Sanger’s question: “What would be the use in repeating the bombing? You did it for 38 days and you did not get the political changes in Iran.”

The president threatened Iran. If they didn’t agree to terms-- or move in that direction-- he would start bombing again. Sanger was asking him to explain the reasoning behind the claim he had just made. Not only is this a basic journalistic question, it’s a basic human one. There is no more elementary response in the brain: you said something—why do you think that is so?

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The president labeled the question treasonous, called it a “false question” and said Sanger was committing treason. (Full response in footnotes.)1

Join me for a tour through the sub-basement. That’s how far down you have to go to find the bar the president was being asked to clear by this question—watch your head, the water lines run through here.

There are several possible answers the president could have given—all of which would have helped him. He could have said: the leadership is a mess and can’t get their act together . , we’re being patient, but another round of strikes might focus their attention. Or he could have said: their oil is stuck in tankers with nowhere to go, they’re shutting down rigs, their economy is crippled . , the IRGC is practicing riot control because they know the public won’t stand for it much longer. Another round of strikes might accelerate that implosion from within.

Those are spin, to one degree or another, but they are plausible. They advance his position. And the president chose the one answer that didn’t advance it—unless his position is no longer winning the war but winning the argument about the war. 2

Let’s look at what he actually said. He interpreted a question about how bombing is connected to objectives as the claim that “you sit there and say it didn’t work?” Sanger said no such thing. The president jumped to that conclusion. Studies have shown that people who are anxious about something often interpret questions to be more harsh than they are.

Psychologists call this hostile attribution bias—the tendency to interpret ambiguous cues as attacks. Research has found that people in heightened states of anxiety are significantly more likely to hear a neutral question as an accusation.3

The question is, what he’s anxious about. The answer is in the claim he chose to make. President Trump called the Iran war a “total military victory. Total victory.” He invites us to linger on this claim, which none of the competent answers would have. Is it useful to his goals to do so?

No.

First, it’s another version of the doth protest too much problem we’ve already addressed.

Second, it invites external validation of the claim. Robert Kagan—the neoconservative hawk who championed the Iraq invasion—wrote in The Atlantic that the U.S. has suffered “total defeat,” a loss that “can neither be repaired nor ignored.” Sir Alex Younger, who ran Britain’s MI6 from 2014 to 2020, told The Economist the U.S. has “lost the initiative to Iran” and that the regime has shown “greater resilience than anyone would have expected.” His predecessor Sir John Sawers called it “an unnecessary war” that “was not required.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, a U.S. ally, said publicly that the United States is “being humiliated” by Iranian negotiating tactics. The Iranians proposed reparations among their demands. That is not the behavior of a nation that thinks it has experienced total defeat.

By Donald Trump’s lights he hasn’t achieved this kind of total victory either. Ian Bremmer, president and founder of the Eurasia Group listed all the objectives Trump has cited for 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.

These things have not happened. In “total victory,” some or all of them would.

Total victory might look like this:

Iran surrenders, admits their Navy is gone and resting at the bottom of the sea, and their Air Force is no longer with us, and if their entire Military walks out of Tehran, weapons dropped and hands held high, each shouting ‘I surrender, I surrender’ while wildly waving the representative White Flag, and if their entire remaining Leadership signs all necessary ‘Documents of Surrender,’ and admit their defeat to the great power and force of the magnificent U.S.A.

That would indeed be total victory. It comes from a social media post by the president. He was being facetious, going on to say even if all of that did happen the New York Times wouldn’t give him credit. But it hasn’t happened. Not total victory.

What has happened is total military dominance. That’s been true for nearly as long as the war has been going on. Iran’s navy is at the bottom of the sea. Its air force is gone. Its former supreme leader is dead. And yet gas is $4.52 a gallon today. A year ago it was $3.18. The world economy is on edge. Why?

Because Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz—a crisis that didn’t exist before the war started. Iran charges tolls for safe passage, limits transit to nations it favors, and can close the strait entirely when it wants leverage. Military dominance destroyed Iran’s conventional forces. It did not give the United States control of the waterway that sets the price of energy for the planet. That is the distance between dominance and victory, and voters see it every time they look into that digital window at the gas pump.

You can bomb the hell out of people rhetorically by telling them we’ve achieved “total victory,” but the tonnage can’t make them believe it.

This is an uncomfortable fact for the president. He knows what dominance looks like and his irritation at Sanger possibly betrays that. No one would dispute the claim if he applied it to illegal border crossings.

Donald Trump won office claiming the Iraq4 war had been a mistake and now most voters think Trump made the wrong call in starting a war with Iran. Nearly two-thirds of voters in the NYT/Siena poll released today say that going to war had been the wrong decision, including almost three-quarters of politically crucial independents.

The president’s response to Sanger raises presidential-level questions. Was he purely being performative or is his temperament as threadbare as it appears? If it is, what does that mean about the decisions he has before him and how he will make them?

The Chinese are watching—they’re Iran’s biggest oil customer and investor. They could help out, or they could let the U.S. dangle as they did when they hosted its president for three days and sent him home with no breakthroughs. They’ve chosen the dangle. The Iranians are watching—they rejected his terms and proposed reparations. And the voters are watching. They just gave Trump a 37% approval rating.

David Sanger asked the president a simple question: why do you think this will work? The voters are asking the same one. They’re just not getting called treasonous for it.

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“This not time for a war powers act. Operation Epic Fury has been declared concluded, and it is, and now we’re into a new project, and that is to get the Strait of Hormuz open. This is about diplomacy And negotiation, you don’t have kinetic warfare right now. You don’t have missiles flying around. So, We’ve got to allow the administration time to finish this and sort it out.”

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There is a lot going on in this answer. Let’s break it down:

1. “This is not time for a war powers act”

   1. Frames a constitutional obligation (the power to declare war) as a matter of timing — something you get around to when conditions are right, rather than a legal requirement triggered by specific facts on the ground.

2. “Operation Epic Fury has been declared concluded, and it is”

   1. Accepts the executive branch’s unilateral determination that hostilities have ended and ratifies it as fact. “Has been declared” is passive — declared by whom? The administration. “And it is” converts that declaration into reality. In those three words, the Speaker is deferring to the very branch the War Powers Resolution was designed to check.

3. “Now we’re into a new project”

   1. Reclassifies a naval blockade enforced by 50,000 troops into a “project” — a word that domesticates an act of war into something that sounds like an infrastructure initiative. The “project,” is a result of the war which the president promises to resolve by shooting more missiles.

4. “This is about diplomacy and negotiation”

   1. Describes the situation as diplomatic while the diplomacy is made possible by military coercion. Forty-five commercial vessels have been turned back by warships. That’s not the absence of hostilities — it’s the textbook definition of gunboat diplomacy. It’s a cousin of when the Secretary of Defense says: “We negotiate with bombs.”

5. “You don’t have kinetic warfare right now. You don’t have missiles flying around.”

   1. Defines war as the visible, explosive part — if nothing is detonating on camera, it isn’t war. But the War Powers Resolution was written to cover exactly this situation. The legislative history1 specifically defines hostilities to include confrontations where no shots have been fired but a clear and present danger of armed conflict exists.

6. “We’ve got to allow the administration time to finish this and sort it out”

   1. Recasts Congress’s constitutional role as an interruption — an impatience that should yield to executive competence. The premise is that the administration is handling things and Congress should stay out of the way until it’s done, which is precisely the Vietnam-era dynamic the Resolution was written to prevent.

Imagine your apartment is flooding because of a building-wide pipe problem from the water tank on the roof. You want to call the insurance company — or a lawyer, or the city inspector — but the super says: “The flooding phase is over. We’re in a water removal project now. This is a moisture situation. You don’t need to make that call.” Meanwhile, the water is still pouring in and the super has told the building owner he can turn the pressure back up at any time.

Thank you all so much for supporting these experiments. I am grateful to those of you who have paid for subscriptions to keep this work going.

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I realize that I entirely left out a section on the changes to voting districts. We discussed that on the Gabfest however, so it can be found there. Proof that I was thinking about that issue, but also maybe proof of why I didn’t get it into the machine:

I am off to collect Anne from the train (she has a cameo on Friday’s digest in Stack the Week about which she’ll be thrilled, I’m sure). We have great expectations for the results at the end of the long arm of a bartender.

Blessings to all of you out there,

John

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.

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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.

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(audio playback is not AI; it may not even be I.)

The man at the corner table has been having a big time. He’s ordered the Chateaubriand for two. Twice. Three bottles of wine. Oysters. Finally, after four hours, he is finished. But then the waiter brings the check and the man erupts. How dare they. Doesn’t this restaurant know who he is? He bestowed his custom on this establishment. The meal should be free. The wine should be free. The restaurant should be thanking him for choosing to spend his time there.

Now let me introduce you to something more absurd.

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On Sunday night, Mother’s Day, the president picked up his phone. Nobody asked him a gotcha question. No crisis forced his hand. He hauled off with a 545-word attack on Truth Social about the two Supreme Court justices he nominated to the bench.

Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett voted with the majority in February to strike down his tariff policy. 1

He is convinced they will rule against him again on birthright citizenship. He is livid:2

“…people that I appointed have shown so little respect to our Country, and its people. What is the reason for this? They have to do the right thing, but it’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them to ‘almost’ the highest position in the land, that is, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.”

This isn’t an isolated outburst. After the February tariff ruling, Trump called Gorsuch and Barrett a “disgrace,” “disloyal,” “unpatriotic,” “fools and lapdogs,” and “an embarrassment to their families.” Sunday was the moderated version.

The president of the United States declares that Supreme Court justices should be loyal to the president who appointed them. The president, who swore to protect the Constitution, would like the justices not to do their duty by the same Constitution they swore to.

“I don’t want loyalty, but I do want and expect it for our Country,” he wrote. That is a version of “I’m not a racist, but…” The disclaimer exists to be overridden by everything that follows. By the end of the president’s post, “loyalty to the Country” has become indistinguishable from loyalty to Trump’s policy preferences. The tell is that he never identifies a principle the justices should be loyal to — not originalism, not textualism, not judicial restraint. The only metric is whether they ruled his way.

President Trump reinforces this when he talks about Democrats. He praises their justices for staying “true to the people that honored them” and never wavering “no matter how good or bad a case may be.” He’s explicitly lauding justices for ruling on the basis of political allegiance rather than legal merit, and wishing his appointees would do the same. This isn’t subtext. It’s text.

The Founders designed life tenure to insulate judges from exactly this kind of pressure. Justice Gorsuch has addressed this: “My loyalty is to the Constitution, the laws of the United States. That’s the oath I took. It’s really just that simple.”

Gorsuch’s answer is the conservative answer — it’s the Federalist Society’s whole theory of the judiciary, the one Trump’s own judicial selection apparatus was built on. The post doesn’t just attack two justices. It repudiates the principle that produced them.

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I’m coming to you from a narrow hallway in the Charlottesville airport, where they have seats secreted away. I have opted out of listening to the detailed description of life’s minor procession from one of my fellow travelers who is speaking to a colleague, I think, but who, based on projection, scope and general brio, appears to be speaking to mankind. Perhaps you can hear him where you are.

I returned to the land of my youth to participate in a discussion at the Miller Center, which I quite enjoyed. The YouTube video is here.

I am happy to report that our Reporter’s Notebook received another recognition. We won the New York Press Club award for Commentary. So that’s awfully neat.

I filed Stack the Week a little early this week so that I could make the plane back to New York where I will meet my Virginia classmate as I am lucky enough to these Friday evenings. You can also find Stack the Week on iTunes podcasts, where you can also leave a review.

Thank you as always for subscribing and particularly those who have a paid subscription. It is a thrill to write for you and subject you to these experiments.

Have a lovely weekend to you all.

John

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.

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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.2

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 fucking 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.

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Private money poses its own ethical issues, but nearly a year ago when this essay aired, what was on my mind was the Gold Spoon Oration, a speech given on the floor of Congress that targeted President Martin Van Buren for his opulence and spending at the public cost. The official title of the House floor speech was “The Regal Splendor of the President’s Palace,” and it was delivered by Charles Ogle (Whig-PA) over the course of three days starting on April 14, 1840. (Three days?! Without smartphones what else were people going to do?)

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When I first wrote about Van Buren in my book Whistlestop, I described him this way:

To fix the incumbent Martin Van Buren in your mind, focus not on his height, for which he was given the nickname Little Van, but on his sideburns. Imagine two driver-side airbags fully deploying on either side of a man’s face. This was what Van Buren—or Sweet Sandy Whiskers, as they called him—looked like. You could probably have taken his sideburns in each fist and turned his head like a steering wheel. There is no figure in the presidential coloring book who looks more like the Wizard of Oz than Martin Van Buren.

What I later came to learn is that those sideburns were a sign of wealth and elite city status. (I learned this while re-familiarizing myself with Roscoe Conkling after watching Death by Lightning, the excellent four-part series on Garfield’s assassination. Conkling, also a New York pol like Van Buren, had crazy facial hair too).

Here’s a description of the speech from my book Whistlestop:

On April 14, 1840, the House of Representatives met to consider the Civil and Diplomatic Appropriations Bill. A portion of the bill concerned appropriations “for alterations and repairs of the President’s house and furniture, for purchasing trees, shrubs, and compost, and for superintendence of the grounds.” Charles Ogle, a Whig congressman from Pennsylvania, rose to speak against the provision. It was as if speech had been dammed up within him for some time. The appropriation brought forth the geyser. “Mr. Chairman, I consider this a very important item in the bill—not as to the amount, but as to the principles involved in it. I doubt much the policy of this Government in granting the Chief Magistrate emoluments or revenues of any kind, over and above the fixed salary paid to that officer out of the Treasury of the United States… No former Chief Magistrate ever acted upon the principle notoriously adopted by the present incumbent, of spending the money of the People with a lavish hand, and at the same time saving his own with sordid parsimony.” At this point, everyone in the gallery was pretty sure that the Whig congressman Ogle was going to go on a bit, slagging the incumbent for his gaudy ways. “Mr. Chairman I object to this appropriation on higher grounds. I resist the principle on which it is demanded as anti-democratic—as running counter in its tendency to the plain, simple, and frugal notions of our republican People. And I put it to you, sir, and to the free citizens of this country, whose servant the President is, to say whether, in addition to the large sum of one hundred thousand dollars which he is entitled to receive for a single term of four years, they are disposed to maintain—for his private accommodation—a royal establishment at the cost of the nation? Will they longer feel inclined to support their chief servant in a palace as splendid as that of the Caesars, and as richly adorned as the proudest Asiatic mansion?”

