sorry, it’s not working. Try it again. Oh, there it is working. Nope, it’s not working again. They’ve reset the system. You can load it on your phone, but not on your computer. Oh great, it’s working. Unfortunately, it’s working at the baud rate of a 1985 computer.The airlines are in a race to improve your experience. That’s why when you fly Delta, they will tell you that Delta is on a Wi-Fi journey to improve its service, which sounds like something that requires a team of therapists.The amenity wars among airlines have moved from seatback screens and legroom to something more basic: whether passengers remain connected to the rest of the world. Airlines are desperate to capture high-margin business travelers and premium leisure travelers who refuse to be offline for even one quivering desperate clutching moment. Business travelers want to work. Leisure travelers want to stream. Parents want to text their children. Increasingly, people regard six hours without internet access the way earlier generations regarded six hours without electricity.That is why American Airlines’ announcement Tuesday that it will install SpaceX’s Starlink service on roughly 500 narrow-body Airbus aircraft matters. High-speed, gate-to-gate connectivity is rapidly moving from luxury perk to baseline expectation.The technology behind that shift is a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites that can deliver dramatically faster speeds and lower latency than the older geostationary systems that have long frustrated airline passengers. By signing major carriers one after another—first United, now American—Starlink is positioning itself as the connective tissue not only for remote farms, ships at sea and rural communities, but increasingly for the ordinary routines of modern life.TyopsHumans of the earth untie. I mean unite. I may have just proved I am human. Both because of a typo and a dad joke.A report Tuesday by The Atlantic highlights the growing role typos play in establishing humanity in an age increasingly flooded with polished, AI-generated content. Tyops are not sloppy. They’re authentic. Though try making that joke in Google Docs. The software keeps correcting “tyops” to “typos.” The machines are ever vigilant, and so too must we be.Some job applicants are now intentionally planting spelling mistakes in cover letters to prove a machine did not write them. Corporate executives and celebrities receive praise for sending messages that appear unedited. Researchers studying dating apps have found that minor mistakes can make a profile seem more genuine because they suggest an actual human being sat down and typed the words.The strange consequence is that some of the qualities we once tried hardest to eliminate are becoming valuable again. For decades technology promised a future free of mistakes. Now mistakes themselves are becoming evidence that a person was involved.We’re all figuring out personal watermarks.You can imagine this spreading beyond typos. Instead of showing up at the door with six-pack abs and a professionally optimized dating profile, future Romeos may prepare for their date by wrinkling their shirt. Perhaps mash a handful of crushed potato chips under the arms to create that authentic “I’ve been on the couch for three days contemplating existence” look.Wednesday May 27A war looks different when you calculate how long it takes to replace the missiles. An economy looks different when you ask who received the gains. Fun looks different when you ask whether people are really talking about meaning. Even a guitar becomes a different object after seventy years of imitation.IranOn Wednesday the Iran conflict looked less like a military campaign than a public argument about leverage.President Trump told his cabinet that Iran had misjudged him.“They thought they were going to outwait me. You know, ‘we’ll outwait him. He’s got the midterms.’ I don’t care about the midterms.”The statement was aimed at Iran, but it also carried an implicit claim about public support. Trump appeared to cite the previous night’s political results as evidence of strength. Yet the election he was referring to was a Republican primary in Texas decided by fewer than ten percent of registered voters. National polling paints a different picture. Multiple surveys now show majorities of Americans disapprove of the conflict and would prefer the United States disengage rather than remain involved in a prolonged war.Still, the point of the statement was not really polling. It was signaling. Trump wanted Iran to believe he is willing to stay in the fight.Iran spent the day sending signals of its own.State television published what it described as the outlines of a preliminary agreement with the United States. The reported framework discussed shipping lanes, sanctions and military withdrawals. Missing from the proposal was any meaningful discussion of Iran’s nuclear program—the issue that led to the conflict in the first place. The White House dismissed the report as a fabrication.Whether the proposal was real is almost beside the point. Like Trump’s comments, it was an attempt to shape perceptions about who has leverage and who needs a deal.That dynamic appeared again later Wednesday when Trump threatened military action against Oman if it participated in a joint arrangement to manage shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. For those of you keeping score, Oman is a US ally. According to CNN’s tally, Oman becomes the 15th country Trump has either threatened to attack, left open the possibility of attacking, or actually attacked during his two terms. Those countries are home to roughly one out of every eleven people on Earth.Missile GapIn the 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy warned of a “missile gap” between the Soviet Union and the United States. The war with Iran has revealed a different kind of missile gap: the gap between how quickly America can fire missiles and how quickly it can replace them.A new analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates it will take roughly three years for the United States to replenish the munitions stockpiles depleted so far in the war. The problem is not money. Congress has already appropriated replacement funds. The problem is time.Modern missiles require specialized factories, trained workers, complex supply chains and long production schedules. A Tomahawk cruise missile can be launched in seconds. Replacing it can take years.The United States has expended more than 1,000 Tomahawks during the conflict. Over the past decade, the Navy purchased an average of just 86 per year. Raytheon recently produced fewer than 200 annually. The Navy now wants 785 Tomahawks in its 2027 budget request, but according to Defense Department projections those missiles will not begin arriving until 2030. CSIS estimates the inventory expended during the war will not be fully restored until late that year.That creates what military planners call a window of vulnerability. America still possesses overwhelming military power, but some of its most sophisticated weapons now exist primarily as purchase orders and production schedules rather than inventory sitting in warehouses, launch tubes and magazines.CEO PayImagine starting your career today and working continuously until the year 2226. For workers at half the companies in the S&P 500, you still would not have earned what their CEO made this year. In a single year.According to an Associated Press analysis, the typical CEO compensation package rose nearly 6 percent in 2025 to $17.7 million. The median employee earned $89,744, a 4.7 percent increase that technically outpaced inflation but did little to relieve the financial pressure many households continue to face.The result is a widening gap. At the median company surveyed, it now takes a typical worker 200 years to earn what the chief executive earns in one year. Twelve months ago the figure was 192 years.Supporters of high executive compensation argue that running a large corporation requires rare skills and that boards must compete for talent. Critics respond that modern compensation packages increasingly reward executives for rising stock prices while leaving most workers dependent on wages that grow far more slowly. (And you’ll remember from one of our earlier Stack the Week stories that though productivity is up, the share of productivity going towards worker wages is as low as it has ever been.)The debate is ultimately about who benefits from economic growth. Corporate profits, stock prices and executive compensation have all risen sharply over the last generation. Workers have not benefited at anything close to the same pace.Food InsecurityFood insecurity is a sterile phrase for a very human experience. It means parents skipping meals so their children can eat. It means relying on food banks. It means standing in a grocery store calculating whether the last item rolling down the conveyor belt will last until the next paycheck.According to the USDA, 13.7 percent of American households now experience food insecurity, up from 10.2 percent in 2021. Among families with children, the figure rises to 18.4 percent—nearly one in five households and the highest level seen since the years surrounding the Great Recession.What makes these numbers notable is that the country is not in a recession.So if you’re gardening while listening to this and all of those percentages just blew past you, here’s the simple version: gas prices, rent, utilities and groceries have hit lower-income families particularly hard, and many of those families are hungry. Little of that shows up in the pretty graphs on the business shows or in the pronouncements from podiums about the strength of the economy.Unemployment remains relatively low. Economic growth continues. The disconnect helps explain one of the central puzzles of contemporary American life: why so many people feel economically strained even when headline indicators appear undismal.The problem is that necessities consume most of the budget for lower-income households. When rent, groceries, utilities and insurance rise, there are few places left to cut. A wealthier family may postpone a vacation or eat out less often. A poorer family is already spending most of its income on the basics.At the same time, pandemic-era assistance programs expired, savings accumulated during the pandemic dwindled, and many households turned to credit cards to bridge the gap. Once those options disappear, even a small setback—a missed shift, a car repair, an unexpected medical bill—can become a crisis.The psychological toll is beginning to show up in surveys. According to the New York Fed, families that regularly run out of food have become dramatically more pessimistic about their financial futures. The share expecting to be better off a year from now has fallen sharply since 2020.Are You Having Fun?Those data might explain this next item.“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”That observation by E.B. White came to mind after reading a new survey on fun.When asked whether they were having enough fun, 48 percent of Americans said no. Twelve percent said they could not remember the last time they had an entire free day to enjoy themselves. Half said they wished they could do something fun and social every day—or at least several times a week. On average, those who felt deprived said an additional 17 hours of free time each week would make a meaningful difference.What counts as fun? Mostly familiar activities. Americans reported spending leisure time watching television (77 percent), seeing family and friends (69 percent), dining out (59 percent), enjoying outdoor activities (50 percent), pursuing hobbies (49 percent), and playing games (48 percent).But before we go any further, it is worth asking what fun actually means.I find Stack the Week fun. It is also a tremendous amount of work. A great play is fun. So is a long conversation with a friend. Watching television may be enjoyable, but it feels like a different category. Fun seems to imply something more than pleasure. It suggests engagement. Novelty. Play. The feeling that, for a little while, you are more alive than usual. Time passes slowly.Whatever fun is, Americans appear to think they need more of it. More than seven in ten respondents said it reduces stress. Others said it improves motivation and helps them feel closer to family and friends.Perhaps what people are really saying is not that they lack fun. Perhaps they lack the freedom to pursue the things that make life feel larger than the obligations that fill most days.The survey asked about fun. The answers may have been describing meaning.Guitar DramaIf you close your eyes and imagine an electric guitar, there’s a very good chance you’re picturing a Fender Stratocaster.That’s remarkable because Fender no longer owns the shape.Leo Fender, who was not a musician himself, designed the Stratocaster in 1954 by asking working guitarists what they wanted and then building it. The result proved so influential, and so widely copied, that a U.S. trademark board ruled in 2009 that the design had become generic. Too many companies had been making Strat-style guitars for too long. The silhouette had entered the culture.Now Fender wants it back.According to the Wall Street Journal, Fender recently sent cease-and-desist letters to guitar makers demanding they stop producing Strat-shaped instruments, recall unsold inventory and destroy remaining stock. The company is relying on a German court ruling that declared the Stratocaster a copyrightable work of art under German and European law.The maneuver is clever. Fender lost the trademark fight in the United States. So it found a different legal path in a different country and is now attempting to use that ruling against companies selling guitars elsewhere.The dispute turns on a surprisingly difficult question: when does an idea stop belonging to its creator?We usually think of success as ownership. But some creations become so successful they escape ownership entirely. Nobody asks permission to build a rocking chair. Nobody pays royalties to write a sonnet. The Stratocaster may have crossed the same threshold. It became less a product than a category.That question feels especially contemporary. Artists, authors and musicians are all wrestling with it in the age of artificial intelligence. How much originality deserves protection? How much imitation is permissible? And when does something become so woven into the culture that it belongs to everyone?Fender’s argument is that the Stratocaster remains a work of art. Its critics argue it has become something rarer: a work of art so influential that it turned into a common language.Counting Sheep in ChinaHere’s a fun item. In China many office workers are daydreaming about counting sheep. Late last month a job post for a position looking after 3,000 sheep in Mongolia went viral on Chinese social media and attracted white-collar applicants.More than 700 people applied, including office workers from Shanghai and Chongqing, factory workers, and university graduates. The posting generated 59 million views within hours and became one of the country’s most discussed topics online.The frenzy comes at a difficult moment for Chinese workers. Underemployment is rising, wages have struggled to keep pace with economic growth, and many employees complain about the country’s notorious “996” work culture—9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.Analysts expect conditions to become more challenging as factories face higher costs from the war in Iran, artificial intelligence reshapes parts of the labor market, and a record 12.7 million university graduates begin looking for work this summer.The appeal wasn’t entirely romantic. The job paid 8,000 yuan a month—about $1,100—well above the average salary at many private companies, and included housing and groceries.The farm owner ultimately hired two couples, all born in the 1980s and all with prior farming experience. He kept another 40 couples on a waiting list but ruled out singles and young city dwellers. His reason was simple. “In our place, you might not see people for a whole year,” he said. “Whether someone can endure such loneliness, I don’t know.”Thursday May 28It was a day of negotiations: over peace, over money, over political identity and over perception. Nations negotiated to end a war. Families negotiated with dwindling savings. Political parties negotiated between ideology and electability. And millions of people around the world negotiated whether the story America tells about itself is still worth buying a ticket to experience.Iran: Negotiating in PublicDavid French captured the strange moment in the Iran war this way: “At the moment, the United States is negotiating with a regime that President Trump claimed we had already changed, to open a strait that was supposed to be open last month, and to end a nuclear program that we said we had obliterated.”That paradox sits at the center of a potentially significant diplomatic breakthrough. According to Axios on Thursday, U.S. and Iranian negotiators have reached a 60-day memorandum of understanding that would extend the ceasefire and create a framework for talks over Iran’s nuclear program. The deal still requires President Trump’s approval, and Iran has not yet formally accepted it.Under the proposed agreement, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz would become unrestricted, Iran would remove mines from the waterway within 30 days, and the United States would gradually lift its naval blockade and issue sanctions waivers allowing Iran to resume oil exports. Iran, in turn, would commit not to pursue a nuclear weapon and begin negotiations over the disposal of its highly enriched uranium and the future of its enrichment program. The United States would also agree to discuss sanctions relief, the release of frozen Iranian funds, and mechanisms for delivering humanitarian aid and commercial goods.The proposed framework highlights the gap between military objectives and political outcomes. Some of the issues under negotiation—Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions relief and regional security arrangements—predated the war. Others exist only because of the war. The Strait of Hormuz was open before the fighting began. The naval blockade did not exist. The mines were not in the water. Part of what is now being hailed as a breakthrough consists of restoring conditions that existed before the conflict began.And, of course, even as diplomats worked on the framework, the war continued. Overnight Wednesday, Iran fired a ballistic missile at a U.S. base in Kuwait, which was intercepted, while U.S. forces shot down four Iranian drones and struck a drone-control facility inside Iran.The exchange served as a reminder that the parties are still negotiating over objectives that President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have repeatedly declared were already achieved.American’s Savings Rate DeclineAmericans are dipping deeper into their savings.The Commerce Department reported that the personal saving rate fell to 2.6 percent in April, down from 4.3 percent at the beginning of the year and the lowest level since June 2022.Part of the explanation is straightforward: prices continue to rise and consumers have not yet meaningfully pulled back on spending. Roughly half of April’s spending increase went toward necessities such as gasoline, utilities, housing and food. But Americans also spent more on recreation and restaurants, suggesting many households are still trying to maintain familiar routines even as their financial cushions shrink.The more revealing economic news came from a revision to first-quarter growth. The Commerce Department lowered its estimate of economic growth from 2.0 percent to 1.6 percent after finding that consumer spending and investment were weaker than initially reported.That matters because the first quarter largely predates the economic effects of the Iran war.The administration argues that rising energy prices and economic anxiety stem from the conflict and from the determination to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. But the revised data suggest some of the weakness was already present. Consumers were spending less than previously believed. Economic growth was slower than previously believed and a great deal less than the 5% boasts that the administration once promised. Americans were already drawing down savings before the war added new pressures.The story here is not simply that prices are higher. It is that many households were already losing their financial cushion before the latest shock arrived. Savings are what absorb the unexpected car repair, the medical bill or the missed week of work. When that cushion shrinks, the next problem hurts more than the last one.Tony Blair Has AdviceWhen we last looked at British politics two weeks ago, Prime Minister Keir Starmer was barely holding his job. Labour MPs were calling for him to step down. Cabinet ministers were resigning, some to position themselves to replace him.Now a former prime minister has put his oar in.Tony Blair published a 5,700-word broadside against his own party, arguing that what ails Labour is not the leader but the absence of a plan. He called the destination the “radical centre” — policy first, politics last.His prescriptions all run the same direction: toward business and away from the party’s left wing. Cut welfare, which he says the country can no longer afford. Drop the planned wind-down of North Sea oil and gas, a green measure he blames for raising energy costs and driving away jobs. Stop being squeamish about artificial intelligence and treat it as the central project of governing. Mend relations with Donald Trump, not out of affection but because Britain’s economy is too weak to pick fights with Washington. Cheaper energy over cleaner. Business over the base.Blair wrote that Labour has “an almost infinite capacity for self-delusion,” and that it won in 2024 not by acclaim but by being the acceptable default to a Conservative government the country could no longer stomach. That’s a bit thick, critics would say. Blair was the cheerleader of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the decision many on the left regard as Blair’s own great act of self-delusion.Forcing Starmer out before anyone knows what would replace him, Blair wrote, is not serious.Labour did not take it warmly. Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, who may challenge Starmer, named the flaw directly: Blair is diagnosing the wrong disease. The essay never mentions inequality, and a party that cannot see voters being priced out of ordinary lives—where roughly one in five Britons lives in poverty after housing costs are taken into account—does not understand the moment.That argument will sound familiar to American ears. It is the same fight increasingly bubbling up among Democrats: whether parties win by moving toward the center to capture growth and opportunity, or by focusing on the economic pressures that make many voters feel growth has passed them by. Also similar: the fight over whether ideological purity costs you the power to do anything at all.E. Jean CarrollThe Justice Department has opened a criminal perjury investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the writer who successfully sued Donald Trump for sexual abuse and defamation. Prosecutors are reportedly examining whether Carroll lied during a 2022 deposition when she said she had not received outside funding for her lawsuit. It was later disclosed that billionaire Reid Hoffman helped cover some legal fees and expenses.A jury found Trump liable in 2023 for sexually abusing Carroll and awarded her $5 million. A second jury awarded her $83.3 million in 2024 after concluding Trump had defamed her by repeatedly attacking her claims. Trump has long denied the allegations, calling them a “made-up scam.”Carroll joins a growing list of former officials, investigators, prosecutors and critics who have faced criminal investigations, lawsuits or other legal scrutiny during Trump’s second term. It also demonstrates the President’s ironclad law that you go after those who have come after you, even though in this case it risks reminding voters in an election year of the considerable number of sexual assault claims leveled against him. Supporters argue these cases reflect a willingness to pursue wrongdoing regardless of politics. Critics see something else: the use of governmental power against people who have challenged the president personally or politically.CEO ConfidenceThe people paid to be optimistic are getting less optimistic.The people who decide whether to build the factory, hire the workers, buy the equipment or expand the business are getting more nervous.A new survey from The Conference Board and The Business Council found CEO confidence fell 12 points in the second quarter to 47, pushing it back into negative territory after a burst of optimism earlier this year. Nearly half of chief executives now say economic conditions are worse than they were six months ago, up from just 8 percent in the previous quarter.The reversal is striking because it comes after the initial enthusiasm that greeted President Trump’s return to office. Earlier this year many business leaders expected faster growth, lighter regulation and stronger investment. Now they are looking at the same economy and reaching a different conclusion. As Conference Board chief economist Dana Peterson summarized it, CEOs believe conditions are materially worse than they were six months ago and expect further deterioration over the next six months.Often the White House responds to warnings about the economy by questioning the judgment of the people making them. That argument is harder to make here. These are not commentators or forecasters. They are the people making many of the decisions that determine whether the economy grows.The good news is that their caution has not yet translated into retreat. Most companies have not reduced planned capital spending, and a growing share expects to increase investment over the coming year.What has changed is their list of worries. Cybersecurity now ranks among the top concerns for nearly two-thirds of CEOs. Geopolitical instability, artificial intelligence, supply-chain disruptions and energy risks have all moved higher as well.Confidence measures tell us how people feel. Investment plans tell us what they are doing. At the moment, America’s business leaders are acting more confidently than they are talking.The question is how long that gap lasts.Ukraine’s Patriot ProblemThe war in Iran is now affecting another battlefield entirely.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he is urgently pressing the United States for more Patriot missile interceptors, warning that supplies are running short as American stockpiles are depleted. “I believe the U.S. must act quicker,” he said during a visit to Sweden. A reminder that military power is not infinite. Every missile fired in one conflict is unavailable for another.At the same time, Ukraine is looking elsewhere. Zelenskyy announced plans to purchase Swedish Gripen fighter jets. The purchase will be financed through the European Union’s new €90 billion loan package for Ukraine.Jill BidenAhead of the release of her memoir View from the East Wing, Jill Biden is offering a striking new account of Joe Biden’s disastrous 2024 debate performance.“I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” she told CBS News. “I don’t know what happened. As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”As a reminder, if you think someone is having a stroke, time matters. Medical experts emphasize the acronym FAST: facial drooping, arm weakness, speech difficulty, time to call emergency services. Every minute without treatment increases the risk of permanent brain damage.The political significance of the quote is not the medical speculation but the contradiction it revives. The morning after the debate, Jill Biden publicly praised her husband, telling a rally crowd, “Joe, you did such a great job.” She was also widely reported to be among the strongest voices urging him to remain in the race.Which brings us back to one of the central questions of the 2024 campaign. If those closest to the president found his debate performance alarming enough to wonder whether he was suffering a medical emergency, why were they simultaneously assuring the public that nothing was wrong and encouraging him to continue his reelection bid?Jill Biden’s explanation attempts to portray the debate as a singular event. The difficulty is that many voters, journalists, donors and Democratic officials spent months debating whether it was singular. The debate became such a political earthquake precisely because it appeared to confirm concerns that had already been circulating for years which is an indictment of all those who covered up the obvious.France Finally Repeals a Slave CodeFrance’s National Assembly voted unanimously this week to repeal the Code Noir, the 1685 law that governed slavery in France’s colonial empire. The measure passed 254-0, formally removing from French law a decree that treated enslaved people as property and authorized their sale, punishment, and exploitation.France abolished slavery in 1848, but the legal framework underpinning slavery was never formally repealed. For nearly 180 years after emancipation, the law remained.The vote is largely symbolic. Nobody was enforcing a seventeenth-century slave code. But symbols matter. France operated the world’s third-largest slave trade, transporting roughly 1.4 million Africans to colonies whose sugar wealth helped build cities such as Nantes and Bordeaux. The repeal serves as a reminder that ending an institution and fully reckoning with its legacy are often separated by generations.French Open Heat WaveWhen workers water the clay courts at the French Open between sets—a routine necessary to keep the crushed brick from drying out and blowing away—they have taken to directing their hoses at spectators begging to be cooled off, too.Temperatures during the opening days of the tournament have reached 33°C (91°F), unusually hot for late May in Paris. Players drape bags of ice around their necks during changeovers. Fans crowd around sprinklers.The heat is changing the game.Clay courts traditionally favor patient defenders. The surface slows the ball and rewards long rallies. Extreme heat alters those conditions. Warmer, thinner air creates less drag. Pressurized tennis balls become livelier. Serves arrive faster. Topspin jumps higher. Power hitters gain an advantage.It’s not just France. Britain is experiencing unusual heat as well. Firefighters battled a grass fire on Arthur’s Seat, the hill overlooking Edinburgh. Several drownings were reported in Britain and France as people sought relief from the temperatures.Tourism in America DeclinesA country exports many things: products, movies, ideas, culture.It also exports itself.Last year, fewer people bought American.International tourism to the United States fell by 5.5 percent in 2025, a loss of roughly four million foreign visitors and more than $8 billion in spending. Outside of the pandemic, it was the sharpest annual decline in foreign tourism to America in roughly two decades.Global tourism moved in the opposite direction. International travel grew worldwide. America was one of the few major destinations moving backward.The reasons appear to be both practical and political. Travel groups cite rising costs, a proposed $250 visa integrity fee, higher airfares driven in part by fuel prices, and a sharp drop in visitors from Canada. The dismantling of Brand USA, the country’s primary international tourism marketing organization, has not helped.But there may be something harder to measure at work as well.Tourism is one of the few industries where perception is the product.Visitors do not come to America because they need America. They come because they want America. They are buying a feeling, an experience, a story about the country they are about to visit.When fewer people choose that story, the consequences show up first in hotel occupancy rates, restaurant receipts and theme-park admissions.Friday May 29A peace deal that wasn’t a deal. A fund that couldn’t pay anyone. An attorney general turned bus driver. A company worth Switzerland and a country worth less. An agent caught telling stories. And Louisiana, squeezed down to one. Floppy disks holding the planes apart is less frightening than eight kids flat on their backs a hundred feet up.IranFriday, the Iran war negotiations were happening out in public again.President Trump laid out what he described as the terms for ending the Iran war. Iran must permanently abandon any nuclear weapons ambitions. The Strait of Hormuz must immediately reopen to unrestricted shipping. Remaining naval mines must be removed. The U.S. naval blockade would end. Buried enriched uranium would be excavated and destroyed in cooperation with Iran and international inspectors. “Other items, of far less importance, have been agreed to,” Trump wrote, before announcing he was headed to the Situation Room to make a “final determination.”Within hours, Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency called Trump’s account a “mixture of truth and lies.” Iranian officials disputed his claim that Tehran had agreed to free passage through the Strait of Hormuz without tolls. They also rejected his assertion that the United States and Iran would jointly excavate and destroy buried enriched uranium, saying no such provision appears in the draft framework currently under discussion.According to diplomatic leaks, the actual agreement on the table is more modest: a 60-day extension of the ceasefire, a phased reopening of shipping traffic, a gradual reduction of the U.S. naval blockade, and temporary sanctions relief while negotiators attempt to tackle the much harder questions surrounding Iran’s nuclear program.For the last several weeks, nearly every Friday has arrived bearing what appears to be a major breakthrough, only for the apparent breakthrough to dissolve by Monday morning. At this point, if your preferred foreign-policy doctrine is “wake me when something actually happens,” the recent news cycle has done little to challenge that view.“Anti-Weaponization” BlockedPresident Trump’s $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” ran into a problem Friday.A federal judge in Virginia temporarily blocked the administration from creating, funding or operating the program while legal challenges proceed. The fund was designed to compensate Trump allies and others who believe they were unfairly targeted by government investigations, prosecutions or administrative actions.The lawsuit that triggered the injunction was filed by a coalition including former federal prosecutor Andrew Floyd, who investigated the January 6 Capitol attack, and California professor Jonathan Caravello, who was arrested during an immigration protest; they argue the administration’s arbitrary definition of “weaponization” unconstitutionally excludes victims of political retaliation who do not align with the current White House.Their challenge is not simply that they want access to the fund. They argue the government cannot create a compensation program for victims of political targeting while limiting eligibility in a way that favors one political viewpoint over another.That argument gets at the central legal difficulty. If the government is compensating people harmed by politically motivated actions, what standards will it use to determine who qualifies? And can those standards be applied without regard to politics?Bondi Bus DriverPam Bondi spent Friday defending the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files while refusing to answer questions about President Trump’s role in the process.Appearing before the House Oversight Committee, the former attorney general acknowledged that the Justice Department made redaction errors when releasing the files but insisted the department had been committed to “accountability and transparency” throughout the process.She said oversight of the release had been delegated to then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who now serves as acting attorney general.This, in Washington, is called under-bussing. I.e. throwing someone under the bus. It was notable that Bondi could be as precise as a diamond drill when she wanted to be, when it came to Blanche. When it came to the president she was less so.Democrats emerged from the closed-door interview saying Bondi refused to answer questions Friday on President Donald Trump’s involvement in the release of the Jeffrey Epstein case files. This is not exactly under-bussing, but because Bondi did not say that the President had no involvement at all, she leaves interpretations open.At her testimony, Bondi wore a bandage from surgery for thyroid cancer which she underwent several weeks ago.Anthropic Most Valuable AI FirmA valuation is not a pile of money. It is a prediction about the future.Imagine you own a lemonade stand. An investor buys 10 percent of it for $100.Only $100 changes hands. If 10 percent of the lemonade stand is worth $100, then simple math suggests 100 percent would be worth $1,000. That’s what a valuation is: an estimate of what the whole enterprise would be worth based on the price paid for a small piece of it.That is essentially what happened to Anthropic this week.The artificial intelligence company became the most valuable AI start-up in the world after raising $65 billion from investors. The amount those investors were willing to pay implies that Anthropic is worth roughly $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI’s last reported valuation of $730 billion.Three months ago Anthropic was valued at $380 billion. Investors have effectively added more than half a trillion dollars of expected future value in about ninety days.To put that in perspective, Anthropic is now valued at roughly what Switzerland produces in a year, more than the combined market value of every U.S. airline, and more than the entire annual U.S. defense budget.Why?Partly because businesses are adopting Anthropic’s products at extraordinary speed. The company’s annualized revenue run rate has climbed from $4 billion last summer to $47 billion today. Its Claude models have become particularly popular among software developers, and its newest systems are considered among the industry’s strongest at generating computer code from ordinary English instructions—a practice known as “vibe coding.”The question investors are trying to answer is whether artificial intelligence resembles electricity, automobiles, or the internet—or whether it resembles one of the many technological booms where expectations arrived long before profits did.At the moment, nearly a trillion dollars is betting it’s the former.Japan Shrinks by 3 millionA country can lose three million people and never fire a shot, suffer a plague, or endure a natural disaster.It just has fewer babies than funerals.That is what happened in Japan.New census figures released Friday show Japan’s population fell by more than 3 million people over the past five years, dropping from 126.1 million to 123 million. It is the largest decline since the country began keeping census records in 1920.For every baby born in Japan, roughly two people die. The country has one of the world’s lowest birth rates and, unlike many developed countries facing similar problems, has remained reluctant to offset the decline through large-scale immigration.Why are birth rates falling?There is no single accepted explanation, but researchers point to a combination of forces. People are marrying later or not at all. Raising children has become more expensive, especially in large cities. Many young adults face economic uncertainty, making it harder to commit to starting families. Women have gained greater educational and career opportunities, which often leads to having children later in life. And once birth rates fall, they can become self-reinforcing: smaller generations produce fewer potential parents in the next generation.Japan appears to be an extreme version of a trend visible across much of the developed world. South Korea, Italy, Spain, and several other countries have fertility rates well below the level needed to maintain their populations without immigration.The consequences show up first in the countryside.Young people leave for Tokyo, Osaka and other large cities. Villages age. Schools close. Some are converted into nursing homes. Hospitals shrink. Train lines disappear. Millions of homes sit vacant because nobody wants to live in them.Japan’s population peaked at 128 million in 2008. Government projections suggest it could fall to 87 million by 2070.The reason the rest of the world watches Japan so closely is that it is living in the future.Just a few months ago, the United States recorded its lowest fertility rate ever. American birth rates have fallen roughly 23 percent since 2007. Much of Europe faces similar trends.A shrinking population creates unusual economic problems. Labor shortages make it harder to fill jobs. Fewer workers must support more retirees. Health-care systems strain under the weight of aging populations. Economic growth slows because there are simply fewer people producing, consuming and paying taxes.ICE Agent Charged Can a state prosecutor charge a federal immigration agent with a crime committed during a federal immigration operation?Minnesota is testing that proposition.Federal immigration agent Christian Castro was arrested Friday in Texas and faces four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime stemming from a January immigration sweep in Minneapolis.According to state prosecutors, Castro chased a man to an apartment duplex and then fired his weapon through the front door, striking another resident in the thigh. The bullet continued through the home and lodged in the wall of a child’s bedroom.The shooting itself might have remained a disputed law-enforcement encounter. What transformed the case was what allegedly happened afterward.Castro and another agent reportedly claimed they had been attacked with a broom handle and a snow shovel. Federal authorities initially charged two Venezuelan men with assaulting federal officers. Those charges collapsed after security-camera footage appeared to contradict the agents’ account. A federal judge dismissed the case, and ICE Director Todd Lyons later acknowledged that agents had lied about key aspects of the encounter.The arrest deepens a growing confrontation between Minnesota officials and the Trump administration.Minnesota prosecutors argue that federal employees are not above state criminal law. ICE has called the prosecution a political stunt. Behind the rhetoric sits a fundamental question: when federal officers operate inside a state, who ultimately holds them accountable if they break the law?Louisiana Approves MapLouisiana just demonstrated the practical consequences of one of the Supreme Court’s most important recent voting-rights decisions.On Friday, the Louisiana Legislature approved a new congressional map that eliminates one of the state’s two majority-Black districts and is expected to shift the state’s congressional delegation from 4 Republicans and 2 Democrats back to 5 Republicans and 1 Democrat.The immediate trigger was the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais earlier this year.Just a few years ago, the Court required Alabama to create a second majority-Black congressional district under the Voting Rights Act. Louisiana followed suit, drawing a second majority-Black district stretching roughly 200 miles from Baton Rouge to Shreveport.This year the Court reversed course, ruling that Louisiana’s map relied too heavily on race and amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.That ruling exposed a tension that has been building in American election law for years.The Court has repeatedly said racial gerrymandering is unconstitutional. It has also repeatedly said partisan gerrymandering is generally permissible.In theory those are different things.In Louisiana they often look remarkably similar.Black voters make up roughly one-third of the state’s population and vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Republicans openly acknowledged that the new map was drawn for partisan advantage rather than racial purposes. Democrats and civil-rights groups argue that targeting Democratic voters in Louisiana inevitably means diminishing Black political representation.The result is a map with one majority-Black district instead of two.The state’s new map is the first major redistricting effort to emerge from the Court’s new framework. Voting-rights advocates fear it provides a roadmap for similar challenges elsewhere across the South, which will inevitably lead to decreased representation for Black voters.Air Traffic Control Time WarpThe last place you want to engage in forced nostalgia with the seventies and eighties would be when you’re thirty thousand feet in the air.As the summer travel season begins, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told CBS this week that hundreds of air traffic control facilities still rely on technology from the 1970s and 1980s. Some systems still use floppy disks. Others run on aging Compaq computers, a brand that disappeared in 2002. Presumably the technology that requires burning charcoal briquettes has been updated, however.Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently compared parts of the system to something out of Apollo 13—a movie from the 1990s about technology from 1970.Fortunately, air traffic control is not like your laptop. Reliability often matters more than novelty. The challenge is that every year it becomes harder to find replacement parts, maintain aging systems and recruit people who know how to repair them.The FAA is now spending more than $12 billion to modernize the system by 2028, replacing copper wires with fiber optics and upgrading radios, radar and communications networks. Another $10 billion phase would eventually bring artificial intelligence, drones and air taxis into the same airspace.Roller Coaster RescueLife can be a roller coaster. Sometimes a roller coaster can be a roller coaster.Eight students on a field trip in Galveston, Texas spent four hours Thursday staring at the sky from 100 feet in the air after a roller coaster called Iron Shark stopped during its climb.There were several warning signs that mayhem was aborning. First, it was a roller coaster. Second, it was called Iron Shark. Had it been called Iron Teddy Bear, riders might reasonably have expected a different outcome.The students, from Energized for STEM Academy Middle School and STEM Academy High School, received an unplanned lesson in physics.Photographs from the rescue show a giant cherry picker inching upward toward the stranded car. Because the ride stopped during its ascent, the passengers spent the entire ordeal on their backs, facing upward toward an uninterrupted blue Texas sky.Spelling Bee WisdomA year ago, Shrey Parikh didn’t even make it to the National Spelling Bee.He misspelled a word at his middle school’s qualifying competition and was eliminated before regionals, before nationals, before any of the stages where future champions are supposed to appear.“I was really dejected and just very upset,” he later said.On Thursday, he won the whole thing.The 14-year-old from Rancho Cucamonga, California, outlasted 246 competitors to claim the Scripps National Spelling Bee championship and a $50,000 prize. In the final spell-off — a controversial speed-round tiebreaker that many spelling traditionalists dislike because it involves throwing stars — no, it doesn’t involve throwing stars — he correctly spelled a record 32 words in 90 seconds.His championship word was bromocriptine, a medication used to treat conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and certain hormone disorders.“Once I get the word,” Shrey said, “I’m not really nervous anymore, because then it’s all in my control.” Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for May 18th through the 22nd. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player.Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering.The president settled a lawsuit with himself, and his party started to notice. The cycle of threats and pauses in Iran continued as did the decline in the mood in the US. AI showed up everywhere — in commencement boos, papal encyclicals, and mass layoffs at companies reporting record profits. And deep in the ocean, scientists kept finding creatures that have been quietly outlasting every catastrophe on Earth for 400 million years. But let’s see if they can handle Colbert leaving.Let’s take it day by day.Monday May 18Strike out in Iran, Trump settles with himself, Musk is unsettled, rioters smell a payout, Iran mulls taxing the internet.IranIt has been hard to keep up with the strikes threatened and called off in the Iran war, so you could be forgiven the confusion. Monday night President Trump posted that he’d called off the strike against Iran scheduled for Tuesday. He credited Saudi and Qatari leaders — both facing economic pain from the Strait closure and exposed to Iranian reprisal if bombing starts again — with brokering last-minute talks. Despite the delay the president said “The clock is ticking.”The pattern is now familiar enough to chart. Announce escalation. Accept intervention. Claim the intervention proves leverage. Repeat. The question each cycle is whether the pause reflects a genuine diplomatic opening or just a longer fuse on the same bomb.In Tehran, the Iranian President did something Iranian leaders almost never do: he admitted the damage. Speaking at a public event, he acknowledged deep infrastructure destruction from U.S. and Israeli strikes, crippling fuel shortages — gasoline production has dropped to 100 million liters against 150 million liters of daily demand — and severe economic strain. He pushed back explicitly against hardliners who want to walk away from negotiations. “It is not logical to say we will not negotiate,” he said — a sentence that only needs saying when a significant faction believes the opposite.That faction answered immediately. Former IRGC commander Mohammad Ali Jafari said publicly that talks should stop unless the U.S. makes major concessions first. The internal fight Pezeshkian was describing — whether to negotiate from weakness or refuse from pride — is the same split that blew up the Iranian delegation in Islamabad weeks ago, when Pakistani hosts spent more time separating Iranians from each other than from the Americans.Meanwhile, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council launched a new body it calls the “Persian Gulf Strait Authority,” declaring that any vessel transiting the Strait of Hormuz without explicit permission will be treated as illegal. The move formalizes what has been happening in practice for weeks — Iran claiming sovereignty over the chokepoint.More quietly, and potentially more consequentially, Iranian lawmakers and state media floated plans to impose licensing fees on the undersea fiber-optic cables that cross the strait. Roughly a quarter of the internet traffic connecting Europe to Asia runs through those waters. Regulating the cables wouldn’t require a single missile — just a licensing regime and the implied threat that noncompliance could mean a cut line.On the water itself, the blockade grinds on. CENTCOM reported it has now redirected 85 commercial vessels and disabled four since enforcement began.Donald Trump won the presidency in part by saying that George W. Bush had made a mistake invading Iraq. Now voters think that of him. On the 73rd day of the war, a New York Times poll found nearly two-thirds of voters said going to war had been the wrong decision, including almost three-quarters of independents. Over the weekend, an Economist/YouGov poll showed only 28 percent of Americans support the war, down from the previous week.Trump’s approval rating in the NYT poll sat at 37 percent. Historically, when a president is below 50 percent, his party loses an average of 33 House seats.Trump drops IRS lawsuitOne of Donald Trump’s first acts in his second term was to pardon the men and women who had been convicted by juries in connection with their effort to overturn the will of 81 million Americans by attacking the Capitol on January 6th. Since then, he has expanded his efforts to reward those involved, blending their grievances with his own legal battles. There are a lot of benefits to being in the January 6th club.The latest boon comes via a highly unusual legal settlement. Trump had filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the 2019 leak of his tax returns by contractor Charles Littlejohn, who was sentenced to five years in prison in 2024. Because Trump filed the lawsuit and controls the IRS, this was a settlement in the sense that shaking your own hand is an agreement.Career lawyers in the IRS’s chief counsel office prepared a 25-page memo recommending the DOJ move to dismiss the suit, identifying several flaws — including that Trump may have filed too late, since his personal lawyer Alina Habba attended the Littlejohn guilty plea in October 2023, more than two years before he sued. The DOJ never used the memo.Trump had reason to move fast. Federal Judge Kathleen Williams had already questioned whether the two sides were “sufficiently adverse” and scheduled a May 27 hearing on whether to toss the case entirely.In lieu of damages, the Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” — the figure a nod to the founding year — intended to compensate Trump allies, including January 6th defendants, who claim they were mistreated by the Biden-era DOJ. The money comes from the Judgment Fund, a permanent, uncapped appropriation the DOJ can tap to settle cases without congressional approval. Trump appoints the five-member commission that distributes the money and can fire any of them.The DOJ cited as precedent Obama’s Keepseagle settlement for Native American farmers, but that case dragged on for over a decade, went through a judge, and compensated documented claimants — not a dispute that started and ended in under four months without the government ever mounting a defense.Brian Morrissey, the Treasury Department’s own Trump-appointed general counsel, resigned the day the fund was announced.Peter Keisler, who served as acting attorney general under George W. Bush: “This is not an authentic settlement of the IRS case.”The original 2020 New York Times reporting on the leaked returns revealed that Trump paid just $750 in federal income tax the year he entered the White House, frequently wiping out his tax liability through chronic, colossal business losses.Writing in the National Review, Dan McLaughlin called the arrangement what it looks like: “a collusive operation to create a slush fund to pay off friends and political allies. And in doing so, it expends nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money that Congress never appropriated.”The fund fits a pattern. Trump has used the power of his office to extract $60 million total from Meta, Alphabet, and X; $16 million each from Paramount and ABC. He previously demanded $230 million from the DOJ itself for past investigations into his conduct. As The Atlantic noted, no modern president has monetized grievance at this scale.Musk loses in Open AI suitElon Musk, a man who fired thousands of federal workers with zero concern for timing, lost his biggest lawsuit on Monday because he didn’t file on time. The jury deliberated for less than two hours. Due diligence and deadlines turn out to matter—whether you’re cleaning out someone else’s desk or trying to protect what was on yours.The federal jury and a judge ruled Musk waited too long to bring his claims against the AI startup and its top executives, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Because the jury found the case wasn’t filed on time, it didn’t weigh in on Musk’s three claims, including breach of charitable trust, unjust enrichment, and, against Microsoft, aiding and abetting.However, he still succeeded in wasting his competition’s time and during his cross-examination of Altman, Musk’s lawyer cited comments from eight witnesses, including Musk, who said Altman misled or lied to others.“This verdict removes the single largest legal threat to a public ⁠offering,” said James Rubinowitz, a trial lawyer and AI specialist quoted by Bloomberg. “Even in victory, OpenAI walks away with the worst documentary evidence about its governance now permanently in the public record. Every institutional investor reading this trial transcript is doing their own credibility analysis on Altman before they buy in.”According to Axios: Public trust in AI is nosediving. Public approval of AI now trails that of both the war in Iran and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.145,000 children separatedEvery parent who has lost sight of a child in a grocery store for 30 seconds knows the visceral panic. A new report suggests the American government is inflicting that exact trauma on a scale never before seen.Is that too dramatic a way to start this item? Does it load the scales against the kinds of tough eventualities that come from carrying out policies that people voted for? Or is it the kind of lede needed to shake us out of the mindless numb of numbers and news so that we are a little more attentive to what’s happening in our name—whether we cheer for it or find it abhorrent?You may remember the first Trump administration’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy in 2018, when about 5,500 children were separated from their parents immediately after crossing the southern border. This was an outrage because children were taken from their parents as a deliberate deterrent, and the government had no plan to give them back.A new analysis by the Brookings Institution suggests that more than 145,000 children—who are themselves U.S. citizens by virtue of being born on U.S. soil—have likely experienced a parent booked into detention since the second term started. Even more starkly, more than 22,000 of those American children have experienced the detention of all their co-resident parents, effectively leaving them with no guardian at home.As a political matter, the president has seen his standing on the issue of immigration decline because survey recipients tell pollsters that his methods go too far. Recent polling shows a 54% majority of registered voters now say the administration’s localized enforcement methods have overreached, contributing to an 11-point drop in the president’s immigration approval rating over the last six months. This was once his strongest political issue.LIRR workers and housekeepers get raises. The LIRR strike ended Monday after three days. Five unions representing 3,500 workers walked off Saturday. Monday was the first weekday hit, affecting the railroad’s 270,000 daily riders. The deal landed at roughly a 4.5 percent raise for 2026. Workers hadn’t had a raise since 2022.The more striking labor story happened quietly alongside it. NYC hotel housekeepers secured average pay of $100,000 a year under a new contract between the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council and owners of nearly 250 hotels. The eight-year deal raises wages more than 50 percent. The settlement averts a threatened strike that could have collided with this summer’s World Cup and America 250 tourism surge.How can hotels afford to pay that? New York City has the highest average room rates of any big city in the United States, at about $335 a night. In the past year, New York hotels have also had the nation’s highest occupancy rate, at about 84 percent.Union membership in the U.S. has been in steady decline for four decades: 20.1 percent of workers belonged to a union in 1983. By 2024, that number was 9.9 percent.Samsung Workers threaten strikeIn South Korea, the courts just put the brakes on a massive corporate showdown. The Suwon District Court partially accepted an injunction request from Samsung, legally restricting an 18-day worker walkout that was set to begin on Thursday. The court ruled that even during a strike, essential staffing levels must be maintained to prevent facility damage and protect product quality.The workers are demanding that Samsung scrap its current cap on bonuses and instead allocate a flat 15 percent of the company’s operating profit directly to employee payouts.A prolonged strike could significantly bruise the national economy. Samsung accounts for nearly a quarter of South Korea’s exports and twelve and a half percent of its GDP — a concentration the U.S. hasn’t seen since Standard Oil. And it comes at the worst possible moment, just as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has triggered a brutal energy shock. South Korea imports nearly all of its energy.Graduates boo AIMy recollection of both giving and receiving commencement addresses is that the college audience is not engaged. I expect my son to carry on this tradition this weekend in the audience. However, some speakers this year have broken the spell. Mentioning AI can wake the sleeping beast. At the University of Arizona Sunday, graduates booed Google CEO Eric Schmidt as he urged them to adapt to the technology. Gloria Caulfield, a real estate executive, called A.I. the “next industrial revolution” and was met with a loud chorus of boos. Stunned, she asked, “What happened?”According to new research from the employment site ZipRecruiter, some 47 percent of recent graduates say that A.I. has already affected hiring in their field, and nearly 51 percent of soon-to-be grads believe that A.I. will reduce the number of entry-level jobs.Fearing automation, significant numbers of students are rethinking their fields of study, according to a Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2026 State of Higher Education Study. They are moving away from entry-level tech or statistical analysis and focusing on critical thinking, communication, and human-centric fields.Pope talks about AIIt’s hard to imagine that anyone will boo the Pope when he delivers a speech on the challenges posed by AI next week. I mean unless they want to be relegated to the eternal fires for all time. Just kidding. He’s into forgiveness. It’s the other guy who can’t let go of the grievances.Though the Trump administration won’t be a fan of Pope Leo XIV’s choice of guests. The Vatican announced Monday that the Pope will present his first major teaching document on the ethical challenges of AI alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, the AI company that’s suing the Trump administration for what it says is illegal retaliation for the company’s choice to put restrictions on the U.S. military’s use of its technology.The encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas (”Magnificent Humanity”), will center on “the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence”The Vatican said that Leo had signed the new encyclical on May 15, 135 years to the day since the pope’s namesake, Pope Leo XIII, signed the landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum (”Of New Things”) on the rights of workers and social upheaval amid the industrial revolution.Starbucks Korea snafuStarbucks Korea fired its CEO Monday after a marketing campaign landed on Democratisation Movement Day — the anniversary of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, in which a military dictatorship used tanks to crush pro-democracy protesters in a massacre. The promotion was called “Tank Day,” advertising a line of tumblers with the tagline “put it on the table with a sound of ‘Tak!’” The backlash was immediate. Social media filled with videos of customers smashing Starbucks mugs with hammers and screenshots of deleted apps. President Lee Jae Myung called the campaign inhumane, saying it “mocked the bloody struggle of citizens.” The conglomerate that licenses the chain in South Korea, sacked CEO Sohn Jeong-hyun within hours for “inappropriate marketing.”Tuesday May 19Trump purges his party, deportations purge the workforce, Iranians turn marriage into a shield and Minnesota bans betting on what happens next.Politics“The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally — not a 20 percent traitor.” Ronald Reagan said that. Donald Trump has completely refashioned the party Reagan built and turned that rule on its head.A single week in mid-May laid bare the dominance the president exerts over his own party. In Kentucky, Representative Thomas Massie — a libertarian-leaning maverick who clashed with the administration over the Epstein files and the war with Iran — was soundly defeated by Trump-backed challenger Ed Gallrein. The race drew nearly $33 million in ad spending, the most expensive House primary since the tracking firm AdImpact started keeping records in 2018. It also drew a highly irregular visit from the Secretary of Defense to campaign against the incumbent.Trump’s allies launched a dedicated super PAC last summer for the sole purpose of removing Massie. Pro-Israel groups, unhappy with his opposition to the Iran war, spent heavily alongside them — $19 million against Massie or for Gallrein in total. “This is @realdonaldtrump’s Republican Party,” Florida State Representative Randy Fine wrote on X. “The rest of us get the privilege of living in it.”Massie’s defeat came on the heels of two other intra-party purges: Senator Bill Cassidy’s loss in Louisiana’s Republican primary and the ouster of several Indiana state Republicans who resisted leadership’s redistricting lines. Three flexes of executive muscle.If only the Strait of Hormuz could be cleared as easily by GOP primary voters.The old rules of political gravity no longer apply. In any previous era, a president with historically close personal ties to Epstein — and whose Commerce Secretary is still explaining why he visited Epstein’s private island in 2012 — would downplay a fight with a member of his own party that risks reanimating the saga. Not this one.Under the old rules, you might also expect a president with bargain-basement approval ratings, an unpopular war, stubborn inflation, and heavily criticized import taxes to watch down-ballot Republicans quietly back away from him. That is exactly what the party did to George W. Bush in 2006 as Iraq dragged down their midterm prospects. Not this time. To be a Republican is to hug the president no matter how radioactive he is. In fact, the more he glows, the tighter the party presses its face to the rays and sheds the hazmat suit.Even legendary party behemoths didn’t command this level of submission. Roosevelt’s 1937 court-packing scheme triggered massive midterm losses, and his 1938 attempt to purge party moderates who bucked the New Deal was a spectacular failure. The difference today is the absolute nationalization of politics and the power of hyper-partisanship. Loyalty to Donald Trump has eclipsed policy, character, and institutional precedent.But can this power elevate a candidate, or does it only punish? The test is playing out in Texas, where the president endorsed Attorney General Ken Paxton over veteran Senator John Cornyn in a Republican primary runoff. Paxton carries extraordinary baggage: a messy public divorce, a previous impeachment by members of his own Texas GOP House, and an ongoing federal investigation into allegations of corruption and bribery.Texas may simply be too red for Democratic challenger James Talarico to capture the seat in November. But the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee remains quietly terrified, operating under the assumption that Paxton’s vulnerabilities make him a far riskier gamble than an institutionalist like Cornyn.Study: deportations costing American jobsAt the State of the Union address in February, President Trump said, “More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country.”Without knowing anything else, would you say that’s true or false?Well, it’s always true. Because the population grows, more Americans are almost always working today than at any time in the history of our country.Economists consider this a hollow statistic because it doesn’t tell you anything about the health of the economy. Percentages do that. So if you were evaluating the statement, you’d know just by listening to the president that he was trying to make something sound more impressive than it is.I tell you here today that I am older than I have ever been before!I raise this because a new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonpartisan research organization, finds that recent surges in deportations have led to job losses for both immigrant and American-born workers, while wages have stayed flat. The president’s key domestic policy initiative has hurt the non-immigrant workforce.Researchers compared communities that experienced deportation surges between January and October 2025 with those that did not, focusing on four industries that rely heavily on undocumented immigrant workers: agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and wholesale. In those industries, employment dropped 5 percent for male undocumented workers and 1.3 percent for male American-born workers without a college degree.Construction was hit hardest—and directly contradicts the White House’s earlier claim that deportations had benefited the industry. Employment dropped 3 percent for male American-born workers without a college degree and 7.5 percent for undocumented workers. For each arrest, six American-born workers lost a job and four undocumented workers lost one.Even before the deportation surge, construction faced labor shortages amid an aging workforce with no robust pipeline of newly trained workers. The exodus of foreign workers during the 2008 foreclosure crisis, when almost 2 million construction workers lost their jobs, has had a lasting impact. The country has failed to build enough homes since then, in part because of a persistently anemic labor force.IranIn Tehran, couples arrived in the square in military jeeps with mounted machine guns and were married on a stage in a ceremony presided over by a cleric, AFP images showed. The stage was festooned with balloons and a giant image of supreme leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei. He has yet to appear in public since the killing of his father and predecessor on the first day of the war elevated him to the position. “Certainly, the country is at war, but young people also have the right to marry,” one young woman in a white Islamic bridal dress said beside her groom in footage published by the semi-official Mehr news agency.The ceremonies involved hundreds of couples across several major squares in Tehran. All had signed up for the regime’s “self-sacrifice” scheme pledging to put their lives on the line by, for example, forming human chains outside power stations. Iranian authorities say millions have enrolled, including the speaker of parliament and the president. State TV broadcast the weddings to boost wartime morale as Trump repeatedly threatens new military action amid a shaky ceasefire.Asked Tuesday how long Iran had to return to the table, Trump said: “Two or three days. Maybe Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Maybe early next week. A limited period of time.” Iran sent a new peace proposal via Pakistani mediators Sunday night. The White House dismissed it.Minnesota bans prediction marketsMinnesota became the first state to ban prediction markets. Governor Tim Walz signed a law making it a crime to host or advertise a prediction market—defined as any system letting consumers wager on future outcomes including sports, elections, entertainment, and world affairs.Sites like Kalshi and Polymarket must leave the state or face felony charges when the law takes effect in August. The Trump administration sued immediately. The CFTC filed to block the law, arguing prediction markets fall under exclusive federal regulation, and also framing the fight around farmers who have long used weather and crop futures to hedge risk. Minnesota is already moving to address that objection—an updated bill allowing weather trading is expected to pass Saturday. Bills targeting prediction markets have been introduced in seven other states, with Hawaii and North Carolina pursuing outright bans.Donald Trump Jr. sits on Polymarket’s advisory board and acts as a strategic adviser to Kalshi. His venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, has made a strategic investment in Polymarket.Under Biden, the DOJ and CFTC investigated whether Polymarket was illegally accepting U.S. bets; both investigations were closed last summer with no action. The CFTC has since withdrawn a Biden-era effort to prevent Kalshi from accepting bets on sports and elections.Meanwhile the insider trading problem prediction market critics warned about keeps materializing. A $30,000 bet on the capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January led to a U.S. soldier being charged with using classified information to profit more than $400,000. Reports have since surfaced of political candidates, campaign staffers, and others with access to material nonpublic information placing bets on markets tied to their own work.The Bounty of the Ocean CensusDid you know there’s a census for the ocean? Yes, every ten years an army of scientists goes door to door which is weird because the fish are in the ocean.No, silly. The Ocean Census, according to CNN, is a global effort to map marine life involving more than 1,000 researchers across 85 countries. And last year “1,121 “previously unknown” species were discovered in the world’s oceans, according to a Tuesday announcement. It marks a 54% increase in annual identifications. And we’re going to end each day with one more freaky finding.The first is: Twenty-six hundred feet beneath the Pacific, southeast of Tokyo, glass sponges build translucent skeletons out of crystalline silica—the chemical component of glass. Scientists call them glass castles. A team aboard the manned submersible Shinkai 6500 just discovered they have tenants. Two entirely new species of bristle worm live inside the sponge’s walls. The arrangement is elegant: the worms crawl deep into the mesh chambers, shielded from predators by a perimeter of sharp glass needles that would shred anything trying to reach them. In return, the worms clear debris and silt from the sponge’s delicate channels so the host can breathe and feed. The real twist is that the glass castle is a duplex. These two worm species are unrelated. Genetic analysis shows their symbiotic lifestyles evolved completely independently—two different creatures, facing the brutal physics of the deep ocean, arrived at the same conclusion: find a glass castle and make yourself useful to the landlord.TSA experimenting with moving outside the airportStarting June 1, Boston Logan is piloting a suburban airport terminal. Delta and JetBlue passengers can drive to a parking lot in Framingham, 25 miles from the airport, check their bags, clear a standard TSA screening, and board a shuttle that delivers them directly to their departure gate — bypassing terminal traffic, security lines, and the airport entirely. Logan parking runs $37 a day; Framingham costs $7. The shuttle is $9 each way. The pilot is small — two airlines, morning hours, one suburb. But airports across the country are running out of physical space to handle growing passenger volume.Wednesday May 20The Senate majority starts to stir. The president’s poll numbers are as low as the taxes he pays. Ebola spreads, Castro gets the Maduro treatment and Nvidia reaches Everest-like heights — a mountain so crowded on Wednesday it was easier to summit than to fail a class at Harvard.IranFor the eighth time since the war began, Democrats forced a vote to require the president to either end the conflict or get congressional authorization to continue it. This time, they won. The Senate voted 50–47 Tuesday to take up the resolution, which now moves to debate and a final vote in the coming weeks.The margin came from two places. Three Republican senators — Tuberville, Tillis, and Cornyn — were absent. And Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who lost his primary over the weekend after Trump targeted him for defeat, switched his vote and sided with Democrats. A man with nothing left to lose voted like it.The vote landed in an atmosphere of eroding public consent. The Times poll that showed two-thirds of voters calling the war a mistake also found 63 percent — including 27 percent of Republicans — saying the president should not be able to use military force without congressional approval. Whether the resolution survives a final vote, let alone a presidential veto, remains unlikely. Override requires two-thirds of both chambers.On Wednesday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards widened the threat, warning that retaliation for any new American attack would extend beyond the Middle East — not just striking countries in the region that host U.S. bases, but targets farther afield.The rejected Iranian proposal, now circulating through Pakistani mediators, shows why the diplomatic track keeps stalling. Tehran’s terms repeat demands Trump has already refused: Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, compensation for war damage, lifted sanctions, unfrozen assets, and U.S. troop withdrawal from the region. It added language committing Iran not to pursue a nuclear weapon but offered nothing on suspending enrichment or surrendering its stockpile of highly enriched uranium.The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a contentious call Tuesday evening, with Netanyahu railing against any pact to end the war and Trump defending the diplomatic process. Trump told reporters Wednesday that Netanyahu would “do whatever I want him to do.” Three external forces — the Senate, the IRGC, and the Israeli prime minister — pushed back against the president’s handling of the war in a single 48-hour stretch.Trump hits a polling floorTrump’s economic numbers hit a new floor. One-third of registered voters — 33 percent — approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, against 64 percent who disapprove, according to a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday. That’s the lowest economic approval he’s recorded across either term. The drop since mid-April is driven almost entirely by his own party: Republican approval fell from 88 percent to 73 percent in five weeks. Among independents, 70 percent disapprove. Among Democrats, 97 percent. The war with Iran and the oil price spike it triggered have done what tariffs and inflation alone couldn’t — crack the floor under the one number Trump has always relied on most— his party’s support.IRS grants Trump immunityThe settlement announced Monday turned out to reach further than the fund. The Department of Justice agreed to permanently bar the IRS from pursuing tax claims against Donald Trump, his eldest sons, and the Trump Organization. The one-page document, signed by acting attorney general Todd Blanche, declared the government “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from prosecuting or pursuing pending claims.Federal law requires mandatory annual audits of presidential tax returns and prohibits the president from directing the IRS to start or stop specific audits — though the statute carves out an exception for the attorney general, who in this case is the president’s former personal lawyer. The New York Times reported in 2024 that a loss in an ongoing IRS audit could cost Trump more than $100 million.Two Capitol Police officers who were injured defending the building on January 6th sued to block the anti-weaponization fund, arguing it would reward the people who attacked them. More than 140 officers were injured that day. About 1,500 people were eventually charged. Vice President Vance, Speaker Johnson, and acting Attorney General Blanche did not rule out that those convicted of assaulting officers could receive money from the fund.Even Senate Majority Leader John Thune acknowledged “there are, and will be, continue to be, a lot of questions” about the agreement.Raúl CastroFederal prosecutors on Wednesday charged former Cuban president Raúl Castro with ordering the 1996 shootdown of two civilian planes operated by Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based exile group. Four people were killed, including three Americans. Castro, now 94, was Cuba’s defense minister at the time. Asked how a 94-year-old former head of state might be brought to a U.S. courtroom, acting Attorney General Blanche said “this isn’t a show indictment” and that there are “all kinds of different ways” to bring in defendants located in other countries.The last time the administration went after Latin American leader — Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, on narco-terrorism charges first filed in 2020 — it followed with a Delta Force raid on January 3 that extracted Maduro from Caracas to stand trial in New York. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said Monday that Cuba “has the absolute and legitimate right to defend itself against a military assault” and warned such an operation would “cause a bloodbath with incalculable consequences.”Since January, the administration has imposed an effective energy blockade on the island, warning of tariffs on any country that sells oil to Cuba. The blockade has triggered fuel shortages, rolling blackouts, and three island-wide grid collapses since March. UN experts have described the policy as “energy starvation.” Trump has repeatedly suggested Cuba is next after Venezuela and Iran.EbolaLess Hantavirus news this week. More Ebola.A fast-moving outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has surged to more than 500 suspected cases and at least 130 deaths. The World Health Organization has declared it a public health emergency of international concern. The CDC confirmed that an American healthcare worker exposed to the virus — along with six high-risk contacts — is being medically evacuated to a specialized isolation unit.The current outbreak is being driven by the Bundibugyo strain. While the world spent years developing a highly effective vaccine for the more common Zaire strain, there is no approved vaccine and no approved therapeutic for Bundibugyo. Health officials are fighting a deadly virus with an empty medical toolkit.The outbreak is unfolding in eastern Congo’s crisis zone, where conflict, mass displacement, and community mistrust make contact tracing nearly impossible. Ebola does not spread like Covid — it is not airborne, and it requires direct contact with infected bodily fluids, meaning the risk of a domestic outbreak remains low. But the CDC has triggered an emergency 30-day Title 42 order, suspending entry into the United States for any foreign nationals who have been in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, or South Sudan within the last 21 days. American citizens face mandatory enhanced health screenings at ports of entry.Barney Frank diesBarney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who represented Boston’s suburbs for 32 years, died in hospice in Ogunquit, Maine, at 86. Frank came out as gay in 1987 — the first member of Congress to do so voluntarily — and in 2012 became the first sitting lawmaker to marry a same-sex partner.He co-authored the Dodd-Frank Act, the most significant financial reform since the New Deal. In an April interview from hospice, he offered a warning to his party as it heads into what could be a bruising primary: “You should not take the most unpopular parts of your agenda and make them litmus tests. And that’s what my friends on the left have been doing.”A Politico story recounts the moment Frank told Speaker Tip O’Neill he was gay. O’Neill looked stricken — not at the sexuality, Frank wrote, but at what disclosure would cost him. “I’m sorry to hear it,” O’Neill said. “I thought you might become the first Jewish speaker.” O’Neill then set about warning his press secretary, Chris Matthews: “Chris, we might have an issue to deal with. I think Barney Frank is going to come out of the room.” Matthews, Frank noted, quickly made the necessary metaphoric adjustment.Two men this week said what their parties wouldn’t let them say while they still had something to lose. Bill Cassidy, defeated in his primary after Trump targeted him, crossed the aisle Tuesday and voted to force the president to get congressional authorization for the war. Barney Frank, dying in hospice in Maine, warned Democrats to stop making their least popular positions into loyalty tests.Nvidia EarningsNvidia posted $81.6 billion in quarterly revenue, beating expectations by nearly $3 billion. CEO Jensen Huang said demand had “gone parabolic” which I thought was just something you did on a weekend in college but a parabola starts shallow and then shoots nearly straight up. Huang isn’t saying demand is growing — he’s saying it’s accelerating at an increasing rate. The more demand there is, the faster it grows. The company says that Nvidia chips now power every major frontier AI model. The stock still dipped in after-hours trading.The company’s data center compute revenue came in slightly below analyst estimates. And then there’s China. The Trump administration approved sales of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China last year, but Beijing hasn’t signed off. For now, Nvidia remains the world’s most valuable public company at roughly $5.5 trillion, up nearly 20% this year.Meta Layoffs.Meta began pushing termination notices to nearly 8,000 employees Wednesday — about 10% of its workforce — while shifting 7,000 others to AI projects and closing 6,000 open roles. The company is reporting record profits and has pledged up to $145 billion in AI spending this year. It is not shrinking. It is redirecting. Morale was already crumbling. In April, Meta rolled out an internal surveillance program tracking employees’ every action on their computers, saying it would use the data to train AI models. Workers petitioned to end the tracking. Some told Wired they were hoping to be laid off — 16 weeks’ severance looked better than staying. An employee of more than a decade told the San Francisco Standard: “I tend to cry in the shower.” Since 2022, major tech companies have collectively cut more than 150,000 workers. This year alone: Oracle an estimated 30,000, Amazon more than 15,000, Meta 8,000. What many tech workers once understood as a guarantee of affluence has quietly dissolved — replaced, in some cases, by the very technology they built.Harvard caps number of A’sIn 2010, A’s accounted for a third of all Harvard grades. By 2025, that had doubled to over 60 percent. So Harvard’s faculty voted to cap A’s at 20 percent of letter grades in any course, effective 2027. Faculty passed it 70 percent to 30. Students opposed it 94 to 6. Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who has long pushed the issue, said grade inflation “forced a race to the bottom in which any professors who held the line with challenging material and standards would see their enrollments plummet. It turned universities into national laughingstocks.”EV sales rise worldwide even as they fall in U.S.Global electric car sales grew 20% in 2025 to exceed 20 million — one in four new cars sold worldwide. The International Energy Agency projects that will climb to 23 million in 2026, nearly 30% of all sales, even as the two biggest markets soften. China is slowing. U.S. consumer spending on EVs plummeted after federal tax credits lapsed in late 2025 and remained flat in the first quarter of 2026, down 23% year over year. The growth is coming from places the industry didn’t expect. The IEA projects EV sales in Asia-Pacific countries outside China will surge over 50% this year, and Latin American sales will jump 45% — puncturing the long-held assumption that electric cars would be too expensive for developing economies. In Thailand, EV prices have matched combustion vehicles for two years, driven largely by affordable Chinese imports. Then there’s the war. Since the U.S.-Iran conflict began pushing fuel prices up across Europe, German marketplace Carwow reports that EV inquiries have risen from 40% to 75% of its traffic.274 People Summited Everest in a DayA record 274 climbers reached the top of Mount Everest on Wednesday from the south side — nearly 50 more than the previous single-day record of 223, set in 2019. China issued no permits for the north face this year, funneling all traffic through Nepal. The window is narrow: harsh winter winds ease in mid-to-late May, giving alpinists a brief shot at the top. The record came days after guide Kami Rita Sherpa summited for the 32nd time, breaking his own record, and Lhakpa Sherpa reached the peak for the 11th time, extending hers. Nepal issued 494 permits this year at $15,000 each. Overcrowding is now a defining feature of the mountain other than its height and difficulty.Ocean Discovery for WednesdayAn inch-long ribbon worm with orange, cream, and brown stripes is another one of more than 1,100 new marine species catalogued in the Ocean Census. The stripes are not decorative. They are a warning — aposematism, in the jargon — that translates roughly to: eat me and die. Ribbon worms pack pyridine alkaloids into their skin mucus and their proboscis, a retractable tube they use to paralyze prey. The most studied of these toxins, anabaseine, targets nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in the nervous system. When researchers examined how anabaseine behaves in mammals, they found it binds powerfully to a specific receptor — alpha-7 nicotinic — that malfunctions in both Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.Stimulating it improves memory, attention, and the brain’s ability to filter background noise. Raw worm toxin is far too dangerous for medicine, but a University of Florida scientist named William Kem used its chemical architecture as a blueprint to build a safer synthetic version called GTS-21, which has advanced through human clinical trials for both diseases.The logic is almost absurd in its elegance: a soft, slow creature that spent hundreds of millions of years evolving chemical weapons to avoid being eaten may have quietly produced the molecular scaffold for the next generation of cognitive medicine. The catch is that we are destroying coral reefs faster than we can catalogue what lives in them. Every species lost is an unread library burned.Thursday May 21The autopsy is DOA. Democrats play to the cliche. The AI state governor tries to save his workers. US troops were treated like gifts. A congressman vanishes and beavers enlist in the London Corps of Engineers.Stephen Colbert ended his run at the Late Show. Our thoughts can be found at johndickerson.com.2024 AutopsyEveryone loves a revival. Will Rogers said I’m not a member of an organized party, I’m a Democrat. The Democratic National Committee’s modern adaptation is a 192-page document autopsying what happened in the 2024 election. It united the party – against itself. DNC Chair Ken Martin published the document only after CNN obtained it first, then immediately disavowed it. “I am not proud of this product,” he wrote. “I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it.” The author, consultant Paul Rivera, is no longer working for the DNC. The DNC never received a finished version or a list of interviewees. The document is riddled with errors and missing sections, and the DNC stamped annotations on nearly every page questioning its own report’s methods. An autopsy meant to examine a dead body itself was dead.What it does say is not new but is now on the record: Harris’s campaign failed to make an affirmative case for her candidacy, never established a strategy to damage Trump’s public standing, and was “boxed” by a single attack ad highlighting her support for taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgery for inmates. The campaign assumed voters’ views of Trump were “baked in” — a conclusion the report calls “a major failure of analysis and reality, given how his favorability has cratered” since his return to office. What the report doesn’t mention is more telling: no discussion of Biden’s decision to seek reelection, no mention of Israel or Gaza, no accounting of the party’s collapse with Latino men.The DNC Chair may not have that job long.NYT Democratic Voter PollA separate New York Times/Siena poll released the same day showed the frustration runs deeper than the DNC’s fumbled paperwork. More than half of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said they were dissatisfied with their own party — despite being well positioned to take the House and compete for the Senate in November. The unhappiness spanned every demographic slice of the coalition and was sharpest among the voters least attached to the party, the ones most likely to swing elections. Among Democratic-leaning independents, 65 percent were dissatisfied.Asked what the party needs to do to win the next presidential election, 52 percent of Democratic supporters said move to the center. Only 25 percent said move left. The centrist impulse held on nearly every issue tested — crime, immigration, economics, transgender policy — with a single exception: health care, where 45 percent wanted a leftward shift. Fifty-eight percent said the party wasn’t fighting back hard enough against Trump. Nearly three-quarters now oppose military aid to Israel, up from 45 percent three years ago.The numbers describe a party whose voters want it to be tougher and more moderate at the same time — a combination that is easy to poll and extraordinarily difficult to execute.Newsom’s AI OrderCalifornia Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order — the first of its kind by a U.S. governor — directing state agencies to study how to subsidize companies that keep workers rather than replace them with artificial intelligence. The order expands job training programs aimed at white-collar roles expected to be eliminated: customer service, software development, marketing, sales. It also orders an examination of universal basic capital, which would give all residents stakes in assets like corporate stocks, bonds, or wealth funds. The question of what to do with workers displaced by AI is now a live policy debate across multiple governments. England, Japan, and South Korea have contemplated universal basic income. Sam Altman and Elon Musk have both said some form of it may be necessary. Musk has argued that AI-driven productivity gains will generate enough government revenue to compensate people who lose their jobs. That theory has not been tested.5,000 Troops to PolandThe United States is sending 5,000 additional troops to Poland, President Trump announced late Thursday on Truth Social — weeks after announcing it was pulling roughly the same number out of Europe.The administration had confirmed withdrawing about 4,000 service members from Poland and at least 5,000 from Germany, the latter a punishment after Chancellor Merz publicly criticized the administration’s handling of the Iran war. Trump then told reporters he’d be “cutting a lot further than 5,000.” Now, the number goes back up — but in a different country, for a different reason.“Based on the successful Election of the now President of Poland, Karol Nawrocki, who I was proud to Endorse, and our relationship with him, I am pleased to announce that the United States will be sending an additional 5,000 Troops to Poland,” Trump wrote.The structure is now visible: alliance commitments fluctuate based on the president’s personal relationship with individual leaders. Merz criticizes; Germany loses troops. Nawrocki wins an election Trump endorsed; Poland gains them.Trump’s Late-NightsA Washington Post analysis of Trump’s public communications found a president whose rhetoric is growing coarser, more self-referential, and more erratic. A third of his original Truth Social posts this year have gone up between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. — up from a quarter last year and roughly one in six during a comparable stretch of his first term. Nearly half of his 2026 posts contain first-person pronouns like “I” or “myself,” often a dozen or more times in a single post; in 2018, that figure was 30%. In his second-term speeches, the median number of digressions from topic has hit 37 or more — up from 10 in the equivalent period of his first term.Where Is Tom Kean?Republican congressman Tom Kean of New Jersey, 57, has not voted in the Capitol since March 5 — nearly three months. He hasn’t been seen publicly in his district, hasn’t appeared in a video statement, and just canceled a local chamber of commerce event. His office calls it a “personal medical issue,” promises a full recovery, and offers nothing else. Two neighbors told NBC they haven’t seen him in months. He has missed more than 80 votes, including measures on ICE funding and the president’s Iran war powers, the latter narrowly defeated. Kean is unopposed in his GOP primary in less than two weeks, which means he’ll be locked into one of the most competitive House races in the country in November.The Beavers of West LondonBritain is famous for drizzle, but climate change is making rainfall heavier and less predictable. Places that didn’t used to flood are now waterlogged. So conservationists near the Greenford Tube station in West London resettled five beavers in a 20-acre park that used to be a golf course. Within weeks, the beavers dammed the creek, created a pond, and diverted flow into smaller tributaries — turning the site into a wetland that absorbs heavy rainfall and releases it slowly. The local Tube station stopped flooding. Eight new bird species showed up, along with two types of bats, freshwater shrimp, and rare brown hairstreak butterflies, which lay their eggs on blackthorn branches the beavers had nibbled. The city scrapped expensive plans to dig a reservoir and levee.Ocean Discovery for ThursdayAnother finding from that Ocean Census: Nearly two miles down in the South Sandwich Trench, in freezing water and permanent darkness, scientists found a sponge that eats animals. The creature — a kind of death ball sponge— looks like a cluster of translucent lollipops anchored to the seafloor: pale stalks branching outward, each tipped with a glassy white sphere. The spheres are covered in microscopic hooks, structurally identical to Velcro. When a deep-sea crustacean drifts past on the current and brushes a sphere, the hooks snag its hairs and joints instantly. The sponge has no nervous system, no muscles, no tentacles. Instead, its cells migrate — crawling toward the trapped animal like a living film, enveloping it completely, then secreting enzymes that dissolve the soft tissue from the outside in. The whole process is silent and brainless, an organism that solved the problem of scarce nutrition at crushing depth by abandoning filter-feeding and becoming a passive predator.Friday May 22Republicans revolt. The government proves its own vindictiveness in court. Gas hits $4 in all fifty states. The nation’s mood hits a floor it hasn’t seen since Eisenhower. And a creature older than flowers closes out the week.Senate GOP awakens“So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — take your pick.” That’s not a Democratic talking point. That’s Republican Mitch McConnell.Senate Republicans postponed a vote on tens of billions in additional ICE and border funding after a new $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” derailed the bill. The fund would compensate people the administration says were unfairly prosecuted. Senators wanted to know who would qualify and what guardrails existed to keep January 6 defendants from collecting. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche met the caucus for lunch and, according to two GOP aides, did not adequately answer either question.The ballroom didn’t survive the week either. Senators were already preparing to strip $1 billion for the “East Wing Modernization Project” — the administration’s euphemism for Trump’s proposed underground ballroom and renovations — after multiple Republicans made clear they wouldn’t support it. Then the Senate parliamentarian ruled Saturday that it didn’t comply with budget rules, which would have required Democratic votes to pass.Trump called for firing the parliamentarian. It didn’t matter. Even without the ruling, Republicans said they didn’t have the votes.Trump compounded the friction with his own party by endorsing primary challengers against Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas. Cornyn came within a few votes of the majority leader’s chair and has been raising money for colleagues across the conference. “You can’t underestimate the psychological impact of endorsing against Cornyn like that,” said Michael Ricci, a former top communications aide to Speakers Ryan and Boehner. “He has been doing events for all these members. I just feel like that was an accelerant on an already simmering flame.”Then, in the week’s other rebellion, House Republicans canceled a vote on a resolution to halt the Iran war after it became clear they didn’t have enough votes to defeat it.Majority Leader Thune sent the Senate home without passing the bill. The Washington Post called it the week Trump and Senate Republicans found themselves more at odds than at any other point in his second term.Killmar Abrego GarciaIn the totalitarian nightmare, the state picks out a human and brings the weight of authority on their head to meet the whims of the ruler. The person is whipped around like a ragdoll.If you were an official in a democracy — one founded as proof that humans could resist the totalitarian impulse — you’d hope you could muster at least a word in your defense against the charge that you had used the power of the state vindictively.That did not happen in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The Trump administration was charged with vindictive prosecution and in the pathetic thinness of their defense helped prove to the judge that the charge was true.Here’s how lame the defense was: the government’s sole argument was that the decision to indict Abrego Garcia was made independently by a line prosecutor, free of political interference. To prove it, they needed to put that prosecutor on the stand and have them say so under oath. They didn’t. Instead, they called other witnesses who testified secondhand about what the decision-maker had been thinking — without the decision-maker ever appearing to confirm it. Meanwhile, defense attorneys produced internal Justice Department emails in which senior officials at Main Justice referred to Abrego Garcia’s prosecution as a “top priority” — before the line prosecutors had even taken over the case. The government set out to prove the indictment wasn’t political and instead produced a paper trail showing it was.That the government was even in a position to fail so badly was a sign. In criminal law, a defendant claiming vindictive prosecution– in this case Abrego Garcia– faces an incredibly high legal bar. They must show that the government brought criminal charges primarily to punish or retaliate against them for exercising a lawful, constitutional right (such as appealing a ruling or filing a lawsuit).Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador last year became an embarrassment for Trump officials when they were ordered to return him to the U.S. Abrego Garcia was charged with human smuggling and conspiracy to commit human smuggling, with prosecutors claiming that he accepted money to transport within the United States people who were in the country illegally. The charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee for speeding. Body camera footage from a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer shows a calm exchange with Abrego Garcia. There were nine passengers in the car, and the officers discussed among themselves their suspicions of smuggling.However, Abrego Garcia was eventually allowed to continue driving with only a warning. In the Friday ruling, the judge wrote that the timing of the charges was central to the presumption of vindictiveness. Homeland Security had been aware of the traffic stop for two years and had closed the case against Abrego Garcia when it deported him. Once the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that he should be brought back to the U.S., they reopened the case.Gas updateWe keep updating you on gas prices, and by now it might feel like tracking a yo-yo. But this isn’t a bounce — it’s a spike. All 50 states now average above $4 a gallon, according to AAA, with several topping $5, including California at about $6.15, Washington and Hawaii around $5.70, and other high‑price states such as Alaska, Nevada, Oregon, and Illinois also above $5. Nationally, the average price of regular gasoline is about $4.55 a gallon, up roughly 45 percent from around $3.14 a year ago and more than 40 percent higher than late‑winter levels before the latest Middle East disruptions.Two forces are driving it. The war with Iran has choked the Strait of Hormuz, a shipping lane that handles roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply. But seasonal demand is compounding the squeeze — gas prices normally rise in spring and summer anyway, as driving picks up and refineries switch to the more expensive summer blend. The last time all 50 states averaged above $4 a gallon was 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine.Tulsi Gabbard leaves DNI for personal reasonsTulsi Gabbard announced she was stepping down as Director of National Intelligence, effective June 30, to care for her husband, Abraham, who has been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer.Gabbard’s deputy will serve as the acting director. The intelligence community now enters another transition at the top while managing an active war, an escalating hantavirus situation, and the ongoing reorganization of national security agencies. The acting director inherits all of it.(Another) record low consumer sentimentAmericans haven’t felt this bad about the economy since 1952 when the University of Michigan started asking. The index of consumer sentiment fell to 44.8 in May — below last month’s 49.8, and below the previous historical floor set in June 2022 during the post-pandemic inflation spike.Fifty-seven percent spontaneously told researchers that high prices were eroding their personal finances — up from 50 percent last month. Long-run inflation expectations are rising too, which means Americans aren’t treating this as a temporary squeeze.The survey dates back through Korea, Vietnam, the 1970s oil embargo, the stagflation years, 9/11, the Great Recession, and the pandemic. Americans are now more pessimistic than during any of them. The cost-of-living crisis that preceded the war had already soured the national mood. The war poured jet fuel on it. Things are that bad, the metaphors are getting all mixed up.Over a billion people living with mental health disordersNearly 1.2 billion people worldwide had a mental disorder in 2023 — a 95.5 percent increase since 1990, according to a study published Thursday in The Lancet covering 204 countries and territories.Anxiety and depression drove the largest increases and remain the most common diagnoses, with anxiety up 158 percent and depression up 131 percent since 1990. The least common disorders studied — anorexia, bulimia, and schizophrenia — still affected roughly 4 million, 14 million, and 26 million people respectively. Most disorders were more common in females, with exceptions: autism, conduct disorders, ADHD, personality disorders, and intellectual disability were more prevalent in males.Part of the increase reflects better detection and reduced stigma — more people seeking help, more clinicians trained to identify conditions, broader diagnostic criteria.The study’s lead author said he “was honestly shocked at the magnitude” — and conceded the numbers can’t be fully explained. The factors researchers can actually measure — things like substance use, childhood trauma, workplace stress — held roughly steady since 1990 and account for less than a fifth of the damage. Which means the bulk of the increase comes from forces the study can identify but not precisely weigh: genetics, poverty, inequality, war, climate disruption, and whatever the pandemic permanently changed.Rates of anxiety and depression were already climbing before COVID-19. During and since the crisis, depression increased and hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. Anxiety peaked and stayed elevated through 2023.$2 Billion in Quantum Computing GrantsThe federal government is awarding $2 billion to nine quantum computing firms, the largest public investment yet in a technology that remains, for most practical purposes, a promissory note.Quantum algorithms manipulate information in ways classical machines can’t access, producing dramatic speedups for certain problems — molecular simulation, cryptography, optimization — especially when paired with classical supercomputers.The advantages are narrow but deep. A classical computer can’t accurately model how a drug molecule folds and binds to a protein — too many variables interacting simultaneously, which is why new drugs still take ten to fifteen years and billions of dollars to develop. Quantum machines could model that molecular behavior directly. The same logic applies to encryption, logistics networks with millions of moving parts, and financial risk modeling across vast numbers of scenarios — problems where the number of possible states explodes beyond what any classical machine can brute-force.The hardware is as exotic as the math. The systems are so fragile that a stray vibration or flicker of heat destroys the quantum state. Most processors run inside dilution refrigerators cooled to around 10 millikelvin — a hundredth of a degree above absolute zero, a hundred times colder than outer space. The machines look less like computers than like gold-plated chandeliers hanging inside industrial cylinders, cooled by a mixture of rare helium isotopes, one of them sourced mostly as a byproduct of nuclear decay.None of this works reliably yet at commercial scale, which is why the government is spending the money. The bet is that whoever builds the foundry builds the future.Ghost SharkFour hundred million years ago — before dinosaurs, before trees — a group of cartilaginous fish split from the line that would become sharks and rays and went deep. They haven’t changed much since. The chimaera, better known as the ghost shark, still cruises the pitch-black ocean floor on enormous wing-like pectoral fins, flying more than swimming, pale and scaleless and silent. Hit one with a submarine’s headlights and it glows like an apparition. Its eyes — huge, dark, backed by a reflective layer like a cat’s — have spent 400 million years learning to see in absolute darkness.The name chimaera comes from the Greek monster stitched together from different animals, and the creature earns it. It has a rat’s tail, a rabbit’s face, and a retractable sensory snout that looks like a plow. Run your eye down its body and you’ll see what appear to be suture lines — as though something assembled it. Those grooves are lateral lines packed with receptors that detect electrical fields and shifts in water pressure, letting the ghost shark hunt blind. Instead of the conveyor-belt rows of teeth that make regular sharks famous, it carries three pairs of permanent grinding plates that look like rodent buckteeth, built for crushing crabs and sea urchins on the seafloor.The mating is as strange as the anatomy. Males carry a retractable club on the top of the head — a tenaculum — fitted with small hooks, used to latch onto a female’s pectoral fin. Females lay their eggs in leathery cases that look borrowed from a prop department, dropping them onto the mud, where the embryos take up to a year to hatch.Ghost sharks are not, technically, sharks at all. They belong to a separate subclass, Holocephali, that parted ways with everything else in the ocean when the planet’s landmasses were still fused together. They are among the oldest unchanged body plans on Earth — older than flowers, older than the Atlantic Ocean. They have outlasted every mass extinction in the fossil record, and they did it by going where almost nothing else goes, moving slowly, seeing in the dark, and asking very little of the world around them.That sounds like heaven.And it shall conclude our week. Thank you for hanging with us gang. We love doing the work for you. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for May 11th through the 15th. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player.Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering.A summit with two leaders claiming two outcomes. A war with no outcome, a UK administration with ministers coming out, Cuba is just plain out. The battle of prices vs. wages, tech bro vs. tech bro and ICE against the judiciary. Hey, Neanderthals are smarter than we thought but smart cars are dumber. All things you can talk about with your neighbor.Let’s take it day by day.Monday May 11Which will collapse faster? The ceasefire in Iran or the UK Prime Minister? Or will it be citizens melting on the streets of India? Gas prices are making the president sweaty so he’s offering the equivalent of a paddle fan. Young Americans are glum about jobs. Maybe they should go outside and play. We all should.IranDay 73 of the war.Twenty-nine days since the president said Iran was desperate to make a deal.Twenty-five days since he told CBS News that Iran had “agreed to everything.” On Monday, the president called Iran’s actual response “garbage” and said he hadn’t finished reading it.He did, however, finish describing the ceasefire. “I would say the ceasefire is on massive life support,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, adding that it was “unbelievably weak.”Iran’s formal response to the administration’s one-page peace proposal is not materially different than Iran’s position before the bombs started falling. Indeed, Iran is asking for reparations for the bombs, so Iran is asking for more that it would have before the war.The rest of the list: a regional ceasefire — including no Israeli strikes in Lebanon. Sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, requiring all commercial vessels to coordinate with the Iranian Navy. Lifting of all U.S. sanctions, removal of the naval blockade, and an end to the ban on Iranian oil sales.On the nuclear question — the most often stated reason in the carousel of justifications the US has put forward for the war — Iran reportedly proposed a moratorium on enrichment far shorter than the 20 years the U.S. demanded, offered to export only a portion of its highly enriched uranium while diluting the rest, and refused to dismantle its nuclear facilities.Iranian leaders also demanded a formal guarantee of non-aggression. In other words, you can’t hit us if we don’t comply.There’s also a third player in this discussion of an Iranian end state. In an interview with Major Garret on 60 minutes, the Israeli Prime Minister said the war would not be over until all enriched uranium was removed from Iran, its enrichment sites dismantled, its proxy networks dissolved, and its ballistic missile production curtailed. Tall order.Gas TaxOn Monday the president said he plans to suspend the federal gas tax “for a period of time.” “I think it’s a great idea,” he said. Several Democratic lawmakers have already introduced legislation to either pause or lower the tax.But suspending the excise taxes — 18.4 cents off a $4.52 gallon on gas and 24.4 cents on diesel — requires an act of Congress and would cost the federal government roughly half a billion dollars a week.The lost revenue would land on a federal debt that crossed 100 percent of GDP mark this spring for the first time outside of an emergency like a pandemic or war. Hantavirus cruiseThe cruise brochures don’t usually highlight the biocontainment units.On Monday, two of the 17 Americans airlifted from the MV Hondius cruise ship— that’s the one bristling with clouds of virus whipped up from rodent droppings— arrived sealed inside portable isolation pods — negative-pressure units where the air inside is kept lower than the air outside, so nothing contaminated can leak out through a seam or tear. Everything passes through HEPA filters that trap 99.97 percent of particles.The Andes variant of hantavirus is far less communicable than Covid-19, but three passengers on the cruise ship Hondius have died from the hantavirus, which WHO has linked to rodent exposure during the voyage. It starts with flu-like symptoms and then floods the lungs with fluid until the patient drowns from the inside.The Americans were transported to the National Quarantine Unit in Nebraska — one of the few facilities in the country built for exactly this.Since patients exposed may not develop symptoms for over a month, their quarantine period could last up to 42 days, according to the Times. This presents psychological challenges. The NQU is windowless and high-containment, which creates its own problem: patients in strict isolation lose track of time, and losing track of time makes people lose their minds.The facility counters this with a circadian lighting system that shifts the color temperature throughout the day — warm ambers at night, vivid greens and blues during daylight hours. The green light suppresses melatonin more effectively than other wavelengths, resetting the body’s clock when the body has no other cues. It’s a small, strange detail: a building designed to keep the deadliest diseases from getting out, engineered down to the color of the light to keep the people inside from falling apart.This is NutsThis all sounds very complicated, but nothing as complicated as the operation to deliver medical supplies to one of the passengers quarantined on the remote volcanic island of Tristan da Cunha, a British territory in the south Atlantic. If you’ve ever looked at a globe and wondered about those little flecks in the middle of the vast ocean, this is one of those flecks.Tristan da Cunha is Britain’s most remote inhabited overseas territory. It is accessible only by boat, has no airstrip, and has a population of 221 inhabitants.Oxygen supplies on the island were at a critical level, so there was no time for delay getting care to the patient who had disembarked from the plague ship and was quarantined in the hospital on the island. A two‑bed facility with a two‑person medical team.So British soldiers dropped out of the sky to help. First, they flew almost 7,000 km to the closest airbase and then 3,000 more km to waddle to the end of the back bay of their lumbering plane and parachute down on to Tristan carrying oxygen canisters and 3 tons of medical equipment. (or I guess they pronounce it tonnes; at least that is how it’s spelled here.)Oh and the plane had to refuel in mid-air because the island is just so damn remote. And the average wind speed is 25 MPH so you can imagine what a joy that was to drop down into. The mission was a success. But the soldiers had to wait for a boat since you can’t parachute up and out.Keir StarmerThat is a story of extraordinary achievement from the good people of Great Britain.Less smooth-running Monday, was the operation of the British government. Things were extraordinary there, but not for the same good reasons.On Monday it appeared that the British Prime Minister was about to Keir over. Keir Starmer gave a speech to an audience of Labour party lawmakers and activists in an attempt to save his political life.Now, before we go too much further on this, I’d like to take a tiny little detour (which, when you add them together, will add up to an hour and forty five minute podcast.) All week long, you probably have been hearing about the predicament of Keir Starmer. But what’s been totally absent, and the reason I find Stack the Week meaningful, if you’ll pardon this personal interlude, is that it forces intentional thinking about what’s really going on here.What’s happening in Britain is a version of what’s happening in the United States. Both are liberal democracies. Liberal democracies find it difficult to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. The situations faced by the governments in the UK and the United States include managing immigration, inequality, the high cost of the routes to prosperity, misinformation, the distracting appeal of the attention economy.All that we experience in the United States, they also face in the UK. And just as in the United States, populist leaders are making big promises to the voters who are fed up with the collapse of the institutions that have promised them so much and that seem full of elites out of touch with their lives.So, I don’t think it’s too much to say that all of these stories about Keir Starmer falling down the stairs of his prime ministership are an echo of what we experience here in the United States. It would have been so useful if, during the week, in all of the reporting about what’s happening to Starmer, that kind of context could have been given to people, so they could see it in their own lives instead of as some distant circus with hard to pronounce players like Plaid Cymru.The proximate cause of Starmer’s predicament was a disastrous showing by Starmer’s labour party in council elections. They lost over 1,500 councilors. Councils are the local government, but whereas in the United States, a city council falls under State power, in the UK they are creatures of Parliament. So in the UK, local councils and the national Parliament are like two floors of the same house, whereas in the US, they are more like separate buildings on the same street.So the “fortunes” of a British council are almost entirely tethered to the national party’s brand. Hence, a bad result there runs all the way up to the head of the political body.So when 40 MPs called for Starmer to resign after Thursday’s losses, it’s because those MPs know that the “council fortunes” are a direct preview of their own. If the voters are firing the local Labour councillors today, they are planning to fire the Labour MPs tomorrow.Why the losses?The “big losses” stemmed from voter dissatisfaction on the left and right. On the right, Reform UK, the nationalist party led by Nigel Farage capitalized on a weak economy, stagnant GDP growth (hovering near 0.1%) and high interest rates and immigration concerns, to flip traditional labour areas in the heartland. Farage is promising a very Donald Trump-like mass deportation scheme, an end to liberal cultural interventions— what might be called wokeness in the United States— and he’s promising to cut the foreign aid budget in half.On the left, the Green Party and Plaid Cymru (Plied Kum-ree) (in Wales) – That was me speaking Welsh there– surged as progressive voters rebelled against Starmer’s centrist pivot dropping high-spending socialist pledges in favor of “fiscal discipline.”Add into the mix a declared ‘national emergency’ over rising antisemitism and a fierce backlash against Starmer’s appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington— despite Mandelson’s considerable ties to Jeffrey Epstein — which cost him support from both flanks at once.In his speech Monday, Starmer vowed that he would prove his detractors wrong, promised economic reforms to deepen ties with the EU, help younger workers, and nationalize British Steel to save roughly 4,000 jobs.India is hotOn April 27, every one of the planet’s 50 hottest cities was in one country: India. Average peak temperatures across all 50 hit 112.5 degrees Fahrenheit. The air quality monitoring platform AQI, which compiled the data, said there is “no modern precedent.” But the most dangerous number wasn’t the daytime peak — it was the nighttime low. Cities like Banda recorded minimums near 94 degrees. When the night never drops below 90, the body never resets. Core temperatures stay elevated, organs accumulate stress, and the demand for cooling becomes round-the-clock — which is exactly what the grid can’t handle.India gets about 4 percent of its power from gas-fired plants, and 60 percent of its liquefied natural gas imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz, which is closed. With gas-fired generation now economically unviable, coal picks up the slack: coal-fired power rose to 164.9 average gigawatts in April, up 3.5 percent from the month before.To survive heat driven by global warming today, India burns more of the fuel that guarantees worse heat tomorrow. Experts warn temperatures may cross the survivability limit for healthy humans by 2050.In the meantime, the adaptation is preindustrial: across Delhi and Kerala, community-run water kiosks called thanneer pandals distribute water and oral rehydration salts to laborers and rickshaw drivers who have no choice but to work through it. In the last week of April, two schoolteachers died of heatstroke — not construction workers, not rickshaw drivers, but teachers. Roughly 380 million Indians, about three-fourths of the workforce, labor in heat exposure.The youngs are pessimisticIf you have a young person in your life who has just graduated from college, give them a hug. In most countries, young people think the job market is better than their parents do. In the United States, it’s the opposite — by the widest margin Gallup has measured anywhere.Only 43 percent of Americans aged 15 to 34 said it was a good time to find a job locally — 21 points below Americans 55 and older. Since 2023, optimism among younger Americans has dropped 27 points — a plunge comparable to the 2007–2009 financial crisis.The mechanics explain the mood. From 2023 to 2025, the sectors that usually absorb college graduates — information services, finance, professional services — shed an average of 9,000 jobs a month. Before the pandemic, those same industries added 44,000 jobs a month. Layoffs are low, companies are holding onto existing staff, and without churn there are no entry-level openings. Graduates apply to hundreds of listings that stay posted but never result in a hire.Computer engineering, once the safe bet, now carries a 7.8 percent unemployment rate among recent grads as AI automates the junior work that used to be the on-ramp to longer-term employment.So they compromise. About 69 percent of the Class of 2026 say they’ll settle for less than their ideal role. In 2012, recovering from the Great Recession, roughly 45 percent of graduates reported a similar concession — but they treated it as a temporary setback.Seventy-five percent of this cohort would take a job they plan to quit within a year just for immediate income. Fifty-two percent of recent graduates are already working jobs that don’t require a degree — the highest mismatch since the 1990s.The result: degree holders now make up 25 percent of the total unemployed population — double the share in 2008. Oxford Economics estimates a million more young adults are living with their parents than pre-pandemic trends predicted, spending roughly $1,200 less a year than peers who move out.Cutting paid family leaveAnd jobs ain’t what they used to be. This week, Zoom cut parental leave to 18 weeks from 22 for most birth mothers and to 10 from 16 for other parents. Deloitte halved paid family leave for certain employees — eight weeks instead of 16. Both companies explained the cuts in the same dialect of corporate euphemism: Zoom cited the “long-term health and sustainability of our business”; Deloitte said it was tailoring benefits to “better align with the marketplace.”The marketplace they’re aligning with is getting worse.The share of U.S. employers offering paid family leave dropped two percentage points in 2025, to 31 percent. The United States remains the only wealthy country with no federal paid family leave. What it offers instead is 12 weeks unpaid — and many workers don’t even qualify for that.Long live recessDo you need a break? Is it spring where you are? Let’s hold Stack the Week outside today shall we? Better yet, let’s break for recess.The American Academy of Pediatrics would approve. It just released its first guidance on recess in 13 years. Here it is: “Recess is a necessary break in the day for optimizing a child’s social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development. In essence, recess should be considered a child’s personal time, and it should not be withheld for academic or punitive reasons.”The guidance is necessary because recess has been in retreat for two decades. After No Child Left Behind introduced high-stakes testing in 2002, roughly 44 percent of school districts cut time from recess, PE, art, and music to make room for more reading and math. The logic was intuitive and wrong: if scores are low, add more instructional minutes.When you have recess matters too. Teachers and researchers have noted improved behavior and attention once students resume classroom work when recess occurs before lunch. One reason is that it shifts the lunch mindset from a “rush to play” to a “relax to eat” mindset. When they play first they arrive hungry and eat more calories and vegetables. Walking into class from lunch is calmer than walking in from the playground.But my favorite reason is something called “cognitive spacing.” The brain consolidates learning during breaks — but only if those breaks actually feel like breaks. Memory and focus improve when instructional blocks are punctuated by genuine shifts in environment and activity. Unstructured time lets the prefrontal cortex rest. When a child spends lunch scrambling for a spot in a soccer game or rushing to finish a sandwich, that rest never happens.And here’s one more fun fact for the dinner table: in one study, schools that replaced one long recess with four 15-minute breaks spread across the day saw cortisol levels — the body’s stress hormone — drop by 70 percent compared to traditional schools. Chronically elevated cortisol in children is linked to executive function deficits, sleep disruption, and the kind of emotional volatility that gets a kid sent to the principal’s office.Tuesday May 12Inflation ate your raise, and sent people running from healthcare. Iran is eating the budget. Canadians are bailing and so are Starmer’s allies. And why can’t the benevolent be given the keys to the doom machine?IranTuesday, Pentagon officials briefed the Senate on the growing cost of the Iran War: $29 billion, up about $4 billion from just two weeks ago. That figure does not include repairing American military facilities damaged in Iranian attacks — another $4 billion estimated.The Secretary of Defense testified Tuesday to defend the administration’s proposal to raise Pentagon spending by more than 40%, to around $1.5 trillion in 2027.Mr. Trump was asked whether Americans’ financial situation was motivating him to make a deal with Iran. “Not even a little bit,” he said. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran — they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”The man asking Congress for $1.5 trillion of Americans’ money says he doesn’t think about their financial situation.This got a lot of attention as a symbol of the President’s callousness. But a President fighting a war should only care about the war. Where the concern should come in is before a president launches a war, as he considers whether war is really justified and weighs the consequences.Turning the question of war into a domestic economic issue is natural because it’s an election year and gas prices are how voters feel the war in their lives. But in terms of presidential decision making, it cheapens the overwhelming cost of a war to shrink it down to an election year nuisance.The Strait of Hormuz gets the attention, but Iran has increased the pain in the world economy in another way. By hitting America’s allies in the Persian Gulf it has choked off oil and gas. Saudi oil exports have fallen by a third, UAE exports by half, and Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait have dropped to nearly zero.These countries cooperated with the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports — and Iran hit them for it, striking oil infrastructure, disrupting shipping routes, and turning the strait into a no-go zone for commercial tankers. The Gulf states are now losing billions in revenue to support a war whose purpose — eliminating Iran’s nuclear program — hasn’t advanced since the first bombs fell. Or hasn’t advanced much.At some point a partner taking losses with no considerable return stops being a partner. The UAE’s largest gas plant, heavily damaged by Iranian strikes, won’t return to 80 percent capacity until the end of 2026 — meaning the infrastructure damage outlasts any ceasefire.Here’s a little blockade update, just to remind us what’s going on while nothing’s going on at the negotiating table. CENTCOM redirected 65 Iranian commercial vessels and disabled four others on Tuesday. As for the negotiating table, maybe they could use it for paper football.Senator Lindsey Graham and other lawmakers questioned Pakistan’s role as mediator after reports that Iran repositioned military aircraft — including an RC-130 reconnaissance plane — at Pakistan’s Nur Khan Air Force Base to shield them from U.S. and Israeli strikes.If Iran can park military aircraft on a nominal U.S. partner’s airfield, the coalition holding this war together is fraying from more than one direction — Gulf states bleeding revenue for a war that hasn’t advanced, and now a mediator doubling as a shelter.In Tehran, the IRGC’s internal security unit conducted exercises in preparation for potential domestic unrest. This is a good sign for the United States that the war is causing enough internal tension that the thugs are limbering up with the batons, such domestic pressure could make Iranian leaders a little more interested in a deal.CPIThe most recent CNN poll found that 76% of Americans call cost-of-living issues their biggest economic problem. They got a new reason for concern Tuesday. Paychecks aren’t keeping pace with prices. The last time inflation outran average hourly earnings was April 2023. It’s doing it again now.The consumer price index rose 3.8% in April from a year earlier, up from 3.3% in March — the highest reading in nearly three years. Annual wage growth slowed to 3.6%. In real terms, the average worker’s purchasing power shrank. This is the first time since the Iran conflict began that the inflation tax has fully consumed the average worker’s annual raise.The headline number was driven by a 28.4% annual surge in gasoline, which traces directly to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and a 44% jump in Brent crude since the fighting started. But the energy shock is no longer staying in the energy column. It’s bleeding into everything that moves by truck or runs on power. Grocery prices jumped 0.7% in April alone — economists point to diesel and energy costs embedded in food production and transport. Shelter, the largest single line in most household budgets, rose 0.6% for the month. Airfares climbed 20.7%, a straight pass-through of jet fuel.Pick up a tomato and you’re holding the whole mess at once. Tomato prices jumped nearly 40% from a year ago. Unseasonably wet weather in Mexico and freezes in Florida shrank the crop. Tariffs on Mexican tomatoes — roughly 17%, after the administration ended a free-import agreement last year — raised the floor. And war-driven fuel costs raised the price of getting whatever survived to your store.Open a can of beans instead and you hit a different wall: canned fruits and vegetables cost 5.7% more than a year ago, largely because a tin can accounts for about a third of the wholesale price, and over 80% of the tin plate used in American cans was imported last year. Trump’s steel tariffs pushed those costs straight through to the shelf.You might wonder why the Federal Reserve doesn’t step in. When wages slow, the Fed typically cuts interest rates to give the economy a boost. But it can only do that if inflation is cooling — and a particular slice of inflation isn’t. Strip out housing and energy, and look at what’s left: insurance premiums, haircuts, tuition, daycare. These are services set by contracts and labor costs, not by the price of a barrel of oil. Once they go up, they tend to stay up — even after the thing that pushed them up comes back down. That category of prices accelerated to a 5.5% annualized pace in April.So the Fed is stuck. Cutting rates would make borrowing cheaper and give the economy a boost — but it would also risk pushing those already-stubborn prices higher. The medicine for slow wages would make the inflation disease worse.The story a few weeks ago was that the war made gas expensive. The story now is that expensive gas is making everything else expensive, and the raises aren’t keeping up.Ink shortageIn other crazy economic effects of the war news: Imagine the brightest packaging you’ve ever seen — a Japanese potato chip bag that could land planes in fog. Not anymore. An ink shortage caused by the Middle East conflict is forcing Japan’s biggest potato-chip maker, Calbee, to switch to black and white. Resins derived from naphtha, a derivative of crude oil, are typically used as a basic ingredient for commercial packaging inks.Affordable Care Act Marketplace dropoutsGas prices dominate the anxiety now, but before the war it was healthcare. Last year, 86 percent of Americans said access to quality health care was a part of the American dream, according to a poll by Investopia.According to reporting from NOTUS, more than one in five Americans who enrolled in health insurance through HealthCare.gov this year were dropped for failing to pay their first month’s premium. Last year the dropout rate was 12%. The difference is the end of the pandemic-era subsidies that Congress — specifically, congressional Republicans — declined to extend in December.Without them, a silver-tier plan that cost a 30-year-old $50 a month might now cost $300. The people disappearing from the rolls are disproportionately between 25 and 40 — old enough to need coverage, young enough to gamble they won’t.If the pool shrinks and the people left in it are sicker, the premiums climb further, which drives out the next healthiest layer, which drives premiums up again. You may remember the term used to describe this from the Obamacare years: a death spiral.Student loan defaultersI’m just going to call it: Tuesday was the economic bummer marathon.Here’s another one: For four years, pandemic-era protections drove student loan defaults to zero — not because borrowers got healthier, but because the government stopped reporting missed payments. Now 3.6 million borrowers have defaulted in six months.The default rate has returned to roughly where it was in late 2019, though the pace of new defaults slowed slightly last quarter, suggesting the worst of the initial shock may have passed.The average defaulter is 38.9 years old, two and a half years older than before, with a disproportionate spike among borrowers over 50 — student debt that was supposed to be a young person’s problem is following people into the years when they should be building wealth, not losing it.Credit scores for these borrowers dropped 91 points on average — enough to lock them out of mortgages and auto loans at the point in life when they’d normally be qualifying for both.And the numbers will get worse: Seven million borrowers haven’t made a payment in months — their repayment plan, the Biden-era SAVE program, was struck down by the Eighth Circuit as exceeding the Department of Education’s authority. Once the clock runs out on the transition window as a result of legal proceedings, they might default too.The Canadians aren’t comingA University of Toronto study using cell phone data found that Canadian visits to U.S. metro areas dropped 42% year over year — nearly double the decline that border crossing statistics capture. The snowbird destinations took the obvious hit: Florida, Las Vegas, Disney World. But the more telling losses are in cities where Canadians come to do business, not build sandcastles. San Francisco, Houston, and Grand Rapids — which has deep ties to Ontario’s auto industry — are all seeing sharp declines.The causes: the Canadian dollar fell below 70 cents U.S. in late 2024 — down from 76 cents that summer — which means a Canadian family that booked a Florida trip in June watched their money lose 10 percent of its value before they ever got on the plane; the political relationship soured; and the 25 percent auto and truck tariffs that landed in mid-2025 mean there are fewer parts contracts to negotiate in Grand Rapids, fewer tech partnerships to pitch in San Francisco, fewer supply chains that require a Canadian engineer to walk an American factory floor.I declined to insert a little riff on the relationship between the weak Canadian dollar and the weak American dollar, but you can tell me in the comments if you would have liked that kind of a detour.StarmerOn Monday, UK Prime Minister Starmer gave a speech to save his job. On Tuesday, four ministers walked out while he was still talking about governing.The urgency isn’t just that Starmer is unpopular — it’s that Labour MPs fear if they don’t find someone better, Nigel Farage and the hard-right Reform UK could actually take power.The most senior departure was Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, who once said of Labour leaders: “I won’t knife you in the back. I’ll knife you in the front.” She kept her word. What is a safeguarding minister? Covers domestic abuse, child sexual exploitation, modern slavery, stalking, rape policy. Basically the government’s point person on protecting vulnerable people from violence. In her resignation letter, she called Starmer “a good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things” — then added that caring wasn’t enough.The math on Tuesday: roughly 90 Labour MPs calling for Starmer to go, just over 100 who signed a letter urging him to stay. Starmer told his cabinet he would “get on with governing” and pointed out that no one had triggered the formal process to remove him. That process requires a challenger to secure the backing of 81 MPs — 20% of the parliamentary party. If the 90 dissenters can agree on a single name, the threshold is already met. But they can’t.Starmer’s position resembles Boris Johnson’s in his final days: insisting the government functions while the ministers who make it function head for the exits. Deputy PM David Lammy urged colleagues to “take a breath.” That might help them relax or give them more air in the lungs for a louder scream.Trump Administration ChurnIt’s churny on this side of the pond too. Over the weekend, the president criticized the two Supreme Court justices he put on the bench for not being loyal to him. I wrote about that on Substack. But loyalty — who has it, who lost it, who never had it — was the organizing principle of the entire week’s personnel chaos.Start with Cameron Hamilton, whom the president just nominated to lead FEMA. Hamilton is a former Navy SEAL and combat medic with no professional background in emergency management.Last year, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem subjected him to a polygraph test to find out who leaked details of a meeting about dismantling the agency. Then he told a House subcommittee that eliminating FEMA was not in the country’s best interest. The president had said it was. He was fired the next day. Noem was herself fired in March 2026. Now that she’s gone, Hamilton is back — renominated for the same job he was fired from for doing honestly. FEMA, meanwhile, has operated for more than 15 months without a Senate-confirmed leader.The agency has had a rough stretch even by its own standards. Earlier this year, the administration fired FEMA’s on-call disaster response staff in what employees called a “New Year’s Eve Massacre,” leaving regional offices nearly empty. A federal judge had to order the administration to stop withholding disaster aid from states that voted against the president.Then there’s Kari Lake, the failed gubernatorial and Senate candidate who was installed as interim head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, where she attempted to shutter Voice of America. In March, a federal judge ruled she had been serving illegally — never Senate-confirmed — and voided all of her official actions, including mass layoffs. The reward for having her tenure declared null by a court: Trump nominated her this week as Ambassador to Jamaica.And the doctor is out at the FDA, vanished in a cloud of strawberry-scented vape smoke. Dr. Marty Makary resigned Monday as FDA commissioner, reportedly after refusing to authorize fruit-flavored e-cigarettes that Trump and industry lobbyists wanted approved. Trump also complained: complained that Makary hadn’t done enough to carry out his “Right to Try” legislation aimed at getting experimental therapies to terminally ill patients, according to WSJ reporting. Trump repeatedly brought up a cancer drug he said Makary wouldn’t approve, the people said.The pattern: install loyalists, skip Senate confirmation, fire anyone who contradicts the president’s position even once, replace them with someone who watched what happened to the last person, and if the original firing becomes inconvenient, rehire the same person.Charges in Key Bridge collapseFederal prosecutors charged the Singapore-based operator of the Dali container ship and a senior employee in the 2024 collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, which killed six construction workers. Men doing the necessary mundane work of public life, filling potholes.The indictment says the ship lost power twice in four minutes as it left port — and the second blackout was preventable. A fuel pump that could have restarted the generators in time wasn’t used because a different pump, one not designed to restart after a blackout, was running instead. The company then covered it up.Musk v. AltmanSam Altman defended himself in court Tuesday against Elon Musk’s claim that Altman betrayed OpenAI’s founding mission as a nonprofit that would make AI safe for the world.It might be easy to see this as a battle between tech behemoths, but the distinction at the heart of this case matters because a nonprofit answers to a mission — in OpenAI’s case, the mission was to develop AI carefully, with safety as the priority, not shareholder returns. A for-profit answers to investors.When the technology you’re building might be the most powerful and dangerous thing humans have ever created— other than the atom bomb— who you answer to determines how fast you move and how many guardrails you leave in place. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit specifically because the people who started it — including Musk — believed AI was too dangerous to build on a profit motive. The question in this trial is whether Altman dismantled that safeguard, and if so, whether he did it with everyone’s knowledge or behind their backs. If it was behind everybody’s backs, yikes! He’s the guy who’s got the keys to the death ray.The trial offers something else: a map of how powerful people respond to pressure — who gave in, who maneuvered, who looked away. The same kinds of pressures — money, ego, speed, competitive fear — will shape every major AI decision from here forward. How these men handled the small version of the question is a preview of how the big version gets answered.Altman’s defense: Musk knew the company was heading toward a for-profit model and wanted in — he just wanted to run it. Musk is asking the court to block OpenAI’s conversion to for-profit and remove Altman from the board. If he wins, it’s a gift to OpenAI’s competitors — including Musk’s own AI company, xAI. If he loses, Altman consolidates control of a company now valued at $730 billion and clears the path toward what could be one of the largest IPOs in history.Altman and his internal operating source code get to determine the future.Musk brought a stress ball to the witness stand and squeezed it while he testified. Last week his lawyers read the diary of OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman aloud in court — entries written in 2017, before a meeting with Musk. “Can’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight,” Brockman wrote. “His story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end about still wanting to do the for-profit just without him.” Then, after the meeting went better than expected: “If we accomplish it, then we’ll really have shown him that we can outperform him even at something he’s great at. If we fail, well, we’ll deal with it then.”The diary of a man who knew he was being dishonest with his partner and decided to win the argument before the partner figured it out.Myanmar RubyThat is a lovely pigeon blood globule you have on your finger, madame.There is a kind of sweet spot where the most rarefied jewels of the most rarefied people intersect with civil war, child labor, and smuggling networks — and that sweet spot is currently sitting in a mine in Myanmar looking like a jumbo hamburger someone didn’t quite finish mashing into a patty.Miners near the town of Mogok, in upper Mandalay, unearthed an 11,000-carat ruby — 4.8 pounds, roughly the size of a fist. It’s the second-largest ever found in Myanmar, but likely more valuable than the first because of its superior color: a purplish-red with yellowish undertones, high transparency, and a reflective surface that gemologists describe as exceptional. When it’s buffed up and set by a master jeweler it will no doubt look exquisite as it swans across a ballroom on an oligarch’s favorite. For now, it looks like something you’d return at a butcher counter.It’s what the trade calls a “pigeon blood” ruby — a vivid red with a subtle blue undertone and a fluorescent glow. Fewer than 1 percent of all rubies qualify. The name comes from the Burmese word “ko-twe,” which translates directly to “pigeon blood.” One legend traces it to the first two drops of blood from a killed pigeon. Another says it matches the color at the center of a pigeon’s eye. Either way, the marketing department was not involved.Myanmar produces 90 percent of the world’s rubies, primarily from Mogok and Mong Hsu — regions that have seen intense fighting in the country’s civil war. Gemstones, both legitimately traded and smuggled, are a major revenue source for the military junta. So somewhere between the mine and the auction house, between the hamburger patty and the velvet case, this stone will quietly fund the war it was pulled out of.Wednesday May 13Iran won’t stay obliterated. More inflation signs greet the new Fed chair, ICE can’t stop losing in court. The Senate shoots blanks in the US but not in the Philippines. That line wouldn’t get you an A at Harvard but since it wasn’t written by AI at least it might get a smile at Princeton.IranThe New York Times reported Wednesday that classified U.S. intelligence assessments find Iran has regained operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait. Ninety percent of its underground missile facilities are partially or fully operational. Seventy percent of mobile launchers intact. Seventy percent of prewar missile stockpile intact.The reason: when the U.S. struck Iranian missile facilities, it sealed tunnel entrances rather than destroying entire sites — to conserve bunker-buster munitions for a potential conflict with North Korea or China. The U.S. has expended 1,100 long-range stealth cruise missiles — roughly the remaining stockpile — and 1,300 Patriot interceptors, more than two years of production. The Pentagon is rationing, and Iran knows it. A threat you can’t afford to carry out isn’t a threat.The Senate voted 49-50 to reject a resolution to end the war. Three Republican senators — Rand Paul, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski — voted with Democrats. Democrat John Fetterman voted with Republicans. The antiwar position is now one Republican defection away from a majority.Israel conducted a wave of drone strikes on the coastal highway south of Beirut, killing twelve people, including a woman and her two children. This under a ceasefire that Israel and Lebanon agreed to in November 2024.IRGC Brigadier General Mohammad Akrami Nia declared that Iran will no longer allow U.S. weapons or warships bound for regional bases — including the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain — to transit the Strait of Hormuz. Whether Iran has the naval capacity to enforce that is unclear, or maybe this is saber-rattling for the home crowd. We’ll have to see.ABC reports the Army is cutting training across the force to cover a $4 to $6 billion budget shortfall driven by the Iran war, the border mission, and the $1.1 billion National Guard deployment in Washington. The hardest hit: III Armored Corps, which commands 70,000 soldiers and nearly half the Army’s combat power. Internal documents warn its aviation units will deploy next year at “a lower state of readiness” and that rebuilding combat proficiency will take a full year.The president has called the war an “excursion.” The math calls it a $33 billion budget hit, a depleted missile stockpile meant for China, and an army cannibalizing its own readiness just to keep the excursion going.10,000 lossesHow many times would you have to lose at something before you might rethink what you were doing? 30%, 40%, 50%? Federal judges have now ruled against ICE detention practices more than 10,000 times, according to a Politico analysis. That’s a 90% loss rate for the administration.How did they achieve such excellence in losing? Federal law says people “seeking admission” to the country must be detained. Every previous administration read that to mean people caught at the border. Last July, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons signed a memo saying it also applies to millions of immigrants who have lived here for years — meaning they get locked up with no hearing, no bail, no chance to see a judge.Courts keep saying that’s not what the law means. More than 425 judges have reached the same conclusion, including a majority of Trump appointees. The case files include a nursing mother with active refugee status, a five-year-old detained on his way home from school, parents of U.S. servicemembers. ICE has defied orders by transferring detainees to new states, forcing them to refile with new lawyers — generating more litigation, more losses.The administration doesn’t care about 10,000 losses because it only needs one win — at the Supreme Court. Courts in Texas and Minnesota have backed the administration. Courts in New York, Atlanta, and Cincinnati have not. When appeals courts split like that, the Supreme Court steps in to settle it. The court almost certainly will.PPITuesday you heard about the Consumer Price Index, inflation. Why are you telling me about another thing on Wednesday? Can’t we get a rest? I’m sorry, the answer is no. Today we must talk about the Producer Price Index. The PPI measures what businesses pay each other — for steel, for chemicals, for shipping containers full of clothes. It matters because businesses don’t eat those costs. They pass them on. When it costs Target more to stock the shelves, it eventually costs you more to fill your cart. The CPI measures the price of your cart. The PPI tells you what’s coming for your cart next.The story with the Producer Price Index, or PPI as it is known, was that at the beginning of the year, economists wondered whether companies had stockpiled their inventories before the tariffs hit in order to keep prices low, but that at some point in the year 2026, the inventories would run out and companies would be paying import taxes, which they would then pass along to consumers.It’s happening. In February, core wholesale prices — stripping out food and energy — jumped 0.8% in a single month, nearly triple the forecast, pushing the annual rate to 3.6%. That meant the cheap inventory was running out. By April, the number had climbed to 5.2%. The stockpiles are gone. Businesses are now paying the full tariff price — and that price is heading to you.And then a war landed on top of it. Seventy-five percent of April’s rise in goods prices came from energy — a direct consequence of the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz. Gasoline jumped 15.6%. But the more dangerous number is diesel, up 12.6%, because diesel moves everything else other than your car — every truck, every freight train, every container ship. Diesel is the invisible cost inside the price of groceries, of clothes, of everything that traveled to reach you.Kevin Warsh confirmed to FedWhat a fun time to be chairman of the Federal Reserve. The Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh on Wednesday, 54-45 — the slimmest margin for a Fed chair in history, with only one Democrat, John Fetterman, crossing party lines. Bipartisan support for Fed picks used to be the rule; Alan Greenspan won unanimous confirmation in 2000.Trump, asked on CNBC if he’d be disappointed if Warsh didn’t immediately cut rates, said, “I would.” Warsh vowed during his confirmation hearing that monetary policy would remain “strictly independent.” CME FedWatch gives a 1 percent chance rates come down this year. The market is betting on Warsh, not the president.PhilippinesThe United States Senate can’t stop a war, but at least nobody’s shooting in the chamber. Chaos erupted Wednesday night in the Philippine Senate when gunfire rang out as authorities tried to arrest a senator who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for a charge of crime against humanity. Senator Ronald dela Rosa served as national police chief under President Rodrigo Duterte, leading anti-drug crackdowns that killed somewhere between 12,000 and 30,000. The ICC warrant accuses him of murdering “no less than 32 persons” between 2016 and 2018. Dela Rosa had barricaded himself in the chamber under the protection of allied senators and called on followers to gather and block his arrest.Princeton Honor Code ChangeFor more than a century, Princeton prided itself on an honor code so revered that proctoring during exams was banned. A student’s pledge not to cheat was enough. Faculty voted to require proctors in all in-person exams starting this summer — reversing a policy set in 1893 — largely because of AI. The technology has made cheating both easier to commit and harder to detect. Students are afraid to report violations because they’ll get called out on social media, and anonymous reports are hard to investigate. Students will still sign the pledge. Now someone will be watching while they do.A for everyone - Harvard debates limiting A’sHarvard’s faculty began voting on whether to cap the number of A’s professors can give. The reason: in 2010, A’s accounted for a third of all grades. By 2025, that had doubled to over 60 percent. The proposal would limit solid A’s to 20 percent of a class.One Harvard faculty member, Joshua Greene, writing in the Atlantic, put it this way: grade inflation “perversely deters students from taking classes that could threaten” a perfect GPA. “It’s as if students start college with a shiny new car and hope to go four years without a scratch. Who would dare go off-road?”Murdaugh KillingI hate this story because it’s gothic and it encourages the worst kind of gawking in cable TV land, but this legal angle is interesting so here goes: South Carolina’s Supreme Court unanimously overturned Alex Murdaugh’s double murder convictions. The court found that the clerk overseeing jurors had told them not to be “fooled” by Murdaugh and to watch his body language — what the justices called “shocking jury interference.” The clerk later resigned and pleaded guilty to misusing public funds and promoting her book about the trial. Murdaugh stays in prison for stealing millions from clients. He’ll be retried for killing his wife and son.Thursday May 14Pageantry in China, nothing to see here in Iran, Starmer’s cabinet gets thinner, Cuba is in the dark ages, which is where we’ll go to go long on Neanderthal teeth.Trump in ChinaPresident Trump arrived in Beijing Thursday for his first China visit since 2017.The pageantry was identical — 21-gun salute, marching soldiers so precise they looked like they’d come out of a box, flag-waving schoolchildren.The circumstances have changed in the nine years. China is more powerful, the U.S. is at war with Iran, and Trump needs Xi’s help reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Trump says he doesn’t. Xi knows better.On Wednesday — the day Trump landed — a Chinese supertanker carrying two million barrels of Iraqi crude sailed through the strait, the third known Chinese passage since the war began. Iran’s state media confirmed an agreement to let Chinese ships pass. Iran is now running its own transit authority and collecting fees in Chinese yuan. So while the American economy chokes on four-dollar gas, Chinese tankers sail through. Leverage, demonstrated on the eve of the summit.Minutes into their meeting in the Great Hall of the People, Xi named his price: Taiwan. He called it “the most important issue” and warned that mishandling it would mean the two countries “will collide or even clash.” Then he invoked the Thucydides Trap — the theory that when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, war is the default outcome. Xi is telling Trump that China is the rising power, the U.S. is the incumbent, and avoiding conflict requires the incumbent to make room. Starting with Taiwan.Trump did not respond. According to a White House official, he moved to the next topic without acknowledging the comment. The White House readout mentioned trade, fentanyl, and Iran. It did not mention Taiwan.The administration has already postponed a $13 billion weapons package to avoid angering Xi. If Trump discusses the planned sales with Xi at all, he’d be violating one of the Six Assurances — Reagan-era commitments sent to Taiwan’s president in 1982, one of which says the U.S. will not consult with Beijing before selling arms to Taipei. Trump has said he’ll have the conversation. That pillar of U.S.-Taiwan policy, forty-four years old, may not survive the week.Washington framed the day as a trade reset. Trump brought an airport courtesy bus full of heavy hitters from American industry: Apple’s Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Goldman’s David Solomon, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman, and Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg on the red carpet. It was a sign of respect and a sign that the U.S. is ready to do business in China.The American wish list, per Montana Senator Steve Daines: “Boeing, beef, and beans.” U.S. soybean farmers and beef producers have been locked out of the Chinese market for a year. In an early signal, China renewed import licenses for hundreds of U.S. beef plants.Before China can buy American beef, each U.S. meatpacking plant has to be individually certified by Chinese regulators. China had let hundreds of those certifications lapse during the trade freeze. Renewing them doesn’t mean beef is flowing — it means the door is unlocked. China can open it whenever it wants, or leave it shut.And then there was Rubio. The Secretary of State was sanctioned by China in 2020 — banned from entering the country — for condemning Beijing’s internment of Uyghur Muslims and supporting sanctions over Hong Kong.Thursday he stood in the front row in the Great Hall of the People. How? Beijing changed the spelling of his name. Chinese state media swapped one character in the transliteration — “Rubio” became “Lu” — and declared that the ban applied to Senator Rubio, not Secretary Rubio. The sanctions remain technically in force. The man is technically someone else. Strategic ambiguity doesn’t just apply to the U.S. position on Taiwan. It works for names too.SCOTUS allows abortion by mail to continueThe Supreme Court just issued a prescription for the entire country, but didn’t bother to sign the note. The Supreme Court ruled in an emergency order that abortion medication can continue to be prescribed by telehealth and shipped by mail, blocking restrictions imposed by the Fifth Circuit while litigation continues. The majority offered no reasoning — standard for emergency orders. Thomas and Alito dissented. Alito called the order “remarkable” and “unreasoned.”This is part of the shadow docket, which justices on both sides have complained about. When the Court decides the fate of medical access for millions in a single-page order, it leaves the law “in limbo” without a clear map for lower courts to follow. The case now goes back to the Fifth Circuit to be decided on the merits, which could take months, and will almost certainly end up back at the Supreme Court after that.Nearly two-thirds of U.S. abortions now use pills. A quarter involve telehealth. The FDA approved telehealth prescriptions of mifepristone in 2021 after reviewing data showing the drug was safe without an in-person visit. More than 100 studies back that finding.DOJ lawyers defended the FDA in lower courts but never said whether the administration actually supports mailing the pills. After losing at the Fifth Circuit, the administration made the unusual choice to file nothing at the Supreme Court — no brief, no position, no opinion. Silence as strategy: if the court protects access, the White House doesn’t have to.By filing nothing, the White House avoided a “lose-lose” political situation. If they supported the pill, they would anger the religious base; if they opposed it, they would alienate the moderate voters who have approved 14 of 17 abortion-rights ballot measures since 2022.IranThe Pentagon fired the people responsible for counting the dead, then told Congress they have a near-perfect record of not killing anyone. Admiral Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, told senators Thursday that the U.S. military has avoided civilian casualties in Iran and that there was “no way” to corroborate reports of damage to civilian sites.There is no way — because Defense Secretary Hegseth terminated dozens of Pentagon positions responsible for tracking civilian deaths, dismantling the Civilian Harm Mitigation Response office his predecessor created for exactly that purpose.The New York Times has verified destruction at 22 schools and 17 health care facilities.The Human Rights Activists News Agency estimates at least 1,700 Iranian civilians killed. The non-profit, U.S.-based agency relies on a network of activists inside Iran to confirm all reported fatalities.Cooper acknowledged one incident — a school in Minab where Iranian officials say 175 people died, which he conceded may have been caused by a U.S. bomb. That was the only civilian casualty event he knew of.22 verified schools, 17 health facilities, an estimated 1,700 dead — and the head of Central Command is aware of one incident. Big gap.Cuba goes darkThe refrigerators in Cuba aren’t working, so food is spoiling. Hospitals are cancelling surgeries. The air is thick with the smoke of wood and coal as households burn what they can find. Blackouts have left Cubans sleeping on rooftops to escape the heat. Others wake at odd hours when the power briefly returns to make coffee, charge phones. Havana is now dark 20 to 22 hours a day. Power comes back for as little as 90 minutes.The trigger is American. Cuba’s electrical grid has been failing for years — the infrastructure predates the current crisis. The U.S. actions accelerated a collapse that was already underway.On January 3, the U.S. intervention in Venezuela cut off 25 years of Venezuelan oil donations. On January 29, Trump signed an executive order blockading oil shipments to Cuba. Mexico paused its own shipments under U.S. pressure. Cuba produces 40,000 barrels a day but needs 100,000. Venezuela and Mexico had been making up the shortfall.By mid-May, Cuba’s energy minister announced the country had completely run out of fuel oil and diesel.The squeeze is producing contact. CIA Director John Ratcliffe visited Havana Thursday and met with Raúl Castro’s grandson, the interior minister, and the head of Cuban intelligence. According to reports, he told them to take a lesson from what happened to Maduro.Cuba was the first to announce the meeting — a government that has resisted Washington since 1959 publicly acknowledging it hosted the CIA director. It also released a political prisoner Thursday. Secretary of State Rubio has been running secret talks with Cuban leaders. A senior administration official’s assessment: “They have no fuel. They have no money. They have no one coming to rescue them.” The administration wants regime change but not a refugee crisis — officials say the goal is to ensure a “non-repressive security structure remains intact” to avoid unrest and mass migration to the U.S.A third of Cuban households now report that at least one family member went to bed hungry in the last 30 days — up from a quarter last year. On Wednesday evening, residents across Havana banged pots and pans and set fire to trash cans in the dark in protest.StarmerUK Health Secretary Wes Streeting resigned Thursday morning after a Wednesday meeting with Starmer that lasted sixteen minutes. In his letter, he said he’d lost confidence in the Prime Minister’s leadership and called the rise of the nationalist Reform UK an “existential threat to the future integrity” of the country. He wrote: “Where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift.”Streeting stopped short of formally triggering a leadership contest, but nobody read it as anything other than a starting gun. He’s the most prominent figure on Labour’s right. On the left, Angela Rayner — who resigned as deputy PM last year over a tax dispute — announced Thursday that tax authorities had cleared her of wrongdoing, removing the obstacle to her own candidacy. And in Manchester, Andy Burnham, the mayor who leads polls of who Labour voters actually want, was spotted boarding a train to London. Burnham’s problem: he isn’t a member of Parliament. Someone in a safe seat would have to step aside to let him run. The party has three plausible successors who appeal to three different factions, and no mechanism for choosing among them that doesn’t tear the coalition apart further.Starmer has not resigned. The formal challenge has not been triggered. But the government is now losing ministers so fast it’s going to start showing up in the unemployment figures.Retail salesRetail sales grew 0.5% in April, down from March’s 1.6%. Strip out gas stations and the number drops to 0.3% — which, adjusted for inflation, is a decline. The Iran war’s inflation tax is showing up in what Americans are no longer buying. Department stores: down 3.2%. Furniture: down 2%. Clothing: down 1.5%. Cars: down half a percent. Restaurant and bar spending rose 0.6% — Americans will still pay for a night out, but they’re stopping themselves from buying a new couch.The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index, tracked since 1952, hit 48.2 in early May — the lowest reading in its 74-year history. Lower than the 2008 financial crisis. Lower than the 1980 stagflation trough.About a third of respondents mentioned gas prices unprompted. And April’s numbers were artificially propped up: Trump’s tax cut legislation produced refunds $22 billion larger than last year, and most of that money landed between February and April. Tax refund season is now over. Gas prices are not.The Hundred-Slide PitchDuring the Trump administration, one of the storylines has been about how the president has targeted law firms with lawyers who worked in any way associated with the many cases brought against him.There is another side of this story: law firms whose lawyers helped the president. One such firm is Sullivan & Cromwell. The firm’s co-chairman, Robert Giuffra, is one of Donald Trump’s personal attorneys — the same lawyer helping Trump overturn his felony conviction for falsifying business records.Earlier this year, Indian billionaire Gautam Adani quietly hired Giuffra to make a problem go away.The problem: fraud and bribery charges the Biden Justice Department brought in late 2024 over an alleged scheme tied to solar power contracts that affected U.S. investors. Giuffra’s team met with senior officials at Main Justice and clicked through a 100-slide presentation arguing the case was jurisdictionally weak and evidence-thin.The last slide was worth paying attention to. It promised that Adani would invest $10 billion in U.S. energy and infrastructure and create 15,000 jobs if the government walked away. DOJ officials told Giuffra the investment offer would “play no role” in their decision.The Trump Justice Department is now moving to drop the charges. Adani is reportedly in talks to settle the related SEC civil case for $15 to $20 million — a rounding error against both the scale of the alleged scheme and a net worth north of $60 billion.The pattern is legible enough to function as a manual: hire the president’s personal lawyer, offer a patriotic investment denominated in jobs, and let political gravity do the rest.Won’t you be my neighbor?Anne locked herself out on the porch Friday morning and had an incredibly busy day at the end of an incredibly busy week. She was at home alone without her usual hero to provide ready assistance. How did she solve the problem? She called a neighbor.Thank you to our hero Brian Allen.While her husband is less sociable, despite his chatty seatmate podcast persona, Anne is in a shrinking minority of people who are in touch with their neighbors. Only 40 percent of Americans talk to their neighbors regularly — down from 59 percent in 2012. Among young adults, the collapse is stunning: one in four, down from one in two.The American Enterprise Institute’s new neighbor survey finds the usual culprits — screens, remote work, the slow replacement of sidewalk life with app-mediated everything — but the sharper finding is about class.College-educated Americans are more likely to socialize with their neighbors, text them, trust them, and work with them to fix a problem on the block. They’re more comfortable asking a neighbor to watch their kid in an emergency.Among mothers without a degree, fewer than one in three would ask. It’s not that less-educated Americans are less friendly. They’re less likely to live near a coffee shop, a park, or a community center — the places where you bump into people often enough that they stop being strangers. Americans with six or more of these gathering spots nearby talk to their neighbors at nearly twice the rate of those with none.The other dividing line is the church door. Forty-nine percent of weekly churchgoers talk to their neighbors regularly. Among Americans who never attend services, it’s 31 percent. Among young adults, the gap doubles: weekly attendees are twice as likely to know the people next door.Religious Americans are also more likely to believe that being a good neighbor means offering help without being asked. Most Americans — two-thirds — believe the opposite: that being a good neighbor means not getting too involved.The default setting in American neighborhood life is now a polite mutual avoidance, and we’ve convinced ourselves it’s a virtue.College pay offA study tracking a million students through Texas public colleges finds that a bachelor’s degree still pays off — but the payoff is slower and more uneven than the brochure suggests. On average, graduates earned a cumulative $86,806 more than peers who skipped college, measured 15 years after enrollment. But it took nine years just to break even — factoring in tuition and the wages they didn’t earn while sitting in lecture halls. Architecture and engineering majors cleared $200,000 above their noncollege peers over that period. Liberal arts majors cleared about $35,000.An NBC News poll last fall found only one-third of Americans think a four-year degree is worth the cost, down from 53 percent in 2013.59,000 Years Before NovocaineWhen the dentist asks, “Have you been flossing?” do you struggle with your conscience?Do you think Neanderthals did? They might have. Archaeologists think they’ve found the earliest known instance of dental cavity intervention in human evolutionary history. In a cave in southwestern Siberia where Neanderthals lived almost 59,000 years ago, researchers found a molar — according to a report published in the scientific journal PLOS One — with a deep hole bored through the biting surface all the way down to the pulp chamber — the inner cavity that holds nerves and blood vessels.… It’s a term that has always freaked me out. Pulp. I mean of all the weird names in science and medicine that bear no relationship to the thing it’s describing, suddenly the dentists rush into the room with the most gruesomely accurate description of something? No wonder people are nervous at the dentist.A study published last September in the Journal of the American Dental Association: nearly 73 percent of U.S. adults report being afraid of going to the dentist, with about 46 percent describing moderate fear and 27 percent severe fear.…all this loose talk about pulp is no doubt the reason.Anyway, a micro-CT scan revealed microscopic radial grooves consistent with deliberate drilling. Basically a root canal says one of the authors of the study.To test whether the procedure was even possible with Stone Age tools, the team replicated it on modern human teeth using a stone tool replica — including a tooth donated by one of the researchers because these guys know how to have fun.Scratches on Neanderthal teeth had been documented before, suggesting they used toothpicks and chewed medicinal plants. But cavities were rare for Neanderthals — they had a richer oral microbiome and a low-carbohydrate diet, which meant fewer cavity-causing bacteria. Also fewer Pop Tarts which hold the sugar on the teeth for 59,000 years.However, when a cavity did develop, it was apparently notable enough to warrant someone picking up a stone tool and drilling into a companion’s mouth.This is more than just a fun story to tell at cocktail parties. It represents an evolutionary bend in the road. Chimpanzees treat themselves with medicinal plants — behavior experts call instinctual self-medication.This is something else. As one of the study’s reviewers put it, it documents the transition “from instinctive self-medication to a truly intentional and deliberate medical strategy.” Someone looked at someone else’s pain, diagnosed the problem, fashioned a tool, and performed a procedure.Unfortunately the problem was a hangnail. Still! A for effort. (This is not true).The human animal is amazing.Friday May 15Trump flew home from Beijing on Friday with rose seeds, a Boeing order China hasn’t confirmed, and a Taiwan policy that may not survive the flight.ChinaThe summit ended with praise, vagueness, and a promise to meet again. Trump called Xi “one of the World’s Great Leaders” and “really a friend.” Xi called the visit “historic and symbolic” and declared they had established a “new bilateral relationship, based on constructive strategic stability.”A set of operating rules, that’s what China wants. In just the way President Trump likes to say that deals have been agreed to when they actually haven’t, to put pressure on the person he’s negotiating with, the Chinese have their own version.Xi touted a framework for the rest of Trump’s term — locking the U.S. into a posture of restraint on tariffs, sanctions, and Taiwan in exchange for the appearance of partnership. For Xi, stability means the U.S. stops surprising him.Did he get what he wanted? Was the flattery of Trump enough? Why would Trump keep any promise? We’ll see.The deliverables were thin judging by the market’s reaction.The S&P 500 dropped more than 1 percent at the open. Oil jumped nearly 3 percent, with domestic crude hitting $104 a barrel. Thirty-year Treasury yields climbed above 5.1 percent — the highest since May 2025. Investors wanted progress on the Strait of Hormuz. They got nothing.Trump said Xi had agreed to buy 200 Boeing jets, with a promise of up to 750 “if they do a good job.” Boeing’s stock fell nearly 5 percent. China’s Foreign Ministry, asked to confirm the order, said only that trade ties were “mutually beneficial.”Trump’s trade representative, Jamieson Greer, said a new board would oversee tariff reductions on roughly $30 billion in goods and that China would make “double-digit billion” agricultural purchases over three years — but acknowledged the soybean calendar means nothing closes until fall.Trump said he and Xi did not discuss extending the tariff truce. He said they did not discuss chip export controls. Jensen Huang, the Nvidia CEO who showed up at the Alaska refueling stop to hitch a ride to Beijing, stayed behind after the summit for a separate meeting. China still hasn’t approved purchases of Nvidia’s H200 chips. “They chose not to,” Trump said. “They want to try to develop their own.”TaiwanThe most consequential exchange may have happened on Air Force One. Asked whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion, Trump said: “There’s only one person that knows that. You know who it is? Me. I’m the only person.” He said Xi had asked him the same question in Beijing and received the same answer. That’s a return to the traditional refusal to answer — Biden broke with it at least four times by saying yes. But the more significant moment came next.Trump confirmed he discussed the pending $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan with Xi “in great detail.” A reporter asked whether that violated the Six Assurances — the 1982 Reagan-era commitments that include an explicit promise not to consult with Beijing on arms sales to Taipei. “Well, I think the 1980s is a long way,” Trump said. “That’s a big, far distance.”He then added: “I think the last thing we need right now is a war that’s 9,500 miles away.”Taiwan’s foreign ministry pointed to Secretary Rubio’s statement that U.S. policy “remains unchanged.”Trump invited Xi to the White House on September 24. Analysts note the invitation gives Beijing a reason to delay anything it doesn’t want approved before then — starting with the arms sale. Every high-profile event gives China another chance to argue that a weapons announcement would “undermine the atmosphere.”Iran - Shift?Trump said he did not ask Xi for help reopening the Strait of Hormuz. “I’m not asking for any favors,” he said, “because when you ask for favors you have to do favors in return.” He predicted Xi would lean on Iran anyway. There is no evidence of that.Beijing didn’t even mention Iran by name in its public statements about the summit.Trump told reporters he’s weighing whether to lift sanctions on the Chinese companies buying that oil — a concession his own Treasury Secretary framed weeks ago as financing terrorism.Buried in the Air Force One press gaggle was a significant change in the administration’s nuclear demand. Trump said for the first time that he would accept a 20-year moratorium on Iranian enrichment — dropping the insistence on permanent abandonment.“Twenty years is enough,” he said, “but the level of guarantee from them is not enough. In other words, it’s got to be a real twenty years.” He added: “If they have any nuclear of any form, I don’t read the rest of it.” He also signaled the ceasefire may not hold. “We finished probably 70, 75 percent” of the bombing targets, he said. “We’ll go back and finish them off.”It’s worth pausing to measure that shift against the administration’s own stated war goals. Ian Bremmer compiled the list of what Trump said he wanted out of the war: rescuing the Iranian people, choosing the next Iranian leader, taking the oil, ending Iranian ballistic missile capabilities, ending Iran’s support for regional proxies, removing Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles, and ending Iran’s nuclear enrichment capabilities. A 20-year moratorium satisfies exactly one of those — partially — and abandons the most absolute version of it. The rest of the list hasn’t moved.The gap between The United States and Iran is the same gap not just before the war, but before the first Trump administration. It’s the original disagreement, the same set of questions the Obama administration and five other world powers addressed in 2015 with the JCPOA — how much uranium enrichment, who inspects, where the stockpile goes.Before Trump pulled out of the JCPOA in his first term, Iran had slashed its enriched uranium stockpile by 98 percent, capped enrichment at 3.67 percent — a fraction of weapons grade — shipped more than 25,000 pounds of enriched material out of the country, cut its centrifuges by two-thirds, and submitted to continuous international inspections. Breakout time had gone from two months to more than a year. Iran was in verified compliance. The Obama deal never demanded zero enrichment, a core Trump demand.The difference between whatever Trump gets Iran to agree to and the JCPOA isn’t just the terms of the two agreements — it’s the price of arriving at them. The JCPOA cost nothing like this: thousands dead, a depleted Pacific missile inventory, a closed strait, and gas prices that have climbed more than 50 percent since February 28, hitting $4.52 a gallon on Sunday.The IRS HeistWhile the president was abroad, ABC News reported that the White House is close to settling Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the 2020 leak of his tax returns — a leak carried out by a contractor who was caught and is serving five years in prison. The expected settlement would create a $1.7 billion fund to compensate “allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration.” That means January 6 defendants.The commission overseeing disbursements would serve at Trump’s pleasure. Members could be removed without cause. There would be no obligation to disclose how the money was allocated. Trump himself would be barred from receiving payments directly, but entities associated with him would not be explicitly excluded.The federal judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams, has been scrutinizing whether the government and Trump are genuinely adversarial parties. She gave both sides a May 20 deadline to submit briefs explaining in what sense they are actually in conflict. The White House response, according to the Times, has been to treat the deadline not as a legal obligation but as a settlement deadline — racing to finalize terms before the judge can rule that the case is a sham.U.S. arrests Iraqi military commanderFederal prosecutors unsealed charges Friday against Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, a commander of an Iranian-backed militia accused of plotting to bomb a prominent synagogue in New York and Jewish centers in Los Angeles and Scottsdale, Arizona. Al-Saadi is accused of planning at least 20 attacks across Europe and Canada since the Iran war began in February. He was detained in Turkey and handed over to U.S. authorities. He is one of the highest-level figures tied to Iran known to have been arrested since the war started. His case represents exactly what U.S. officials have warned about since the first bombs fell: that the war would produce retaliatory terrorism on Western soil. The threat was always the reason critics said the costs of the war extended far beyond the Strait of Hormuz. Now it has a name, a criminal complaint, and a target list that included American houses of worship.Egyptian mummy buried with the IliadArchaeologists in Egypt found a 2,000-year-old mummy with a clay-sealed papyrus packet resting on its wrappings. Inside the packet: a fragment of Homer’s Iliad — specifically, lines from Book 2’s “Catalogue of Ships,” the passage that inventories the fleet assembled to retrieve Helen of Troy. It is the first time a literary work has been found serving a functional, spiritual role in mummification — not decoration, not accident, but purpose. For this Roman-era Egyptian, a nonroyal male buried, the Iliad wasn’t entertainment. It was equipment for the afterlife.Preliminary dating places the burials in the first or second century A.D., well after Rome conquered Egypt in 30 B.C.The idea of literature as spiritual technology wasn’t new even then. Foy Scalf, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago, notes that the Greco-Egyptian magical formularies prescribed the Iliad as medicine. For a patient bedridden with malaria, the treatment was: press your head against a papyrus scroll of Book 4 to break the fever.I always found that reading the Iliad gave me a headache, but that’s because I’m a Dad and I’m required by my role to make that joke.Waymo’s Lost WeekendAnd finally, a story that is not about geopolitics but may say something about the age we’re living in: residents of a cul-de-sac in northwest Atlanta reported that dozens of empty Waymo self-driving cars have been circling their dead-end street, mostly between 6 and 7 in the morning. One neighbor counted 50 in an hour. When a resident put a children’s-crossing sign in the road, eight Waymos got stuck trying to figure out how to turn around. Waymo said it has “already addressed this routing behavior.” The neighbors said they just want the cars to stay on main roads.I feel like this is the opening scene in some apocalyptic thriller about how the robots come for us.That’s it for this week’s Stack the Week. I hope you haven’t felt like it’s made you go round and round. Thank you for listening. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for May 4th through the 8th. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player.Thank you to Annie Cohen for help preparing this delicious offering.The war became a project and then a trifle. Jobs are up, but not for Democratic lawmakers. So are gas prices and appliances, but the dollar is down. The gap between expectations and reality is squeezing the American Dream more than the aquifer in Mexico City. Rubio swaps gifts with the Pope. Lutnick endures the inquisition. The Pentagon releases info about UFOs, which are now easier to spot than some parts of the Epstein files. Tariffs are 0 for 5 in court and Sunday is for mothers, who really deserve more than a brunch.Let’s take it day by day.Monday, May 4Monday was a day about the distance between the way things are and the way they’re supposed to be—the easy use of pepper spray in a system that isn’t supposed to punish, an exodus from a financial “safe haven,” the college students with too much faith and their parents without enough, a successful phone ban that didn’t score, a parade without tanks, and over-prescribing a heroin metaphor.“Project Freedom”On Monday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard launched cruise missiles, drones, and fast-attack speedboats against commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. None succeeded. U.S. missiles shot down the incoming fire; Apache and Seahawk helicopters lifted off the deck of carriers and sank six speedboats threatening two American-flagged tankers. (Between Venezuella and Iran, the U.S. has been hell on speedboats.)The tankers made it through—the first since the ceasefire began on April 8.The operation was called “Project Freedom,” the administration’s attempt to reopen the strait without restarting the war. (For a little while I was calling it Project Freedom, which I also thinks works).“He wants action,” a senior official told Axios about the president. “He doesn’t want to sit still.” Trump had been presented different plans of action. Adm. Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, unfurled a plan to drive Navy ships through by force and destroy any Iranian battery or boat that responded.Trump chose the less aggressive path. U.S. destroyers and aircraft would loiter near merchant ships, share intelligence on mine locations, and intervene if Iran attacked—but wouldn’t formally escort anyone.The restraint was partly tactical and partly arithmetic. The U.S. doesn’t have enough destroyers to escort the more than 100 ships that transited the strait daily before the war through a channel where the usable lanes are about two miles wide and Iranian missiles can be fired from trucks and fishing boats. All Iran has to do is get enough through to make captains, shipping companies, and their insurers nervous.By the United States military’s estimation, about 1,550 marine vessels—oil tankers, bulk carriers, container ships, and more—idled in the Persian Gulf right on Monday. The crews weren’t planning for that which means they’re running out of supplies.The question wasn’t whether American warships can win a fight in the strait. It’s whether the Project Freedom umbrella was wide enough to bring commercial traffic back.Meanwhile the president’s poll numbers resemble those speed boats: sinking. A Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll in late April found 61 percent called the strikes on Iran a mistake—disapproval at the level Iraq hit in 2006, Vietnam in 1971.Ukrainian strike on Moscow swellsThe oligarchs aren’t safe. Early Monday a Ukrainian drone hit a luxury 54-story tower in southwestern Moscow in a neighborhood of foreign embassies and Russian elite. —about six kilometers from the Kremlin, three from the Defense Ministry. One floor was gutted; no one was killed. The target’s swank address was the point: even the most protected civilians in the capital are within reach, and Moscow’s tightened GPS jamming and internet restrictions failed to stop it.The attack comes five days before the Victory Day parade on Red Square, an annual World War II celebration Putin has used to cast the war in Ukraine as a continuation of the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany. This year’s parade will proceed without heavy military equipment for the first time since 2007—no tanks, no armored vehicles—and without military school cadets.Whether that reflects a critical shortage of display-ready hardware or a fear that stationary armor on Red Square would make easy targets for a drone swarm, the effect is the same: the showcase of Russian power has been hollowed out.The guest list tells its own story. In 2005, Bush, Chirac of France, and Schröder of Germany attended. In 2015, after Russia invaded Crimea, Xi Jinping and Modi still showed up. In 2026, the marquee foreign dignitary is Slovakia’s Robert Fico—who announced he will meet Putin and lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier but skip the parade itself, distancing himself from the optics of honoring a war against a neighboring European state.Merz penaltyThe alliance supposedly opposing Russia took a hit of its own. On Friday, the Pentagon announced it would withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany over the next six to twelve months — fulfilling a threat President Trump made after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said publicly that the United States was “being humiliated” by the Iranian leadership and criticized Washington’s lack of strategy in the war. Merz was saying what allied diplomats had been saying privately for weeks. Trump’s response was to punish the messenger. The withdrawal reverses part of the buildup President Biden ordered after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and will leave about 30,000 American troops in Germany. Spain and Italy were warned they could be next.ICE Use of ForceThe story of Donald Trump’s successful immigration crackdown is contained in the numbers. Border crossings have fallen 93 percent; deportations are running 85 percent above two years ago. There are other numbers too. Forty-seven people have died in ICE custody since January 2025—one every six days this year. Seventy-one percent of those detained have no criminal record, according to ICE’s own data, undermining the president’s claim that he would only round up “the worst of the worst.” A Washington Post investigation highlights another number: 1,460 use-of-force incidents across 98 detention facilities between January 2024 and February 2026. During the first year of Trump’s second term, those incidents rose 37 percent. The number of individuals subjected to force climbed even faster—54 percent, to 1,330 people—because guards increasingly used chemical agents and physical tactics on groups rather than individuals.The detained population grew 45 percent over the same period, which means force is outpacing even the surge in bodies.Detention is classified as non-punitive administrative custody—a system for making sure people show up for court, not a sentence. Yet the tools are indistinguishable from high-security corrections: Tasers, pepper spray, restraint chairs, takedown maneuvers, deployed in facilities often housed in former prisons and staffed by former corrections officers.In multiple incidents the Post documented, the triggering behavior was detainees asking for things they’re legally entitled to—food, water, medical care, personal belongings. The administration also shuttered two oversight offices responsible for investigating detention conditions, saying they added “bureaucratic hurdles.” What the emails describe is a system designed for administrative holding that, under the pressure of rapid expansion, has defaulted to the only model its operators know: crowd control.A Pew survey last week found that only 41 percent of Americans are confident Trump can make good decisions on immigration, down from 53 percent after his reelection—a 12-point drop on what was supposed to be his signature issue. An NBC poll found that 58 percent of Americans say they do not believe that “regular, law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear” from immigration agents.On Monday the Pulitzer board awarded the Chicago Tribune its prize for local reporting — for its coverage of ICE sweeps in Chicago.Mifepristone in LimboThe 5th Circuit blocked telehealth and mail prescription of mifepristone last Friday claiming that it threatened the safety of pregnant women and the sovereignty of Louisiana, which has banned abortion in almost all cases. Women can still get the pill, but only by going to a clinic in person.Telehealth lets a woman finish a medication abortion within a few days. In-person requirements stretch that into multiple clinic visits — time off work, gas, a babysitter, sometimes a hotel — which means more money and, more importantly, more time. Time matters because mifepristone is only approved for the first ten weeks of pregnancy. The longer the trip takes to arrange, the more women age out of the option.In states with abortion bans — thirteen of them — there is no clinic to go to. Those women had been getting pills by mail from providers in states with shield laws.The two manufacturers immediately asked the Supreme Court to stay the ruling. The Court issued a temporary administrative stay through May 11. Sixty percent of U.S. abortions now happen by medication; about 1 in 4 are by telehealth. Mifepristone is roughly as safe as ibuprofen. Carrying a pregnancy to term — any pregnancy — is about 14 times more likely to kill you than ending one with the drug.Voters have approved 14 of 17 abortion-rights ballot measures since Dobbs — the 2022 ruling that eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion and returned the question to the states — including in Republican-leaning Missouri, Montana, and Ohio.The FDA is conducting a parallel safety review, though mifepristone is one of the most-studied drugs in the country — approved in September 2000, used safely for more than 26 years by over 7.5 million women in the United States, with more than 100 clinical studies supporting its safety and effectiveness.Kennedy vs. the SSRIsHealth Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the first concrete policy action in his “Make America Healthy Again” mental health agenda on Sunday: an HHS initiative to reduce the use of SSRIs, the antidepressants taken by one in six American adults.SSRIs are Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor which always confuses me. Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) increase the levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that stabilizes mood, within the brain’s synaptic spaces. They achieve this by blocking the “reuptake” (or reabsorption) of serotonin by nerve cells, allowing more of this chemical to remain active for communication between neurons.The plan centers on “deprescribing”—the clinical process of tapering patients off medications—with a particular focus on children and long-term users. The proposal would allow doctors to be reimbursed for time spent helping patients stop taking medications, an effort to counterbalance incentives to prescribe which are reimbursable. Federal agencies will provide information on transitioning patients to non-drug treatments like therapy, exercise, and nutrition. HHS is also pushing updated guidelines requiring clinicians to offer patients a “clear path off” medications before they start them.Antidepressant dispensing rates for children and young adults rose 66 percent between 2016 and 2022, and the question of whether that reflects overmedicalization or a proportionate response to a worsening crisis is legitimate. Britain commissioned a major report on overprescribing and followed up with reforms including updated clinical guidelines and a national audit program.But Kennedy repeated Monday that SSRIs can be “harder to quit than heroin,” a claim clinicians believe wildly overstates the real phenomenon known as SSRI discontinuation syndrome. More than hyperbole, it could scare patients into quitting abruptly, which risks severe relapse or suicidal ideation. Kennedy also continues to suggest a link between SSRIs and school shootings, a claim the American Psychiatric Association and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention have consistently refuted, citing studies showing the medications actually reduce the risk of violence and suicide. Neither the APA nor the American Academy of Pediatrics was present at the summit where the initiative was announced—an absence that underscores their concern that a fixation on overprescribing ignores the millions of Americans who still can’t access any mental health care at all.The “Stock in America”Imagine you could buy stock in America. The world can in various ways, through buying bonds, but also through buying/investing/trading in U.S. currency, the dollar. America’s security in the world—meaning its reputation as a place where the rules don’t change overnight and the government always pays its debts—has meant that the dollar was where you wanted to be.But lately, as the Associated Press reported Monday, the dollar, stock in America, has been growing weaker.The dollar has fallen about 10% against other major currencies since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. The U.S. Dollar Index, which measures the greenback against other major currencies, logged its steepest six-month drop in more than 50 years in the first half of 2025.Greenback? Why that term.In 1861, the U.S. government was running out of gold and silver to pay for the war. To solve this, Congress passed the Legal Tender Act of 1862, which allowed the Treasury to print paper money that wasn’t backed by physical gold.To prevent counterfeiters from easily faking the bills, the government used a new, chemically stable green ink on the back of the notes. Since the front was printed with black ink and the back was solid green, people simply started calling them “black fronts.” No they didn’t: they called them greenbacks. Why is this more than a historical cul-de-sac, because it’s also a story about stability. Before then, people didn’t really trust paper money unless they could trade it in for a gold coin at a bank. These new greenbacks were the first time the government said, “This is money because we say it is.”Back to the present. The dollar loses value when people worry the dollar might become even less valuable tomorrow. So, they all try to sell their dollars at the same time to trade them for something “safer.” Gold is one option—it’s up 41% over the last year, hitting record highs near $5,000. Or, they buy real assets—like data centers and warehouses—which are expected to see a 16% jump in investment this year as people look for things that have real-world value.The immediate effect of this is that people who buy foreign goods or travel. It costs the store more to buy fruit from Mexico or electronics from Japan. To make up for that, they raise the price for you. If you go to Disneyland Paris, your dollars won’t buy as many crepes or berets as they used to. Everything in that country feels “extra expensive” to you.The winners are domestic manufacturers. Their goods are cheaper and so consumers buy more of them. Hence Trump in 2025: “You make a hell of a lot more money with a weaker dollar.”Why is this happening? Investors value stability above all else, and the current administration’s approach has been anything but stable. Trump’s erratic economic policy—broad tariffs that invite retaliation, public attacks on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, and the massive deficit spending from the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—has made investors more fearful of the dollar’s long term strength. And so they’ve done what economists call “hedging their bets”—moving their money into the Euro, the Swiss Franc, and even the Japanese Yen to avoid being over-exposed to the unpredictable swings of the U.S. government. As the dollar loses its “safe-haven” status, the U.S. has to pay higher interest rates to convince people to keep lending us money, which could eventually push the country toward a fiscal crisis or a period of stagflation—where prices keep rising even as the job market starts to cool.Outliving the moneyMore Americans are having existential nightmares about money. Two-thirds– 67 percent– now worry more about running out of money than they do about death. That’s up ten points from 2022, according to the 2026 Annual Retirement Study from the Allianz Center for the Future of Retirement — Allianz being an insurer that sells the products meant to fix this problem.Gen Xers — in their 40s and 50s, a decade before retirement — are most fearful. Seventy-three percent say they worry more about money than death. Millennials, in their 30s and early 40s, come in at 69 percent. Boomers, the only cohort with a clearer view of their fixed income, worry least at 59 percent. Asked what’s driving the fear, respondents put inflation and market volatility at the top, tied at 57 percent. Healthcare costs follow at 53 percent.The fear translates into action. One in seven retirees has skipped a medical appointment to preserve savings. One in eight has skipped a meal. And these are the better-off Americans. Allianz only surveyed people with at least $50,000 in single income, $75,000 married, or $150,000 in investable assets. The genuinely poor — for whom running out of money is not a fear but a current condition — weren’t asked.The gap between what Americans say they need and what they have is large enough to fall through. Respondents now estimate they need $1.46 million to retire comfortably — about $200,000 more than they estimated a year ago, according to the 2026 Northwestern Mutual Planning & Progress Study. Meanwhile, the median household approaching retirement (ages 55 to 64) has significantly less, with Federal Reserve data suggesting a median closer to $185,000, while many middle-class benchmarks sit even lower.When Congress added Section 401(k) to the tax code in 1978, the provision was meant to be a “side dish”—a way for workers to put a little extra away on top of their pension. The pension did the hard work: it pooled money from thousands of workers, paid out a check every month for life, and the company carried the risk if the math went wrong.The pensions are mostly gone now, and the side dish is the whole meal. Only 15 percent of private sector workers have a pension now, so a worker in her forties is supposed to look at a screen, pick the right funds, ride out every recession without panicking, guess her own life expectancy, plan around a chronic illness she doesn’t have yet, and figure out how to pay for her mother’s nursing home. By herself. All the while trying to keep up with the fashion adventurism taking place at the Met Gala that evening in New York.College graduate overshootWhile we’re in this neighborhood of the role imagination plays in our economy. Today’s college seniors expect to earn about $80,000 a year after graduation, according to a Clever Real Estate survey. The actual average starting salary: $56,153—a gap of nearly $24,000. The disconnect widens with time. Students project they’ll be making $144,889 a decade into their careers; the real midcareer average is $95,521, a 34 percent overshoot.This matters because students borrow against the fantasy number, not the real one. When the first paycheck arrives roughly 30 percent lighter than planned, the debt-to-income math stops working, and the life milestones that were supposed to follow the degree—house, family, savings—slide further out of reach.The gap is widest for graduates in the humanities and narrowest in computer science, which means the students who borrowed the most relative to earning power are also the ones most likely to have miscalculated. The cost of aspiration gets locked in at purchase, but the return gets determined by a market that never agreed to the terms.The phone pouch verdictWe all suffer from cell phone distraction so surely making school kids lock them up during class time would improve things, right?Not exactly. The first large independent study of strict bans, published Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found a mixed set of results. Researchers at Stanford, Duke, Penn, and Michigan looked at more than 40,000 schools between 2019 and 2026, using GPS data, test scores, discipline records, and surveys of teachers and students. The schools they focused on use Yondr — magnetic locking pouches that hold a student’s phone for the school day — and were compared to demographically similar schools with looser policies.The pouches did what they were supposed to do. Cellphone pings from school grounds dropped 30 percent in the first three years. The share of students using phones for non-academic reasons in class fell from 61 percent to 13.But test scores barely budged — the effect was “close to zero,” according to the paper. Attendance didn’t improve. Perceptions of online bullying didn’t improve.And in the first year after strict bans went into place, student suspensions jumped 16 percent. The authors don’t fully know why, but Stanford’s Thomas Dee, one of the researchers, offered a theory: some students were caught violating the bans, others were getting into more peer conflict because they were, in Dee’s phrase, “no longer self-anesthetizing” through their phones.The discipline spike faded over the following years.Two things did improve, both slowly. Teachers reported fewer classroom distractions and higher morale. And students themselves reported a greater sense of personal well-being over time — not in a test-score sense, but in the texture of the school day.Seoul sleep contestThe Iced Americano is the unofficial drink of South Korea’s hustle class, consumed year-round, even in sub-zero temperatures. In a culture where workers routinely put in 54-plus hours a week, the “Ah-Ah” isn’t a treat — it’s a medical necessity. South Korea has one of the highest densities of coffee shops per capita in the world. The average Korean adult drinks over 400 cups a year, nearly double the global average.Why? Because no one sleeps. South Koreans average 7 hours and 41 minutes a night, the lowest among OECD nations — though that sounds like a long sleeping beauty slumber to me.So to encourage their people to kip down, South Korea this week held its third annual Power Nap Contest. Held on the banks of the Han River, the Seoul competition transforms a public park into a mass outdoor bedroom where hundreds of participants — students in sleeping beauty gowns, office workers in koala onesies — compete for the title of Best Sleeper.Winners aren’t chosen by who looks the most asleep. Officials use wearable tech to track heart rate stability. The goal is to reach and maintain a deep parasympathetic state — the body’s “rest and digest” mode — while judges actively try to sabotage it. Distractors include feather tickling and the sound of a buzzing mosquito played directly into your ears. If your heart rate spikes, you’re out.This year’s winner was an 80-year-old retiree, which tells you everything. The younger competitors brought the costumes. The elder brought the one thing the modern Korean economy lacks: a regulated nervous system.Tuesday May 5A war changed its name so it wouldn’t need permission, DOJ puts on the tinfoil hat and heads to Fulton county, Delta cuts the nuts and the oldest Tony nominee in history was honored for playing a woman desperate to remember, which is hard to do when they rename wars that aren’t even two months old.Project Freedom Is Not Epic Fury If you give a military operation a different name, does it make a sound? On Tuesday, the Defense Secretary argued that Operation Project Freedom—the effort to reopen the Strait of Hormuz—is legally distinct from Operation Epic Fury, the strikes on Iran’s nuclear program. Denying Iran nuclear weapons, in this telling, is not the same as protecting the strait, even though protecting the strait became necessary because of the war started to deny Iran nuclear weapons.The logic is politically sound for domestic legal purposes. If the war hasn’t restarted, the president doesn’t need congressional approval under the War Powers Act, which requires it after 60 days—a clock that has now run out.But geopolitically the distinction is fragile, because it assumes the United States can unilaterally decide when a war has ended while its ships are still being engaged by the same adversary in the same theater.As a political matter, the president faces a challenge. His war with Iran has become all about opening the strait of Hormuz which was the state of affairs before the war started. In that case is this the hammer stopping war? Why are you hitting yourself in the head with a hammer? Because it feels good when I stop.And by the end of the day Tuesday the Project was over. President Trump announced that he was pausing US activities in the Strait in the hopes a deal could be secured.Russia strikes backIn advance of its celebration of its world war II history — Victory Day in Moscow — Russia bombed three Ukrainian cities on Tuesday, killing more than 20 people and wounding dozens. Zaporizhzhia took the worst of it: 12 dead, 37 wounded, one of the deadliest single strikes this year.Every Claim Debunked, Every Worker SubpoenaedFulton County gets a lot of love from the conspiracy theorists. Election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss were accused of pulling “suitcases” of illegal ballots from under a table—state investigators confirmed they were standard ballot containers placed in full view of observers; both women won a $148 million defamation judgment against Rudy Giuliani. Thousands of “pristine” counterfeit ballots were supposedly injected into the count—Georgia conducted three separate tallies, including a full hand recount, all affirming the original result. Flash drives and scan files were allegedly missing—Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger verified the digital records and confirmed the certified totals.Every claim investigated, every claim debunked. Now the Justice Department is back. On Monday, a federal grand jury subpoenaed the identities of every worker who staffed the 2020 election in the county—poll workers, election employees, likely thousands of names, addresses, and phone numbers. The Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections moved the same day to quash the subpoena, arguing it would “target and harass the president’s perceived political enemies,” chill future participation in elections, and interfere with Georgia’s authority to administer its own voting.FDA blockedThe FDA blocked publication of several taxpayer-funded studies that found the Covid-19 and shingles vaccines to be safe, the New York Times reported Tuesday. The agency’s own scientists, working with outside data firms, reviewed millions of patient records and found serious side effects to be very rare. One of the suppressed studies examined 7.5 million Medicare beneficiaries and found no statistically significant safety concerns beyond an extremely rare allergic reaction affecting roughly one in a million people.HHS said the studies “drew broad conclusions not supported by the underlying data” — a characterization independent experts at Johns Hopkins and Penn rejected after reviewing the work at the Times’ request. Meanwhile, the administration has applied no such rigor in the other direction: a memo by the former head of the FDA’s vaccine division claiming the Covid vaccine was linked to ten children’s deaths drew widespread coverage before the FDA’s career scientists significantly watered down the claim. Twelve former FDA commissioners published a joint rebuke in the New England Journal of Medicine.Trade deficitAmerican trade is going through another undulation, according to the first U.S. trade snapshot since the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s sweeping tariffs in late February on the grounds that he had exceeded his authority. The president responded by putting a temporary tariff in place —initially a 10 percent tariff, later raised on many products—which, under the law’s 150‑day limit, is scheduled to expire in July unless Congress acts to extend it.In the interim, foreign goods have come back to the U.S. market: imports rose 2.3 percent in March to a record $381.2 billion. At the same time, war with Iran has made U.S. energy more attractive abroad, and the U.S. trade surplus in petroleum hit a record in March. Exports overall grew 2 percent in the month to a record, driven by higher shipments of oil, soybeans and other industrial supplies.Those gains reflect a broader pattern: U.S. raw materials and agricultural staples have become more attractive to buyers trying to secure reliable supplies. The result of all of this: a 4.4 percent rise, as the gap between what the United States imports and what it exports widened despite the record‑breaking export performance.Delta nutsDoes the middle seat get both arm rests? If not, which do they get? Window shade up or down? Recline or not? These matters of airplane etiquette can start a heated argument, settled only by the fact that we can all agree that anyone who listens to entertainment without headphones should be ejected into the white and fluffy.But that’s not what happened on Tuesday. Tuesday, Delta changed its snack plan. On short flights you get nothing. Not even the weak-sauce Express Service water/coffee offerings. Why? Flights under 350 miles leave little time for flight attendants to get up, dish the grub and get seated again, now that Delta is asking them to lock in for longer due to turbulence issues. Plus, carts, ice and snacks make a plane heavier and therefore more expensive now that fuel costs are higher. A fully loaded galley for a narrow-body jet (like an A321 or Boeing 737) can weigh between 500 and 800 pounds.But the airline will add full beverage and snack service for the Delta Comfort and Delta Main cabins on flights of 350 or more miles. The airline said this meant a larger total number of flights would ultimately have beverage and snack service.One thing I don’t get. while the economy cabin loses the “weak-sauce” snacks, the First Class cabin on these exact same flights still gets full beverage service—meaning the weight/safety argument only applies to the back of the bus.Character.AI won’t see you nowPennsylvania became the first state to sue an AI company for practicing medicine without a license. Governor Josh Shapiro’s administration filed suit Tuesday against Character.AI after a state investigator created an account and, within minutes, was in conversation with a bot named “Emilie” who described herself as a psychiatrist, claimed a medical degree from Imperial College London, offered to assess whether medication might help, and — when asked — produced a Pennsylvania medical license number. The number was fake. Emilie had logged roughly 45,500 conversations with real users. Character.AI said its bots are fictional and clearly labeled as such. The state’s position is simpler: Pennsylvania law doesn’t care whether the entity claiming to be a licensed doctor is a person or a program. It just can’t do that.Mexico City is sinkingThe Angel of Independence in Mexico City, rises above the busy city streets in testament to the independence of the nation and the angel is rising……because Mexico City is sinking.The golden monument has needed 14 steps added to its base as the ground beneath it sinks.Think of the city sitting on a water-soaked sponge. When the aquifer is pumped, the water that once filled the microscopic spaces between soil particles is removed. The weight of the city then crushes those empty spaces, causing the ground to collapse inward.Unlike some aquifers that can be “recharged” during a wet season, this clay structure is being permanently deformed. Once the “sponge” is crushed, it can never hold that volume of water again, meaning the sinking is largely permanent.Sewer lines, which rely on gravity to move waste out of the valley, are now sloping in the wrong direction. The city has to rely on massive, high-energy pumping stations just to keep sewage from flowing backward into homes, as delightful as that might be.Water pipes are also rupturing. It is estimated that nearly 40% of the city’s water is lost to leaks caused by the ground shifting from withdrawing water.Because the local aquifer is failing and the ground is collapsing, the city must pump water from the Cutzamala (koots-ah-mell-uh) River system—nearly 1,100 vertical meters uphill and across mountains—making it one of the most energy-intensive water systems on Earth.Also sinking in Mexico City? The American nightclub goers reputation. A nightclub in Mexico City’s Roma Norte has implemented a $300 cover charge for U.S. citizens. If you’re from another country, it’s $20 bucks. The club owner, Federico Crespo, stated the fee is a political response to years of insults against Mexico by Donald Trump and a protest against the “gentrification and touristification” of Mexico City by American remote workers and tourists.China goes boomAn explosion at a fireworks factory in China’s Hunan province killed 21 people and injured 61, according to state media. People living within 3km of the blast were evacuated; two nearby gunpowder factories remained a risk, authorities said. President Xi Jinping said there would be a full investigation and that those responsible for the disaster would be held to account.-China produces roughly 90% of the world’s fireworks, supplying displays from small-town celebrations to major national events.-Much of the world’s fireworks are produced in a handful of Chinese provinces, where dense clusters of factories mean that when accidents happen, the risks can spread quickly.Fireworks trace back more than a thousand years to Chinese alchemists searching for immortality, who instead discovered gunpowder… which is usually the way these things go in life.Toxic bossesHave you ever had a toxic boss? What does that term mean to you? Okay, now that you’ve had a think, walk with me. Harris Poll’s Thought Leadership Practice just conducted its Toxic Boss survey, which included online responses from 1,334 employed U.S. adults. The results came out Tuesday:A staggering six out of 10 workers said they currently have a toxic boss. Meanwhile, 70% say they’ve had a toxic boss at some point in their career. This rises to 75% for LGBTQIA+ workers.It defined a toxic boss as someone who “exhibits harmful workplace behaviors, including unfair preferential treatment, lack of recognition, blame-shifting, unnecessary micromanagement, unreasonable expectations, being unapproachable, taking credit for others’ ideas, acting unprofessionally, or discriminating against employees based on personal characteristics.”Nearly half of workers say they have experienced increased stress, burnout, or a decline in mental health due to a toxic boss, while roughly one-third say they have lost a financial reward or seen their promotion chances reduced.The majority of workers (66%) say they’ve responded to toxic bosses by wearing a hazmat suit until they got the message. But when that didn’t work, they genuinely tried to meet their demands — working on weekends and on days off. Not to editorialize, but this kind of response is only going to encourage the toxic boss. Two-thirds of workers also say they’ve changed jobs because of a toxic job. But either way, workers are seeking mental health care to cope with how they feel about the situation. More than half (53%) have gone to therapy over their toxic boss.June SquibbOn Tuesday, June Squibb became the oldest Tony’s nominee in history at age 96! She’s nominated for best actress in a featured role in a play for Marjorie Prime, in which she plays the title character, an elderly woman battling dementia and memory loss, who uses an AI-generated “Prime” of her late husband, Walter, to help preserve and revisit memories from their life together.Wednesday May 6The administration tries to get Iran on the same one page. Hoosier Republicans find out what happens when you don’t stick to the script, which now includes a line item for a billion dollar ballroom. But even when it’s written down, the Commerce Secretary doesn’t know why he visited Epstein island, the only thing more unpopular than presidential Jesus cosplay. Anti Jewish violence is up and a Virginia Dem may go down. A busy day of news which Ted Turner knew before it happened.Iran still cookingWednesday was another day with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake in the Iran war. On the one hand, the president heralded “Great Progress” toward a final diplomatic resolution. Reports suggest the U.S. and Iran are nearing a one-page memorandum of understanding (MoU) intended to serve as a bridge to a permanent treaty. Key terms include the U.S. ending its naval blockade of Iranian ports and the potential release of frozen assets. In return, Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz to all commercial traffic for at least 60 days and accept a temporary freeze on uranium enrichment.It all sounded very fuzzy, particularly when Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking on NPR’s First Up, described the difficulty of pinning down the Iranian delegation. Rubio noted that while the broad strokes are being discussed, the technical specifics remain elusive. He told host Leila Fadel: “This is highly complex, and highly technical, but we have to have a diplomatic solution that is very clear... the Iranians have to agree about what they are going to put on paper, and so far we’re finding they’re much better at talking in the hallways than they are at committing to a signature.”Simultaneously, the President warned that if a deal is not reached within the next 48 hours, the U.S. will launch a new wave of bombing at a “much higher level and intensity” than seen during the initial “Operation Epic Fury” in February. If you feel like we’ve been here before, we have—the cycle of “maximum pressure” and eleventh-hour diplomacy has become the hallmark of this conflict. Meanwhile, there was still skirmishing in the area:A U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet from the USS Abraham Lincoln fired on and disabled the rudder of the Iranian-flagged tanker M/T Hasna in the Gulf of Oman after it reportedly ignored orders to turn back.The UAE Ministry of Defense reported intercepting a barrage of Iranian missiles and drones for the second consecutive day, including an engagement that saw 15 missiles and four drones downed by Emirati air defenses near the Fujairah Oil Terminal.This urgent focus on ending enrichment and securing stockpiles makes it clear that the nuclear program was not “obliterated” in the way the President and Secretary of Defense initially claimed. In June 2025, Secretary Pete Hegseth stated: “Based on everything we have seen—and I’ve seen it all—our bombing campaign obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons.” While the large-scale industrial ability to make bombs was indeed leveled, the underlying knowledge and the critical uranium stockpiles proved un-bombable.The administration marketed the initial attacks as a “Total Kitchen Closure” for health violations. In reality, the building was demolished, but the chefs saved the starter dough and the recipes; they are currently sitting in the basement waiting for the inspectors to leave so they can start a “pop-up” shop.The President’s characterization suggested Iran had been bombed back to the glass beads and abacus stage, but his 48-hour ultimatum is an admission that the “chefs” are still very much in business.In other marketing news. The Washington Post reported that its analysis of Iranian attacks showed that Iran has hit far more U.S. military assets than reported, satellite images show - Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft and key radar, communications and air defense equipment. The amount of destruction is far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government or previously reported.Experts who reviewed The Post’s analysis said the damage at the sites suggested that the U.S. military had underestimated Iran’s targeting abilities, not adapted sufficiently to modern drone warfare and left some bases under-protected.K-shaped at the pumpThe New York Fed looked at how gas prices have affected Americans and like so much of what we’ve seen, there is a k shape to it.Higher-income households are spending more on gas but buying the same amount — they don’t notice. Lower-income households are also spending more but buying less — they drive less, carpool, take the bus. Same price spike, two different economies.The K shape is life for the wealthy going up and life for the rest going down. In case you were trying to get your head around the alphabet metaphor.The numbers from March: households earning under $40,000 increased gas spending by 12 percent but cut actual consumption by 7 percent. Households earning above $125,000 increased spending by 19 percent and cut consumption by 1 percent.The pattern matches 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent energy prices to similar levels — except the Fed researchers note the gap in consumption is now quantitatively larger. And the underlying economy is weaker. In 2022, wage growth among rank-and-file workers was strong enough that the Fed was actively trying to slow it down. Now Bank of America reports the widest wage gap since 2015: higher-income households seeing 5.6 percent annual wage growth, lower- and middle-income households getting 1 to 2 percent. The cushion that existed last time isn’t there.Indiana muscleDonald Trump may have a record high disapproval rating in the general electorate according to polls, but within his own party he still has plenty of power. In primaries in Indiana, Trump-backed candidates replaced incumbents in five of seven state Senate races by wide margins. One race is still too close to call.For a little context, according to Elliot Morris of Strength in Numbers, the incumbent re-election rate is typically 95% or higher.The trouncing was a bit of payback from the president who disapproved of Indiana Republicans who stood against his plan to redraw congressional maps to keep hold of the U.S. House of Representatives ahead of the 2026 midterms, just one of the states in what has become a nationwide tit for tat as the two parties seek advantage but has thus far fought to roughly a draw. The president’s allies spent millions in the usually sleepy races.One of the great shifts in American politics over the last 50 years has been the power of the party primary. The most die-hard members of a party maintain discipline by punishing members who stray from party orthodoxy. This works to chill behavior before punishment is even necessary.Lawmakers will not stand up against their party or president for fear of losing in a primary or even facing a challenger who will cause them to spend millions. This also explains why lawmakers will push for ballroom funding and not say boo about usurpation of Congressional power whether it’s for tariffs or the war in Iran.That this fight requiring orthodoxy punishment took place over gerrymandering only exacerbates the purity based – rather than lawmaker’s conscience based– move in American politics. Both parties are working to build safe districts where their party is protected which means the only competition of ideas will be on either end of the political spectrum.This creates a structure that rewards purity over compromise so that when they get to Washington these lawmakers are structurally built not to engage in the central requirement of lawmaking: compromise.Lutnick testifiesCommerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met behind closed doors yesterday with the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. The billionaire New York financier has become a primary symbol of the administration’s ongoing difficulties surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein records. In a series of instances, Lutnick’s previous claims about his proximity to Epstein have been proven untrue. Specifically, while he previously maintained he had no contact with Epstein after 2005, newly released files include emails and calendar entries showing professional and social correspondence well into 2011 and 2012, including a documented visit to Epstein’s private island that Lutnick had not disclosed during his confirmation process.The accounts of what Lutnick said behind closed doors largely mirror the partisanship of the members of Congress providing them, rendering the testimony’s ultimate value unclear.However, the Secretary’s situation embodies a larger structural problem for the administration. Although forced by law to disclose all relevant information, the Department of Justice has been accused of failing to fully comply. Ultimately, the DOJ released millions of pages but withheld significant tranches of data on national security and privacy grounds—rationales that the Epstein Files Transparency Act expressly sought to limit or forbid in the interest of full public disclosure.The document release also suffered a “double botch”: while some powerful figures remained shielded by redactions, the release disclosed the identities of several of Epstein’s victims, leading to a fresh wave of legal and ethical criticism.Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie are now leading a bipartisan push to force the DOJ to allow congressional investigators to see the unredacted files. While the public files remain heavily obscured—ostensibly to protect those victims—Khanna and Massie are demanding the House Oversight Committee receive full, unredacted access. They argue that the administration is using “privacy” as a convenient shield to hide the names of high-profile political and financial figures who appear in the records.Also Wednesday, a federal judge unsealed a 2019 suicide note from Epstein’s first attempt in which he wrote investigators had “FOUND NOTHING,” written in all capital letters, which might be interpreted as a boast of innocence or which, given all we now know, represents the last act of delusion and lying from a monster.One of the reasons we know that Epstein was among the worst examples of human behavior is because of the dogged, lonely work of Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown, whose 2017–2018 investigation first cracked open the Epstein network. The Pulitzer board awarded her a special citation Monday.The Easy ScenarioWhat’s your reaction when you hear that a deadly virus has killed three on a cruise ship? Don’t go on a cruise ship, sure, but do you think the authorities have been alerted and are on the case? Surely they are. We’re only a few years from a global pandemic.And yet, there is deep murkiness.Six Americans who left a hantavirus-stricken cruise ship on April 24 are back in the country and being monitored by three states. None have shown symptoms. The public learned this Wednesday not from the CDC or the State Department but from MedPage Today, a medical trade publication. The CDC issued its first statement about the outbreak more than four hours later — a single sentence about “technical assistance” that did not mention the returned Americans. The agency had only stood up a response team the day before, nearly a month after the first passenger died. The New York Times reports that public health experts say the virus itself is not the worry — hantavirus spreads rarely, and only through sustained close contact.What concerns them is what the response reveals: an administration that gutted CDC staffing, withdrew from the World Health Organization, and eliminated pandemic preparedness offices is now struggling to manage an outbreak that one former biosecurity official called “a relatively easy scenario.” The WHO’s expert group on pandemic-potential viruses meets Monday to discuss the hantavirus findings. It does not include anyone from the CDC.White House metaphorIf you were looking for a metaphor for the Trump presidency it would have to include these elements: Demolish the inherited structure. Build something far bigger than the occasion requires. Promise someone else will pay for it. When they don’t, redefine the expense as an emergency. If there’s fallout let others deal with it even if it’s toxic and dare anyone to complain. Replace the people who object. And when the courts intervene, keep digging — underground, where the judge’s order doesn’t reach.Speaking of the White House ballroom, though its proposed design will be large enough to see from space, it snuck into the $70 billion Republican reconciliation bill on little cat feet. The bill funds a variety of measures — most notably Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border patrol through the end of President Trump’s term — but, we learned Wednesday, tucked inside is $1 billion proposed by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa for security work related to Mr. Trump’s East Wing renovation. The measure does not mention the president’s proposed new ballroom, which is being challenged in court, but Mr. Trump has insisted that a main reason for the project is to enhance security.Trump last November: “And by the way, no government funds. These are all private individuals that put up a lot of money to build the ballroom. Not one penny is being used from the federal government.”Religion on the sleeveThe Washington Post poll also shows that Americans are deeply uncomfortable with recent religion-related statements. Eighty-seven percent of Americans have a negative view of Trump’s social media post appearing to depict himself as Jesus. Sixty-nine percent dislike Hegseth praying at the Pentagon for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” The root of this disappointment is that the Christian religion is formed around Jesus, who preached mercy and peace throughout his life and calls on his followers to follow both. So the Hegseth prayer is a little like asking a vegan chef to make steak tartar. More figures in footnote.Antisemitic violenceAnti-Jewish assaults in the U.S. hit their highest level since 1979, the ADL reported Wednesday. Physical attacks rose to 203, up from 196 in 2024, with 32 involving deadly weapons (up from 23). Three people were killed—the first antisemitic murders in the U.S. since 2019. Attacks included a shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C., a Molotov cocktail at a Colorado rally for Israeli hostages, a stabbing in New York, and a firebombing of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence while his family was inside. Overall antisemitic incidents fell 33% to 6,274—still the third-highest year on record—but the decline in harassment and vandalism didn’t extend to violence.FBI VA raidFBI agents on Wednesday served more than ten search warrants in a criminal investigation targeting L. Louise Lucas, the Democratic president pro tempore of the Virginia State Senate, who has served more than 30 years. Agents searched her office and a neighboring cannabis dispensary. The investigation, which dates back to the Biden administration, examines possible corruption and bribery related to marijuana dispensary businesses. Two people familiar with the case described it as financial in nature.Lucas is not a minor figure in state politics. She played a central role in Virginia’s recent congressional redistricting, championing maps that gave Democrats the advantage in four seats. When Texas Sen. Ted Cruz called the maps a Democratic gerrymander, Lucas responded on X in February: “You all started it and we f*****g finished it.”Ted Turner, 87Brian Stelter, of CNN, wrote about a day in the early history of CNN when a janitor walked right up to anchor Bernard Shaw’s desk and emptied his wastebasket while Shaw was on the air. The janitor didn’t realize he was on television. Nobody did. That was the thing about CNN in the beginning — nobody entirely believed it was real.We learned this week that CNN’s founder, Ted Turner, died at age 87. I found myself groping into the past to explain just how big a change CNN represented in the world, and the trouble is this: we all live inside the change now.Before June 1, 1980, when Turner launched CNN, the entire country’s appetite for televised news was supposed to fit inside three half-hour broadcasts — one each on ABC, NBC, and CBS. Ninety minutes a day. That was it. That was the window through which Americans watched the world.Turner said: that’s not how any of this works. Who wants news at 2pm and 2am, the skeptics asked. Would there even be enough news to fill 24 hours? Whether there’s enough news to fill 24 hours is, of course, a question still up for grabs every time you see a chyron that says BREAKING NEWS about a story that has been breaking for the last several days with no new developments.But what Turner grasped was that the demand wasn’t for more news — it was for access to the world as it unfolded. The old format treated reality as something that could be carved into tidy, equal-sized portions and served once a day at dinnertime. Life doesn’t work that way. Turner built a format that matched the mess.Not to throw any shade on Stack the Week, the product toward which you are inclining your ear presently, which is vital to all right-thinking Americans and people of good conscience.Reporters Without BordersReporters Without Borders published its annual World Press Freedom Index this week, and the United States fell seven places to 64th out of 180 countries — its lowest ranking in the index’s 25-year history. In 2002, when the index launched, the U.S. sat at 17th. It now ranks between Botswana and Panama.RSF cited the administration’s detention and deportation of journalists, politically motivated investigations targeting specific reporters and outlets, defunding of public broadcasters including NPR and PBS, the gutting of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and political interference in media ownership. But RSF’s North America director, Clayton Weimers, cautioned against blaming the decline entirely on Trump. “We have structural deficiencies that are imperiling the future of press freedom in this country,” he said — pointing to the ongoing consolidation of media ownership, the collapse of local newsrooms, and a broader political culture in which attacking reporters has become bipartisan sport. Trump, in his telling, is “pouring gasoline on the fire.” The fire was already burning. Globally, the picture is worse. For the first time in the index’s history, more than half of all countries fall into the “difficult” or “very serious” categories. Only one in a hundred people on earth now lives in a country with what RSF considers a healthy, diverse media landscape. In 2002, it was one in five.Thursday May 7Project Freedom wasn’t free, washers are getting costly and so is living, for low income Americans. Rubio won’t write with the Pope’s pen. The Chief Justice says the court isn’t political and Tennessee Republicans say hold my beer. Texas is drowning in short-term thinking. Iranians won’t learn any of this from the internet.Project Freedom's shelf lifeOn Thursday we learned why the U.S. military operation “Project Freedom” was not a very long project. After two days it could not survive the diplomatic wall it had hit. Reports, primarily from NBC, indicate that Saudi Arabia was angered by the Trump administration’s decision to announce the blockade-breaking effort via social media without prior consultation, leading the Kingdom to suspend U.S. access to critical airspace and the Prince Sultan Airbase. This lack of coordination from a highly improvisational president has not only forced a pause in the operation—leaving U.S. naval assets without their necessary land-based “defensive umbrella”—but has also created friction with a key ally who remains focused on Pakistani-led diplomatic negotiations to end the 60-day conflict.The UN’s International Maritime Organization reported that approximately 1,500 ships and 20,000 crew members remain trapped in the Gulf due to the ongoing Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.President Trump struck a public note of optimism, telling reporters a deal was “very possible” after “very good talks.” The President claimed that there was an agreement for Iran to abandon nuclear ambitions.However, Iranian officials downplayed these reports, calling the U.S. proposal an “American wish list” rather than a reality. If you feel like we’ve been here before, we have. It’s a signature move for the president to declare that the other side has agreed to terms it hasn’t as a way of trying to assert leverage. It hasn’t worked so far.Iranians can’t follow this bounding ball with the intensity of you Stack Week listeners because on Thursday Iran’s nationwide internet blackout entered its 69th day.That’s the longest and most severe in the country’s history. But “blackout” doesn’t mean no tiktok videos. Ordinary Iranians have zero access to the global internet — no Google, no WhatsApp, no Wikipedia. Military-grade jammers block Starlink signals. Authorities conduct house-to-house searches in Tehran to seize satellite dishes. What remains is the National Information Network — a controlled, domestic-only intranet where citizens can access state-run news and banking apps, but only with government-validated IDs, and only under surveillance.Global internet access still exists for a select few: security forces, government officials, and businesses willing to pay for state-issued “Internet Pro” packages.A new class of digital refugees — professionals who need a working connection to earn a living — has begun relocating to Turkey and Armenia just to get online. Families cannot reach relatives abroad. Students are severed from the global web. The blackout began as a tool for suppressing protest. It has become something else: a permanent restructuring of Iranian society around state-controlled digital isolation.The Israeli military said on Thursday that it had killed a senior Hezbollah commander in a strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs a day earlier, the first attack near the Lebanese capital since a U.S.