John Dickerson Field Notes

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 again

Before 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 ally

This 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 farm

This 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, renegotiated

The 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 files

A 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 coverage

More 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 Resigns

In 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 Blackout

By 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.

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/NATO

Every 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 leader

The 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 children

Migrant 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 Shooting

Early 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 off

While 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 bell

On 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 pitch

One 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 shrinkage

New 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 tomorrow

Eighty 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!

Intro

Welcome 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 22

Hammering 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 exit

Britain 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 blocking

President 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 mean

A 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 growing

Confirmed 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 Greenspan

Alan 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 Davis

Clive 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 up

In 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 23

Tech stocks

Traders 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 war

The 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 roof

Tuesday 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 conviction

On 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 deportations

When 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 regret

Tuesday 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 hot

Summarizing 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 opener

Somewhere 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 shelf

Lionel 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 me

A 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 24

The 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 hostage

Wednesday 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 exist

Trump 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 Senators

Trump 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 bankruptcy

Camp 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 help

A 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 25

Venezuelan double quake

Two 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 here

The 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 TPS

The 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 Asylum

Imagine 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 Roundup

For 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 PM

On 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 blink

France 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 person

And 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.

Friday

Foolish violation

President 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.

Lebanon

Four 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 strikes

Ukraine 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 guilty

John 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 Watergate

JD 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 approval

OpenAI 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 scrolls

A 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.”

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 15th

Memorandum of Misunderstanding

For 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 balance

President 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 snoop

In 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 switch

Anthropic 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 ban

Britain’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” tree

A 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 plague

In 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 Dots

Here’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 16

Iran economic fallout

Trump 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 game

Trump 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 allies

On 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 parents

A 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 hike

Japan 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 lesson

Closed, 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 Serena

Serena 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 17

Trump speaks at G-7

The 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 Deal

At 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 confirmation

From 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 Results

Trump’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 investigation

A 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 insecurity

Global 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 meeting

Kevin 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 SNAP

More 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 debate

FIFA 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 18

SCOTUS on guns and pot

The 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 opening

The 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 Congress

A 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 attack

Ukraine 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 prices

Gas 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 diet

And 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 dies

The 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 19

Iran deal wobbles

The 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 G7

During 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 study

They 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 ponder

The 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.

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 Podcasts

Thank 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 8

Iran and Israel

Last 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 dead

When 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 Fire

The 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 spread

The 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 cuts

The 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 bourbon

11,000 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 $161,000

Chocolate in New Jersey: valued at $150,000

Blueberries and kiwis in New Jersey: valued at $160,000

Processed lobster meat: valued at $400,000, which completely disappeared after being picked up from a warehouse in Taunton, Mass.

Tuesday June 9

Apache down

At 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 war

The 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 Advances

Unsurprisingly, 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 announced

NASA 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 Pyongyang

Monday 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 shortfall

Social 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 Interruptus

For 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 thimble

If 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 market

A 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 10

Inflation is up

Inflation 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 high

The 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 Room

There 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 booming

Sometimes 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” influencer

Influencers 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 11

Iran: 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 DNI

Trump 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 War

On 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 Specialists

How 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 DC

Staging 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 well

We 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 kickoff

The 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 riots

Anti-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 Sticker

Sixteen 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 Fungi

Pick 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 12

Iran

The 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 IPO

For 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 doors

A 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 up

For 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.

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 1

Monday 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.

Bored

The 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 ajar

Before 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 goeth

This 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 lawyers

One 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 accounting

The 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 40

Two 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 offering

There 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 hang

How 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 flour

It 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 2

Tuesday 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 Attack

Russia 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 lives

Acting 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 window

President 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 list

For 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 grass

Six 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 3

Coping to crazy, ballroom dancing, a tariff backdoor, showing bureaucrats the door, and the bathtub analogy that might explain next year.

Crazy, on the record

The 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 ballroom

Senate 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 silence

The 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 list

SpaceX 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 workaround

If 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 developing

Imagine 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+ issues

American 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 celebration

The 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 comeback

Unlike 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 brushes

A 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 4

The 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 powers

The 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 day

The 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 bottom

Four 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 bus

Last 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 instrument

The 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 Bolton

John 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 shoe

The 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 back

The 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 offensenders

A 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 majority

Denmark 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 percent

Drama thatchers

Should 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 5

The 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 report

Job 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 Senate

The 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 office

The 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 alive

A 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 outbreak

In 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 Minutes

The 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.