This is but the start of the oration. It would go on for almost three days and is one of the most baroque and powerful negative attacks on an incumbent in campaign history. The title of the speech was “The Regal Splendor of the President’s Palace,” but it would come to be known as the Gold Spoon Oration. It won that name from a widely circulated story about the Whig congressman Landaff Watson Andrews of Kentucky. A dinner guest at the White House, he was said to have picked up a “golden spoon” and held it up to the Democratic President, saying, “Mr. Van Buren, if you will let me take this spoon to Kentucky and show it to my constituents, I will promise not to make use of any other argument against you—this will be enough.” Ogle accused Van Buren of being “a democratic peacock, in full court costume, strutting by the hour before golden-framed mirrors, nine feet high and four feet and a half wide… The soul of Martin Van Buren is so very, very, very diminutive, that it might find abundant space within the barrel of a milliner’s thimble to perform all the evolutions of the whirling pirouette avec chasse au suivant, according to the liberal gesticulations practiced by the most celebrated danseurs… Mere meadows are too common to gratify the refined taste of an exquisite with sweet sandy whiskers. He must have undulations, beautiful mounds, and other contrivances, to ravish his exalted and ethereal soul. Hence, the reformers have constructed a number of clever sized hills, every pair of which, it is said, was designed to resemble and assume the form of an Amazon’s bosom, with a miniature knoll or hillock on its apex, to denote the nipple.”

Ultimately Van Buren lost to William Henry Harrison who, despite considerable wealth, ran as a man of the people— the candidate of hard cider and the log cabin. In part, Whigs used the splendor of the office to weigh down Van Buren. The panic of 1837 didn’t help either.

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“A second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.” — Samuel Johnson

In the New York Times focus group1 I wrote about a few days ago, one response was the clearest from Trump voters who say they regret their 2024 vote choice. Unprompted, in their own words, they all said that the president didn’t learn his lesson.

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Nancy thought “the second go-around, he’d learn some lessons. But it seems like it’s just total chaos.”

Jose: “I thought he’d learned his lesson, and was going to prove to everybody he learned from his mistakes, and he was going to turn the country around and he was going to be a stellar president.”

Pamela: “I was hopeful that he had learned his lesson.”

Chris: “I was hoping for a great comeback. I was hoping that he’d learned from his past successes and failures.”

Natan: “I thought the second term would be a little better from the first.”

Kitty: “I was expecting what he was like his first runaround, and it’s completely different. Completely the opposite of what you’d hope for.”

Six of twelve voters, six versions of the same sentence. The focus group moderator didn’t lead them to this.

Implicit in this view is a story about a chastened man. Trump had been impeached twice, prosecuted, beaten in 2020. The expectation was that humiliation and time and the weight of the office would round the edges.

That belief is also an exit. If Trump was supposed to have learned and didn’t, the failure is his. The voter wagered on a more reasonable man and got the same one. The disappointment is real, but it isn’t implicating. He failed me. I didn’t fail in judgment. The frame keeps regret separate from complicity. You can be disappointed in him without being disappointed in yourself.

But the frame has the agency backward. A lesson is something taught by someone. If Trump was supposed to learn from the first term, who was the teacher? The 2020 election loss? He thinks he won that. The 2024 election? What did that election teach him?

It taught him that the conduct of the first term worked. That impeachments and indictments and a January 6 attack on the Capitol were survivable, and more than survivable — they were rewarded with a second term and the popular vote. No bigger prize.

When these regretful voters say he didn’t learn, they have the verb right and the subject wrong. He learned exactly what the election taught him. The lesson he absorbed is the lesson that was delivered. Vendettas, Iran, ICE, tariffs — these aren’t evidence of a man who failed to grow. They’re evidence of a man who was told, in the only language a politician understands, that he could keep doing this.

He didn’t learn is a story about him. We taught him he didn’t have to is a story about the electorate. I wrote a book arguing that voters should think more about what the presidency actually requires — the discipline, the preparation, the restraint that no one sees. They hired a man who didn’t buy that idea either. He told them the job was something else. They agreed.

Trump promised them, plainly, that he wasn’t going to change. The surprise isn’t that he kept the promise. It’s that they didn’t believe him when he made it.

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Another week comes to a conclusion. Stack the Week is in the world and now it is available as a podcast, which means you can listen to it through your podcast apparatus as well as on Substack. I’m still doing all the writing and recording so it will sound like that is what I’m doing even though it may post right next to NPR.1

The Stack the Week has become what the Face the Nation Diary was for me back in 2017, a way to work through the events of the week for the purpose of figuring out what I think. “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” E.M. Forster didn’t say. (See who did say that in the footnote2) Its length is attributable variously to lack of skill, verbosity, genius hidden even from its author and the complexity of things like the role of rhetoric in violence, untangling incorrect first reports.

I wrote a piece about a NYT focus group this week because I thought its findings merited the effort but also as an act of discipline as I work to wean myself from the constant interruption of the algorithms. More on that later.

Thank you to all of you out there who have subscribed and who write in with your thoughts. It is very sustaining. I am grateful for your support.

We all have our struggles but to give you a window into my process, this picture illustrates the distance my office chair roams when I stand up to stretch. The floor is not level:

Off to the kitchen where we are going to take a chance on cooking duck and where I intend to get on the outside of something clear and bracing faster than it will take for the ink to dry on this message.

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An assassination deconstructed. The Defense Secretary IDs the real enemy. The Fed can’t agree, but conservatives on the Supreme Court can. The Chancellor sees humiliation in Iran, the king brings the jokes to Congress, the FCC brings jokes to court and the DOJ meme police go after James Comey. Five million Americans 86 their health insurance. See what I did there? Well, the monks would have laughed.

Let’s take it day by day.

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Monday, April 27

Assassination Attempt

Monday, the details firmed up about the nearly four seconds in the Washington Hilton Concourse Level when a shooter rushed headlong down a hallway into a group of at least nine security officials one floor above where President Trump was having dinner. The assailant fired one shot from a 12-gauge shotgun in the direction of the staircase leading down to the ballroom, hitting a Secret Service officer in his bulletproof vest, which stopped the round. In 1.2 seconds the officers fired six rounds in return, according to the Washington Post. The assailant fell, though he was not hit. He was taken into custody unharmed.

The clue that resolved who fired first came from the dust in the ceiling lights. A frame-by-frame analysis released by the FBI showed dust resting in two overhead lights had been disturbed and was drifting downward in the frame after the suspect raised his shotgun — and before any officer returned fire. The most likely explanation is the muzzle blast from his weapon. Prosecutors recovered one spent shell from the shotgun. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said there was “no evidence the shooting was the result of friendly fire.” The shooter’s public defenders argued the video shows no muzzle flash. The charges filed Monday included attempted assassination and firing a weapon, but not shooting a federal officer — a gap that may close as the forensic case develops.

The system worked, but the threat was more deliberate than first reported. Surveillance footage from April 24, the day before the attack, shows the suspect casing the hotel corridors and entering the gym. The headlong rush wasn’t panic. It was a route he had practiced.

He still helped the system along. He barreled down a hallway full of people strolling, many of whom were security, drawing attention to himself, then ran through the magnetometer instead of around it, slowing his progress. He put every ounce of momentum into reaching a choke point staffed by nearly a dozen armed officers.

Even if he had made it past the staircase, he still had to get down a floor and through the ballroom doors to the most heavily protected human on the planet (probably), who had just been served a salad — a route that passed dozens of armed officers whose earpieces would already have been carrying his location.

That no one died is a kind of miracle. The two thousand in attendance now join the 54% of Americans say that they or a family member have been impacted by gun violence.

The shooter took the shotgun and the .38 he purchased legally in California in 2023 and 2025 on a train from Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington, arriving April 4. He booked his room at the Hilton on April 6 — three weeks before he used it. About twenty minutes before he stepped onto the elevator, he emailed a manifesto to family members and a former employer. He signed it “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen.” In the manifesto he called the president a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” and wrote that he was “no longer willing to permit” such men to “coat my hands with [their] crimes.” He declared it his “duty” to target administration officials. Federal authorities said his writings also railed against the U.S. military strikes on boats in the eastern Pacific suspected of smuggling drugs.

It was the third attempt on Trump’s life — Butler in July 2024, West Palm in September 2024, the Hilton — and the first in which the gunman successfully discharged a round at security personnel.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies tracks political violence. Their 2025 readout was the roughest in thirty years. For the first time in two decades, the left outpaced the right in sheer number of plots and attacks — mostly Molotov cocktails at immigration facilities and Republican offices. The right still accounts for more of the bodies: targeted assassinations of lawmakers, armed assaults on government headquarters.

Security and Ballroom

The president was never in danger from this shooter, though the event did raise questions about security unrelated to the facts of the case. “I’m the one that would complain,” Trump said Saturday night. “I’d be up here right now saying they didn’t do their job. Oh, believe me, because, you know, it’s my life.”

But imagine a more competent shooter. Or a team of Iranians looking to cause mayhem. The Hilton has more than a thousand rooms; the Iranians, who spent a decade building a network of proxies, would not have sent a man with a shotgun and a training that consisted of being in the nerf club.

The Secret Service runs the names of all event attendees through criminal databases, but not the names of every guest in the hotel’s 1,000-plus rooms.

But it was in the context of security concerns that the subject of the White House ballroom was once again in the Washington swirl.

The White House ballroom is a story you may have trained yourself to ignore. The project is an abomination of proportion, scale, taste and beauty — traditions Western Civilization has relied on for hundreds of years to cool the passions and enliven the senses.

Up to this point, President Trump has brought up the ballroom willy-nilly. Often when more important matters are at stake. The fixation is as rooted in his bones as his fixation on crowd sizes. A Washington Post analysis on April 19 found he had mentioned the ballroom on about a third of the days this year — about as many days as health insurance and affordability. He brought it up with oil and gas executives, with foreign leaders, and at an Easter lunch.

Invoking the Hilton attack to argue for the ballroom smacks of using a near tragedy to justify Trump’s vanity project.

Still, the security argument is not nothing. Every time the president goes to the Hilton or a convention center, he moves through soft zones — hotel kitchens, service elevators, public hallways — where security is temporary and reactive. A dedicated ballroom on the White House grounds would eliminate the off-site trip, and with it the guest who books a room two floors up three weeks in advance.

The cost is the fortress itself. It further encases the people’s representative, adding another wall to an already imperial presidency. And it turns every event into an away game for everyone else — stripping out the particular joy, cultural significance, and vibe (as the founders called it) of gatherings not held inside a bunker.

A Washington Post poll this week found 56% of Americans oppose tearing down the White House’s East Wing to make way for the planned ballroom. Twenty-eight percent support it — roughly a two-to-one margin. A YouGov survey this week found opposition at 53% and support at 29%.

Iran

Last week one piece of Iran reporting wouldn’t fit. The Economist had it: when Vice President Vance met the Iranians in Islamabad two weeks ago, the Iranian delegation ran to more than eighty members — and the disputes among them were hotter than anything between the two governments. The Pakistani hosts spent most of their time pulling Iranians off other Iranians.

The reason it didn’t make last week’s digest: late Friday, the White House announced Jared Kushner and lead negotiator Steve Witkoff were headed back to Islamabad for another round. But two days later the trip was called off — in part, the reporting suggested, because the Iranian side was still pulling itself apart.

So Monday’s news arrived with that picture in mind. Tehran, mediated by Pakistan, offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the war if the United States lifts its naval blockade of Iranian ports.

The catch? What wasn’t in the offer. The proposal pushes the nuclear question — enriched uranium, enrichment going forward, who inspects what — into a later phase. That has been, by the administration’s own framing, the entire point of the war.

So the Iranian offer amounted to essentially giving up nothing but the leverage it had gained since the war started.

But the clock is ticking for Iran. The blockade has forced Iran to store oil in makeshift containers and disused tanks for lack of buyers willing to run the gauntlet.

Tehran’s oil infrastructure has essentially become a massive, clogged drain, forcing engineers to frantically stash crude in everything from rusty, decommissioned coastal tanks to the “zombie” hulls of 30-year-old tankers anchored like sitting ducks in the Gulf. With the U.S. blockade choking off 80% of exports, the regime is staring down a “storage doomsday” in mid-May.

Now there’s the kind of term you can just drive right by without explaining. A “Storage Doomsday” represents the physical seizure of the entire Iranian energy sector, where the sheer lack of space forces a catastrophic choice between allowing an environmental disaster from overflowing tanks or permanently “killing” oil wells through forced shutdowns that could take decades to repair.

Monday afternoon,The Atlantic published that Vice President Vance has been quietly questioning the Pentagon’s portrait of the war. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, have publicly described U.S. weapons stockpiles as robust and Iranian forces as devastated. Vance, according to senior administration officials, has been pressing Trump on whether either claim is true.

Internal assessments suggest Iran retains two-thirds of its air force, the bulk of its missile-launching capability, and most of the small fast boats that can mine the strait.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated this week that the United States may have already burned through more than half its prewar supply of four key munitions — interceptors and standoff missiles that would also be needed to defend Taiwan, South Korea, or Europe.

If Vance’s reading is closer to the truth than Hegseth’s, the Iranian offer reads differently. Tehran may not be giving up nothing because it has nothing. Tehran may be giving up nothing because it has noticed that the United States doesn’t have as much in the magazine as it has said it does. A negotiation is shaped by what each side believes the other can still afford. Iran appears to have done the math.

Brent crude closed above $108 a barrel — up roughly 50% since the war began. A coalition of dozens of nations led by Bahrain issued a joint statement demanding the strait be reopened, citing the cost to global food and fertilizer supplies that move through it.

And the Iranian Foreign Minister went to Moscow. He met with Vladimir Putin to ask for support — the same Putin who, according to Ukrainian intelligence, has been using Russian satellites to help Iran target U.S. forces.

The Iranians have done a solid for Russia in return. The BBC reported Monday that one of Putin’s closest oligarchs was sailing a $500 million superyacht through the strait that no one else can use. The Nord, 465 feet long, registered to the wife of Russian steel billionaire Alexei Mordashov, slipped from Dubai to Muscat over the weekend along a route that requires Iranian permission. The boat has a swimming pool, a submarine, and a helipad.

Hepatitis B Infection Risk

This story starts in the recovery room of a hospital, where a new mother—exhausted, overwhelmed, and holding a 12-hour-old baby—is being asked to make a high-stakes medical decision. For decades, the “safety first” rule was simple: every baby gets a Hepatitis B shot before they even leave the hospital. But under a new policy from HHS, the government suggests skipping that birth dose and waiting until the baby is two months old.