-mediated cease-fire took effect last month.And Thursday the son of Hamas’ chief negotiator in U.S.-mediated talks over Gaza’s future died, the results of an Israeli airstrike, the day before. Leaders of the militant group are holding talks in Cairo regarding their truce with Israel.Jonathan PollardJonathan Pollard, an American who in 1985 sold suitcases of top-secret U.S. intelligence to Israel — reconnaissance photos, the NSA’s ten-volume manual on how the country gathers signal intelligence, the names of thousands of people who had cooperated with American agencies — announced this week that he’s running for the Israeli parliament. Pollard served 30 years in federal prison, moved to Israel in 2020, and is now campaigning on a platform that includes annexing Gaza, forcibly removing its entire Palestinian population, and repopulating the territory with Israelis.Whirlpool and IranWhile the war in Iran seems like a whirlpool of confusion, for Whirlpool the swirl is not just metaphorical. (This lede brought to you by your Dad). The domestic manufacturer said in its earnings report Thursday, the disruptions from Iran are creating a “recession level industry decline.”Big-ticket items like washers, dryers, and kitchen appliances are often the first purchases consumers postpone during periods of uncertainty. The war caused consumer confidence to hit record lows in April, leading to a sharp pullback in spending on durable goods.Analysts at JPMorgan noted that Whirlpool is facing significant raw material inflation for metals like aluminum, which is critical for many appliance components, energy can account for up to 40% of production costs. When energy prices double, raw material prices follow almost immediately. Aluminum is often referred to by industry insiders as “congealed electricity” because the smelting process requires an immense, constant flow of electrical current to break the bond between aluminum and oxygen.Consumers “running out of money”Corporate earnings calls this week became a roll call of consumer distress. Kraft Heinz CEO Steve Cahillane said lower-income Americans are “literally running out of money at the end of the month,” dipping into savings to cover basics. McDonald’s reported “heightened anxiety” among its customers, with gas prices hitting low-income diners hardest. Dine Brands, which owns Applebee’s and IHOP, said its most price-sensitive guests are staying home — a pullback it isn’t seeing at higher income levels.Warby Parker flagged younger shoppers squeezed by unemployment and student debt. The pattern is the same K-shape visible at the gas pump: one economy for people who don’t check the price, another for people who can’t stop checking it.Rubio and the PopeThe Secretary of State visited me and all I got was this lousy football. The Pope didn’t say that and because he believes in Christian charity and is an all around grateful guy, he was no doubt thrilled to get the glass football with the Department of State seal. A bottle of the bourbon that FBI director Kash Patel gives with his name etched in it, that we learned about from The Atlantic this week, would certainly have been inappropriate.In return, the Pope prayed for the eternal rest of Rubio’s soul, which is nice. And he gave him a pen made from olive wood. He noted that an olive branch is the symbol of peace.As for the Director of the FBI, his behavior was more monastic this week, according to Carol Loenig and Ken Dilanian of MS Now. Patel walled himself off from some senior bureau leaders this week after multiple media reports raised red flags about his leadership, according to three people familiar with his recent actions. Patel has also ordered the polygraphing of more than two dozen former and current members of his security detail, as well as other staff, and has been described as being in panic mode to save his job and find leakers among his team, according to two people briefed on the development.The Longest Serving and the Least PoliticalClarence Thomas became the second longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history on Thursday. The first baby boomer on the Supreme Court is surpassed only by liberal justice William O. Douglas, who wrote the opinion for Griswold v. Connecticut protecting the right to contraception and joined the majority in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional.Thomas would overtake Douglas in 2028 if he remains on the court — and there’s no sign he plans to retire anytime soon.Supreme Court justices are not “political actors,” Chief Justice John Roberts said, speaking before a conference of judges and lawyers from the 3rd U.S. Circuit in Pennsylvania. “I think, at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, we’re saying we think this is how things should be, as opposed to what the law provides,” he said. “I think they view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.”Memphis, Split Three WaysIn the wake of last week’s Supreme Court decision essentially voiding the Voting Rights Act — for which Roberts voted — the Tennessee Republican legislature moved to remove the one minority district in the state’s congressional delegation. By splitting the 9th district, which represents a predominantly Black portion of the state anchored in Memphis, into three districts, the majority power in the state makes it likely that the congressional delegation will have nine Republicans and zero Democrats.Steve Cohen, the Democrat who holds the seat, has said he’ll sue. And Tennessee had to repeal its own ban on mid-decade redistricting before it could pass the map — all in the same special session.Tariffs 0-5The U.S. Court of International Trade ruled 2-1 Thursday that President Trump’s 10 percent global tariff is illegal — the fifth consecutive court loss for the president’s tariff agenda in his second term. Trump imposed the tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 as a fallback after the Supreme Court struck down his broader IEEPA tariffs in February. Section 122 allows a president to impose tariffs up to 15 percent for 150 days, but only in response to “large and serious balance-of-payments deficits.”The court found the administration had no such deficit — it had simply relabeled the trade deficit, which is a different thing. The judges noted that accepting the government’s expansive reading would give the president virtually unlimited tariff power, a constitutional problem.The tariffs remain in effect for importers who haven’t sued and were set to expire in July anyway unless Congress extended them, but the ruling strips the administration of its last functioning legal basis for broad unilateral tariffs. The administration is expected to appeal.FOOTNOTE: The trade deficit measures just goods and services—what the U.S. buys from abroad minus what it sells. The balance of payments is the full ledger: it includes that trade deficit but also tracks investment flows, financial transfers, and other capital moving in and out of the country. Why does the distinction matter? Because a country can run a big trade deficit and still be financially healthy if foreign money is pouring in as investment—which is exactly what happens with the U.S. The trade deficit alone makes it look like America is losing; the balance of payments shows that foreigners are also buying U.S. Treasury bonds, real estate, and companies, which means dollars flow back in. The trade deficit is the scoreboard politicians yell about; the balance of payments is the actual financial picture.Since 1973:Over nearly 60 years, Texas lawmakers rejected more than five dozen bills that would have restricted construction in flood-prone areas, ProPublica and the Texas Tribune found. The majority of the 137 people who died in last July’s Hill Country flood were staying in places the federal government had already identified as dangerous — places where the state had a chance to ban building and chose not to.The first such bill came in 1973, after a deadly flood in the same region. It would have prohibited all structures for human use in the most dangerous flood zones. A lawmaker gutted it before the first hearing.A 1989 bill to ban youth camps near waterways died too; 28 children, counselors, and a camp director died on July 4 in exactly the locations it would have covered.Texas has more buildings in flood-prone areas than any state except Florida, yet trails at least 29 states — including Florida — in requiring those buildings to be elevated.After the deadliest flood in the state’s modern history, the legislature banned youth camps from flood zones and did nothing else. More than a hundred Kerr County residents have already received permits to rebuild in the same areas. The pattern is not unique to Texas or to floods: lawmakers decline to regulate because the cost of prevention is visible and immediate while the cost of inaction is diffuse and future — until it isn’t, at which point the disaster is called unforeseeable, the dead are mourned, and the cycle restarts.Friday, May 8Iran trifleWas the war on or off? It depends what the meaning of war is.The plain meaning of words has always been up for grabs in the Trump years, mercury running all over the stainless steel table refusing to sit still.Sorry, I’ve been reading Ross MacDonald this morning and I’m a little dramatic.The war wasn’t a war, the firing didn’t undo the cease-fire. Overnight the US and Iran had exchanged missiles. U.S. Central Command said that “unprovoked Iranian attacks” on three American destroyers had involved missiles, drones and small boats. In response, the U.S. military said it had “targeted Iranian military facilities responsible for attacking U.S. forces,” including missile and drone launch sites. Senior Iranian military officials said the U.S. “crossed the point of no return” with the attacks and they vowed to respond.Nevertheless, when the day broke the president declared that the ceasefire had not been broken by all of this firing. A ‘trifle,” he called it. Sure, from the guy who called the war he started an “excursion.” From threatening an entire civilization to hurrying to circle bubble wrap around explosions to keep the peace, president Trump has been on a journey with this war.Here’s one way to look at events. And I put it that way because so much of this war is opaque, a lot of our views should be provisional.The US and Iran are discussing a peace proposal. It has these elements: the two sides would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and cease hostilities for 30 days as they negotiate a comprehensive deal.The economic strain is heavy on Iran. They are militarily out-gunned too. But they’re not as bloodied as the administration claims, they’ve successfully seized the Strait and are using it as leverage and they might be able to limp along for longer than president Trump can stand.The Washington Post reported that a confidential CIA assessment delivered to the White House this week concludes that Iran can survive the U.S. naval blockade for three to four months — and possibly longer — before facing severe economic hardship, undercutting the administration’s public insistence that Tehran is desperate to deal.The assessment also found that Iran retains roughly 75 percent of its prewar mobile launchers and 70 percent of its missile stockpiles, has reopened nearly all of its underground storage facilities, and has even assembled new missiles from components that were near completion when the war began.The president told reporters Wednesday that Iran’s missiles were “mostly decimated” and that perhaps 18 or 19 percent remained — a figure sharply at odds with his own intelligence community’s estimate.Iran is also cushioning the blockade’s impact by storing oil aboard idle tankers and may be moving some crude overland by rail through Central Asia.One U.S. official familiar with the analysis said Iran’s capacity to endure is likely even greater than the CIA projects, noting that the regime’s leadership has grown more radical and more confident it can outlast American political will. A former head of the Iran branch in Israeli military intelligence warned that a war launched to topple the regime and dismantle its nuclear and missile programs may instead leave Iran stronger — with sanctions relief, significant remaining arsenals, and uranium enrichment still on its own soil.Israel arrested four people — one civilian and three soldiers — accused of spying for Iran since they were minors. The Shin Bet said the suspects had long-term contact with Iranian intelligence and carried out missions on its behalf, including documenting train stations, shopping centers, security cameras, and an Air Force technical school where some of them had studied.April jobs upA good jobs report in April. The economy added 115,000 jobs, up about twice what economists expected. There were revisions up and down, but the last three months have averaged 48,000 jobs.Health care jobs were up, driven by the demographics of boomers aging, spending more on healthcare and creating more need for people who work in that industry.Employment in manufacturing declined slightly, after posting a surprise gain in March. The centerpiece of the Trump economic agenda has been to rewrite global trade in order to build manufacturing jobs. This has not happened. Overall manufacturing employment has dropped 100,000 jobs since Trump’s second term began, even after brief monthly upticks.The steady but unremarkable pace of the job market reflects two forces pulling in the same direction. On the supply side, the administration’s immigration crackdown has shrunk the available workforce just as the population ages out of it. On the demand side, employers have frozen in place — not expanding, not cutting — paralyzed by tariff uncertainty and the cost of borrowing.The result is a labor market running on idle: tolerable if you already have a job, punishing if you’re looking for one. Recent college graduates are feeling it worst, entering what by several measures is the weakest hiring environment they’ve faced in years.According to the New York Times: “Wages accelerated slightly on an annual basis, growing 3.6 percent from a year ago. The pace of average hourly earnings growth has been slowing gradually, and is getting uncomfortably close to the rate of inflation — when those two lines cross, workers in the aggregate are seeing their earnings decline in real terms.”Eggs in one market basketThe stock market is never a good measure of broad economic health. It certainly doesn’t tell us how the average American is doing. At this point the stock market is an even less useful measure of what’s going on.Before the war, something encouraging was happening in the stock market. The Equal Weight version of the S&P 500 — which treats all 500 companies the same rather than letting a handful of trillion-dollar tech giants dominate the index — was outperforming the headline number.That mattered because when the equal-weight index leads, it means the gains are spreading: a regional bank in the Midwest is healthy enough to lend, a construction firm in the South has enough orders to hire.The recovery was moving off the screen and onto the street. The war killed that. According to the Financial Times, Wall Street’s rebound since late March has been driven by the smallest number of stocks on record. UBS found that only 42 stocks are materially contributing to the index’s performance — far below the roughly 100 that has been typical in recent decades.Just five tech companies — Alphabet, Nvidia, Amazon, Broadcom, and Apple — account for more than half the gains.The equal-weight index, which was leading before the conflict, now trails. The energy shock from the Iran war crushed earnings in the sectors that had been broadening the rally — consumer goods, materials, industrials — while Big Tech’s earnings grew 40 percent in the first quarter. As one strategist at Citi put it, while the Strait of Hormuz is closed, broad-based earnings growth is off the table.Virginia’s new old linesThe Virginia Supreme Court struck down the congressional redistricting that voters approved last month, ruling 4-3 that Democratic legislators botched the procedural steps required to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot. The decision restores the 2024 map and kills what would have been Democrats’ biggest counter in the nationwide gerrymandering fight Trump set off last year. Under the now-voided map, Democrats stood to flip four Republican-held House seats; without it, Republicans hold a clear advantage in the redistricting wars heading into November, with new maps already locked in or underway in Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama—several of them made possible by last week’s Supreme Court decision gutting much of the Voting Rights Act.School enrollment dropsAmerica’s record-low birth rate is now showing up in the classroom. Public school enrollment has fallen in 30 states since the mid-2010s, hitting big urban districts like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York—but suburban and smaller districts are shrinking just as fast.Housing costs are pushing families out of cities, the immigration crackdown has cut off a stream of new students that had been propping up enrollment nationwide, and school choice—charters, homeschooling, virtual options—is siphoning off others.But the dominant driver is demographic: the U.S. fertility rate peaked in 2007 and has dropped 24 percent since. Because school funding is tied to headcount, fewer students means less money, which means districts across the country are now staring at program cuts and school closures.Guns in the mailHandguns could soon travel through the U.S. mail for the first time in nearly a century. Congress banned the practice in 1927 to curb crime; the Trump Justice Department now calls that ban unconstitutional, arguing the Second Amendment requires the postal service to ship firearms to law-abiding citizens. Last month USPS proposed a rule allowing anyone—not just licensed dealers—to mail concealable weapons like pistols and revolvers. Two dozen Democratic attorneys general sent a letter opposing the change this week. Public comments closed Monday; a final rule could follow.Pentagon looks upThe Pentagon has started releasing UFO files, posting 162 documents—old State Department cables, FBI records, NASA transcripts—on a new retro-styled website and promising more on a rolling basis. The effort spans the White House, the director of national intelligence, the Energy Department, NASA, and the FBI. The administration framed it as a break from predecessors, saying Trump is providing “maximum transparency” and that the public “can ultimately make up their own minds.” Among the files: a report from a drone pilot who says an object shone a bright light in the sky and vanished.The administration’s commitment to maximum transparency has not yet extended to the financial dealings of the president, his Cabinet, or their families, where a number of unidentified anomalous phenomena also await disclosure.Thanks MomSunday is Mother’s Day. So thank you to all you mothers out there. And a particular prize for any mother who has listened this long, a chore possibly rivaling many of the most exhausting challenges of raising a human. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for April 27th through May First.An assassination deconstructed. The Defense Secretary IDs the real enemy. The Fed can’t agree, but conservatives on the Supreme Court can. The Chancellor sees humiliation in Iran, the king brings the jokes to Congress, the FCC brings jokes to court and the DOJ meme police go after James Comey. Five million Americans 86 their health insurance. See what I did there? Well, the monks would have laughed.Let’s take it day by day.Monday, April 27Assassination AttemptMonday, the details firmed up about the nearly four seconds in the Washington Hilton Concourse Level when a shooter rushed headlong down a hallway into a group of at least nine security officials one floor above where President Trump was having dinner. The assailant fired one shot from a 12-gauge shotgun in the direction of the staircase leading down to the ballroom, hitting a Secret Service officer in his bulletproof vest, which stopped the round. In 1.2 seconds the officers fired six rounds in return, according to the Washington Post. The assailant fell, though he was not hit. He was taken into custody unharmed.The clue that resolved who fired first came from the dust in the ceiling lights. A frame-by-frame analysis released by the FBI showed dust resting in two overhead lights had been disturbed and was drifting downward in the frame after the suspect raised his shotgun — and before any officer returned fire. The most likely explanation is the muzzle blast from his weapon. Prosecutors recovered one spent shell from the shotgun. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said there was “no evidence the shooting was the result of friendly fire.” The shooter’s public defenders argued the video shows no muzzle flash. The charges filed Monday included attempted assassination and firing a weapon, but not shooting a federal officer — a gap that may close as the forensic case develops.The system worked, but the threat was more deliberate than first reported. Surveillance footage from April 24, the day before the attack, shows the suspect casing the hotel corridors and entering the gym. The headlong rush wasn’t panic. It was a route he had practiced.He still helped the system along. He barreled down a hallway full of people strolling, many of whom were security, drawing attention to himself, then ran through the magnetometer instead of around it, slowing his progress. He put every ounce of momentum into reaching a choke point staffed by nearly a dozen armed officers.Even if he had made it past the staircase, he still had to get down a floor and through the ballroom doors to the most heavily protected human on the planet (probably), who had just been served a salad — a route that passed dozens of armed officers whose earpieces would already have been carrying his location.That no one died is a kind of miracle. The two thousand in attendance now join the 54% of Americans say that they or a family member have been impacted by gun violence.The shooter took the shotgun and the .38 he purchased legally in California in 2023 and 2025 on a train from Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington, arriving April 4. He booked his room at the Hilton on April 6 — three weeks before he used it. About twenty minutes before he stepped onto the elevator, he emailed a manifesto to family members and a former employer. He signed it “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen.” In the manifesto he called the president a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” and wrote that he was “no longer willing to permit” such men to “coat my hands with [their] crimes.” He declared it his “duty” to target administration officials. Federal authorities said his writings also railed against the U.S. military strikes on boats in the eastern Pacific suspected of smuggling drugs.It was the third attempt on Trump’s life — Butler in July 2024, West Palm in September 2024, the Hilton — and the first in which the gunman successfully discharged a round at security personnel.The Center for Strategic and International Studies tracks political violence. Their 2025 readout was the roughest in thirty years. For the first time in two decades, the left outpaced the right in sheer number of plots and attacks — mostly Molotov cocktails at immigration facilities and Republican offices. The right still accounts for more of the bodies: targeted assassinations of lawmakers, armed assaults on government headquarters.Security and BallroomThe president was never in danger from this shooter, though the event did raise questions about security unrelated to the facts of the case. “I’m the one that would complain,” Trump said Saturday night. “I’d be up here right now saying they didn’t do their job. Oh, believe me, because, you know, it’s my life.”But imagine a more competent shooter. Or a team of Iranians looking to cause mayhem. The Hilton has more than a thousand rooms; the Iranians, who spent a decade building a network of proxies, would not have sent a man with a shotgun and a training that consisted of being in the nerf club.The Secret Service runs the names of all event attendees through criminal databases, but not the names of every guest in the hotel’s 1,000-plus rooms.But it was in the context of security concerns that the subject of the White House ballroom was once again in the Washington swirl.The White House ballroom is a story you may have trained yourself to ignore. The project is an abomination of proportion, scale, taste and beauty — traditions Western Civilization has relied on for hundreds of years to cool the passions and enliven the senses.Up to this point, President Trump has brought up the ballroom willy-nilly. Often when more important matters are at stake. The fixation is as rooted in his bones as his fixation on crowd sizes. A Washington Post analysis on April 19 found he had mentioned the ballroom on about a third of the days this year — about as many days as health insurance and affordability. He brought it up with oil and gas executives, with foreign leaders, and at an Easter lunch.Invoking the Hilton attack to argue for the ballroom smacks of using a near tragedy to justify Trump’s vanity project.Still, the security argument is not nothing. Every time the president goes to the Hilton or a convention center, he moves through soft zones — hotel kitchens, service elevators, public hallways — where security is temporary and reactive. A dedicated ballroom on the White House grounds would eliminate the off-site trip, and with it the guest who books a room two floors up three weeks in advance.The cost is the fortress itself. It further encases the people’s representative, adding another wall to an already imperial presidency. And it turns every event into an away game for everyone else — stripping out the particular joy, cultural significance, and vibe (as the founders called it) of gatherings not held inside a bunker.A Washington Post poll this week found 56% of Americans oppose tearing down the White House’s East Wing to make way for the planned ballroom. Twenty-eight percent support it — roughly a two-to-one margin. A YouGov survey this week found opposition at 53% and support at 29%.IranLast week one piece of Iran reporting wouldn’t fit. The Economist had it: when Vice President Vance met the Iranians in Islamabad two weeks ago, the Iranian delegation ran to more than eighty members — and the disputes among them were hotter than anything between the two governments. The Pakistani hosts spent most of their time pulling Iranians off other Iranians.The reason it didn’t make last week’s digest: late Friday, the White House announced Jared Kushner and lead negotiator Steve Witkoff were headed back to Islamabad for another round. But two days later the trip was called off — in part, the reporting suggested, because the Iranian side was still pulling itself apart.So Monday’s news arrived with that picture in mind. Tehran, mediated by Pakistan, offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the war if the United States lifts its naval blockade of Iranian ports.The catch? What wasn’t in the offer. The proposal pushes the nuclear question — enriched uranium, enrichment going forward, who inspects what — into a later phase. That has been, by the administration’s own framing, the entire point of the war.So the Iranian offer amounted to essentially giving up nothing but the leverage it had gained since the war started.But the clock is ticking for Iran. The blockade has forced Iran to store oil in makeshift containers and disused tanks for lack of buyers willing to run the gauntlet.Tehran’s oil infrastructure has essentially become a massive, clogged drain, forcing engineers to frantically stash crude in everything from rusty, decommissioned coastal tanks to the “zombie” hulls of 30-year-old tankers anchored like sitting ducks in the Gulf. With the U.S. blockade choking off 80% of exports, the regime is staring down a “storage doomsday” in mid-May.Now there’s the kind of term you can just drive right by without explaining. A “Storage Doomsday” represents the physical seizure of the entire Iranian energy sector, where the sheer lack of space forces a catastrophic choice between allowing an environmental disaster from overflowing tanks or permanently “killing” oil wells through forced shutdowns that could take decades to repair.Monday afternoon,The Atlantic published that Vice President Vance has been quietly questioning the Pentagon’s portrait of the war. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, have publicly described U.S. weapons stockpiles as robust and Iranian forces as devastated. Vance, according to senior administration officials, has been pressing Trump on whether either claim is true.Internal assessments suggest Iran retains two-thirds of its air force, the bulk of its missile-launching capability, and most of the small fast boats that can mine the strait.The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated this week that the United States may have already burned through more than half its prewar supply of four key munitions — interceptors and standoff missiles that would also be needed to defend Taiwan, South Korea, or Europe.If Vance’s reading is closer to the truth than Hegseth’s, the Iranian offer reads differently. Tehran may not be giving up nothing because it has nothing. Tehran may be giving up nothing because it has noticed that the United States doesn’t have as much in the magazine as it has said it does. A negotiation is shaped by what each side believes the other can still afford. Iran appears to have done the math.Brent crude closed above $108 a barrel — up roughly 50% since the war began. A coalition of dozens of nations led by Bahrain issued a joint statement demanding the strait be reopened, citing the cost to global food and fertilizer supplies that move through it.And the Iranian Foreign Minister went to Moscow. He met with Vladimir Putin to ask for support — the same Putin who, according to Ukrainian intelligence, has been using Russian satellites to help Iran target U.S. forces.The Iranians have done a solid for Russia in return. The BBC reported Monday that one of Putin’s closest oligarchs was sailing a $500 million superyacht through the strait that no one else can use. The Nord, 465 feet long, registered to the wife of Russian steel billionaire Alexei Mordashov, slipped from Dubai to Muscat over the weekend along a route that requires Iranian permission. The boat has a swimming pool, a submarine, and a helipad.Hepatitis B Infection RiskThis story starts in the recovery room of a hospital, where a new mother—exhausted, overwhelmed, and holding a 12-hour-old baby—is being asked to make a high-stakes medical decision. For decades, the “safety first” rule was simple: every baby gets a Hepatitis B shot before they even leave the hospital. But under a new policy from HHS, the government suggests skipping that birth dose and waiting until the baby is two months old.The problem: life happens. While about 80% of children eventually get their preventive visits, data shows that many families, especially those struggling with transportation or work schedules, find it hard to make it back to the doctor on time once they leave the hospital’s bubble of care. In fact, medical experts warn that when you delay the first shot, the chances of a child ever finishing the full three-dose series drop significantly. Data shows that while 97% of babies who get that first shot in the hospital go on to finish the full three-dose series, only about 55% of babies who skip the birth dose ever get fully protected.Even if a mom’s pregnancy test was negative, those tests can be wrong or the paperwork can get lost. Because Hepatitis B is a “silent” virus that can live in tiny amounts of fluid—like on a shared toothbrush or a caregiver’s nicked finger—an unprotected baby is at total risk. While an adult’s immune system can usually fight the virus off, a baby’s system is so new that 90% of those infected will have the virus for life, leading to liver cancer or even death. By moving the shot from the hospital (where the baby is already “right there”) to a later appointment that might be missed, new studies in JAMA Pediatrics published Monday, predict we will see hundreds of extra infections and at least $16 million in added healthcare costs just from the babies born this year.Teacher salaries Teacher salaries have grown 28.2% over the last decade. What your teacher will tell you is that figures can sometimes mean less than they do at first blush. When adjusted for inflation, the average teacher has actually seen a 4.6% pay decrease since 2017.Let’s all pause for a moment and remember the teachers in our lives: Mrs. Maziotta, Mr. Jewell, Mr. Tonken, Mr. Lang, Mr. LeSure, Dr. Duckham, Mr. Hill. The people who introduced you to wonders, set you back on course when you were lost, and who, as my friend and teacher Neal Tonken, sometimes provided you with a sympathetic ear because, as he used to say “kids need an adult they can tell their s**t to.”Those life-changing people are already undervalued. Now more so. Low pay limits the ability to attract and retain quality educators in the profession. Too many potential educators never enter the classroom, in part because of low starting salaries and a widening wage gap between teaching and other professions requiring similar education. Other talented, passionate educators leave the profession due to low wages. On average, teacher salaries are 27% lower than those of their similarly educated peers.Pope XIV and Archbishop of CanterburyHenry VIII wanted to split with a woman so he split with the Catholic church. In a reversal of all that, the first female Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally joined with the head of the Catholic church, Pope Leo XIV. The two prayed together Monday in the Vatican where the Pope vowed to keep working to overcome differences “no matter how intractable they may appear.” One difference would be that the Catholic Church does not let women into the ordained clergy and does not recognize or perform same‑sex marriages, even though it has recently allowed limited blessings for same‑sex couples. In related news, the current king of England– also known as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England – landed in the U.S. on Monday.Monks and PotIn other religious news, Sri Lankan customs officers at Bandaranaike International Airport in Colombo on Saturday arrested twenty-two Buddhist monks returning from Thailand. Their suitcases, packed with school supplies and candy on top, contained nearly 247 pounds of cannabis underneath — about eleven pounds per monk. Police called it one of the largest drug seizures in the airport’s history. Daily News, the state-owned newspaper, valued the haul at $3.45 million. Recreational cannabis is illegal in Sri Lanka, and trafficking convictions can carry the death penalty. The monks, many of them in their twenties, are unlikely to face the worst of those penalties.Extremely Fast HumansI went for a run yesterday and it was the metaphysical oposite of this story. Sebastian Sawe of Kenya ran the London Marathon Sunday in 1 hour, 59 minutes, and 30 seconds — the first time anyone has finished a 26.2-mile marathon under two hours in an officially sanctioned race. He beat the previous world record by 65 seconds. Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, running his first marathon, finished eleven seconds behind him, also under two hours. Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo came in third at 2:00:28. All three men ran faster than any human being had ever run that distance until that morning. The barrier had stood since the marathon was invented. Three people went through it on the same Sunday.Tuesday, April 28Iran: MerzThe German Chancellor Frederich Merz said the American President was getting played. “An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership,” he told students Monday. The Iranians, Merz said, are “very skilled at not negotiating, letting the Americans travel to Islamabad and then leave again without any result.” The Americans, he added, have “no truly convincing strategy.”Merz is a center-right CDU Chancellor who took office promising to repair the transatlantic relationship. Many leaders have chosen to coddle Trump. Merz went right at his sense of himself as the world’s great negotiator and used his favorite concept: humiliation. Humiliation matters because it’s the word the President’s political life has been built around. Never be humiliated, always come out on top, never let anyone catch you getting worked.In three weeks president Trump has declared total victory, threatened to destroy Iranian civilization by 8 p.m., called it off ninety minutes before the deadline, sent envoys to talks the Iranians wouldn’t attend, and returned to the same technical questions the Obama administration negotiated in 2015. The President has spent roughly $28 billion to reopen a conversation he spent years mocking Obama for closing.The response from the White House came on Truth Social, and it followed the script the administration has settled into for allies who decline to cheer. Merz, the President wrote, “thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.” But Merz wasn’t saying Iran’s military program should be allowed to continue. His claim was that Trump was losing.This was in contrast to the President’s response when asked over the weekend about what he thought about China helping Iran. “They’re helping, but not much,” he said on Fox News’ The Sunday Briefing. “They could help more. I’m not overly disappointed. We help people too… So I don’t consider them having been bad.”Merz said the war was going badly and was accused of wanting Iran to have the bomb. China is reportedly preparing to ship MANPADs to Iran and got a shrug.Assassination AttemptBy Tuesday, the near tragedy at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner became a debate about the connection between speech and violence.Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt argued that the assassination attempt was the “direct result” of years of what she described as systemic demonization of the President. There is some truth to this.Her core argument was that the language used by political opponents and media figures had effectively “legitimized” violence by painting the administration as an existential threat.That undoubtedly contributes to the situtation too — you can hear it in the ravings of two of the president’s would-be assassins. Butler is the cautionary footnote. Thomas Crooks’s motive was never established. No manifesto, no clear ideological frame, no rhetorical smoking gun. The man who came closest to killing Donald Trump did so for reasons no one has been able to name. Immediately, then, we’re faced with evidence that something other than words cause violence. (That didn’t stop JD Vance at the time of that shooting from blaming Democrats; for which there was no evidence, but which is evidence if you’re measuring whether Vance and others are acting in good faith.)The question is not whether the rhetorical climate contributes, but how much, exactly whose rhetoric we’re talking about, the relative weight of the speaker, and how much words contribute relative to other factors.If the White House is arguing that there is a link between speech and violence then an analysis of public speech — including all levels of the quote unquote media — must also include speech and actions by the most powerful person in the world, the president.Donald Trump has done more than any other president to degrade public dialogue and demonize opponents. Starting with his role as America’s chief advocate of the racist smear that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, he is directly responsible for promoting the most effective claim of presidential illegitimacy that, by Leavitt’s reasoning, contributes to violence. His consistent labeling of the January 6th defendants as “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots” directly challenges the legitimacy of the judicial process in a way that, by the Press Secretary’s own causal logic, “legitimizes” resistance to federal authority. That instinct continues from the president today. We see it in his repeated characterization of federal judges as “partisan hacks” and his description of the political opposition as “vermin” that must be “rooted out.” It is a part of his administration now. Last month, Trump administration officials publicly labeled two American citizens killed protesting immigration crackdowns as “domestic terrorists” — a designation easily falsifiable with the human eye.There is a difference though between when a user says it on Twitter and when a president says it. That’s determined not only by the obvious fact his megaphone is larger, but by the traditions that govern the person who uses it. A Twitter user is expected to pop off. A president is not. The breach of that tradition has a magnifying force that contributes to these conditions.We know about the power of President Trump’s voice by the testimony of the January 6th rioters who cited his encouragement and the Unite the Right protesters in Charlottesville who associated themselves with Trump’s views.Usually conservatives argue that responsibility begins and ends with the shooter. By opening the door to causal links outside the shooter himself, the president’s allies also put themselves in a new position in the gun debate. If a single tweet is a powerful enough “nudge” to propel a man toward a shotgun, why is a high-capacity magazine considered a neutral object? If crazy people can be inspired by Tweets then do gun laws play no role at all? Is it possible that the ease of access to the tool is as much a “condition” as the rhetoric that precedes its use? You cannot hold rhetoric responsible for animating a shooter and hold the shotgun blameless for arming him. Either the environment shapes the act, or it doesn’t.We should probably roll in some historians too as we’re trying to sort the proportions of causality. Ford was targeted twice in a month in 1975. There was no Twitter. Kennedy, obviously the same. Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley — three presidents killed in thirty-six years, in a country that had not yet invented the radio. History reminds us that there are other things that contribute to the unmistakably repugnant act of assassins.Furthermore, a culture that celebrates norm breaking as heroic — whether it is blowing up drug boats in the Atlantic or putting masked police in the streets — creates the conditions for blowback. It’s the kind of causation Trump has repeatedly argued for in the foreign policy context — about Iraq, about Libya, about the Middle East generally — that American intervention creates the conditions for the violence that follows. Why is that question not permissible on domestic affairs when the president is the one challenging the traditions of separation of powers and due process as he carries out his job?Asking these questions should leave you with the impression that the answers are necessarily against the administration’s interests. They are the kinds of questions we’re compelled to ask if the press secretary wants to go down this road. But evidence suggests that Karoline Leavitt wanted to keep the lane narrow as a balance beam. Her argument was that because the shooter was a crazy extremist, any words or sentiments he used when used by the press — say words like “authoritarian” — made them complicit in what led to the assassination attempt.The press secretary was joined by the acting Attorney General Todd Blanche who said to the Justice Department press corps:“Many people in this room, if we’re going to be honest about it, have done it as well. They’re just as guilty as a lot of people on X. When you have reporters, when you have media, media just being overly critical and calling the president horrible names for no reason and without evidence, without proof, it shouldn’t surprise us that this type of rhetoric takes place.”No, we shouldn’t be surprised. But what might surprise us is comparing Twitter users to credentialed members of the press corps. We don’t know who was in the room, but the people who cover the Justice Department for a living are correspondents from the wires, the Times, the Post, the television networks. The charge that they call the president “horrible names for no reason” does not describe their work; it describes someone else’s, ported over.That is the move. Not to draw a connection between speech and violence — but to redefine journalist down to the level of X user, so that the speech-violence connection lands on credentialed reporters who can be chilled from reporting critically about Trump administration policies. The chill is the policy. The argument about the shooter is the vehicle.Comey indicted againSpeaking of which…Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted for a second time Tuesday, this time over a photo of seashells officials said threatened President Donald Trump. Comey posted a photo on social media of shells on a beach writing out the numbers “86 47,” which critics said referred to taking out or killing Trump. Comey removed the post the same day, writing on social media that he assumed the shells represented “a political message” but “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.”The Department of Justice previously brought a case against Comey suggesting he had lied to Congress, but it was thrown out after a federal judge found that the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, had been illegally appointed by the Justice department.This is a reminder that public figures shouldn’t meme.The case will hinge on whether the prosecutors can prove subjective intent. It isn’t enough for the DOJ to show that a “reasonable person” would find the seashells down by the sea shore threatening. They must prove that James Comey personally understood that there was a substantial risk his post would be viewed as a threat and that he proceeded anyway—a standard known as recklessness—or that he intended it as a “true threat.”The origins of “eighty-six” range from 1930s soda jerk shorthand for “out of stock” to the legend of Chumley’s speakeasy at 86 Bedford Street, where the address served as a code to exit before a police raid. Others point to Article 86 of the New York liquor code regarding refusing service to drunks, or naval engineering where the “number 86” valve was used to shut down a ship’s engine. More macabre theories suggest it refers to an “eighty-six inch” grave depth or the power of the Winchester Model 1886 rifle, while linguists argue it might just be rhyming slang for “nix,” meaning to cancel or veto.FCC To Review Disney LicensesThe FCC has decided that what Jimmy Kimmel says on television is a question of character.That’s the legal frame Chairman Brendan Carr is reportedly preparing to use to open an early license review of the eight ABC stations Disney owns and operates. Broadcast licenses run on an eight-year cycle. The Communications Act lets the FCC pull one off the cycle if the licensee no longer serves “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” Since 1986, the agency has policed something called the “character factor” — a standard built for felony fraud and licensees lying to the Commission. Carr has spent the last year suggesting it can also cover DEI policies and “misleading” programming. [Make sure that is a fair characterization.] Just as the definition of “emergency,” and “war” have been stretched in other contexts in the administration, the category here is being stretched until it can hold whatever the chairman wants to put in it.The catalyst is Kimmel’s joke told two days before the WHCA dinner and in a different context in which he made fun of Donald Trump’s age and referred to his wife as an “expectant widow.”The administration’s argument is that the joke contributes to a climate of political violence. ABC has been here before — the network suspended Kimmel last fall over comments about Charlie Kirk. What Carr is signaling now is that the network’s own discipline isn’t sufficient.Carr’s stated theory is that broadcasters use public airwaves and owe the public something in return. The unstated theory is that broadcasters use public airwaves and owe the President something in return. The first is the one in the statute. The second is the one being applied.A license review costs Disney’s lawyers months and Disney’s stock several percentage points. Networks notice. Talent gets called in for conversations. Jokes don’t get written.For those of you keeping track of things on your Stack the Week notebook at home:Comey posts a meme and gets indicted.Germany’s Mertz says the war isn’t going well and gets accused of wanting Iran to have the bomb.Italy’s Meloni declines to send troops and gets called a coward.The Fed’s Powell won’t lower rates and gets a visit from DOJ prosecutors. The instrument changes — Truth Social, a criminal probe, an FCC review — but the operation is the same one. Find the regulatory or rhetorical lever closest to the critic or adversary and pull it.King Charles visitKing Charles followed in his mother’s footsteps Tuesday, becoming only the second British monarch to address a joint session of Congress — his mother was the first, in 1991. He came with jokes:On the East Wing demolition: “I cannot help noticing readjustments to the East Wing. I’m sorry to say that we British, of course, made our own small attempt at real estate development in the White House in 1814.” (Also the only other time the US Capitol was attacked other than January 6, 2021). On the President’s frequent line that Europe would be speaking German without American help, the King offered an alternative timeline at the state dinner: “Dare I say that, if it wasn’t for us, you’d be speaking French.”The speech extolled “checks on executive power” – a direct descendant of George III reminding Americans in the age of “No Kings” protests. The King also referenced “defending democratic values,” and made a glancing reference to Saturday’s near-tragedy at the Hilton — the shared heritage of the two nations, the King said, provides a necessary check on the impulses of any single leader. Trump called the speech “fantastic,” then added: “He got the Democrats to stand. I’ve never been able to do that.”The King gave the President a framed facsimile of the 1879 plans for the Resolute Desk and a British World War II relic, the original bell from the HMS Trump, a T-class submarine launched in 1944 which sank one of the last ships to be destroyed by a British warship in World War .The special relationship itself was a relic, argued the UK Ambassador, Sir Christian Turner, though he didn’t’ mean for anyone to hear him. A Financial Times story (leaked no doubt by one of Turner’s adversaries) reported on a recording in February where Turner told sixth-form students– roughly eleventh or twelfth grade in the American system— that “special relationship” was a phrase he tried not to utter — “nostalgic,” “backwards-looking,” carrying “a lot of sort of baggage.” The country with an actual special relationship with the United States, Turner said, “is probably Israel.”He also called it “extraordinary” that the Epstein scandal had cost Britain a member of the Royal Family and an ambassador while in the United States it “really hasn’t touched anybody.”The Foreign Office called the comments “private, informal” and “not any reflection” of the government’s position, which is also a lesson to those sixth form students a diplomatic way of saying the ambassador meant every word and shouldn’t have said any of them out loud.UAE Leaves OPECIf I have to hear one more story about oil in the Strait of Hormuz I’m going to faint. Okay, what about a story about oil and OPEC? There is a massive break up in the world of oil that will make gasoline more expensive for everyone because the group that usually works together to keep the world’s oil flowing-- that’s OPEC-- is falling apart just as a major shipping route has been blocked. (Don’t you dare mention Hormuz)So now there is less oil available and more chaos in how it gets to us.The United Arab Emirates initiated the crack up. The world’s third biggest producer behind Saudi Arabia and Iraq, said that on May 1 they are officially quitting OPEC.To understand what this means, imagine a group of neighbors who all own lemonade stands. To keep the price of lemonade high, they all agree to only sell 10 cups a day. If they all flooded the street with lemonade, the price would crash, and nobody would make a profit. The UAE is sick of this arrangement. They spent billions building a massive lemonade factory that can produce 50 cups a day, but the club is still forcing them to only sell 34. They are tired of leaving their expensive equipment sitting idle while they watch other club members like Russia “cheat” by selling more than they allowed.Saudi Arabia, the leader of the club, is now losing its best partner, which means when it tries to set those prices for lemonade in the future, there’s going to be one big producer out there selling it whatever he wants to be selling it for, and that will affect what Saudi Arabia and the members of the club can do to set global prices. Implicit in the move by the UAE is that they want to grab as much oil money as they can right now before the world moves to electric cars and away from oil, which is where the world is moving despite what some people say.Jet Blue fuel costsJetBlue is the latest airline to tear up its previous expectations and run to the whiteboard to accommodate the mayhem created by a war the airline doesn’t fly anywhere near. On Tuesday, the company’s CEO said demand isn’t the problem. Revenue is up. Revenue per seat is up. The problem is fuel — twenty-six percent above what they were expecting. The second quarter is going to be an even longer ride in the middle seat: fuel prices seventy-five percent above last year. To accommodate this, the airline is going to raise fares, fly fewer planes, hire fewer people. Checked bag fees on domestic economy jumped to $39 to $49.You’ll remember from last week’s discussion of Spirit Airlines that low-cost carriers buy fuel at the price the day demands, while the Big Three — Delta, United, American — buy fuel forward. This makes JetBlue really sensitive to the daily swings.Gallup Affordability Survey55 percent of Americans say their personal financial situation is getting worse, according to Gallup’s annual affordability survey released Tuesday. The highest figure Gallup has recorded since it started asking the question in 2001. The only previous period that came close was the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 during a period where the unemployment rate went from 5 to 10 percent.The cost of living remains the top concern at 31 percent, below the 41 percent peak in 2024 but still among the highest readings on record. Housing costs are tied for second at 13 percent. Healthcare is fourth at 8 percent. 60 percent of Americans say they are “very worried” about being able to pay for a serious illness.Speaking of affordability: The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Regal recently charged $50 a ticket for opening-night seats to Dune: Part Three in its best theaters. Premium-format screens — bigger picture, better sound. Movies, which were once a marginal stretch for the typical family so everyone could have a little fun, are becoming premium events. That drives profits but excises people out of behavior they associate with basic prosperity.Open AI trialElon Musk’s lawsuit of OpenAI opened Tuesday. Musk co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 and he is trying to undo its shift to a for-profit company. He says CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman betrayed the original mission. OpenAI’s lawyers say Musk is a sore loser who sued only after he failed to take over the company himself, and that going for-profit was the only way to pay for the computing power the technology requires.Musk testified first. He told the jury the company wouldn’t exist without him. OpenAI’s lawyers then showed that his often-cited $100 million donation was actually closer to $40 million. Musk, who is frequently wrong on matters of verifiable fact, said he may have been mistaken on the number but his reputation was worth more than the cash.OpenAI is currently valued at around $852 billion and is planning a public stock offering later this year that could value it at a trillion. Musk is asking for $134 to $150 billion in damages, returned to the original nonprofit, and a court order removing Altman and Brockman from the board. A win for Musk would end the IPO.Talking LessMonk and Altman aren’t on speaking terms much and neither are the rest of us. Americans are talking to each other 28 percent less than they did a decade ago. Researchers at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Arizona counted. In 2005, the average American spoke about 16,632 words a day. By 2019, that number had fallen to 11,900. The researchers haven’t published post-pandemic data yet, but they suspect the gap has widened. Across a year, that’s roughly 120,000 words each of us no longer says out loud. The reasons aren’t mysterious — texts replace conversations, AirPods replace eye contact, the phone replaces the person across the table. I, however, am trying to accomplish 120,000 words in one episode of a podcast.Wednesday, April 29IranThe Pentagon put a price tag on the war Wednesday: $25 billion so far. Most of it is munitions. The rest is operations and equipment replacement. This first official accounting since the conflict began came out in testimony to the House of Representatives — your shared-powers system– briefly–in action. The administration is asking Congress for a $1.5 trillion defense budget — a nearly 50 percent increase — to sustain what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described as an “existential fight.”Hegseth was the day’s main event Wednesday. He told lawmakers that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “obliterated,” then was pressed: if the threat has been eliminated, why is the blockade still in place? Hegseth answered that while the facilities are gone, the “nuclear ambitions” remain.What was the point of this war? Well, there have been many, but a consistent one was that Iran posed an imminent nuclear threat. That’s what justified the military action rather than diplomacy. The clock was ticking. That always grated against President Trump’s claim that the program was obliterated last summer. If obliterated, how imminent — as the poet said. Now the Secretary is using that term again, this time with respect to the success of recent military action. To slalom around the question of why the US needs to keep fighting if everything has been so successful, he changes the terms of the war. Now, it’s Iran’s “nuclear ambitions” that are the case for war.That’s the goalposts moving. Think back to the Iraq war twenty years ago. The failure was not finding a weapons of mass destruction program. Were there ambitions for WMD? Certainly. Would saying it was ambitions and not actual WMD have shielded Bush from withering criticism — criticism, from Donald Trump among others, that he should have been impeached? It would not have shielded him.Facilities can be bombed. Ambitions cannot. By saying that getting rid of Iran’s nuclear ambitions is the goal, and the reason for the war, makes for a lower bar for conflict.The most striking line of the day was directed not at Iran but at the room. “The biggest adversary we face at this point,” Hegseth told the committee, “are the reckless, feckless, and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans.” Asked about a strike that reportedly killed hundreds of Iranian schoolgirls, he said he had ordered “no stupid rules of engagement” that would put American troops at risk**.**The administration’s case continues to rest on deferred verification. The President says Iran is in collapse, the U.S. holds all the cards, the naval siege is working. The evidence will arrive eventually, in the form of a deal. Until then, supporters are asked to take it on faith and critics are asked to be patient — or, per the Defense Secretary, to keep quiet.Iranian economyWe hear endless figures about the effects of the Iran war on the world and global economy, but not much about what’s happening in the country itself. Now, some data: The war has cost roughly two million Iranians their jobs — one million directly, another million indirectly — out of a workforce of about 25 million, according to an official at Iran’s Labor and Social Affairs Ministry. Annual inflation hit 67 percent in the month through mid-April. Subsidized red meat, most of it imported by sea before the blockade, now runs about $3.60 a pound in a country where the minimum wage is $130 a month. The Iranian government the President has said is in collapse is, by these numbers, collapsing on the people who live under it.Caribbean attacksThe New York Times reported Wednesday that the U.S. military has carried out its 55th strike on a boat in the Caribbean or eastern Pacific — the seventh this month — killing three people on Sunday and bringing the confirmed death toll since September to 185. International monitoring groups put the figure closer to 220 once boats that sank without survivors are counted. The Pentagon has quietly added MQ-9 Reaper drones and fixed-wing attack aircraft, reportedly A-10 Warthogs, to bases in El Salvador and Puerto Rico, enough that strikes can now be launched in either ocean without moving planes between them.The administration calls the targets “narco-terrorists,” a designation that allows it to bypass the boarding-and-arrest protocols used by the Coast Guard in favor of what the Pentagon calls “lethal kinetic strikes.” The military has not produced public evidence — seized narcotics, manifest data — that any of the 55 vessels was actually carrying drugs. In an October strike off Trinidad, the families of the dead produced evidence that those killed were artisanal fishermen on a multi-day run.The first strike, on September 2, killed eleven people. The Times has reported that the aircraft used was classified and painted to look like a civilian plane, with its munitions hidden inside the fuselage. Two survivors of the initial blast climbed onto an overturned piece of the hull and waved at the plane. The military killed them with a follow-up strike. If one accepts the administration’s claim that this is a legal armed conflict, feigning civilian status to attack adversaries is itself a war crime.In December, reporting surfaced that Secretary Hegseth had given a verbal order to “kill everyone” during a live-monitored strike in which two men were seen clinging to wreckage before a second strike was called in.Voting Rights ActLast week we talked about Virginia voters reversing their view on using the shape of districts to retain political power. This week, the Supreme Court reversed what was once settled. In a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the conservative majority removed the Voting Rights Act from American life. I mean, it’s still around. You can visit on Sundays if it’s not napping. But the champ couldn’t stir a ladybug.The case concerned a Louisiana map redrawn to include a second majority-Black district after a federal court found that the state’s previous map — which contained only one majority-Black district out of six — likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.The state complied, drew the new map, and elected Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, in that second district in 2024. Then a group of voters who described themselves as “non-African American” sued, arguing the redrawn map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Supreme Court agreed.The key upshot of the ruling is that the burden of proof shifts. States no longer have to prove their maps aren’t racist. Advocates have to prove they are — and to do it, they must now show intent. It’s no longer enough to demonstrate that the outcome disadvantages one race. A state legislature can simply say: we’re not being racist, we’re just political hacks redrawing districts to stay in power. That second motivation — partisan gerrymandering — has been protected by the Court since 2019.The intent-versus-outcome distinction matters because legislators rarely write down that they meant to dilute the votes of Black or Hispanic citizens. The outcome test was the workaround — courts could look at the map, look at the demographics, and ask whether minority voters had been packed into one district or scattered across several to prevent them from electing a candidate of their choice. Without that test, the only path forward is a smoking gun. Smoking guns are rarely produced on purpose.This is complicated in the South by the fact that race and party affiliation track each other so closely. Black voters in Louisiana vote Democratic at rates above 90 percent. A legislature that wants to weaken Democrats and a legislature that wants to weaken Black voters will, in practice, draw the same map.The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, after Bloody Sunday in Selma, after a century in which Southern states used poll taxes, literacy tests, and redrawn district lines to keep Black citizens from translating their numbers into political power. Section 2 was rewritten by Congress in 1982 specifically to remove an intent requirement the Court had imposed two years earlier — a deliberate choice by the legislature that the burden should not fall on voters to read the legislator’s mind. Wednesday’s ruling restores that burden.This is the third major narrowing of the Voting Rights Act in twelve years. In 2013, Shelby County v. Holder gutted the requirement that states with a history of discrimination get federal approval before changing their voting laws. In 2021, Brnovich v. DNC made it harder to challenge voting restrictions. Wednesday completed the trilogy.On the same day, the Florida House approved a new congressional map proposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis designed to give Republicans four additional seats — a map whose authors explicitly cited the pending Supreme Court decision in their reasoning.Now that the ruling has come down it’s less likely that legal challenges will pause the new congressional map DeSantis has suggested. Here’s how that would go, a civil rights group would make a voting rights challenge, in the past a judge might say okay we’ll pause the DeSantis plan of a new gerrymander ‘till there’s a hearing. Now, the new standard means a judge would be apt to conclude the civil rights case would lose and therefore while not dismissing the case, would not pause the DeSantis plan.South Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri haven’t begun early voting, and could theoretically still draw new maps before the midterms.London antisemitic stabbingTwo Jewish men, ages 34 and 76, were stabbed and hospitalized on a London street Wednesday in a terrorist attack. A 45-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. The attack happened in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in north London, and counterterrorism investigators are looking at whether it connects to a string of arson attacks on synagogues and Jewish sites in the city over the past six weeks — including four ambulances belonging to a Jewish volunteer service torched in March, attempted firebombings of synagogues in April, and an arson attack on a memorial wall in Golders Green honoring Iranian protesters two days before Wednesday’s stabbings.A Fed DividedThe Federal Reserve held interest rates steady Wednesday — keeping the price of borrowing money roughly where it has been all year — in what may be Chair Jerome Powell’s final meeting before his term ends in May. The decision was expected — markets had priced in a 100 percent chance of no change.What was not expected was the split. Four members of the Federal Open Market Committee dissented, citing different reasons, the largest dissent at a Fed meeting since October 1992. The committee’s post-meeting statement cited persistent inflation, “in part reflecting the recent increase in global energy prices.”Some dissenters wanted to cut rates anyway, arguing that the inflation surge is being driven by the Iran war’s effect on energy prices — a one-time supply shock, not the kind of broad-based wage-and-demand inflation that rate hikes are designed to cool. Their view: keeping rates high punishes the economy for a temporary problem rate cuts can’t fix. You can’t cut the rates and open the Straits, as no one says. The rebuttal is that what might seem temporary can have long-term impacts in an economy.Others wanted the Fed to stop hinting that cuts are coming. Their worry: when prices are still rising, a Fed that talks about cuts looks like it’s stopped worrying about inflation. And once businesses and workers stop believing the Fed will hold the line, businesses raise their prices faster and workers demand bigger raises — both bracing for an inflation that the bracing itself helps create. That cycle is what the Fed exists to prevent.Powell, asked about the institution’s future, said: “The Fed can stay independent. But we’re going to have to fight for it.”Kevin Warsh, Powell’s successor, is expected to be confirmed by the full Senate next week.North Korea nuclear arsenalRemember all that talk about imminent nuclear threats? You thought there was just one of ‘em. A Bloomberg story on Thursday throws a cat amongst the pigeons. North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is approaching the size at which it could overwhelm the missile defense system the United States spent thirty years and roughly $65 billion to build. That defense system was designed for a small-scale attack — a handful of incoming warheads, knocked down by interceptors based in Alaska and California. North Korea is now producing enough weapons-grade material to build up to 20 nuclear weapons a year, according to South Korean President Lee Jae Myung.While the Pentagon asks Congress for $1.5 trillion to fight a war with Iran, the slower, larger danger continues to assemble itself in the country we are not at war with.In June of 2018 president Trump declared “There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future!”Thursday April 30 GDPThe American household is starting to flinch. Consumer spending grew just 1.6 percent in the first quarter, down from 1.9 percent the quarter before, with the weakness concentrated in physical goods — the kind of purchases families pull back on first when the gas bill spikes. That’s the human story buried inside Thursday’s GDP report from the Commerce Department, which clocked overall growth at 2 percent, an acceleration from the stagnant 0.5 percent at the end of 2025. The headline number was held aloft by two things: federal government spending, which jumped 9.3 percent on the rebound from last fall’s 43-day shutdown and the war effort in Iran, and business investment, which surged 10.4 percent, almost entirely on AI data centers.Residential investment fell 8 percent — the fifth straight quarterly drop. The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the PCE price index, jumped to 4.5 percent from 2.9 percent. Inflation expectations for April rose from 3.8 to 4.7 percent, the biggest one-month jump in a year. The growth, in other words, is institutional: the government and the AI companies are still spending. The country’s families are starting to do the math.Administration officials once boasted about five or six percent growth. They are no longer doing that. Now they are making the case that it’s a marvel that there is growth at all during wartime. The fact that the country grew at all, the argument runs, is a credit to the administration’s deregulation of domestic energy production, which has kept American crude flowing while imports get squeezed. The 10.4 percent surge in business investment is offered as further proof: the AI boom, in their telling, is the dividend of a hands-off regulatory posture.Voters get a role in this debate. Reuters this poll this week showed the President’s approval rating on the economy was twenty seven percent. 22% on the cost of living.Debt Reaches 100% of GDPThe national debt hit 100.2% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at the end of March, based on new economic data released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.The amount the US owes is bigger than what it produces. Why does this matter:It is another way to demonstrate that leaders aren’t leading. This ratio usually only gets this high during emergencies like World War II. Now, the emergency is that Congress and the president can’t make wise and hard choices.Second, In 2026, the U.S. is on track to spend roughly $1 trillion just on interest payments. That is more than we spend on the entire U.S. Military— well, before this budget request. Every dollar spent on interest is a dollar that isn’t being spent on fixing roads, improving schools, or lowering your taxes.Third, When the government needs to borrow $31 trillion, it has to find people to lend it that money. If the government jumps in and takes almost all of it to pay for its old bills, there’s less left for everyone else to borrow to build things or get a loan.Fourth, no cushion. If there’s another emergency the US has less room to borrow.IranGasoline in California crossed $6 a gallon Thursday — $6.01 on average, per AAA, the highest in the country and the highest the state has seen since October 2023, a 30 percent jump since the war began in late February. The national average rose 27 cents in a week to $4.30.Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine voted Thursday to end the war — the first Republican to change her vote on the military campaign. The resolution failed 47-50, but the shift matters: Friday marks the 60-day deadline under the War Powers Act, after which the President is required to terminate operations unless Congress has authorized them. Rand Paul has been a consistent yes from the GOP side. John Fetterman remained the lone Democrat voting no.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters the deadline doesn’t apply because the ceasefire means there are no active hostilities — a reading that requires ignoring the 10,000 personnel still enforcing the blockade and the $25 billion Hegseth himself disclosed to Congress on Wednesday.The problem: The War Powers Act covers not just active combat but the introduction of forces into “situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated.” A naval blockade is, under international law, an act of war.Also, the statute has no pause button: once the 60-day clock starts, it runs. The law does provide a safety valve — the President can certify in writing that 30 additional days are needed for safe withdrawal — but the administration isn’t using it. It is instead arguing for a third, unwritten category of military action that exists outside congressional oversight.Janet Mills MaineIn the contest to replace Susan Collins. Maine Governor Janet Mills dropped her Senate bid Thursday, citing a lack of campaign funds to compete in what has become one of the country’s most-watched races. Her exit hands the Democratic nomination, almost certainly, to Graham Platner, an oyster farmer who was unknown a year ago and who has spent the last several months answering for past online comments and a tattoo widely recognized as a Nazi symbol. Mills did not endorse him. If Democrats have any shot of retaking the Senate, which requires taking four seats away from Republicans, they will have to beat Collins in Maine.DHS fundingThe 76-day shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security ended Thursday — the longest in the agency’s history — when the House passed, unchanged, the Senate funding bill it had been refusing to take up for weeks.The trigger wasn’t bipartisanship. It was the calendar. Without action by Thursday, roughly 240,000 employees, including TSA agents and Coast Guard personnel, would have missed their first May paycheck during a war. The pay they had received up to that point came from emergency transfers between accounts — money moved around by the executive branch because Congress couldn’t do its job.Step back for a second. The reason these funding fights happen is structural. Major legislation in the Senate needs 60 votes, which forces the parties to work together — and when they refuse, the government runs out of money.Senate Democrats had blocked DHS funding since mid-February, after federal agents shot and killed a 37-year-old man named Alex Pretti during an immigration raid in Minneapolis. They demanded reforms to ICE and CBP use-of-force policies — body cameras during raids, de-escalation training, public reporting of shootings, independent review of fatal incidents — before they would vote to fund the agencies carrying out the administration’s deportation operations.The administration refused. That was the standoff. It is also why, in April, Republicans used budget reconciliation — a procedure that bypasses the 60-vote threshold — to fund ICE and Border Patrol with $70 billion through 2029. That means Democrats lose their leverage. They can’t withhold ICE funding to force changes again until the next presidential term, because the money is already approved and out the door.That left the rest of DHS — FEMA, the Coast Guard, TSA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — still unfunded. Republican Senator Susan Collins and Democratic Senator Patty Murray built a workaround: fund the non-enforcement agencies separately, with no policy riders attached.House Republican leaders felt cut out of the negotiation and sat on the bill. They floated amendments — additional border-wall funding, asylum restrictions, other enforcement language — and couldn’t pass any of them, because their own conference was split between hardliners who wanted to add more enforcement provisions to the bill and moderates who just wanted the agency open.When the deadline arrived, Speaker Mike Johnson brought the Senate bill to the floor unchanged and passed it with mostly Democratic votes. He had to. He didn’t have the Republican votes on his own.Speakers don’t like to do this. Passing a bill with the other party’s votes infuriates the majority’s hardliners — it was the move that cost Speaker Kevin McCarthy his job in 2023 — and it undercuts the leadership’s leverage in the next negotiation. It happens anyway because the alternative, in this case, was federal workers going hungry during a war.The healthier version of this would have been bipartisan negotiation upfront, on the front end of the 76 days rather than the back end. That is what Congress used to do. It is what the institution was built to do. What happened on Thursday isn’t bipartisanship. It’s collapse, with the votes counted at the last possible minute to keep the lights on.Eli Lilly earningsEli Lilly stock jumped almost 10 percent Thursday after the company reported that its two GLP-1 drugs — Zepbound for weight loss and Mounjaro for diabetes — together brought in $12.8 billion in a single quarter. GLP-1s mimic a hormone the gut releases after a meal. They tell the brain you’re full, slow how fast the stomach empties, and prompt the pancreas to produce more insulin. The result, for many patients, is dramatic weight loss and better blood sugar control. Zepbound sales rose 80 percent year over year. Mounjaro rose 125 percent. The drugs now account for roughly two-thirds of Eli Lilly’s total revenue, which itself grew 56 percent to $19.7 billion. Even with lower U.S. prices, demand carried the quarter. A class of medication that didn’t exist as a meaningful business five years ago is now the engine of one of the most valuable pharmaceutical companies in the world.Friday, May 1IranFriday marks 60 days since the President sent his War Powers notification to Congress, the formal report required after the February 28 strikes against Iranian missile sites, mining capabilities, and air defenses. Under the War Powers Act, that’s the deadline by which the President must terminate operations unless Congress has authorized them. Congress hasn’t.The American public has reached its own conclusion. A Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll released Friday found 61 percent of Americans say using military force against Iran was a mistake. Fewer than 2 in 10 think the campaign has been successful. The disapproval has reached the levels Iraq hit in 2006 — three years into a war with thousands of American casualties — and the levels Vietnam hit in 1971, after more than 50,000 American deaths. Thirteen American service members have died in this war so far. The country has reached the same verdict in two months that took the previous wars years.The military picture is the part the administration would prefer not to discuss in front of Congress. The Times reported Friday that the war has drained munitions stockpiles deeply enough that the Pentagon is diverting weapons originally promised to allies. Last Monday, Hegseth told his Estonian counterpart the U.S. was suspending delivery of six HIMARS rocket launchers Estonia — a frontline NATO state on Russia’s border — had already paid for. Similar messages have gone to other European and Asian allies. “If we’re running low after a few weeks of fighting Iran,” said Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute, “we’re nowhere near where we need to be for Russia and China.”The Pentagon’s solution is to buy more. The President has announced ambitious agreements with Lockheed Martin and other contractors to scale up production — Patriot interceptors from 600 a year to 2,000, THAAD interceptors from 96 to 400. The trouble is that the agreements are tentative. Congress hasn’t appropriated the money. Lockheed told investors last week it would wait until the funding was secured before expanding production. And the man asking Congress for the money is the same Defense Secretary who told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that lawmakers were “the biggest adversary we face.” Republican Austin Scott of Georgia tried to flag the math for him: it takes 218 votes to pass anything in the House, the GOP doesn’t have 218 reliable votes, and the Pentagon is going to need Democratic ones. Hegseth doubled down before the Senate the next day.Trump on Thursday acknowledged the economic price for the first time and also tried a new line of spin. “When we hit 50,000 on the Dow and 7,000 on the S&P,” he told reporters in the Oval Office, “I said to myself, ‘We got to do something about Iran.’ And I hated to do it to my people… and the fire is taking place in the lovely country of Iran, and they want to have a nuclear weapon.”The idea here is that everything was jake before he made his presidential decision. Whether Iran was the kind of tough choice a president must make is up for debate. Iran wants a nuke. This is what stopping them looks like. Ignore execution, that’s the presidential level decision to be evaluated by all of us.But what’s not up for grabs is that the economy was doing really great. Trump cites the stock market but those affordability numbers are so low because people know what lives they lead. Wages are fluttering ahead of inflation. Inflation is up and particularly in the areas of housing, education and health care, items Americans associate with opportunity in this country. Growth in the last quarter was anemic and the manufacturing jobs are going to the robots.Sixty percent of Americans say the war has increased the risk of recession. Sixty-one percent say it has increased the risk of terrorism on American soil. Half think gas prices will be worse a year from now.Affordable Care Act flightThe New York Times reported Friday that roughly 5 million Americans have dropped Obamacare coverage since Congress let the enhanced subsidies expire at the end of 2025. Enrollment is on track to fall about 20 percent — from 24 million last year to roughly 19 million — with some analysts projecting losses as high as 26 percent. The hardest hit, according to the Times, are early retirees with middle-class incomes, the group that saw the steepest premium jumps. In some markets, their monthly costs rose by more than $1,000.The behavior that follows shows up in the Gallup affordability survey from earlier this week. A third of American adults report making at least one trade-off to pay for healthcare in the past year, including stretching prescription doses, borrowing money, and skipping meals. Among the uninsured, that figure rises to 62 percent. Roughly half of middle-income households — those making between $48,000 and $180,000 — say they have postponed a major life decision, like buying a home or changing jobs, because of healthcare and energy costs. The squeeze that used to land hardest at the bottom has moved up the income ladder.CEO payCEO pay in the United States grew roughly 20 times faster than worker pay last year, according to a report released this week by Oxfam and the International Trade Union Confederation — both advocacy organizations, but drawing on data from S&P Capital IQ, the Federal Reserve, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Adjusted for inflation, the average private-sector worker’s hourly wage grew 1.3 percent from 2024 to 2025. Pay for the 384 S&P 500 CEOs the analysts could track grew 25.6 percent. The typical CEO now earns 281 times what the typical worker does, per the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. Thirty-five years ago, the ratio was 60 to 1.Spirit Airlines to shutdownSpirit Airlines is preparing to shut down, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The discount carrier had been in talks with the Trump administration over a $500 million rescue that would have given the government a stake of up to 90 percent — but the deal fell apart over disagreements inside the administration about whether the federal government should be in the airline-rescue business at all — and, separately, about how to structure the rescue if it happened. Spirit’s bondholders also weren’t keen. — specifically the part where the deal with the government moved them to the back of the line so taxpayers could move to the front if things went to hell in the end and investors needed to be paid out. With no rescue and no cash, the airline is now moving to liquidate its aircraft fleet. Spirit has spent most of the last year and a half in Chapter 11. The business model that once made it an industry maverick — bargain fares plus a fee for everything else — couldn’t survive the combination of relentless competition, heavy debt, and the war’s effect on jet fuel.If you have made it this far it is a testament to the quality of your breeding and the width of your sympathies.Thank you to Annie Cohen for helping me pull all this together. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for April twentieth through the twenty-fourth.1 You can hear me read it here:Iran on pause. Schrodinger’s Strait was both opened and closed. Kash Out Crash Out at the FBI and cash out from the Treasury Department. Virginia voters turned 3-d chess into checkers. A soldier bet on the wrong war. And in the UK Smoke ‘em while you got ‘em.So let’s take it day by day.Monday April 20Iran WarIn Islamabad, Pakistan, the high-security Red Zone surrounding the Serena Hotel was sealed off by traffic police. Billboards went up. Security checkpoints multiplied. All in anticipation of a face-to-face meeting between Vice President Vance and Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf — a meeting that, by Monday night, had become a ghost summit. The Iranians refused to show, citing the ongoing U.S. naval blockade as a violation of the ceasefire.The president called Iran’s leaders “indecisive.” Regional experts saw something different: an Iranian government waiting for a unified signal from Washington that never came.Friday had looked different. The president told CBS News that Iran had “agreed to everything,” describing a joint operation to remove enriched uranium: “Our people, together with the Iranians, are going to work together to go get it. And then we’ll take it to the United States.” Within hours, Tehran disputed the president’s claims and said there was no such deal.By Sunday, familiar terrain. The president posted that his representatives would arrive in Islamabad the following evening, warning that if Iran rejected what he called a “very fair and reasonable DEAL,” the United States would “knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran.” “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!” he wrote.While gas prices climbed, it felt like the gas went completely out of the president’s war effort.An administration official told Axios that the president is “over it” and willing to give Iran a window of only “three to five days” to “get their s**t together.” He doesn’t want to fight anymore, the official said, but will if he feels he has to.Two questions keep surfacing. Did the president’s negotiating tactics — the public threats and the premature claims of a total surrender — poison whatever progress existed? And is this a repetition of what preceded the initial strike: a fundamental misreading of where the Iranians actually stood? One of the rotating justifications for the war was that Iran refused to negotiate in good faith. There were suggestions at the time that the U.S. had simply misread the internal fractures of the Iranian leadership. Career diplomats exist precisely to anticipate these gaps — to know the difference between posturing and a genuine impasse before the shooting starts.This also returns us to the unanswered questions at the center of the entire war: Was Iran truly close to a weapon, and was military action the only remedy? Only one person claims to know the answers, and he is an unreliable narrator — perhaps even to himself.Monday proved that in the Trumpian theater of war, the Negotiator and the Commander-in-Chief are often on stage at the same time, speaking over one another.Gas PricesPresident Trump told The Hill on Monday his Energy Secretary Chris Wright got it wrong when he said gas prices might not fall below $3 a gallon until next year. “No, I think he’s wrong on that. Totally wrong,” Trump said, adding that prices would drop “as soon as this ends”—meaning the Iran war. The president offered no mechanism, no timeline, just confidence overriding his own appointee’s assessment.But Wright has the better of the argument. Reopening the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t flip a switch. It starts a clock. Tankers need weeks to reach refineries, refineries that cut capacity or shifted schedules during the disruption need time to ramp back up, and the fuel still has to move through the distribution chain to local stations. “Gas prices go up like a rocket and come down like a feather,” as independent oil analyst Tom Kloza put it to CNN.Why? Gas station owners bought their current inventory at peak prices and won’t eat the loss until they’re confident the drop will stick. Consumers, meanwhile, stop comparison-shopping once prices dip even slightly, which removes the competitive pressure that might force stations to cut faster. And none of this accounts for OPEC+, which controls supply independent of any shipping lane. If the cartel holds production cuts to defend an $80 or $90 floor, American drivers pay that price regardless of what happens in the Strait. Peak summer driving season arrives on top of all of it, pushing demand higher just as supply tries to normalize.SCOTUS on Catholic PreschoolsThe Supreme Court decided to wrestle this: A gay parent wants to send their four-year-old to a neighborhood preschool—with money the state set aside for exactly that purpose. The school says no, because the people who run it believe, at the core of who they are, that enrolling that child would be wrong.The Supreme Court justices agreed on Monday to decide whether Catholic preschools in Colorado that decline to enroll 4-year-olds with gay or transgender parents can participate in a publicly funded state program. A Colorado program pays for families to send their children to the preschool of their choice, public or private, including faith-based programs.Two Catholic parish preschools in the Denver area said admitting such children would require them to violate their religious convictions. The state said the schools can’t block the kids. The church sued. The church lost—twice. Now the Supreme Court will decide.At bottom, this is a fight about two things the government does when it makes that call: it decides who belongs, and it decides whose conscience counts. For a gay parent, a state that allows that exclusion when distributing tax dollars is a state that has decided who belongs. For a believer, a state that overrides their conviction is a state that has decided whose conscience counts.FBI Director Kash Patel sues The AtlanticKash out. The FBI director announced Monday that he was suing The Atlantic for a story over the weekend that asserted that Patel drank to such excess that it was affecting his ability to do his job and that as a result, his job might be in danger. The magazine also reported that he is sometimes so out of pocket (that’s not a euphemism) that key decisions cannot be made and, in the article’s most colorful passage: “On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated.” A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors.” If the FBI director were to carry this suit to its conclusion, The Atlantic would be able to depose Patel and administration officials under the penalty of perjury.Detroit BallotsThe Justice Department demanded that Wayne County, Michigan — home to Detroit — turn over more than 860,000 ballots, envelopes, and receipts from the 2024 election. DOJ cited three fraud convictions and five lawsuits as evidence of the county’s “history” of election problems. But the three convictions were from 2020, involved individuals caught forging signatures, and were prosecuted by the state — in other words, cases where the system worked exactly as designed. The five lawsuits were almost entirely dismissed by Michigan judges for lack of evidence. The Republican-led state Senate also investigated and found no widespread fraud. None of it had anything to do with 2024.This fits a pattern. In January, the FBI raided the Fulton County, Georgia, elections office and seized hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots. Last May, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s team seized voting machines in Puerto Rico, finding no evidence of the Venezuelan interference they were looking for. The Justice Department has sued 24 states for refusing to turn over unredacted voter rolls. In each case, the administration cites election integrity; in each case, the predicate is thin or nonexistent.One detail worth noting: Trump won Michigan in 2024. He lost Wayne County by nearly 250,000 votes. The DOJ is investigating an election its own boss won, in a county where he didn’t.Whether any of these inquiries turn up actual fraud is almost beside the point. As Trump’s own attorney general William