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 25

Monday’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 Break

Graham 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 Impact

Since 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 AI

Maybe 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 Market

During 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 Hole

If 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 Tanning

An 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 Rollins

Sonny 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 Farewell

Schlitz, 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.

Iran

On 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: Texas

Only 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 blocked

The 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 Reed

President 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 Workers

Have 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 Starlink

Do 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.

Tyops

Humans 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 27

A 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.

Iran

On 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 Gap

In 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 Pay

Imagine 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 Insecurity

Food 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 Drama

If 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 China

Here’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 28

It 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 Public

David 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 Decline

Americans 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 Advice

When 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 Carroll

The 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 Confidence

The 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 Problem

The 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 Biden

Ahead 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 Code

France’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 Wave

When 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 Declines

A 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 29

A 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.

Iran

Friday, 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” Blocked

President 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 Driver

Pam 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 Firm

A 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 million

A 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 Map

Louisiana 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 Warp

The 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 Rescue

Life 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 Wisdom

A 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.”

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 18

Strike out in Iran, Trump settles with himself, Musk is unsettled, rioters smell a payout, Iran mulls taxing the internet.

Iran

It 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 lawsuit

One 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 suit

Elon 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 separated

Every 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 strike

In 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 AI

My 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 AI

It’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 snafu

Starbucks 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 19

Trump 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 jobs

At 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.

Iran

In 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 markets

Minnesota 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 Census

Did 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 airport

Starting 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 20

The 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.

Iran

For 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 floor

Trump’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 immunity

The 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 Castro

Federal 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.

Ebola

Less 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 dies

Barney 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 Earnings

Nvidia 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’s

In 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 Day

A 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 Wednesday

An 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 21

The 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 Autopsy

Everyone 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 Poll

A 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 Order

California 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 Poland

The 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-Nights

A 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 London

Britain 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 Thursday

Another 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 22

Republicans 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 Garcia

In 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 update

We 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 reasons

Tulsi 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 sentiment

Americans 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 disorders

Nearly 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 Grants

The 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 Shark

Four 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.

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 11

Which 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.

Iran

Day 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 Tax

On 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 cruise

The 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 Nuts

This 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 Starmer

That 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 hot

On 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 pessimistic

If 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 leave

And 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 recess

Do 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 12

Inflation 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?

Iran

Tuesday, 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.

CPI

The 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 shortage

In 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 dropouts

Gas 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 defaulters

I’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 coming

A 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.

Starmer

On 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 Churn

It’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 collapse

Federal 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. Altman

Sam 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 Ruby

That 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 13

Iran 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.

Iran

The 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 losses

How 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.

PPI

Tuesday 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 Fed

What 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.

Philippines

The 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 Change

For 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’s

Harvard’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 Killing

I 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 14

Pageantry 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 China

President 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 continue

The 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.

Iran

The 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 dark

The 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.

Starmer

UK 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 sales

Retail 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 Pitch

During 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 off

A 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 Novocaine

When 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 15

Trump 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.

China

The 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.”

Taiwan

The 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 Heist

While 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 commander

Federal 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 Iliad

Archaeologists 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 Weekend

And 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.

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 4

Monday 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 swells

The 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 penalty

The 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 Force

The 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 Limbo

The 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 SSRIs

Health 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 money

More 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 overshoot

While 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 verdict

We 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 contest

The 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 5

A 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 back

In 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 Subpoenaed

Fulton 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 blocked

The 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 deficit

American 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 nuts

Does 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 now

Pennsylvania 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 sinking

The 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 boom

An 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 bosses

Have 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 Squibb

On 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 6

The 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 cooking

Wednesday 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 pump

The 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 muscle

Donald 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 testifies

Commerce 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 Scenario

What’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 metaphor

If 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 sleeve

The 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 violence

Anti-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 raid

FBI 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, 87

Brian 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 Borders

Reporters 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 7

Project 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 life

On 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 Pollard

Jonathan 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 Iran

While 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 Pope

The 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 Political

Clarence 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 Ways

In 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 0-5

The 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 8

Iran trifle

Was 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 up

A 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 basket

The 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 lines

The 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 drops

America’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 mail

Handguns 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 up

The 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 Mom

Sunday 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.