The problem: life happens. While about 80% of children eventually get their preventive visits, data shows that many families, especially those struggling with transportation or work schedules, find it hard to make it back to the doctor on time once they leave the hospital’s bubble of care. In fact, medical experts warn that when you delay the first shot, the chances of a child ever finishing the full three-dose series drop significantly. Data shows that while 97% of babies who get that first shot in the hospital go on to finish the full three-dose series, only about 55% of babies who skip the birth dose ever get fully protected.

Even if a mom’s pregnancy test was negative, those tests can be wrong or the paperwork can get lost. Because Hepatitis B is a “silent” virus that can live in tiny amounts of fluid—like on a shared toothbrush or a caregiver’s nicked finger—an unprotected baby is at total risk. While an adult’s immune system can usually fight the virus off, a baby’s system is so new that 90% of those infected will have the virus for life, leading to liver cancer or even death. By moving the shot from the hospital (where the baby is already “right there”) to a later appointment that might be missed, new studies in JAMA Pediatrics published Monday, predict we will see hundreds of extra infections and at least $16 million in added healthcare costs just from the babies born this year.

Teacher salaries

Teacher salaries have grown 28.2% over the last decade. What your teacher will tell you is that figures can sometimes mean less than they do at first blush. When adjusted for inflation, the average teacher has actually seen a 4.6% pay decrease since 2017.

Let’s all pause for a moment and remember the teachers in our lives: Mrs. Maziotta, Mr. Jewell, Mr. Tonken, Mr. Lang, Mr. LeSure, Dr. Duckham, Mr. Hill. The people who introduced you to wonders, set you back on course when you were lost, and who, as my friend and teacher Neal Tonken, sometimes provided you with a sympathetic ear because, as he used to say “kids need an adult they can tell their shit to.”

Those life-changing people are already undervalued. Now more so. Low pay limits the ability to attract and retain quality educators in the profession. Too many potential educators never enter the classroom, in part because of low starting salaries and a widening wage gap between teaching and other professions requiring similar education. Other talented, passionate educators leave the profession due to low wages. On average, teacher salaries are 27% lower than those of their similarly educated peers.

Pope XIV and Archbishop of Canterbury

Henry VIII wanted to split with a woman so he split with the Catholic church. In a reversal of all that, the first female Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally joined with the head of the Catholic church, Pope Leo XIV. The two prayed together Monday in the Vatican where the Pope vowed to keep working to overcome differences “no matter how intractable they may appear.” One difference would be that the Catholic Church does not let women into the ordained clergy and does not recognize or perform same‑sex marriages, even though it has recently allowed limited blessings for same‑sex couples. In related news, the current king of England– also known as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England – landed in the U.S. on Monday.

Monks and Pot

In other religious news, Sri Lankan customs officers at Bandaranaike International Airport in Colombo on Saturday arrested twenty-two Buddhist monks returning from Thailand. Their suitcases, packed with school supplies and candy on top, contained nearly 247 pounds of cannabis underneath — about eleven pounds per monk. Police called it one of the largest drug seizures in the airport’s history. Daily News, the state-owned newspaper, valued the haul at $3.45 million. Recreational cannabis is illegal in Sri Lanka, and trafficking convictions can carry the death penalty. The monks, many of them in their twenties, are unlikely to face the worst of those penalties.

Extremely Fast Humans

I went for a run yesterday and it was the metaphysical oposite of this story. Sebastian Sawe of Kenya ran the London Marathon Sunday in 1 hour, 59 minutes, and 30 seconds — the first time anyone has finished a 26.2-mile marathon under two hours in an officially sanctioned race. He beat the previous world record by 65 seconds. Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, running his first marathon, finished eleven seconds behind him, also under two hours. Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo came in third at 2:00:28. All three men ran faster than any human being had ever run that distance until that morning. The barrier had stood since the marathon was invented. Three people went through it on the same Sunday.

Tuesday, April 28

Iran: Merz

The German Chancellor Frederich Merz said the American President was getting played. “An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership,” he told students Monday. The Iranians, Merz said, are “very skilled at not negotiating, letting the Americans travel to Islamabad and then leave again without any result.” The Americans, he added, have “no truly convincing strategy.”

Merz is a center-right CDU Chancellor who took office promising to repair the transatlantic relationship. Many leaders have chosen to coddle Trump. Merz went right at his sense of himself as the world’s great negotiator and used his favorite concept: humiliation. Humiliation matters because it’s the word the President’s political life has been built around. Never be humiliated, always come out on top, never let anyone catch you getting worked.

In three weeks president Trump has declared total victory, threatened to destroy Iranian civilization by 8 p.m., called it off ninety minutes before the deadline, sent envoys to talks the Iranians wouldn’t attend, and returned to the same technical questions the Obama administration negotiated in 2015. The President has spent roughly $28 billion to reopen a conversation he spent years mocking Obama for closing.

The response from the White House came on Truth Social, and it followed the script the administration has settled into for allies who decline to cheer. Merz, the President wrote, “thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.” But Merz wasn’t saying Iran’s military program should be allowed to continue. His claim was that Trump was losing.

This was in contrast to the President’s response when asked over the weekend about what he thought about China helping Iran. “They’re helping, but not much,” he said on Fox News’ The Sunday Briefing. “They could help more. I’m not overly disappointed. We help people too… So I don’t consider them having been bad.”

Merz said the war was going badly and was accused of wanting Iran to have the bomb. China is reportedly preparing to ship MANPADs to Iran and got a shrug.

Assassination Attempt

By Tuesday, the near tragedy at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner became a debate about the connection between speech and violence.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt argued that the assassination attempt was the “direct result” of years of what she described as systemic demonization of the President. There is some truth to this.

Her core argument was that the language used by political opponents and media figures had effectively “legitimized” violence by painting the administration as an existential threat.

That undoubtedly contributes to the situtation too — you can hear it in the ravings of two of the president’s would-be assassins. Butler is the cautionary footnote. Thomas Crooks’s motive was never established. No manifesto, no clear ideological frame, no rhetorical smoking gun. The man who came closest to killing Donald Trump did so for reasons no one has been able to name. Immediately, then, we’re faced with evidence that something other than words cause violence. (That didn’t stop JD Vance at the time of that shooting from blaming Democrats; for which there was no evidence, but which is evidence if you’re measuring whether Vance and others are acting in good faith.)

The question is not whether the rhetorical climate contributes, but how much, exactly whose rhetoric we’re talking about, the relative weight of the speaker, and how much words contribute relative to other factors.

If the White House is arguing that there is a link between speech and violence then an analysis of public speech — including all levels of the quote unquote media — must also include speech and actions by the most powerful person in the world, the president.

Donald Trump has done more than any other president to degrade public dialogue and demonize opponents. Starting with his role as America’s chief advocate of the racist smear that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, he is directly responsible for promoting the most effective claim of presidential illegitimacy that, by Leavitt’s reasoning, contributes to violence. His consistent labeling of the January 6th defendants as “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots” directly challenges the legitimacy of the judicial process in a way that, by the Press Secretary’s own causal logic, “legitimizes” resistance to federal authority. That instinct continues from the president today. We see it in his repeated characterization of federal judges as “partisan hacks” and his description of the political opposition as “vermin” that must be “rooted out.” It is a part of his administration now. Last month, Trump administration officials publicly labeled two American citizens killed protesting immigration crackdowns as “domestic terrorists” — a designation easily falsifiable with the human eye.

There is a difference though between when a user says it on Twitter and when a president says it. That’s determined not only by the obvious fact his megaphone is larger, but by the traditions that govern the person who uses it. A Twitter user is expected to pop off. A president is not. The breach of that tradition has a magnifying force that contributes to these conditions.

We know about the power of President Trump’s voice by the testimony of the January 6th rioters who cited his encouragement and the Unite the Right protesters in Charlottesville who associated themselves with Trump’s views.

Usually conservatives argue that responsibility begins and ends with the shooter. By opening the door to causal links outside the shooter himself, the president’s allies also put themselves in a new position in the gun debate. If a single tweet is a powerful enough “nudge” to propel a man toward a shotgun, why is a high-capacity magazine considered a neutral object? If crazy people can be inspired by Tweets then do gun laws play no role at all? Is it possible that the ease of access to the tool is as much a “condition” as the rhetoric that precedes its use? You cannot hold rhetoric responsible for animating a shooter and hold the shotgun blameless for arming him. Either the environment shapes the act, or it doesn’t.

We should probably roll in some historians too as we’re trying to sort the proportions of causality. Ford was targeted twice in a month in 1975. There was no Twitter. Kennedy, obviously the same. Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley — three presidents killed in thirty-six years, in a country that had not yet invented the radio. History reminds us that there are other things that contribute to the unmistakably repugnant act of assassins.

Furthermore, a culture that celebrates norm breaking as heroic — whether it is blowing up drug boats in the Atlantic or putting masked police in the streets — creates the conditions for blowback. It’s the kind of causation Trump has repeatedly argued for in the foreign policy context — about Iraq, about Libya, about the Middle East generally — that American intervention creates the conditions for the violence that follows. Why is that question not permissible on domestic affairs when the president is the one challenging the traditions of separation of powers and due process as he carries out his job?

Asking these questions should leave you with the impression that the answers are necessarily against the administration’s interests. They are the kinds of questions we’re compelled to ask if the press secretary wants to go down this road. But evidence suggests that Karoline Leavitt wanted to keep the lane narrow as a balance beam. Her argument was that because the shooter was a crazy extremist, any words or sentiments he used when used by the press — say words like “authoritarian” — made them complicit in what led to the assassination attempt.

The press secretary was joined by the acting Attorney General Todd Blanche who said to the Justice Department press corps:

“Many people in this room, if we’re going to be honest about it, have done it as well. They’re just as guilty as a lot of people on X. When you have reporters, when you have media, media just being overly critical and calling the president horrible names for no reason and without evidence, without proof, it shouldn’t surprise us that this type of rhetoric takes place.”

No, we shouldn’t be surprised. But what might surprise us is comparing Twitter users to credentialed members of the press corps. We don’t know who was in the room, but the people who cover the Justice Department for a living are correspondents from the wires, the Times, the Post, the television networks. The charge that they call the president “horrible names for no reason” does not describe their work; it describes someone else’s, ported over.

That is the move. Not to draw a connection between speech and violence — but to redefine journalist down to the level of X user, so that the speech-violence connection lands on credentialed reporters who can be chilled from reporting critically about Trump administration policies. The chill is the policy. The argument about the shooter is the vehicle.

Comey indicted again

Speaking of which…

Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted for a second time Tuesday, this time over a photo of seashells officials said threatened President Donald Trump. Comey posted a photo on social media of shells on a beach writing out the numbers “86 47,” which critics said referred to taking out or killing Trump. Comey removed the post the same day, writing on social media that he assumed the shells represented “a political message” but “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.”

The Department of Justice previously brought a case against Comey suggesting he had lied to Congress, but it was thrown out after a federal judge found that the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, had been illegally appointed by the Justice department.

This is a reminder that public figures shouldn’t meme.

The case will hinge on whether the prosecutors can prove subjective intent. It isn’t enough for the DOJ to show that a “reasonable person” would find the seashells down by the sea shore threatening. They must prove that James Comey personally understood that there was a substantial risk his post would be viewed as a threat and that he proceeded anyway—a standard known as recklessness—or that he intended it as a “true threat.”

The origins of “eighty-six” range from 1930s soda jerk shorthand for “out of stock” to the legend of Chumley’s speakeasy at 86 Bedford Street, where the address served as a code to exit before a police raid. Others point to Article 86 of the New York liquor code regarding refusing service to drunks, or naval engineering where the “number 86” valve was used to shut down a ship’s engine. More macabre theories suggest it refers to an “eighty-six inch” grave depth or the power of the Winchester Model 1886 rifle, while linguists argue it might just be rhyming slang for “nix,” meaning to cancel or veto.

FCC To Review Disney Licenses

The FCC has decided that what Jimmy Kimmel says on television is a question of character.

That’s the legal frame Chairman Brendan Carr is reportedly preparing to use to open an early license review of the eight ABC stations Disney owns and operates. Broadcast licenses run on an eight-year cycle. The Communications Act lets the FCC pull one off the cycle if the licensee no longer serves “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” Since 1986, the agency has policed something called the “character factor” — a standard built for felony fraud and licensees lying to the Commission. Carr has spent the last year suggesting it can also cover DEI policies and “misleading” programming. [Make sure that is a fair characterization.] Just as the definition of “emergency,” and “war” have been stretched in other contexts in the administration, the category here is being stretched until it can hold whatever the chairman wants to put in it.

The catalyst is Kimmel’s joke told two days before the WHCA dinner and in a different context in which he made fun of Donald Trump’s age and referred to his wife as an “expectant widow.”

The administration’s argument is that the joke contributes to a climate of political violence. ABC has been here before — the network suspended Kimmel last fall over comments about Charlie Kirk. What Carr is signaling now is that the network’s own discipline isn’t sufficient.

Carr’s stated theory is that broadcasters use public airwaves and owe the public something in return. The unstated theory is that broadcasters use public airwaves and owe the President something in return. The first is the one in the statute. The second is the one being applied.

A license review costs Disney’s lawyers months and Disney’s stock several percentage points. Networks notice. Talent gets called in for conversations. Jokes don’t get written.

For those of you keeping track of things on your Stack the Week notebook at home:

Comey posts a meme and gets indicted.

Germany’s Mertz says the war isn’t going well and gets accused of wanting Iran to have the bomb.

Italy’s Meloni declines to send troops and gets called a coward.

The Fed’s Powell won’t lower rates and gets a visit from DOJ prosecutors.

The instrument changes — Truth Social, a criminal probe, an FCC review — but the operation is the same one. Find the regulatory or rhetorical lever closest to the critic or adversary and pull it.

King Charles visit

King Charles followed in his mother’s footsteps Tuesday, becoming only the second British monarch to address a joint session of Congress — his mother was the first, in 1991. He came with jokes:

On the East Wing demolition: “I cannot help noticing readjustments to the East Wing. I’m sorry to say that we British, of course, made our own small attempt at real estate development in the White House in 1814.” (Also the only other time the US Capitol was attacked other than January 6, 2021). On the President’s frequent line that Europe would be speaking German without American help, the King offered an alternative timeline at the state dinner: “Dare I say that, if it wasn’t for us, you’d be speaking French.”

The speech extolled “checks on executive power” – a direct descendant of George III reminding Americans in the age of “No Kings” protests. The King also referenced “defending democratic values,” and made a glancing reference to Saturday’s near-tragedy at the Hilton — the shared heritage of the two nations, the King said, provides a necessary check on the impulses of any single leader. Trump called the speech “fantastic,” then added: “He got the Democrats to stand. I’ve never been able to do that.”