Barr testified in 2022, he told the White House at the time that its election fraud theories were “crazy stuff” doing “grave, grave disservice to the country.” Trump and his allies lost dozens of lawsuits challenging 2020 results. But Trump has repeatedly, across decades, raised the specter of election fraud where none exists — not necessarily to prove it, but to create enough confusion that the claim itself becomes the point.Tariff Refunds. (New York Times)Even though president Trump said tariffs were paid by other countries, it was always Americans who paid the import taxes. That’s why this Monday, exactly two months after the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s most sweeping tariffs, American importers started applying for reimbursement. They are owed $166 billion in refunds plus interest. It is estimated that 30,000 to 35,000 firms will apply. Everything from precision manufacturers to pharmaceutical importers will be eligible to upload proof of the levies they paid. It’s a deluge. Some companies have up to 5,000 individual entry lines to reconcile.Refunds will be issued 60 to 90 days after approval. The court ruled that the president had usurped Congress’ power to tax through his tariff program. Economists note that while the money is coming back, it doesn’t account for the “lost opportunity cost.” That is all the things that couldn’t be done while trying to avoid the import taxes– Companies reported moving senior logistics managers off of product development and into “tariff mitigation” full-time for over 18 months– and now another opportunity cost: all the stuff that isn’t being done in order to keep up with this paperwork nightmare that was easily avoidable. Many small businesses, unable to float the 25% tax, went under; they will not be able to request refunds.In an interview, the president said he will “remember” companies that don’t claim their money.While the president’s signature economic policy is being dismantled in keeping with the Supreme Court ruling, his standing on the economy continues to drop. An Associated Press poll puts approval on the economy at 30 percent in April, down from 38 percent in March. Only about a quarter of adults approve of his handling of the cost of living — a Marquette Law School survey puts that number at 24 percent. The New York Times has him at his highest disapproval rating ever: 58 percent.Gaza needs $71 billion to rebuild“Domicide” is the systematic destruction of the ability to call a palace home. That is what a new study by the European Union, United Nations and World Bank shows has happened in Gaza. It says the Israeli destruction in retaliation for the Hamas attack on October 7 has knocked the civilization back eight decades. Over 371,000 housing units are damaged or destroyed. That is roughly 92% of all pre-war residential structures. A daily average of four people are still killed and 24 wounded every day during this “ceasefire” period due to unexploded ordnance and lingering skirmishes.Six months into the ceasefire, the “reconstruction” hasn’t actually begun for most. Nearly the entire population is squeezed into a sliver of land along the coast, while the rest of the territory is occupied or under displacement orders.over 50% of hospitals non-functional. Because Israel still restricts fuel, half of all families are now burning hazardous waste and plastic to cook their food, leading to a surge in respiratory illnesses among children. There is an estimated 40 million tonnes of debris to clear. To put that in perspective, if you lined up the trucks needed to move it, the line would stretch from Gaza to New York and back.Over 80% of croplands are destroyed. The soil is now “decimated” by munitions and noxious gases, meaning Gazans cannot even grow their own vegetables to offset the aid shortages. The World Health Organization’s emergency minimum water ration is 15 liters per person per day. Gazans are currently averaging 8.4 liters—less than a single 10-minute shower for an entire day of drinking, cooking, and washing.Drought in the USIn context that is so different I can’t make obvious transition, there are water shortages in the U.S. too. More than 61% of the nation is now in a drought, the highest percentage in nearly four years, according to the most recent U.S. Drought Monitor. In all, 45 of 50 states are enduring drought, with only Alaska, North Dakota, Michigan, Connecticut and Rhode Island completely drought-free.In Texas and the Southern Plains, soil moisture levels are at historic lows, which typically leads to higher crop insurance claims and potential spikes in food pricing for corn and wheat. In Virginia and the Carolinas, summer droughts significantly increase the risk of “dry lightning” and forest fires in the Appalachian region. Power plants (thermal and nuclear) require massive amounts of water for cooling. Low water levels in reservoirs can lead to reduced power output or temporary shutdowns during peak summer heat.North Korean Missile Launch: Father and Daughter Affair.What are intergenerational dictators wearing to missile launches this season? Black leather jackets. Not exactly a departure from menace wear, but that’s what North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his teenage daughter were both wearing as they watched a missile test launch from a coastal observation point as a projectile soared over the water, trailing gray smoke. No fuchsia for the next generation, but it was far more stylish than the four elderly military officers standing behind them in regulation brown, peering up into the sky, all of them holding small booklets and writing instruments like they were all recording their golf scores. South Korea’s spy service recently assessed that the daughter, reportedly named Kim Ju Ae, could be considered Kim’s heir. North Korea has tested cluster bomb warheads before. But observers say the Iran war may have prompted North Korea to display that it has cluster munitions and accelerate efforts to develop better ones.Labor Secretary Steps DownMonday, the Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer stepped down amid an accordion file of accusations such as sending staff to pick up liquor and attempting to use business trips as excuses for personal travel including for example, a UFC fight in Chicago, a Morgan Wallen concert and to see friends and family in various states. She reportedly asked staff to design work trips that would provide her openings to attend those events. For months, the Labor Department’s Inspector General’s Office has been investigating these claims as well as a complaint that Chavez-DeRemer was having a sexual relationship with a member of her security team. She now joins former Homeland Security Secretary Christie Noem who was accused of similar business and former Attorney General Pam Bondi, as the highest profile ejections from the Trump administration.Tim Cook to Step DownApple — the world’s most valuable company, one of the Magnificent Seven that drive the S&P 500, a $4 trillion enterprise whose devices sit in the hands of 2.5 billion people — will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2026, and this week announced its most significant leadership transition in a generation. CEO Tim Cook will step down September 1, moving to Executive Chairman. Cook transformed Apple from a premium computer maker into a global utility — revenues nearly quadrupled to $400 billion under his watch. But his final years were shadowed by a perceived AI gap, with Apple trailing Microsoft and Google.His successor: John Ternus, the 50-year-old hardware chief who has been with Apple since 2001 and led the transition to Apple Silicon, the move that unified the company’s chips and software architecture. Where Cook was the operations and supply chain master, Ternus is a product engineer — an amateur rally car racer known for taking teams to off-road tracks to practice precision under pressure. The choice signals Apple believes its AI problem is ultimately a hardware problem.While Apple figures out its AI strategy, a Chinese smartphone company just built a robot that outruns every human who has ever lived. One year ago it finished a half marathon in two hours and forty minutes. This year: fifty minutes. So, if Apple licks its AI problem, the next Apple CEO might be a robot.Tuesday April 21Iran War“Vacate your engine room. We are prepared to subject you to disabling fire.” This message sent Sunday by the USS Spruance preceded the disabling the Touska, an Iranian-flagged container ship, which like a child at college, had been ignoring messages. For six hours warnings were sent until finallyprecision rounds were fired directly into the ship’s propulsion compartment. This surgical strike allowed the Marines from the 31st MEU to board via helicopter and secure the vessel.Why am I putting it on a Tuesday? First of all, it’s just an amazing story. And second of all, the seizure underscored the extreme tension in the Strait of Hormuz, where commercial traffic has effectively vanished; only three tankers transited the waterway that entire day, all of which carried non-Iranian cargo and were only permitted passage after pre-coordinating with regional authorities to avoid similar engine room events.On the diplomatic front, the engine also seemed to be disabled. This somewhat bouncy transition brought to you by the bouncy cab in which it was written.Tuesday, President Trump told CNBC that he expected a “great deal” with Iran but signaled he will not extend the ceasefire and was ready to resume bombing. By the end of the day he had announced an indefinite ceasefire.In what is becoming common practice, $500 billion in oil trades were placed just before Trump made the ceasefire announcement.In the CNBC interview the president said, “We’ve taken out their leaders…but these leaders are much more rational.”This is an ongoing matter. Are the leaders of Iran really more rational? What evidence is there of that? These are the leaders whose civilization Trump was promising to destroy. Why would he have wanted to destroy the reasonable leaders? Why would he wing out civilization destroying threats if they were responding to reason. But let’s accept the president’s assertion that he changed the regime. What is the point of regime change if the regime that is in power is still very hostile to the United States or more hostile?What is fair to say is that the U.S. strikes effectively ended the “Theocratic” era of Iran, replacing it with a Militaristic Autocracy led by the IRGC. The “regime change” Trump refers to is the transition from a government of clerics to a government of survivalist generals. Whether they are “rational” or simply “desperate” remains the central question of the current ceasefire negotiations.Finally, because the Iran war has not gone as easily as the president expected, he’s taken to declaring that he would have had an easier time with other wars. Vietnam, for example, the war he did not decide to fight when he had the chance. “I would have won Vietnam very quickly. I would have, if I were president, I would have won Iraq in the same amount of time that we won, because essentially, we won here.”Just a week after Artemis II took humans farther from earth than any had ever been, this assertion traveled an even greater distance from the experience we have had on earth as we know it.Drone BoostThe Pentagon’s largest-ever budget request earmarks $75 billion for drones and the technology to counter them. The centerpiece: the Defense Autonomous Working Group, a little-known office working with U.S. commandos, would jump from $226 million this year to $54.6 billion — likely the largest single year-over-year boost of any defense program in history, and certain to draw scrutiny inside an already eye-catching $1.5 trillion request that’s 42 percent larger than this year’s budget.The numbers amount to a verdict on how effective cheap drones have been in this conflict — and in Ukraine before it. The math is brutal: the U.S. routinely uses million-dollar Patriot and THAAD missiles to intercept drones that cost a few thousand dollars. Roughly $21 billion of the request targets that imbalance directly, funding directed-energy weapons — lasers and high-power microwaves — designed to kill drone swarms at a cost of a few dollars per shot rather than a few million.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Airline Iran War Fallout SpreadsGlobal jet fuel prices are up more than 70 percent, and the Iran-war-based pain is spreading across the airline industry. American Airlines lowered its earnings target, warning it may post a loss in 2026 after $4 billion in additional fuel costs. United Airlines says fares may rise 20 percent. In Europe, where airlines are the largest consumers of fuel shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, low-cost carrier Ryanair said last week it could only guarantee jet fuel supply through May.Passengers are adapting in their own way. Travel experts report that frequent flyers are hedging against cancellations and route disruptions by using miles to make overlapping bookings across multiple routes for the same trip. Because award tickets carry minimal or no cancellation fees compared with cash bookings, travelers can drop the extra reservations at the last minute.Those who stay home are staying home — and drinking there.Nearly a third of Americans who still drink say they now pregame before going out because drinks cost too much. The practice, once associated with college, is showing up on spreadsheets. Suntory, which makes Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark, reports higher demand for its small-format bottles. Among drinkers who say prices influence whether they go out at all, 41 percent have switched to water or non-alcoholic options. Thirty-seven percent are pregaming.Condom pricesAlso potentially grounded as a result of the war: Malaysian company Karex told Reuters Tuesday that the company may be forced to raise condom prices at least 20 to 30 percent. Condom production requires materials that also arrive by ship through the waterway that has become the center of this conflict. The company, which produces Durex and Trojan makes 5 billion condoms annually and exports to more than 130 countries. The company’s CEO Goh told Reuters that along with higher costs for manufacturing and packaging, there are delays in shipping. “We’re seeing a lot more condoms actually sitting on vessels that have not ⁠arrived ​at their destination but are highly required.”Pentagon Flu VaccineThe Pentagon is no longer requiring those who serve to get the annual flu vaccine. For decades, the consensus was that a flu outbreak in a barracks or on a carrier could take a unit “off the board” just as effectively as an enemy strike. The new priority argues that the intangible cost to morale and the political cost of coercion are now higher than the biological cost of the virus. It frames the mandate not as a shield against disease, but as a “compliance test” that alienates the very demographic the military needs to recruit. This isn’t really about the flu; it’s a retroactive battle over the COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The resistance that formed during the pandemic has been industrialized into a broader skepticism of all mandatory medical interventions. By removing the flu shot—a long-standing, relatively uncontroversial requirement—the administration is signaling a “demilitarization” of public health, treating medical decisions as private choices rather than command directives.Congressional Expulsions:Last week two men accused of sexual predation were bounced from the house and this week on Tuesday, there were two more motions in the bouncy House. House Democrats prepared to expel Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-FL) for, among other things, funneling $5 million in COVID relief funds to her campaign, but the Congresswoman resigned before they could make it official. Rep. Nancy Mace introduced a measure to expel Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) who has been accused of campaign finance violations and sexual misconduct.Fed Independence:For months Donald Trump has used his administration to target the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and member of the fed board of governors Lisa Cook. He didn’t like their reluctance to lower rates fast enough. They, along with most economists, worried inflation would rise.Tuesday, the president’s replacement appeared as a part of his Senate confirmation. Much of the intense questioning Kevin Warsh faced regarded his independence from the White House. The Fed is an independent agency to keep politics out of interest rate decisions in order to safeguard the economy. But even a president booing from the sidelines has economic impacts.Southern Poverty LawA federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday — 11 counts including wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The DOJ’s theory: the SPLC, a 55-year-old civil rights organization best known for fighting the Klan, defrauded its donors by secretly funneling more than $3 million to paid informants inside the very extremist groups it claimed to be dismantling.The informants were known internally as “field sources” or “the Fs.” Between 2014 and 2023, at least eight were paid through shell companies with names like “Center Investigative Agency,” “Fox Photography,” and “Rare Books Warehouse,” with payments loaded onto prepaid cards. One informant affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance received more than $1 million. Another, paid $270,000, sat in the online leadership group that planned the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville — attended the rally at the SPLC’s direction, made racist posts under their supervision, and coordinated transportation for other attendees. After Charlottesville left one person dead and dozens injured, SPLC donations nearly tripled, from $50 million to $132 million in a single year.The SPLC calls it a “weaponized prosecution,” saying its informants risked their lives and shared intelligence that saved others. The core problem with the DOJ’s theory: paying confidential sources inside criminal organizations is what federal law enforcement does routinely. Multiple legal scholars called the indictment thin and questioned whether it makes out the elements of a crime.That’s the legal question. The political question is broader. The SPLC’s “Hate Map” has been used for decades by the FBI, banks, and tech companies to track, de-platform, and investigate extremist groups. It has also been used to label conservative organizations — a fact Republicans have hammered for years. This indictment arrives under an acting attorney general who is under reported pressure from the president to deliver wins against perceived political opponents. Whether the underlying conduct was criminal or standard investigative practice, the charges alone freeze the SPLC’s operations and credibility at a moment when the organization sits on a $750 million endowment that the DOJ could target through forfeiture.Florida and AIFlorida launched a criminal investigation into OpenAI on Tuesday after chat logs revealed the suspect in last April’s Florida State University shooting — two killed, six injured — asked ChatGPT what gun and ammunition to use, where and when on campus he’d find the most people, and whether school shooters go to maximum security prison. The chatbot answered. The state’s attorney general said if a human being had provided that advice, prosecutors would charge them with murder. The question with no precedent: does the same apply when the advisor is software?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Ticks sending people to the ERWhile city dwellers move to the country for the warmer months, ticks are moving in the opposite direction. Lyme disease cases in Michigan nearly quadrupled between 2022 and 2025 in part because ticks are moving to suburban and urban areas. The CDC reports that bites are sending Americans to the emergency room (ER) at the highest rate in nearly 10 years. It’s not just the city’s broadway plays and used bookstores that are causing the spike, however. The earlier onset of warm weather means more people are out and about outside.Wednesday, April 22Iran War: Six Months to Sweep Mines.On Wednesday, Iran attacked three ships in the Strait of Hormuz and escorted two to Iranian waters. The dueling naval operations strained the ceasefire and exposed a key sticking point in negotiations: Iran’s chief negotiator says reopening the strait is impossible while the U.S. blockade remains.That blockade was no longer the concern of Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, fired Wednesday, three weeks after Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George got the same treatment. The dispute reportedly pit Phelan—a political appointee—against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over management style, personnel, and the pace of shipbuilding.The Washington Post reported that in a classified briefing to the House Armed Services Committee, Pentagon officials said completely clearing the Strait of Hormuz of Iranian-laid mines could take six months.This is what makes the war so tricky. Wednesday morning the president boasted about destroying the Iranian navy. True enough—92% of the fleet, 140 to 158 vessels. But military analysts and the Pentagon distinguish between the “conventional navy”—which is indeed “gone”—and Iran’s “asymmetric” capacity, which remains potent.Iran deploys hundreds of small, civilian-style boats and midget submarines difficult to track. These launch from hidden coastal facilities and seed small numbers of mines even during a ceasefire or active blockade. Iran has GPS-enabled “floating” mines that can be released remotely, making their location unpredictable once they hit the current. Iran’s sea mine inventory numbers in the hundreds—enough to seed the Strait faster than the U.S. can clear it.Specialized mine-countermeasure vessels are slow-moving and vulnerable. The U.S. uses unmanned underwater vehicles like Knifefish to minimize risk to personnel, but these drones still require support ships that are targets for Iranian missiles, drones, and fast-attack craft. The Navy must first establish a “sanitized” zone to protect clearing operations—difficult when Iran can fire land-based anti-ship missiles from coastal batteries and hidden tunnel networks.And clearing has to be near-total to matter. Shipping firms suspended operations in late February after 21 confirmed attacks on merchant vessels. The uncertainty has driven insurance premiums to prohibitive levels.Ukraine gets CashThe war in Ukraine continues — another conflict the president said he would solve in short order. Since he hasn’t, the Ukrainians took what help they could get: the European Union will finally disburse a €90 billion loan after Hungary lifted its veto, ending months of deadlock over funding that Ukraine needs within weeks to keep both its military and its government running. The breakthrough came with a trade — Ukraine repaired the Druzhba pipeline and resumed Russian oil flows to Hungary and Slovakia, and in return, both countries dropped their blocks on the loan and a fresh package of Russian sanctions.Can we pause here for a minute? Has any artist other than Jimi Hendrix done more with Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” than Dave Matthews? Did I say that out loud? Sorry, that’s on my headphones.No, the reason I wanted to pause is that what we have here is Ukraine repairing a pipeline so their enemy can sell oil — profits that fund the very missiles being fired at Ukrainian cities. They did it anyway, because they needed the money more than they needed the principle. That’s the paradoxical math of relations among nations.On the battlefield, the money arrives at an unexpectedly strong moment. Ukraine’s foreign minister said the country’s frontline position is the strongest it has been in a year, driven largely by drone superiority and improved air defense. An analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War confirmed that Russian troops made almost no territorial gains across the frontline in March — the first time that has happened in two and a half years.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Virginia Redistricting & 2026 MidtermsReform minded states and voters have put independent redistricting commissions in place to keep the party in power from drawing maps that keep it in power. In 2020, 65 percent of Virginia voters approved exactly that — a bipartisan commission to draw the state’s congressional lines. This week, Virginia Democrats threw it out.On Tuesday, voters narrowly approved a referendum — 51.5 to 48.6 percent — to temporarily return redistricting to the Democratic-controlled legislature, which has already drawn a map favoring Democrats in 10 of the state’s 11 House districts. Virginia currently splits 6-5.The new lines could flip four seats. Democrats aren’t pretending this is principled. They’re calling it necessary. The redistricting arms race started last summer, when President Trump pressured Texas to redraw its congressional map mid-decade — something states almost never do between censuses. Texas obliged, targeting five Democratic seats. Missouri and North Carolina followed. The Supreme Court allowed the Texas map to proceed 6-3, despite a lower court finding it was a racial gerrymander.California responded with its own Democratic-friendly redraw. Virginia followed. Trump’s original calculation was straightforward: gerrymander enough red states to insulate the Republican House majority heading into the midterms. Instead, he triggered a chain reaction. Democrats now argue they can’t unilaterally respect nonpartisan commissions while Republicans dismantle the maps in every state they control. All of this activity nets out to mean that Democrats have actually picked up a seat.The legal fight isn’t over. A Tazewell County judge — the same Republican appointee who tried to block the referendum twice before, and was overruled by the Virginia Supreme Court both times — declared the vote void the day after it passed. The attorney general is appealing. The state Supreme Court will likely have the final word before August primaries.More districts drawn to be safe for one party means more representatives who answer only to their base, more primaries decided by the most partisan voters, and less incentive for anyone in office to negotiate with the other side. The commissions were supposed to prevent exactly this.Ten Commandments in Texas classroomsTexas can require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools, a U.S. appeals court ruled. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, called the ruling “a major victory for Texas and our moral values.” “The Ten Commandments have had a profound impact on our nation, and it’s important that students learn from them every single day.” Paxton’s wife of 38 years filed for divorce last year “on Biblical grounds” and in the filing claimed that he had committed adultery, proof of the ongoing need of moral reminders. Similar laws in Arkansas and Louisiana are also before the courts.U.S. Rep. David Scott diesU.S. Rep. David Scott, a Georgia Democrat and the first Black chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, died on Wednesday. He was 80. His office described the death as “unexpected,” – indeed he had voted Tuesday on the House floor– and while no specific cause was immediately released, he had recently dealt with declining health. Scott, who was seeking his 13th term in Congress despite challenges from within his party, was once a leading voice for Democrats on issues related to farm aid policy and food aid for consumers and a prominent Black member of the party’s moderate Blue Dog caucus.CDC won’t publish reportThe Washington Post reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had blocked the publication of a scientific study showing that COVID-19 vaccines significantly reduced hospitalizations and emergency room visits this past winter by approximately 50% to 55%. In public health terms, cutting the risk of hospitalization in half is at the high end of what is usually hoped for from a seasonal flu shot.Acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya—who also leads the NIH—halted the publication citing “methodological concerns.” The Post cited sources familiar with the matter who noted the study used the same process—the “test-negative design” and VISION network data—the CDC recently used to publish flu vaccine effectiveness data.The decision has sparked internal concern that scientific data is being suppressed to align with the views of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent critic of the COVID-19 shots whose critiques have been received with withering criticism from experts across all scientific fields, who point out that his positions contradict the consensus of nearly every major global health body.UK smoking banThe UK Parliament passed the Tobacco and Vapes Bill on Tuesday — legislation that ensures anyone born on or after January 1, 2009, can never legally buy tobacco in their lifetime. Not at 18, not at 30, not ever. Starting in 2027, the legal purchasing age rises by one year, every year. The door closes behind today’s 17-year-olds and stays closed.The scope goes well beyond cigarettes. The bill bans snus, the oral tobacco popular in Scandinavia, and extends to smoking accessories — including cigarette papers, meaning the 2009-and-after generation can’t buy the materials to roll their own. On vaping, the government still treats e-cigarettes as a quitting tool for adults but moved to strip away everything that makes them appealing to children: new powers to restrict candy-like flavors, packaging, and store displays, plus a ban on vaping in cars when children are present. Smoke-free and vape-free zones now extend to playgrounds and the areas outside schools and hospitals.A clerk who fails to check ID faces a £200 on-the-spot fine. Shops that repeatedly violate the law can be banned from selling tobacco or nicotine products for a year. The bill cleared its final legislative stage between the Commons and the Lords on Tuesday and awaits Royal Assent from King Charles, expected next week.While we’re in Britain: the Times published a quiz this week asking whether you can tell real British regional insults from fake ones. “Bampot” (Scottish: lunatic), “wazzock” (Northern English: idiot), “numpty” (Scottish: fool), and “mardy” (Midlands: soft, cowardly) are all apparently real words that real people say to other real people. The quiz is in the show notes, you jammy dodger.Carter Page settlement.The Trump Justice Department agreed Wednesday to pay $1.25 million to Carter Page, the 2016 campaign adviser the FBI wiretapped during the Russia investigation — settling a lawsuit the government had already won in lower courts. Two things are true about Carter Page, and the settlement works hard to obscure one of them. The FBI did botch its surveillance applications — an inspector general found serious errors and omissions across four rounds of court orders. Page had a legitimate grievance. But settling a case you’ve already won is almost unheard of in the history of the Justice Department. The government fights these cases precisely to avoid setting precedents that invite more lawsuits against taxpayers.Walking away from a victory means something else is driving the decision. And this follows a pattern. Last month, $1.25 million to Michael Flynn, who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI before being pardoned. Last year, nearly $5 million to the estate of Ashli Babbitt, shot while breaching the Capitol on January 6th. In each case, the DOJ bypassed normal procedures to carve out settlements for people aligned with President Trump. The administration calls it combating the “weaponization of government.” But taken together — an unprecedented legal surrender, combined with payouts that track loyalty rather than legal merit — it starts to look less like fairness and more like an effort to discredit the entire Russia investigation. An investigation corroborated by the U.S. intelligence community, the Mueller probe’s 34 indictments, and even the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee.Spirit Airlines BailoutWe’ve talked about airlines absorbing the fuel costs of the war with Iran. For Spirit Airlines, the war didn’t just hurt — it made the airline’s existing bankruptcy exit plan mathematically impossible. Unlike the major carriers, Spirit does no fuel hedging — no pre-buying at lower rates — and its entire business model depends on filling cheap seats in volume. When fuel prices spike, the big airlines absorb the hit. Spirit drowns in it.Now the Trump administration is negotiating a $500 million rescue package that could leave the federal government owning 90 percent of the airline. Remember last August, the government converted Biden-era grants into a 10 percent ownership stake in Intel, arguing that without it, the U.S. would depend on chip factories in Taiwan for everything from fighter jets to iPhones. In January, a similar stake in USA Rare Earth. The logic: don’t just give grants to firms, take equity because taxpayers share in the upside, and the government keeps strategic assets from failing or falling into foreign hands. For an administration that campaigned on getting government out of the way of business, it’s a striking turn — the federal government deciding which companies live and which ones don’t.Why is a discount airline strategically critical? The administration argues if Spirit dies, the Big Three lose their primary low-cost competitor, and ticket prices for working-class travelers spike during an already inflationary war. The president also cited the loss of 14,000 jobs. A wrinkle: Spirit flies nothing but Airbus — 76 European-made planes. If this deal closes, the “Buy American” administration becomes the majority owner of an airline that doesn’t fly a single American-made aircraft, while simultaneously locked in trade tensions with the EU. Bottom line: will the U.S. gain leverage or become owner of an airline nobody else wanted.988 Hotline SuccessIn July 2022 the 988 mental health crisis hotline launched, and over the next two and a half years there were 11 percent fewer suicide deaths among 15- to 23-year-olds than researchers had expected — nearly 4,400 lives. This, according to a study published Wednesday in JAMA. As a gut check, researchers looked at England, which had no comparable hotline launch during the same period — and saw no similar decline in youth suicides.The reduction tracked directly with usage: the ten states with the largest increases in call volume saw an 18 percent drop in suicide deaths; the ten states with the smallest increases saw only 11 percent. The more a community used the service, the more lives were saved. The 988 program represents roughly $1.5 billion in federal investment, one of the largest in suicide prevention history. But that 11 percent drop was achieved with specialized sub-networks in place — including partnerships like the Trevor Project’s dedicated line for LGBTQ+ youth, a population at significantly elevated risk.The administration’s July 2025 termination of the dedicated LGBTQ+ sub-network has sparked warnings from researchers that the 2026 data could show a rebound in suicide rates among queer and trans youth, who previously utilized the ‘Press 3’ prompt for counselors specifically trained in their unique stressors.Thursday, April 23Iran WarThursday it was the battle of the blockades.The U.S. military intercepted two Iranian oil supertankers that had attempted to slip through the dragnet but were unable to because, well, they are supertankers, one definition of which is the largest self-propelled vehicles ever built. Very hard to be stealthy.While the U.S. successfully interdicted the outward flow of Iranian crude, Tehran struck back. In a direct retaliation, Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) commandos seized two Western-linked vessels.Senate Adopts G.O.P. BudgetThe Senate passed a Republican budget blueprint early Thursday morning to end the longest Department of Homeland Security shutdown in American history. DHS has been partially paralyzed since mid-February, when federal agents fatally shot a 37-year-old man, Alex Pretti, during an immigration operation in Minneapolis. Democrats used the 60-vote filibuster threshold to block all DHS funding, demanding use-of-force reforms the administration refused to consider.Republicans turned to budget reconciliation — a mechanism that lets them bypass the filibuster and pass the funding bill with a simple majority. The goal: unlock up to $70 billion for ICE and Border Patrol, putting the administration’s immigration agenda on autopilot for the next three and a half years.Democrats couldn’t stop the bill, but they used the mandatory vote-a-rama — a marathon of rapid-fire amendments — to force Republicans on the record rejecting restoration of SNAP benefits, school meal funding, and energy-cost relief.The larger story is what reconciliation costs. Congress generally gets only one reconciliation bill per budget cycle. By spending the 2026 slot to reopen a shuttered department and fund ICE, Republicans forfeit their best tool for passing tax cuts or deregulation later this year. That tradeoff likely drove the only two Republican defections: Rand Paul, who called it a fiscal gimmick that adds billions to the deficit, and Lisa Murkowski, who objected to abandoning the Senate’s tradition of bipartisan cooperation.Epstein DOJThe Justice Department’s internal watchdog opened a review Thursday into whether the department defied the law Congress wrote specifically to prevent it from doing what it did. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed by the president late last year, stripped the DOJ of its usual discretion — no withholding records for “political sensitivity,” “reputational harm,” or the “embarrassment” of public figures. Release everything within 30 days. The only exception: protecting victim identities.The DOJ blew past the December deadline, producing a fraction of the documents and citing “logistical hurdles” that drew bipartisan contempt. When the department finally dumped millions of pages in late January, it managed a special kind of achievement. It failed in both directions: tens of thousands of pages still missing, while the rushed redaction process left the names and personal details of several victims exposed. The Inspector General now wants to know whether the department used privacy as a shield to hide records while simultaneously failing to protect the people the law existed to shield.Marijuana ClassificationActing Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order moving state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I, the same classification as heroin, to Schedule III, alongside ketamine and Tylenol with codeine. The most significant shift in federal drug policy since 1970 legitimizes the medical programs of 40 states in one stroke while leaving recreational marijuana exactly where it was: federally illegal.Medical dispensaries can now deduct rent, payroll, and operating costs on their taxes for the first time — a provision the old Schedule I classification blocked, costing the industry billions.Researchers who spent years trapped in a bureaucratic paradox — needing federal approval to study a drug the federal government insisted had no medical value — can now access state-licensed cannabis for clinical trials without risking prosecution.The legal result is stranger than the policy. The same plant, grown in the same facility, can now be a Schedule III medication when sold to a patient with a medical card and a Schedule I narcotic when sold to an adult for recreational use next door. The administration calls this common sense. The DEA will hold hearings in June on whether to reschedule marijuana more broadly.Soldier arrested for Polymarket betsHe was the soldier who turned Operation Absolute Resolve into Operation No You Didn’t. A U.S. Army Special Forces master sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke was arrested for allegedly using classified information to make extremely profitable bets on the Polymarket prediction market related to the American military mission that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, the Department of Justice said Thursday.Van Dyke, 38, wagered a total of about $33,000 in 13 or so bets in the week leading up to that operation, with the knowledge that the United States was secretly planning military action against Maduro. The bets won Van Dyke nearly $410,000, the indictment alleges.Meta layoffs and Microsoft buyoutsLast week we told you that Meta was creating an AI replica of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg so that employees could interact with the AI boss to get a better sense of what he was thinking. 8,000 of those employees – or 10 percent of its workforce– will be denied that delicious conversation. They are being let go, the company said Thursday so Meta can ramp up spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure and highly paid AI-expert hires. Also Thursday, Microsoft said it was offering voluntary buyouts to thousands of its U.S. employees. The software giant plans to make the offers in early May to about 8,750 people, or 7% of its U.S. workforce.College ToursA study published this week by researchers at Amherst College found that the weather on the day of your campus visit meaningfully affects whether you apply. Applications dropped 10 percent when the tour was hot, 8 percent when it rained, and 5 percent when it was simply cloudy — compared to mild, sunny days. Male visitors, the study found, were more sensitive to weather conditions than female visitors. The study was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is a serious institution that has now confirmed that a passing cloud may have determined where you spent four years of your life.Friday, April 24Iran WarAt the end of the week, the United States was negotiating with Iran over the same points that have been at issue since 2015, when the Obama administration and five other world powers struck the JCPOA — the agreement designed to ensure Iran’s nuclear program stays peaceful. Same technical questions: how much enrichment Iran keeps, who inspects it, whether the stockpile goes to a third country. Same political question: what does Iran get in return.Trump spent years mocking Obama for what he paid to get that deal. Now he’s spent considerably more. The New York Times reported this week that the war burned through roughly $28 to $35 billion — just under a billion dollars a day for 38 days. In the first two days alone, the military used $5.6 billion in munitions.The U.S. fired more than 1,100 JASSM-ER cruise missiles — long-range stealth weapons designed not for Iran but for a war with China. Roughly 1,500 remain in inventory. More than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles, at $4 million each. The U.S. produces about 600 Patriots a year. Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said reconstituting what was expended “could take years.” Admiral Paparo, head of Indo-Pacific Command, told the New York Times: “There are finite limits to the magazine.”Trump has been adamant in private that his deal must be better than Obama’s. But “better” isn’t just a measure of the document. The calculation requires subtracting what the JCPOA would have delivered, then weighing that delta against the full cost of getting here: the dead, the debt, the depleted Pacific posture, and whatever chilling effect this war has on America’s willingness to intervene the next time.Dominic Tierney, writing in Foreign Affairs, offers the frame: the American way of war doesn’t reward tactical dominance. Americans believe winning requires decisive success — which means the definition of winning isn’t only Iran’s to give or the administration’s to give. Trump has to sell it to an electorate that already doesn’t believe him.Support for continuing the war sits at 31 percent. Seventy-eight percent of Americans say the U.S. has not met its goals; 21 percent say it has. The president’s handling of the conflict draws 32 to 34 percent approval, with disapproval as high as 61 percent in Pew and YouGov tracking. Pew found that by nearly two to one, Americans say the war is not going well. Forty percent believe it will leave the country less safe. Sixty-six percent say the U.S. should find a way out, even without achieving its stated objectives.Two thirds of the country have already decided that getting out matters more than winning.For all of president Trump’s marketing genius.(that is how he became president, after all) he is slouching under the weight of two wars– a trade war and the war in Iran. Though he is trying to convince the public that the economy is doing great and that America has won in Iran, he is not succeeding.Criminal inquiry into Jerome Powell closedThe Justice Department closed its criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Friday — clearing the way for Kevin Warsh’s confirmation as Powell’s successor. The probe centered on cost overruns in the Fed’s headquarters renovation: a project that grew from $1.9 billion to roughly $2.5 billion, which the Fed attributed to a sinkhole, asbestos, and inflation. Powell had called the investigation an attempt to pressure the Fed into cutting rates — currently at 3.6% — toward the 1% the president wanted. In March, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg quashed the DOJ’s subpoenas, finding “essentially zero evidence” Powell had committed a crime. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro closed the file Friday, handing the renovation questions to the Fed’s Inspector General, with the option to reopen if the IG finds fraud rather than mismanagement. Republican Senator Thom Tillis had vowed to block any Fed nominee while the probe remained open. With it closed, Tillis signaled he’d support moving Warsh to a full Senate vote.Judge’s Ruling on Asylum.A federal appeals court ruled Friday that Trump’s declaration of an “invasion” at the southern border was illegal — effectively reopening the U.S. to migrants seeking asylum for the first time since the first day of his second term.The administration will almost certainly appeal. Asylum processing hasn’t resumed, and the court didn’t set a timeline. But the ruling lands as a rebuke: Congress, the court found, never gave the president the power to waive asylum law by proclamation. The ruling doesn’t mean open borders — it means the U.S. rejoins nearly every other country in the world in giving people fleeing persecution a hearing.The question of who this country keeps its promises to surfaced elsewhere this week. The Trump administration is weighing whether to send roughly 1,100 Afghans — translators, guides, people who worked alongside American troops against the Taliban — to the Democratic Republic of Congo rather than honor the visa program Congress authorized for them. The alternative the administration is also floating: return them to live under the Taliban. Lawmakers in both parties objected. “We made promises to those fighting by our side to bring them to the U.S.,” said Republican Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska. “We should keep our promises.”And if you’re charting the tussle between the branches this week, you have the independent Fed on slightly firmer footing, the tariff money being repaid for executive overreach, and now this asylum ruling. Three rulings, one direction. Almost like the founders planned it that way.World Cup final tickets listed for more than $2.2millionIn economics, a Veblen good is one where demand increases alongside the price because the cost itself functions as a status symbol. This explains the psychological theater behind the news that a single 2026 World Cup ticket has been listed for $2.3 million. While no one is likely to actually pay that “moonshot” price, its mere existence serves a strategic purpose. By abandoning the resale price caps used in previous tournaments, FIFA has created a wild-west secondary market where they collect a 15% fee from both the buyer and the seller. This 30% combined “tax” gives the governing body a direct incentive to let wacky pricing stand.From a psychological standpoint, however, this outlier functions as an anchor. It recalibrates the fan’s sense of value: once you’ve processed the idea of a $2 million seat, the actual $11,000 price tag for Category 1 seats—itself an astronomical sum—suddenly feels like a bargain.1Some of you may remember the Face the Nation Diary. Same instinct, new form. I think it’s probably best experienced if you listen to me read the audio version. Please let me know what you think — and what you like and don’t like. Get full access to John Dickerson at www.johndickerson.com/subscribe

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