The King gave the President a framed facsimile of the 1879 plans for the Resolute Desk and a British World War II relic, the original bell from the HMS Trump, a T-class submarine launched in 1944 which sank one of the last ships to be destroyed by a British warship in World War .

The special relationship itself was a relic, argued the UK Ambassador, Sir Christian Turner, though he didn’t’ mean for anyone to hear him. A Financial Times story (leaked no doubt by one of Turner’s adversaries) reported on a recording in February where Turner told sixth-form students– roughly eleventh or twelfth grade in the American system— that “special relationship” was a phrase he tried not to utter — “nostalgic,” “backwards-looking,” carrying “a lot of sort of baggage.” The country with an actual special relationship with the United States, Turner said, “is probably Israel.”

He also called it “extraordinary” that the Epstein scandal had cost Britain a member of the Royal Family and an ambassador while in the United States it “really hasn’t touched anybody.”

The Foreign Office called the comments “private, informal” and “not any reflection” of the government’s position, which is also a lesson to those sixth form students a diplomatic way of saying the ambassador meant every word and shouldn’t have said any of them out loud.

UAE Leaves OPEC

If I have to hear one more story about oil in the Strait of Hormuz I’m going to faint. Okay, what about a story about oil and OPEC? There is a massive break up in the world of oil that will make gasoline more expensive for everyone because the group that usually works together to keep the world’s oil flowing-- that’s OPEC-- is falling apart just as a major shipping route has been blocked. (Don’t you dare mention Hormuz)

So now there is less oil available and more chaos in how it gets to us.

The United Arab Emirates initiated the crack up. The world’s third biggest producer behind Saudi Arabia and Iraq, said that on May 1 they are officially quitting OPEC.

To understand what this means, imagine a group of neighbors who all own lemonade stands. To keep the price of lemonade high, they all agree to only sell 10 cups a day. If they all flooded the street with lemonade, the price would crash, and nobody would make a profit. The UAE is sick of this arrangement. They spent billions building a massive lemonade factory that can produce 50 cups a day, but the club is still forcing them to only sell 34. They are tired of leaving their expensive equipment sitting idle while they watch other club members like Russia “cheat” by selling more than they allowed.

Saudi Arabia, the leader of the club, is now losing its best partner, which means when it tries to set those prices for lemonade in the future, there’s going to be one big producer out there selling it whatever he wants to be selling it for, and that will affect what Saudi Arabia and the members of the club can do to set global prices. Implicit in the move by the UAE is that they want to grab as much oil money as they can right now before the world moves to electric cars and away from oil, which is where the world is moving despite what some people say.

Jet Blue fuel costs

JetBlue is the latest airline to tear up its previous expectations and run to the whiteboard to accommodate the mayhem created by a war the airline doesn’t fly anywhere near. On Tuesday, the company’s CEO said demand isn’t the problem. Revenue is up. Revenue per seat is up. The problem is fuel — twenty-six percent above what they were expecting. The second quarter is going to be an even longer ride in the middle seat: fuel prices seventy-five percent above last year. To accommodate this, the airline is going to raise fares, fly fewer planes, hire fewer people. Checked bag fees on domestic economy jumped to $39 to $49.

You’ll remember from last week’s discussion of Spirit Airlines that low-cost carriers buy fuel at the price the day demands, while the Big Three — Delta, United, American — buy fuel forward. This makes JetBlue really sensitive to the daily swings.

Gallup Affordability Survey

55 percent of Americans say their personal financial situation is getting worse, according to Gallup’s annual affordability survey released Tuesday. The highest figure Gallup has recorded since it started asking the question in 2001. The only previous period that came close was the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 during a period where the unemployment rate went from 5 to 10 percent.

The cost of living remains the top concern at 31 percent, below the 41 percent peak in 2024 but still among the highest readings on record. Housing costs are tied for second at 13 percent. Healthcare is fourth at 8 percent. 60 percent of Americans say they are “very worried” about being able to pay for a serious illness.

Speaking of affordability: The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Regal recently charged $50 a ticket for opening-night seats to Dune: Part Three in its best theaters. Premium-format screens — bigger picture, better sound. Movies, which were once a marginal stretch for the typical family so everyone could have a little fun, are becoming premium events. That drives profits but excises people out of behavior they associate with basic prosperity.

Open AI trial

Elon Musk’s lawsuit of OpenAI opened Tuesday. Musk co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 and he is trying to undo its shift to a for-profit company. He says CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman betrayed the original mission. OpenAI’s lawyers say Musk is a sore loser who sued only after he failed to take over the company himself, and that going for-profit was the only way to pay for the computing power the technology requires.

Musk testified first. He told the jury the company wouldn’t exist without him. OpenAI’s lawyers then showed that his often-cited $100 million donation was actually closer to $40 million. Musk, who is frequently wrong on matters of verifiable fact, said he may have been mistaken on the number but his reputation was worth more than the cash.

OpenAI is currently valued at around $852 billion and is planning a public stock offering later this year that could value it at a trillion. Musk is asking for $134 to $150 billion in damages, returned to the original nonprofit, and a court order removing Altman and Brockman from the board. A win for Musk would end the IPO.

Talking Less

Monk and Altman aren’t on speaking terms much and neither are the rest of us. Americans are talking to each other 28 percent less than they did a decade ago. Researchers at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Arizona counted. In 2005, the average American spoke about 16,632 words a day. By 2019, that number had fallen to 11,900. The researchers haven’t published post-pandemic data yet, but they suspect the gap has widened. Across a year, that’s roughly 120,000 words each of us no longer says out loud. The reasons aren’t mysterious — texts replace conversations, AirPods replace eye contact, the phone replaces the person across the table. I, however, am trying to accomplish 120,000 words in one episode of a podcast.

Wednesday, April 29

Iran

The Pentagon put a price tag on the war Wednesday: $25 billion so far. Most of it is munitions. The rest is operations and equipment replacement. This first official accounting since the conflict began came out in testimony to the House of Representatives — your shared-powers system– briefly–in action. The administration is asking Congress for a $1.5 trillion defense budget — a nearly 50 percent increase — to sustain what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described as an “existential fight.”

Hegseth was the day’s main event Wednesday. He told lawmakers that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “obliterated,” then was pressed: if the threat has been eliminated, why is the blockade still in place? Hegseth answered that while the facilities are gone, the “nuclear ambitions” remain.

What was the point of this war? Well, there have been many, but a consistent one was that Iran posed an imminent nuclear threat. That’s what justified the military action rather than diplomacy. The clock was ticking. That always grated against President Trump’s claim that the program was obliterated last summer. If obliterated, how imminent — as the poet said. Now the Secretary is using that term again, this time with respect to the success of recent military action. To slalom around the question of why the US needs to keep fighting if everything has been so successful, he changes the terms of the war. Now, it’s Iran’s “nuclear ambitions” that are the case for war.

That’s the goalposts moving. Think back to the Iraq war twenty years ago. The failure was not finding a weapons of mass destruction program. Were there ambitions for WMD? Certainly. Would saying it was ambitions and not actual WMD have shielded Bush from withering criticism — criticism, from Donald Trump among others, that he should have been impeached? It would not have shielded him.

Facilities can be bombed. Ambitions cannot. By saying that getting rid of Iran’s nuclear ambitions is the goal, and the reason for the war, makes for a lower bar for conflict.

The most striking line of the day was directed not at Iran but at the room. “The biggest adversary we face at this point,” Hegseth told the committee, “are the reckless, feckless, and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans.” Asked about a strike that reportedly killed hundreds of Iranian schoolgirls, he said he had ordered “no stupid rules of engagement” that would put American troops at risk**.**

The administration’s case continues to rest on deferred verification. The President says Iran is in collapse, the U.S. holds all the cards, the naval siege is working. The evidence will arrive eventually, in the form of a deal. Until then, supporters are asked to take it on faith and critics are asked to be patient — or, per the Defense Secretary, to keep quiet.

Iranian economy

We hear endless figures about the effects of the Iran war on the world and global economy, but not much about what’s happening in the country itself. Now, some data: The war has cost roughly two million Iranians their jobs — one million directly, another million indirectly — out of a workforce of about 25 million, according to an official at Iran’s Labor and Social Affairs Ministry. Annual inflation hit 67 percent in the month through mid-April. Subsidized red meat, most of it imported by sea before the blockade, now runs about $3.60 a pound in a country where the minimum wage is $130 a month. The Iranian government the President has said is in collapse is, by these numbers, collapsing on the people who live under it.

Caribbean attacks

The New York Times reported Wednesday that the U.S. military has carried out its 55th strike on a boat in the Caribbean or eastern Pacific — the seventh this month — killing three people on Sunday and bringing the confirmed death toll since September to 185. International monitoring groups put the figure closer to 220 once boats that sank without survivors are counted. The Pentagon has quietly added MQ-9 Reaper drones and fixed-wing attack aircraft, reportedly A-10 Warthogs, to bases in El Salvador and Puerto Rico, enough that strikes can now be launched in either ocean without moving planes between them.

The administration calls the targets “narco-terrorists,” a designation that allows it to bypass the boarding-and-arrest protocols used by the Coast Guard in favor of what the Pentagon calls “lethal kinetic strikes.” The military has not produced public evidence — seized narcotics, manifest data — that any of the 55 vessels was actually carrying drugs. In an October strike off Trinidad, the families of the dead produced evidence that those killed were artisanal fishermen on a multi-day run.

The first strike, on September 2, killed eleven people. The Times has reported that the aircraft used was classified and painted to look like a civilian plane, with its munitions hidden inside the fuselage. Two survivors of the initial blast climbed onto an overturned piece of the hull and waved at the plane. The military killed them with a follow-up strike. If one accepts the administration’s claim that this is a legal armed conflict, feigning civilian status to attack adversaries is itself a war crime.

In December, reporting surfaced that Secretary Hegseth had given a verbal order to “kill everyone” during a live-monitored strike in which two men were seen clinging to wreckage before a second strike was called in.

Voting Rights Act

Last week we talked about Virginia voters reversing their view on using the shape of districts to retain political power. This week, the Supreme Court reversed what was once settled. In a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the conservative majority removed the Voting Rights Act from American life. I mean, it’s still around. You can visit on Sundays if it’s not napping. But the champ couldn’t stir a ladybug.

The case concerned a Louisiana map redrawn to include a second majority-Black district after a federal court found that the state’s previous map — which contained only one majority-Black district out of six — likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

The state complied, drew the new map, and elected Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, in that second district in 2024. Then a group of voters who described themselves as “non-African American” sued, arguing the redrawn map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Supreme Court agreed.

The key upshot of the ruling is that the burden of proof shifts. States no longer have to prove their maps aren’t racist. Advocates have to prove they are — and to do it, they must now show intent. It’s no longer enough to demonstrate that the outcome disadvantages one race. A state legislature can simply say: we’re not being racist, we’re just political hacks redrawing districts to stay in power. That second motivation — partisan gerrymandering — has been protected by the Court since 2019.

The intent-versus-outcome distinction matters because legislators rarely write down that they meant to dilute the votes of Black or Hispanic citizens. The outcome test was the workaround — courts could look at the map, look at the demographics, and ask whether minority voters had been packed into one district or scattered across several to prevent them from electing a candidate of their choice. Without that test, the only path forward is a smoking gun. Smoking guns are rarely produced on purpose.

This is complicated in the South by the fact that race and party affiliation track each other so closely. Black voters in Louisiana vote Democratic at rates above 90 percent. A legislature that wants to weaken Democrats and a legislature that wants to weaken Black voters will, in practice, draw the same map.

The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, after Bloody Sunday in Selma, after a century in which Southern states used poll taxes, literacy tests, and redrawn district lines to keep Black citizens from translating their numbers into political power. Section 2 was rewritten by Congress in 1982 specifically to remove an intent requirement the Court had imposed two years earlier — a deliberate choice by the legislature that the burden should not fall on voters to read the legislator’s mind. Wednesday’s ruling restores that burden.

This is the third major narrowing of the Voting Rights Act in twelve years. In 2013, Shelby County v. Holder gutted the requirement that states with a history of discrimination get federal approval before changing their voting laws. In 2021, Brnovich v. DNC made it harder to challenge voting restrictions. Wednesday completed the trilogy.

On the same day, the Florida House approved a new congressional map proposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis designed to give Republicans four additional seats — a map whose authors explicitly cited the pending Supreme Court decision in their reasoning.

Now that the ruling has come down it’s less likely that legal challenges will pause the new congressional map DeSantis has suggested. Here’s how that would go, a civil rights group would make a voting rights challenge, in the past a judge might say okay we’ll pause the DeSantis plan of a new gerrymander ‘till there’s a hearing. Now, the new standard means a judge would be apt to conclude the civil rights case would lose and therefore while not dismissing the case, would not pause the DeSantis plan.

South Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri haven’t begun early voting, and could theoretically still draw new maps before the midterms.

London antisemitic stabbing

Two Jewish men, ages 34 and 76, were stabbed and hospitalized on a London street Wednesday in a terrorist attack. A 45-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. The attack happened in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in north London, and counterterrorism investigators are looking at whether it connects to a string of arson attacks on synagogues and Jewish sites in the city over the past six weeks — including four ambulances belonging to a Jewish volunteer service torched in March, attempted firebombings of synagogues in April, and an arson attack on a memorial wall in Golders Green honoring Iranian protesters two days before Wednesday’s stabbings.

A Fed Divided

The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady Wednesday — keeping the price of borrowing money roughly where it has been all year — in what may be Chair Jerome Powell’s final meeting before his term ends in May. The decision was expected — markets had priced in a 100 percent chance of no change.

What was not expected was the split. Four members of the Federal Open Market Committee dissented, citing different reasons, the largest dissent at a Fed meeting since October 1992. The committee’s post-meeting statement cited persistent inflation, “in part reflecting the recent increase in global energy prices.”

Some dissenters wanted to cut rates anyway, arguing that the inflation surge is being driven by the Iran war’s effect on energy prices — a one-time supply shock, not the kind of broad-based wage-and-demand inflation that rate hikes are designed to cool. Their view: keeping rates high punishes the economy for a temporary problem rate cuts can’t fix. You can’t cut the rates and open the Straits, as no one says. The rebuttal is that what might seem temporary can have long-term impacts in an economy.

Others wanted the Fed to stop hinting that cuts are coming. Their worry: when prices are still rising, a Fed that talks about cuts looks like it’s stopped worrying about inflation. And once businesses and workers stop believing the Fed will hold the line, businesses raise their prices faster and workers demand bigger raises — both bracing for an inflation that the bracing itself helps create. That cycle is what the Fed exists to prevent.

Powell, asked about the institution’s future, said: “The Fed can stay independent. But we’re going to have to fight for it.”

Kevin Warsh, Powell’s successor, is expected to be confirmed by the full Senate next week.

North Korea nuclear arsenal

Remember all that talk about imminent nuclear threats? You thought there was just one of ‘em. A Bloomberg story on Thursday throws a cat amongst the pigeons. North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is approaching the size at which it could overwhelm the missile defense system the United States spent thirty years and roughly $65 billion to build. That defense system was designed for a small-scale attack — a handful of incoming warheads, knocked down by interceptors based in Alaska and California. North Korea is now producing enough weapons-grade material to build up to 20 nuclear weapons a year, according to South Korean President Lee Jae Myung.

While the Pentagon asks Congress for $1.5 trillion to fight a war with Iran, the slower, larger danger continues to assemble itself in the country we are not at war with.

In June of 2018 president Trump declared “There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future!”

Thursday April 30

GDP

The American household is starting to flinch. Consumer spending grew just 1.6 percent in the first quarter, down from 1.9 percent the quarter before, with the weakness concentrated in physical goods — the kind of purchases families pull back on first when the gas bill spikes. That’s the human story buried inside Thursday’s GDP report from the Commerce Department, which clocked overall growth at 2 percent, an acceleration from the stagnant 0.5 percent at the end of 2025. The headline number was held aloft by two things: federal government spending, which jumped 9.3 percent on the rebound from last fall’s 43-day shutdown and the war effort in Iran, and business investment, which surged 10.4 percent, almost entirely on AI data centers.

Residential investment fell 8 percent — the fifth straight quarterly drop. The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the PCE price index, jumped to 4.5 percent from 2.9 percent. Inflation expectations for April rose from 3.8 to 4.7 percent, the biggest one-month jump in a year. The growth, in other words, is institutional: the government and the AI companies are still spending. The country’s families are starting to do the math.

Administration officials once boasted about five or six percent growth. They are no longer doing that. Now they are making the case that it’s a marvel that there is growth at all during wartime. The fact that the country grew at all, the argument runs, is a credit to the administration’s deregulation of domestic energy production, which has kept American crude flowing while imports get squeezed. The 10.4 percent surge in business investment is offered as further proof: the AI boom, in their telling, is the dividend of a hands-off regulatory posture.

Voters get a role in this debate. Reuters this poll this week showed the President’s approval rating on the economy was twenty seven percent. 22% on the cost of living.

Debt Reaches 100% of GDP

The national debt hit 100.2% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at the end of March, based on new economic data released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The amount the US owes is bigger than what it produces. Why does this matter:

It is another way to demonstrate that leaders aren’t leading. This ratio usually only gets this high during emergencies like World War II. Now, the emergency is that Congress and the president can’t make wise and hard choices.

Second, In 2026, the U.S. is on track to spend roughly $1 trillion just on interest payments. That is more than we spend on the entire U.S. Military— well, before this budget request. Every dollar spent on interest is a dollar that isn’t being spent on fixing roads, improving schools, or lowering your taxes.

Third, When the government needs to borrow $31 trillion, it has to find people to lend it that money. If the government jumps in and takes almost all of it to pay for its old bills, there’s less left for everyone else to borrow to build things or get a loan.

Fourth, no cushion. If there’s another emergency the US has less room to borrow.

Iran

Gasoline in California crossed $6 a gallon Thursday — $6.01 on average, per AAA, the highest in the country and the highest the state has seen since October 2023, a 30 percent jump since the war began in late February. The national average rose 27 cents in a week to $4.30.

Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine voted Thursday to end the war — the first Republican to change her vote on the military campaign. The resolution failed 47-50, but the shift matters: Friday marks the 60-day deadline under the War Powers Act, after which the President is required to terminate operations unless Congress has authorized them. Rand Paul has been a consistent yes from the GOP side. John Fetterman remained the lone Democrat voting no.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters the deadline doesn’t apply because the ceasefire means there are no active hostilities — a reading that requires ignoring the 10,000 personnel still enforcing the blockade and the $25 billion Hegseth himself disclosed to Congress on Wednesday.

The problem: The War Powers Act covers not just active combat but the introduction of forces into “situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated.” A naval blockade is, under international law, an act of war.

Also, the statute has no pause button: once the 60-day clock starts, it runs. The law does provide a safety valve — the President can certify in writing that 30 additional days are needed for safe withdrawal — but the administration isn’t using it. It is instead arguing for a third, unwritten category of military action that exists outside congressional oversight.

Janet Mills Maine

In the contest to replace Susan Collins. Maine Governor Janet Mills dropped her Senate bid Thursday, citing a lack of campaign funds to compete in what has become one of the country’s most-watched races. Her exit hands the Democratic nomination, almost certainly, to Graham Platner, an oyster farmer who was unknown a year ago and who has spent the last several months answering for past online comments and a tattoo widely recognized as a Nazi symbol. Mills did not endorse him. If Democrats have any shot of retaking the Senate, which requires taking four seats away from Republicans, they will have to beat Collins in Maine.

DHS funding

The 76-day shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security ended Thursday — the longest in the agency’s history — when the House passed, unchanged, the Senate funding bill it had been refusing to take up for weeks.

The trigger wasn’t bipartisanship. It was the calendar. Without action by Thursday, roughly 240,000 employees, including TSA agents and Coast Guard personnel, would have missed their first May paycheck during a war. The pay they had received up to that point came from emergency transfers between accounts — money moved around by the executive branch because Congress couldn’t do its job.

Step back for a second. The reason these funding fights happen is structural. Major legislation in the Senate needs 60 votes, which forces the parties to work together — and when they refuse, the government runs out of money.

Senate Democrats had blocked DHS funding since mid-February, after federal agents shot and killed a 37-year-old man named Alex Pretti during an immigration raid in Minneapolis. They demanded reforms to ICE and CBP use-of-force policies — body cameras during raids, de-escalation training, public reporting of shootings, independent review of fatal incidents — before they would vote to fund the agencies carrying out the administration’s deportation operations.

The administration refused. That was the standoff. It is also why, in April, Republicans used budget reconciliation — a procedure that bypasses the 60-vote threshold — to fund ICE and Border Patrol with $70 billion through 2029. That means Democrats lose their leverage. They can’t withhold ICE funding to force changes again until the next presidential term, because the money is already approved and out the door.

That left the rest of DHS — FEMA, the Coast Guard, TSA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — still unfunded. Republican Senator Susan Collins and Democratic Senator Patty Murray built a workaround: fund the non-enforcement agencies separately, with no policy riders attached.

House Republican leaders felt cut out of the negotiation and sat on the bill. They floated amendments — additional border-wall funding, asylum restrictions, other enforcement language — and couldn’t pass any of them, because their own conference was split between hardliners who wanted to add more enforcement provisions to the bill and moderates who just wanted the agency open.

When the deadline arrived, Speaker Mike Johnson brought the Senate bill to the floor unchanged and passed it with mostly Democratic votes. He had to. He didn’t have the Republican votes on his own.

Speakers don’t like to do this. Passing a bill with the other party’s votes infuriates the majority’s hardliners — it was the move that cost Speaker Kevin McCarthy his job in 2023 — and it undercuts the leadership’s leverage in the next negotiation. It happens anyway because the alternative, in this case, was federal workers going hungry during a war.

The healthier version of this would have been bipartisan negotiation upfront, on the front end of the 76 days rather than the back end. That is what Congress used to do. It is what the institution was built to do. What happened on Thursday isn’t bipartisanship. It’s collapse, with the votes counted at the last possible minute to keep the lights on.

Eli Lilly earnings

Eli Lilly stock jumped almost 10 percent Thursday after the company reported that its two GLP-1 drugs — Zepbound for weight loss and Mounjaro for diabetes — together brought in $12.8 billion in a single quarter. GLP-1s mimic a hormone the gut releases after a meal. They tell the brain you’re full, slow how fast the stomach empties, and prompt the pancreas to produce more insulin. The result, for many patients, is dramatic weight loss and better blood sugar control. Zepbound sales rose 80 percent year over year. Mounjaro rose 125 percent. The drugs now account for roughly two-thirds of Eli Lilly’s total revenue, which itself grew 56 percent to $19.7 billion. Even with lower U.S. prices, demand carried the quarter. A class of medication that didn’t exist as a meaningful business five years ago is now the engine of one of the most valuable pharmaceutical companies in the world.

Friday, May 1

Iran

Friday marks 60 days since the President sent his War Powers notification to Congress, the formal report required after the February 28 strikes against Iranian missile sites, mining capabilities, and air defenses. Under the War Powers Act, that’s the deadline by which the President must terminate operations unless Congress has authorized them. Congress hasn’t.

The American public has reached its own conclusion. A Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll released Friday found 61 percent of Americans say using military force against Iran was a mistake. Fewer than 2 in 10 think the campaign has been successful. The disapproval has reached the levels Iraq hit in 2006 — three years into a war with thousands of American casualties — and the levels Vietnam hit in 1971, after more than 50,000 American deaths. Thirteen American service members have died in this war so far. The country has reached the same verdict in two months that took the previous wars years.

The military picture is the part the administration would prefer not to discuss in front of Congress. The Times reported Friday that the war has drained munitions stockpiles deeply enough that the Pentagon is diverting weapons originally promised to allies. Last Monday, Hegseth told his Estonian counterpart the U.S. was suspending delivery of six HIMARS rocket launchers Estonia — a frontline NATO state on Russia’s border — had already paid for. Similar messages have gone to other European and Asian allies. “If we’re running low after a few weeks of fighting Iran,” said Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute, “we’re nowhere near where we need to be for Russia and China.”

The Pentagon’s solution is to buy more. The President has announced ambitious agreements with Lockheed Martin and other contractors to scale up production — Patriot interceptors from 600 a year to 2,000, THAAD interceptors from 96 to 400. The trouble is that the agreements are tentative. Congress hasn’t appropriated the money. Lockheed told investors last week it would wait until the funding was secured before expanding production. And the man asking Congress for the money is the same Defense Secretary who told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that lawmakers were “the biggest adversary we face.” Republican Austin Scott of Georgia tried to flag the math for him: it takes 218 votes to pass anything in the House, the GOP doesn’t have 218 reliable votes, and the Pentagon is going to need Democratic ones. Hegseth doubled down before the Senate the next day.

Trump on Thursday acknowledged the economic price for the first time and also tried a new line of spin. “When we hit 50,000 on the Dow and 7,000 on the S&P,” he told reporters in the Oval Office, “I said to myself, ‘We got to do something about Iran.’ And I hated to do it to my people… and the fire is taking place in the lovely country of Iran, and they want to have a nuclear weapon.”

The idea here is that everything was jake before he made his presidential decision. Whether Iran was the kind of tough choice a president must make is up for debate. Iran wants a nuke. This is what stopping them looks like. Ignore execution, that’s the presidential level decision to be evaluated by all of us.

But what’s not up for grabs is that the economy was doing really great. Trump cites the stock market but those affordability numbers are so low because people know what lives they lead. Wages are fluttering ahead of inflation. Inflation is up and particularly in the areas of housing, education and health care, items Americans associate with opportunity in this country. Growth in the last quarter was anemic and the manufacturing jobs are going to the robots.

Sixty percent of Americans say the war has increased the risk of recession. Sixty-one percent say it has increased the risk of terrorism on American soil. Half think gas prices will be worse a year from now.

Affordable Care Act flight

The New York Times reported Friday that roughly 5 million Americans have dropped Obamacare coverage since Congress let the enhanced subsidies expire at the end of 2025. Enrollment is on track to fall about 20 percent — from 24 million last year to roughly 19 million — with some analysts projecting losses as high as 26 percent. The hardest hit, according to the Times, are early retirees with middle-class incomes, the group that saw the steepest premium jumps. In some markets, their monthly costs rose by more than $1,000.

The behavior that follows shows up in the Gallup affordability survey from earlier this week. A third of American adults report making at least one trade-off to pay for healthcare in the past year, including stretching prescription doses, borrowing money, and skipping meals. Among the uninsured, that figure rises to 62 percent. Roughly half of middle-income households — those making between $48,000 and $180,000 — say they have postponed a major life decision, like buying a home or changing jobs, because of healthcare and energy costs. The squeeze that used to land hardest at the bottom has moved up the income ladder.

CEO pay

CEO pay in the United States grew roughly 20 times faster than worker pay last year, according to a report released this week by Oxfam and the International Trade Union Confederation — both advocacy organizations, but drawing on data from S&P Capital IQ, the Federal Reserve, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Adjusted for inflation, the average private-sector worker’s hourly wage grew 1.3 percent from 2024 to 2025. Pay for the 384 S&P 500 CEOs the analysts could track grew 25.6 percent. The typical CEO now earns 281 times what the typical worker does, per the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. Thirty-five years ago, the ratio was 60 to 1.

Spirit Airlines to shutdown

Spirit Airlines is preparing to shut down, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The discount carrier had been in talks with the Trump administration over a $500 million rescue that would have given the government a stake of up to 90 percent — but the deal fell apart over disagreements inside the administration about whether the federal government should be in the airline-rescue business at all — and, separately, about how to structure the rescue if it happened. Spirit’s bondholders also weren’t keen. — specifically the part where the deal with the government moved them to the back of the line so taxpayers could move to the front if things went to hell in the end and investors needed to be paid out. With no rescue and no cash, the airline is now moving to liquidate its aircraft fleet. Spirit has spent most of the last year and a half in Chapter 11. The business model that once made it an industry maverick — bargain fares plus a fee for everything else — couldn’t survive the combination of relentless competition, heavy debt, and the war’s effect on jet fuel.

If you have made it this far it is a testament to the quality of your breeding and the width of your sympathies.

Thank you to Annie Cohen for helping me pull all this together.

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Voters say President Trump is distracted from what they want and obsessed with what makes their lives worse. When his focus lands on what he promised, it goes so far it bruises their idea of America.

That is the message that runs through the New York Times focus group with 12 voters who regret voting for Trump. (Caveats about focus groups can be found here.1)

It can be a mistake to extrapolate from focus groups (Wait, didn’t you just make that point at length in the footnote? Yes, but it’s worth making again). In addition to the mistakes I outlined, it’s possible to over-read the views of a sliver of a coalition as larger than they are.

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Here’s why it’s worth risking a longer look at this focus group. First, all exploration of themes about 2026 are useful because the president is actively trying to make a bad outcome seem like the result of fraud. He’s done this throughout his career, as I wrote about here. From before he was a candidate, to the Iowa caucuses in 2016 and to the results of the Virginia redistricting vote. Trump’s unfounded malevolent lie about the 2020 election led to the first attack on the capitol since 1814. So following along as the 2026 election takes place arms citizens against claims that crazy things are happening. (More on this in a future piece.)

Second, focus groups show what the polling can’t. We know the president is very unpopular (author quotes self here), but a focus group can give us what the disappointment sounds like.

So let’s take the claims of the lede. Here they are with one poll number for each. The supporting polls are in the footnotes.

President Trump is distracted from what voters want:2

• Morning Consult, current as of last week: 79 percent of voters say bringing down prices should be a top priority and 73 percent say making health care more affordable should be — but only 23 percent say imposing tariffs should be a top priority, while 41 percent say it currently is, an 18-point overshoot.

He is obsessed with what makes their lives worse: Iran:3

• CNBC’s late-April survey on feeling less safe: a 48 percent plurality say they feel less safe because of the war, with 58 percent of independents in that camp. Wars aren’t supposed to make people feel less safe.

He is obsessed with what makes their lives worse: Tariffs:4

• ABC/Washington Post/Ipsos: 64 percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of tariffs to 34 percent who approve, and 65 percent disapprove of his handling of inflation.

Where his focus does land on what he promised, he goes too far:5

• PBS/NPR/Marist: 65 percent say ICE has gone too far.

Their idea of America is at stake:6

• NPR/Ipsos in January: Americans overwhelmingly believe the U.S. should be the world’s moral leader, but only two in five believe it actually is, a serious erosion from 2017.

Now here are quotes from the actual article lining up with those thoughts:

Distracted from what voters want:

• Daniel: “with the current administration, it’s something new every week. DOGE, Venezuela, immigration, Iran. This week, the president’s feuding with the pope.”

• Michelle: “if Trump would have approached the country and the problems that the nation has been having as passionately as he had his personal vendettas against Biden and those before and after him, he would have been an amazing president.”

• Argenis on the loss of focus since first term: “He was so focused on Americans and making the country great, but now it doesn’t seem that way at all. He’s more focused on Israeli affairs and what’s going on there.” And: “he’s very emotional with his decisions. There’s a lot of uncertainty as a result.”

• Chris: “I think Trump is focused on the stock market, Wall Street. He’s focused on the rich.”

• Daniel: “he’s more focused on profit than what happens.”

Voters want help with prices:

• Chris: “Life is becoming more and more unaffordable. The prices of things like gasoline and food overall haven’t come down. I thought it all would just be a lot more affordable.”

• John: “Cost of living, oil, gas — housing. I mean, you touch on any aspect of it, it’s bad.”

• Argenis: “I was hoping to be able to afford a house, and it’s going up and up and up and up and up.”

• Jose: “I’m cutting my travel time because of the prices of gas. The cost of living is terrible.”

Obsessed with what makes their lives worse — Iran

• Daniel: “this whole conflict with Iran is just uncalled for.”

• Jose: “He said we’re not going to be in any wars. We have had wars.” And later: “We shouldn’t be in Iran. They don’t have a nuclear weapon. Show us something with proof.”

• Chris: “And here we are in a war. And the deficit is continuing to expand. We’re headed in the wrong direction.”

Obsessed with what makes their lives worse — tariffs and cost of living

• Natan: “If you understand economic policy, tariffs are not the way to go because the cost is passed to consumers.”

• Nancy: “Tariffs are really impacting me, especially at work, because I work for a company that has offices abroad. The tariffs are just creating chaos at work between all of our customers.”

Where his focus lands on what he promised, he goes too far

• Alla: “When he was saying he would try to fix immigration, I was behind it. But then the way he did it, it’s just not the way I agree with.” Followed by: “How ICE was treating people. This is not the way to do it.”

• Natan: “He did secure the border and slow down immigration. He did it his way, and a lot of it is bad. He could have done it in a much, much, much better way.” And on the spillover effect: “While he has tried to cut back on illegal immigration, it has hurt a lot of legal immigrants. He’s created problems in getting access to legal citizenship.”

• Jose: “He started separating kids and doing that mean stuff to parents, to moms, and all that. That wasn’t necessary. I understand immigration enforcement, but he was trying to be mean.”

• Franceska on her boyfriend stopped by ICE: “He was pulled over by ICE, immigration, and they checked his ID and all that, I feel just because of how he looked.” And the direct judgment: “I do feel the way he is handling immigration now is a little bit of abuse of power.”

• Michelle on the selectivity: “it seems to be just one ethnicity type that’s being targeted in regards to immigration. He’s not trying to clean up both sides of the country’s borders.”

Their idea of America is wounded:

• Jose, on immigration: “We’re discriminating against anybody that looks different than us or believes in whatever religion or sexual preference. That’s not what we’re about.“

• Pamela, after the Zelensky meeting: “I’m not embarrassed by anyone that is like, oh, yeah, we told you this would happen. I’m embarrassed for our whole country that this is what we’re dealing with daily now.”

• Michelle, when asked about Epstein accountability: “Other countries have been willing to dismiss bloodlines and are doing a better job at holding people accountable, and we’re still cloaking and protecting people of power because they’re people of power.”

The picture isn’t uniform. Trump’s base remains with him on tariffs. Border security is still his strongest issue, and a majority of voters still favor deporting people in the country illegally — what they reject is how the deporting is being done. Most Republicans still see America the way they always have. The disappointment in this focus group is the disappointment of a coalition’s edges, not its center. But in a midterm, that’s where a party gets buried.

So that’s a table-setter. I will return to this focus group as a way to think about themes in the election in the coming days.

Next: The most important finding.

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Iran on pause. Schrodinger’s Strait was both opened and closed. Kash Out Crash Out at the FBI and cash out from the Treasury Department. Virginia voters turned 3-d chess into checkers. A soldier bet on the wrong war. And in the UK Smoke ‘em while you got ‘em.

So let’s take it day by day.

Monday April 20

Iran War

In Islamabad, Pakistan, the high-security Red Zone surrounding the Serena Hotel was sealed off by traffic police. Billboards went up. Security checkpoints multiplied. All in anticipation of a face-to-face meeting between Vice President Vance and Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf — a meeting that, by Monday night, had become a ghost summit. The Iranians refused to show, citing the ongoing U.S. naval blockade as a violation of the ceasefire.

The president called Iran’s leaders “indecisive.” Regional experts saw something different: an Iranian government waiting for a unified signal from Washington that never came.

Friday had looked different. The president told CBS News that Iran had “agreed to everything,” describing a joint operation to remove enriched uranium: “Our people, together with the Iranians, are going to work together to go get it. And then we’ll take it to the United States.” Within hours, Tehran disputed the president’s claims and said there was no such deal.

By Sunday, familiar terrain. The president posted that his representatives would arrive in Islamabad the following evening, warning that if Iran rejected what he called a “very fair and reasonable DEAL,” the United States would “knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran.” “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!” he wrote.

While gas prices climbed, it felt like the gas went completely out of the president’s war effort.

An administration official told Axios that the president is “over it” and willing to give Iran a window of only “three to five days” to “get their shit together.” He doesn’t want to fight anymore, the official said, but will if he feels he has to.

Two questions keep surfacing. Did the president’s negotiating tactics — the public threats and the premature claims of a total surrender — poison whatever progress existed? And is this a repetition of what preceded the initial strike: a fundamental misreading of where the Iranians actually stood? One of the rotating justifications for the war was that Iran refused to negotiate in good faith. There were suggestions at the time that the U.S. had simply misread the internal fractures of the Iranian leadership. Career diplomats exist precisely to anticipate these gaps — to know the difference between posturing and a genuine impasse before the shooting starts.

This also returns us to the unanswered questions at the center of the entire war: Was Iran truly close to a weapon, and was military action the only remedy? Only one person claims to know the answers, and he is an unreliable narrator — perhaps even to himself.

Monday proved that in the Trumpian theater of war, the Negotiator and the Commander-in-Chief are often on stage at the same time, speaking over one another.

Gas Prices

President Trump told The Hill on Monday his Energy Secretary Chris Wright got it wrong when he said gas prices might not fall below $3 a gallon until next year. “No, I think he’s wrong on that. Totally wrong,” Trump said, adding that prices would drop “as soon as this ends”—meaning the Iran war. The president offered no mechanism, no timeline, just confidence overriding his own appointee’s assessment.

But Wright has the better of the argument. Reopening the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t flip a switch. It starts a clock. Tankers need weeks to reach refineries, refineries that cut capacity or shifted schedules during the disruption need time to ramp back up, and the fuel still has to move through the distribution chain to local stations. “Gas prices go up like a rocket and come down like a feather,” as independent oil analyst Tom Kloza put it to CNN.

Why? Gas station owners bought their current inventory at peak prices and won’t eat the loss until they’re confident the drop will stick. Consumers, meanwhile, stop comparison-shopping once prices dip even slightly, which removes the competitive pressure that might force stations to cut faster. And none of this accounts for OPEC+, which controls supply independent of any shipping lane. If the cartel holds production cuts to defend an $80 or $90 floor, American drivers pay that price regardless of what happens in the Strait. Peak summer driving season arrives on top of all of it, pushing demand higher just as supply tries to normalize.

SCOTUS on Catholic Preschools

The Supreme Court decided to wrestle this: A gay parent wants to send their four-year-old to a neighborhood preschool—with money the state set aside for exactly that purpose. The school says no, because the people who run it believe, at the core of who they are, that enrolling that child would be wrong.

The Supreme Court justices agreed on Monday to decide whether Catholic preschools in Colorado that decline to enroll 4-year-olds with gay or transgender parents can participate in a publicly funded state program. A Colorado program pays for families to send their children to the preschool of their choice, public or private, including faith-based programs.Two Catholic parish preschools in the Denver area said admitting such children would require them to violate their religious convictions. The state said the schools can’t block the kids. The church sued. The church lost—twice. Now the Supreme Court will decide.

At bottom, this is a fight about two things the government does when it makes that call: it decides who belongs, and it decides whose conscience counts. For a gay parent, a state that allows that exclusion when distributing tax dollars is a state that has decided who belongs. For a believer, a state that overrides their conviction is a state that has decided whose conscience counts.

FBI Director Kash Patel sues The Atlantic

Kash out. The FBI director announced Monday that he was suing The Atlantic for a story over the weekend that asserted that Patel drank to such excess that it was affecting his ability to do his job and that as a result, his job might be in danger. The magazine also reported that he is sometimes so out of pocket (that’s not a euphemism) that key decisions cannot be made and, in the article’s most colorful passage: “On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated.” A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors.” If the FBI director were to carry this suit to its conclusion, The Atlantic would be able to depose Patel and administration officials under the penalty of perjury.

Detroit Ballots

The Justice Department demanded that Wayne County, Michigan — home to Detroit — turn over more than 860,000 ballots, envelopes, and receipts from the 2024 election. DOJ cited three fraud convictions and five lawsuits as evidence of the county’s “history” of election problems. But the three convictions were from 2020, involved individuals caught forging signatures, and were prosecuted by the state — in other words, cases where the system worked exactly as designed. The five lawsuits were almost entirely dismissed by Michigan judges for lack of evidence. The Republican-led state Senate also investigated and found no widespread fraud. None of it had anything to do with 2024.

This fits a pattern. In January, the FBI raided the Fulton County, Georgia, elections office and seized hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots. Last May, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s team seized voting machines in Puerto Rico, finding no evidence of the Venezuelan interference they were looking for. The Justice Department has sued 24 states for refusing to turn over unredacted voter rolls. In each case, the administration cites election integrity; in each case, the predicate is thin or nonexistent.

One detail worth noting: Trump won Michigan in 2024. He lost Wayne County by nearly 250,000 votes. The DOJ is investigating an election its own boss won, in a county where he didn’t.

Whether any of these inquiries turn up actual fraud is almost beside the point. As Trump’s own attorney general William Barr testified in 2022, he told the White House at the time that its election fraud theories were “crazy stuff” doing “grave, grave disservice to the country.” Trump and his allies lost dozens of lawsuits challenging 2020 results. But Trump has repeatedly, across decades, raised the specter of election fraud where none exists — not necessarily to prove it, but to create enough confusion that the claim itself becomes the point.

Tariff Refunds. (New York Times)

Even though president Trump said tariffs were paid by other countries, it was always Americans who paid the import taxes. That’s why this Monday, exactly two months after the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s most sweeping tariffs, American importers started applying for reimbursement. They are owed $166 billion in refunds plus interest. It is estimated that 30,000 to 35,000 firms will apply. Everything from precision manufacturers to pharmaceutical importers will be eligible to upload proof of the levies they paid. It’s a deluge. Some companies have up to 5,000 individual entry lines to reconcile.Refunds will be issued 60 to 90 days after approval. The court ruled that the president had usurped Congress’ power to tax through his tariff program. Economists note that while the money is coming back, it doesn’t account for the “lost opportunity cost.” That is all the things that couldn’t be done while trying to avoid the import taxes– Companies reported moving senior logistics managers off of product development and into “tariff mitigation” full-time for over 18 months– and now another opportunity cost: all the stuff that isn’t being done in order to keep up with this paperwork nightmare that was easily avoidable. Many small businesses, unable to float the 25% tax, went under; they will not be able to request refunds.

In an interview, the president said he will “remember” companies that don’t claim their money.

While the president’s signature economic policy is being dismantled in keeping with the Supreme Court ruling, his standing on the economy continues to drop. An Associated Press poll puts approval on the economy at 30 percent in April, down from 38 percent in March. Only about a quarter of adults approve of his handling of the cost of living — a Marquette Law School survey puts that number at 24 percent. The New York Times has him at his highest disapproval rating ever: 58 percent.

Gaza needs $71 billion to rebuild

“Domicide” is the systematic destruction of the ability to call a palace home. That is what a new study by the European Union, United Nations and World Bank shows has happened in Gaza. It says the Israeli destruction in retaliation for the Hamas attack on October 7 has knocked the civilization back eight decades. Over 371,000 housing units are damaged or destroyed. That is roughly 92% of all pre-war residential structures. A daily average of four people are still killed and 24 wounded every day during this “ceasefire” period due to unexploded ordnance and lingering skirmishes.

Six months into the ceasefire, the “reconstruction” hasn’t actually begun for most. Nearly the entire population is squeezed into a sliver of land along the coast, while the rest of the territory is occupied or under displacement orders.

over 50% of hospitals non-functional. Because Israel still restricts fuel, half of all families are now burning hazardous waste and plastic to cook their food, leading to a surge in respiratory illnesses among children. There is an estimated 40 million tonnes of debris to clear. To put that in perspective, if you lined up the trucks needed to move it, the line would stretch from Gaza to New York and back.Over 80% of croplands are destroyed. The soil is now “decimated” by munitions and noxious gases, meaning Gazans cannot even grow their own vegetables to offset the aid shortages. The World Health Organization’s emergency minimum water ration is 15 liters per person per day. Gazans are currently averaging 8.4 liters—less than a single 10-minute shower for an entire day of drinking, cooking, and washing.

Drought in the US

In context that is so different I can’t make obvious transition, there are water shortages in the U.S. too. More than 61% of the nation is now in a drought, the highest percentage in nearly four years, according to the most recent U.S. Drought Monitor. In all, 45 of 50 states are enduring drought, with only Alaska, North Dakota, Michigan, Connecticut and Rhode Island completely drought-free.In Texas and the Southern Plains, soil moisture levels are at historic lows, which typically leads to higher crop insurance claims and potential spikes in food pricing for corn and wheat. In Virginia and the Carolinas, summer droughts significantly increase the risk of “dry lightning” and forest fires in the Appalachian region. Power plants (thermal and nuclear) require massive amounts of water for cooling. Low water levels in reservoirs can lead to reduced power output or temporary shutdowns during peak summer heat.

North Korean Missile Launch: Father and Daughter Affair.

What are intergenerational dictators wearing to missile launches this season? Black leather jackets. Not exactly a departure from menace wear, but that’s what North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his teenage daughter were both wearing as they watched a missile test launch from a coastal observation point as a projectile soared over the water, trailing gray smoke. No fuchsia for the next generation, but it was far more stylish than the four elderly military officers standing behind them in regulation brown, peering up into the sky, all of them holding small booklets and writing instruments like they were all recording their golf scores. South Korea’s spy service recently assessed that the daughter, reportedly named Kim Ju Ae, could be considered Kim’s heir. North Korea has tested cluster bomb warheads before. But observers say the Iran war may have prompted North Korea to display that it has cluster munitions and accelerate efforts to develop better ones.

Labor Secretary Steps Down

Monday, the Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer stepped down amid an accordion file of accusations such as sending staff to pick up liquor and attempting to use business trips as excuses for personal travel including for example, a UFC fight in Chicago, a Morgan Wallen concert and to see friends and family in various states. She reportedly asked staff to design work trips that would provide her openings to attend those events. For months, the Labor Department’s Inspector General’s Office has been investigating these claims as well as a complaint that Chavez-DeRemer was having a sexual relationship with a member of her security team. She now joins former Homeland Security Secretary Christie Noem who was accused of similar business and former Attorney General Pam Bondi, as the highest profile ejections from the Trump administration.

Tim Cook to Step Down

Apple — the world’s most valuable company, one of the Magnificent Seven that drive the S&P 500, a $4 trillion enterprise whose devices sit in the hands of 2.5 billion people — will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2026, and this week announced its most significant leadership transition in a generation. CEO Tim Cook will step down September 1, moving to Executive Chairman. Cook transformed Apple from a premium computer maker into a global utility — revenues nearly quadrupled to $400 billion under his watch. But his final years were shadowed by a perceived AI gap, with Apple trailing Microsoft and Google.

His successor: John Ternus, the 50-year-old hardware chief who has been with Apple since 2001 and led the transition to Apple Silicon, the move that unified the company’s chips and software architecture. Where Cook was the operations and supply chain master, Ternus is a product engineer — an amateur rally car racer known for taking teams to off-road tracks to practice precision under pressure. The choice signals Apple believes its AI problem is ultimately a hardware problem.

While Apple figures out its AI strategy, a Chinese smartphone company just built a robot that outruns every human who has ever lived. One year ago it finished a half marathon in two hours and forty minutes. This year: fifty minutes. So, if Apple licks its AI problem, the next Apple CEO might be a robot.

Tuesday April 21

Iran War

“Vacate your engine room. We are prepared to subject you to disabling fire.” This message sent Sunday by the USS Spruance preceded the disabling the Touska, an Iranian-flagged container ship, which like a child at college, had been ignoring messages. For six hours warnings were sent until finallyprecision rounds were fired directly into the ship’s propulsion compartment. This surgical strike allowed the Marines from the 31st MEU to board via helicopter and secure the vessel.

Why am I putting it on a Tuesday? First of all, it’s just an amazing story. And second of all, the seizure underscored the extreme tension in the Strait of Hormuz, where commercial traffic has effectively vanished; only three tankers transited the waterway that entire day, all of which carried non-Iranian cargo and were only permitted passage after pre-coordinating with regional authorities to avoid similar engine room events.

On the diplomatic front, the engine also seemed to be disabled. This somewhat bouncy transition brought to you by the bouncy cab in which it was written.

Tuesday, President Trump told CNBC that he expected a “great deal” with Iran but signaled he will not extend the ceasefire and was ready to resume bombing. By the end of the day he had announced an indefinite ceasefire.

In what is becoming common practice, $500 billion in oil trades were placed just before Trump made the ceasefire announcement.

In the CNBC interview the president said, “We’ve taken out their leaders…but these leaders are much more rational.”

This is an ongoing matter. Are the leaders of Iran really more rational? What evidence is there of that? These are the leaders whose civilization Trump was promising to destroy. Why would he have wanted to destroy the reasonable leaders? Why would he wing out civilization destroying threats if they were responding to reason. But let’s accept the president’s assertion that he changed the regime. What is the point of regime change if the regime that is in power is still very hostile to the United States or more hostile?

What is fair to say is that the U.S. strikes effectively ended the “Theocratic” era of Iran, replacing it with a Militaristic Autocracy led by the IRGC. The “regime change” Trump refers to is the transition from a government of clerics to a government of survivalist generals. Whether they are “rational” or simply “desperate” remains the central question of the current ceasefire negotiations.

Finally, because the Iran war has not gone as easily as the president expected, he’s taken to declaring that he would have had an easier time with other wars. Vietnam, for example, the war he did not decide to fight when he had the chance. “I would have won Vietnam very quickly. I would have, if I were president, I would have won Iraq in the same amount of time that we won, because essentially, we won here.”

Just a week after Artemis II took humans farther from earth than any had ever been, this assertion traveled an even greater distance from the experience we have had on earth as we know it.

Drone Boost

The Pentagon’s largest-ever budget request earmarks $75 billion for drones and the technology to counter them. The centerpiece: the Defense Autonomous Working Group, a little-known office working with U.S. commandos, would jump from $226 million this year to $54.6 billion — likely the largest single year-over-year boost of any defense program in history, and certain to draw scrutiny inside an already eye-catching $1.5 trillion request that’s 42 percent larger than this year’s budget.

The numbers amount to a verdict on how effective cheap drones have been in this conflict — and in Ukraine before it. The math is brutal: the U.S. routinely uses million-dollar Patriot and THAAD missiles to intercept drones that cost a few thousand dollars. Roughly $21 billion of the request targets that imbalance directly, funding directed-energy weapons — lasers and high-power microwaves — designed to kill drone swarms at a cost of a few dollars per shot rather than a few million.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Airline Iran War Fallout Spreads

Global jet fuel prices are up more than 70 percent, and the Iran-war-based pain is spreading across the airline industry. American Airlines lowered its earnings target, warning it may post a loss in 2026 after $4 billion in additional fuel costs. United Airlines says fares may rise 20 percent. In Europe, where airlines are the largest consumers of fuel shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, low-cost carrier Ryanair said last week it could only guarantee jet fuel supply through May.

Passengers are adapting in their own way. Travel experts report that frequent flyers are hedging against cancellations and route disruptions by using miles to make overlapping bookings across multiple routes for the same trip. Because award tickets carry minimal or no cancellation fees compared with cash bookings, travelers can drop the extra reservations at the last minute.

Those who stay home are staying home — and drinking there.

Nearly a third of Americans who still drink say they now pregame before going out because drinks cost too much. The practice, once associated with college, is showing up on spreadsheets. Suntory, which makes Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark, reports higher demand for its small-format bottles. Among drinkers who say prices influence whether they go out at all, 41 percent have switched to water or non-alcoholic options. Thirty-seven percent are pregaming.

Condom prices

Also potentially grounded as a result of the war: Malaysian company Karex told Reuters Tuesday that the company may be forced to raise condom prices at least 20 to 30 percent. Condom production requires materials that also arrive by ship through the waterway that has become the center of this conflict. The company, which produces Durex and Trojan makes 5 billion condoms annually and exports to more than 130 countries. The company’s CEO Goh told Reuters that along with higher costs for manufacturing and packaging, there are delays in shipping. “We’re seeing a lot more condoms actually sitting on vessels that have not ⁠arrived ​at their destination but are highly required.”

Pentagon Flu Vaccine

The Pentagon is no longer requiring those who serve to get the annual flu vaccine. For decades, the consensus was that a flu outbreak in a barracks or on a carrier could take a unit “off the board” just as effectively as an enemy strike. The new priority argues that the intangible cost to morale and the political cost of coercion are now higher than the biological cost of the virus. It frames the mandate not as a shield against disease, but as a “compliance test” that alienates the very demographic the military needs to recruit. This isn’t really about the flu; it’s a retroactive battle over the COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The resistance that formed during the pandemic has been industrialized into a broader skepticism of all mandatory medical interventions. By removing the flu shot—a long-standing, relatively uncontroversial requirement—the administration is signaling a “demilitarization” of public health, treating medical decisions as private choices rather than command directives.

Congressional Expulsions:

Last week two men accused of sexual predation were bounced from the house and this week on Tuesday, there were two more motions in the bouncy House. House Democrats prepared to expel Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-FL) for, among other things, funneling $5 million in COVID relief funds to her campaign, but the Congresswoman resigned before they could make it official. Rep. Nancy Mace introduced a measure to expel Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) who has been accused of campaign finance violations and sexual misconduct.

Fed Independence:

For months Donald Trump has used his administration to target the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and member of the fed board of governors Lisa Cook. He didn’t like their reluctance to lower rates fast enough. They, along with most economists, worried inflation would rise.

Tuesday, the president’s replacement appeared as a part of his Senate confirmation. Much of the intense questioning Kevin Warsh faced regarded his independence from the White House. The Fed is an independent agency to keep politics out of interest rate decisions in order to safeguard the economy. But even a president booing from the sidelines has economic impacts.

Southern Poverty Law

A federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday — 11 counts including wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The DOJ’s theory: the SPLC, a 55-year-old civil rights organization best known for fighting the Klan, defrauded its donors by secretly funneling more than $3 million to paid informants inside the very extremist groups it claimed to be dismantling.

The informants were known internally as “field sources” or “the Fs.” Between 2014 and 2023, at least eight were paid through shell companies with names like “Center Investigative Agency,” “Fox Photography,” and “Rare Books Warehouse,” with payments loaded onto prepaid cards. One informant affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance received more than $1 million. Another, paid $270,000, sat in the online leadership group that planned the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville — attended the rally at the SPLC’s direction, made racist posts under their supervision, and coordinated transportation for other attendees. After Charlottesville left one person dead and dozens injured, SPLC donations nearly tripled, from $50 million to $132 million in a single year.

The SPLC calls it a “weaponized prosecution,” saying its informants risked their lives and shared intelligence that saved others. The core problem with the DOJ’s theory: paying confidential sources inside criminal organizations is what federal law enforcement does routinely. Multiple legal scholars called the indictment thin and questioned whether it makes out the elements of a crime.

That’s the legal question. The political question is broader. The SPLC’s “Hate Map” has been used for decades by the FBI, banks, and tech companies to track, de-platform, and investigate extremist groups. It has also been used to label conservative organizations — a fact Republicans have hammered for years. This indictment arrives under an acting attorney general who is under reported pressure from the president to deliver wins against perceived political opponents. Whether the underlying conduct was criminal or standard investigative practice, the charges alone freeze the SPLC’s operations and credibility at a moment when the organization sits on a $750 million endowment that the DOJ could target through forfeiture.

Florida and AI

Florida launched a criminal investigation into OpenAI on Tuesday after chat logs revealed the suspect in last April’s Florida State University shooting — two killed, six injured — asked ChatGPT what gun and ammunition to use, where and when on campus he’d find the most people, and whether school shooters go to maximum security prison. The chatbot answered. The state’s attorney general said if a human being had provided that advice, prosecutors would charge them with murder. The question with no precedent: does the same apply when the advisor is software?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ticks sending people to the ER

While city dwellers move to the country for the warmer months, ticks are moving in the opposite direction. Lyme disease cases in Michigan nearly quadrupled between 2022 and 2025 in part because ticks are moving to suburban and urban areas. The CDC reports that bites are sending Americans to the emergency room (ER) at the highest rate in nearly 10 years. It’s not just the city’s broadway plays and used bookstores that are causing the spike, however. The earlier onset of warm weather means more people are out and about outside.

Wednesday, April 22

Iran War: Six Months to Sweep Mines.

On Wednesday, Iran attacked three ships in the Strait of Hormuz and escorted two to Iranian waters. The dueling naval operations strained the ceasefire and exposed a key sticking point in negotiations: Iran’s chief negotiator says reopening the strait is impossible while the U.S. blockade remains.

That blockade was no longer the concern of Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, fired Wednesday, three weeks after Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George got the same treatment. The dispute reportedly pit Phelan—a political appointee—against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over management style, personnel, and the pace of shipbuilding.

The Washington Post reported that in a classified briefing to the House Armed Services Committee, Pentagon officials said completely clearing the Strait of Hormuz of Iranian-laid mines could take six months.

This is what makes the war so tricky. Wednesday morning the president boasted about destroying the Iranian navy. True enough—92% of the fleet, 140 to 158 vessels. But military analysts and the Pentagon distinguish between the “conventional navy”—which is indeed “gone”—and Iran’s “asymmetric” capacity, which remains potent.

Iran deploys hundreds of small, civilian-style boats and midget submarines difficult to track. These launch from hidden coastal facilities and seed small numbers of mines even during a ceasefire or active blockade. Iran has GPS-enabled “floating” mines that can be released remotely, making their location unpredictable once they hit the current. Iran’s sea mine inventory numbers in the hundreds—enough to seed the Strait faster than the U.S. can clear it.

Specialized mine-countermeasure vessels are slow-moving and vulnerable. The U.S. uses unmanned underwater vehicles like Knifefish to minimize risk to personnel, but these drones still require support ships that are targets for Iranian missiles, drones, and fast-attack craft. The Navy must first establish a “sanitized” zone to protect clearing operations—difficult when Iran can fire land-based anti-ship missiles from coastal batteries and hidden tunnel networks.

And clearing has to be near-total to matter. Shipping firms suspended operations in late February after 21 confirmed attacks on merchant vessels. The uncertainty has driven insurance premiums to prohibitive levels.

Ukraine gets Cash

The war in Ukraine continues — another conflict the president said he would solve in short order. Since he hasn’t, the Ukrainians took what help they could get: the European Union will finally disburse a €90 billion loan after Hungary lifted its veto, ending months of deadlock over funding that Ukraine needs within weeks to keep both its military and its government running. The breakthrough came with a trade — Ukraine repaired the Druzhba pipeline and resumed Russian oil flows to Hungary and Slovakia, and in return, both countries dropped their blocks on the loan and a fresh package of Russian sanctions.

Can we pause here for a minute? Has any artist other than Jimi Hendrix done more with Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” than Dave Matthews? Did I say that out loud? Sorry, that’s on my headphones.

No, the reason I wanted to pause is that what we have here is Ukraine repairing a pipeline so their enemy can sell oil — profits that fund the very missiles being fired at Ukrainian cities. They did it anyway, because they needed the money more than they needed the principle. That’s the paradoxical math of relations among nations.

On the battlefield, the money arrives at an unexpectedly strong moment. Ukraine’s foreign minister said the country’s frontline position is the strongest it has been in a year, driven largely by drone superiority and improved air defense. An analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War confirmed that Russian troops made almost no territorial gains across the frontline in March — the first time that has happened in two and a half years.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Virginia Redistricting & 2026 Midterms

Reform minded states and voters have put independent redistricting commissions in place to keep the party in power from drawing maps that keep it in power. In 2020, 65 percent of Virginia voters approved exactly that — a bipartisan commission to draw the state’s congressional lines. This week, Virginia Democrats threw it out.On Tuesday, voters narrowly approved a referendum — 51.5 to 48.6 percent — to temporarily return redistricting to the Democratic-controlled legislature, which has already drawn a map favoring Democrats in 10 of the state’s 11 House districts. Virginia currently splits 6-5.

The new lines could flip four seats. Democrats aren’t pretending this is principled. They’re calling it necessary. The redistricting arms race started last summer, when President Trump pressured Texas to redraw its congressional map mid-decade — something states almost never do between censuses. Texas obliged, targeting five Democratic seats. Missouri and North Carolina followed. The Supreme Court allowed the Texas map to proceed 6-3, despite a lower court finding it was a racial gerrymander.

California responded with its own Democratic-friendly redraw. Virginia followed. Trump’s original calculation was straightforward: gerrymander enough red states to insulate the Republican House majority heading into the midterms. Instead, he triggered a chain reaction. Democrats now argue they can’t unilaterally respect nonpartisan commissions while Republicans dismantle the maps in every state they control. All of this activity nets out to mean that Democrats have actually picked up a seat.

The legal fight isn’t over. A Tazewell County judge — the same Republican appointee who tried to block the referendum twice before, and was overruled by the Virginia Supreme Court both times — declared the vote void the day after it passed. The attorney general is appealing. The state Supreme Court will likely have the final word before August primaries.

More districts drawn to be safe for one party means more representatives who answer only to their base, more primaries decided by the most partisan voters, and less incentive for anyone in office to negotiate with the other side. The commissions were supposed to prevent exactly this.

Ten Commandments in Texas classrooms

Texas can require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools, a U.S. appeals court ruled. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, called the ruling “a major victory for Texas and our moral values.” “The Ten Commandments have had a profound impact on our nation, and it’s important that students learn from them every single day.” Paxton’s wife of 38 years filed for divorce last year “on Biblical grounds” and in the filing claimed that he had committed adultery, proof of the ongoing need of moral reminders. Similar laws in Arkansas and Louisiana are also before the courts.

U.S. Rep. David Scott dies

U.S. Rep. David Scott, a Georgia Democrat and the first Black chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, died on Wednesday. He was 80. His office described the death as “unexpected,” – indeed he had voted Tuesday on the House floor– and while no specific cause was immediately released, he had recently dealt with declining health. Scott, who was seeking his 13th term in Congress despite challenges from within his party, was once a leading voice for Democrats on issues related to farm aid policy and food aid for consumers and a prominent Black member of the party’s moderate Blue Dog caucus.

CDC won’t publish report

The Washington Post reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had blocked the publication of a scientific study showing that COVID-19 vaccines significantly reduced hospitalizations and emergency room visits this past winter by approximately 50% to 55%. In public health terms, cutting the risk of hospitalization in half is at the high end of what is usually hoped for from a seasonal flu shot.

Acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya—who also leads the NIH—halted the publication citing “methodological concerns.” The Post cited sources familiar with the matter who noted the study used the same process—the “test-negative design” and VISION network data—the CDC recently used to publish flu vaccine effectiveness data.

The decision has sparked internal concern that scientific data is being suppressed to align with the views of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent critic of the COVID-19 shots whose critiques have been received with withering criticism from experts across all scientific fields, who point out that his positions contradict the consensus of nearly every major global health body.

UK smoking ban

The UK Parliament passed the Tobacco and Vapes Bill on Tuesday — legislation that ensures anyone born on or after January 1, 2009, can never legally buy tobacco in their lifetime. Not at 18, not at 30, not ever. Starting in 2027, the legal purchasing age rises by one year, every year. The door closes behind today’s 17-year-olds and stays closed.

The scope goes well beyond cigarettes. The bill bans snus, the oral tobacco popular in Scandinavia, and extends to smoking accessories — including cigarette papers, meaning the 2009-and-after generation can’t buy the materials to roll their own. On vaping, the government still treats e-cigarettes as a quitting tool for adults but moved to strip away everything that makes them appealing to children: new powers to restrict candy-like flavors, packaging, and store displays, plus a ban on vaping in cars when children are present. Smoke-free and vape-free zones now extend to playgrounds and the areas outside schools and hospitals.

A clerk who fails to check ID faces a £200 on-the-spot fine. Shops that repeatedly violate the law can be banned from selling tobacco or nicotine products for a year. The bill cleared its final legislative stage between the Commons and the Lords on Tuesday and awaits Royal Assent from King Charles, expected next week.

While we’re in Britain: the Times published a quiz this week asking whether you can tell real British regional insults from fake ones. “Bampot” (Scottish: lunatic), “wazzock” (Northern English: idiot), “numpty” (Scottish: fool), and “mardy” (Midlands: soft, cowardly) are all apparently real words that real people say to other real people. The quiz is in the show notes, you jammy dodger.

Carter Page settlement.

The Trump Justice Department agreed Wednesday to pay $1.25 million to Carter Page, the 2016 campaign adviser the FBI wiretapped during the Russia investigation — settling a lawsuit the government had already won in lower courts. Two things are true about Carter Page, and the settlement works hard to obscure one of them. The FBI did botch its surveillance applications — an inspector general found serious errors and omissions across four rounds of court orders. Page had a legitimate grievance. But settling a case you’ve already won is almost unheard of in the history of the Justice Department. The government fights these cases precisely to avoid setting precedents that invite more lawsuits against taxpayers.

Walking away from a victory means something else is driving the decision. And this follows a pattern. Last month, $1.25 million to Michael Flynn, who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI before being pardoned. Last year, nearly $5 million to the estate of Ashli Babbitt, shot while breaching the Capitol on January 6th. In each case, the DOJ bypassed normal procedures to carve out settlements for people aligned with President Trump. The administration calls it combating the “weaponization of government.” But taken together — an unprecedented legal surrender, combined with payouts that track loyalty rather than legal merit — it starts to look less like fairness and more like an effort to discredit the entire Russia investigation. An investigation corroborated by the U.S. intelligence community, the Mueller probe’s 34 indictments, and even the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee.

Spirit Airlines Bailout

We’ve talked about airlines absorbing the fuel costs of the war with Iran. For Spirit Airlines, the war didn’t just hurt — it made the airline’s existing bankruptcy exit plan mathematically impossible. Unlike the major carriers, Spirit does no fuel hedging — no pre-buying at lower rates — and its entire business model depends on filling cheap seats in volume. When fuel prices spike, the big airlines absorb the hit. Spirit drowns in it.

Now the Trump administration is negotiating a $500 million rescue package that could leave the federal government owning 90 percent of the airline. Remember last August, the government converted Biden-era grants into a 10 percent ownership stake in Intel, arguing that without it, the U.S. would depend on chip factories in Taiwan for everything from fighter jets to iPhones. In January, a similar stake in USA Rare Earth. The logic: don’t just give grants to firms, take equity because taxpayers share in the upside, and the government keeps strategic assets from failing or falling into foreign hands. For an administration that campaigned on getting government out of the way of business, it’s a striking turn — the federal government deciding which companies live and which ones don’t.

Why is a discount airline strategically critical? The administration argues if Spirit dies, the Big Three lose their primary low-cost competitor, and ticket prices for working-class travelers spike during an already inflationary war. The president also cited the loss of 14,000 jobs. A wrinkle: Spirit flies nothing but Airbus — 76 European-made planes. If this deal closes, the “Buy American” administration becomes the majority owner of an airline that doesn’t fly a single American-made aircraft, while simultaneously locked in trade tensions with the EU. Bottom line: will the U.S. gain leverage or become owner of an airline nobody else wanted.

988 Hotline Success

In July 2022 the 988 mental health crisis hotline launched, and over the next two and a half years there were 11 percent fewer suicide deaths among 15- to 23-year-olds than researchers had expected — nearly 4,400 lives. This, according to a study published Wednesday in JAMA. As a gut check, researchers looked at England, which had no comparable hotline launch during the same period — and saw no similar decline in youth suicides.

The reduction tracked directly with usage: the ten states with the largest increases in call volume saw an 18 percent drop in suicide deaths; the ten states with the smallest increases saw only 11 percent. The more a community used the service, the more lives were saved. The 988 program represents roughly $1.5 billion in federal investment, one of the largest in suicide prevention history. But that 11 percent drop was achieved with specialized sub-networks in place — including partnerships like the Trevor Project’s dedicated line for LGBTQ+ youth, a population at significantly elevated risk.The administration’s July 2025 termination of the dedicated LGBTQ+ sub-network has sparked warnings from researchers that the 2026 data could show a rebound in suicide rates among queer and trans youth, who previously utilized the ‘Press 3’ prompt for counselors specifically trained in their unique stressors.

Thursday, April 23

Iran War

Thursday it was the battle of the blockades.

The U.S. military intercepted two Iranian oil supertankers that had attempted to slip through the dragnet but were unable to because, well, they are supertankers, one definition of which is the largest self-propelled vehicles ever built. Very hard to be stealthy.

While the U.S. successfully interdicted the outward flow of Iranian crude, Tehran struck back. In a direct retaliation, Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) commandos seized two Western-linked vessels.

Senate Adopts G.O.P. Budget

The Senate passed a Republican budget blueprint early Thursday morning to end the longest Department of Homeland Security shutdown in American history. DHS has been partially paralyzed since mid-February, when federal agents fatally shot a 37-year-old man, Alex Pretti, during an immigration operation in Minneapolis. Democrats used the 60-vote filibuster threshold to block all DHS funding, demanding use-of-force reforms the administration refused to consider.

Republicans turned to budget reconciliation — a mechanism that lets them bypass the filibuster and pass the funding bill with a simple majority. The goal: unlock up to $70 billion for ICE and Border Patrol, putting the administration’s immigration agenda on autopilot for the next three and a half years.

Democrats couldn’t stop the bill, but they used the mandatory vote-a-rama — a marathon of rapid-fire amendments — to force Republicans on the record rejecting restoration of SNAP benefits, school meal funding, and energy-cost relief.

The larger story is what reconciliation costs. Congress generally gets only one reconciliation bill per budget cycle. By spending the 2026 slot to reopen a shuttered department and fund ICE, Republicans forfeit their best tool for passing tax cuts or deregulation later this year. That tradeoff likely drove the only two Republican defections: Rand Paul, who called it a fiscal gimmick that adds billions to the deficit, and Lisa Murkowski, who objected to abandoning the Senate’s tradition of bipartisan cooperation.

Epstein DOJ

The Justice Department’s internal watchdog opened a review Thursday into whether the department defied the law Congress wrote specifically to prevent it from doing what it did. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed by the president late last year, stripped the DOJ of its usual discretion — no withholding records for “political sensitivity,” “reputational harm,” or the “embarrassment” of public figures. Release everything within 30 days. The only exception: protecting victim identities.

The DOJ blew past the December deadline, producing a fraction of the documents and citing “logistical hurdles” that drew bipartisan contempt. When the department finally dumped millions of pages in late January, it managed a special kind of achievement. It failed in both directions: tens of thousands of pages still missing, while the rushed redaction process left the names and personal details of several victims exposed. The Inspector General now wants to know whether the department used privacy as a shield to hide records while simultaneously failing to protect the people the law existed to shield.

Marijuana Classification

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order moving state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I, the same classification as heroin, to Schedule III, alongside ketamine and Tylenol with codeine. The most significant shift in federal drug policy since 1970 legitimizes the medical programs of 40 states in one stroke while leaving recreational marijuana exactly where it was: federally illegal.

Medical dispensaries can now deduct rent, payroll, and operating costs on their taxes for the first time — a provision the old Schedule I classification blocked, costing the industry billions.

Researchers who spent years trapped in a bureaucratic paradox — needing federal approval to study a drug the federal government insisted had no medical value — can now access state-licensed cannabis for clinical trials without risking prosecution.

The legal result is stranger than the policy. The same plant, grown in the same facility, can now be a Schedule III medication when sold to a patient with a medical card and a Schedule I narcotic when sold to an adult for recreational use next door. The administration calls this common sense. The DEA will hold hearings in June on whether to reschedule marijuana more broadly.

Soldier arrested for Polymarket bets

He was the soldier who turned Operation Absolute Resolve into Operation No You Didn’t. A U.S. Army Special Forces master sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke was arrested for allegedly using classified information to make extremely profitable bets on the Polymarket prediction market related to the American military mission that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, the Department of Justice said Thursday.Van Dyke, 38, wagered a total of about $33,000 in 13 or so bets in the week leading up to that operation, with the knowledge that the United States was secretly planning military action against Maduro. The bets won Van Dyke nearly $410,000, the indictment alleges.

Meta layoffs and Microsoft buyouts

Last week we told you that Meta was creating an AI replica of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg so that employees could interact with the AI boss to get a better sense of what he was thinking. 8,000 of those employees – or 10 percent of its workforce– will be denied that delicious conversation. They are being let go, the company said Thursday so Meta can ramp up spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure and highly paid AI-expert hires. Also Thursday, Microsoft said it was offering voluntary buyouts to thousands of its U.S. employees. The software giant plans to make the offers in early May to about 8,750 people, or 7% of its U.S. workforce.

College Tours

A study published this week by researchers at Amherst College found that the weather on the day of your campus visit meaningfully affects whether you apply. Applications dropped 10 percent when the tour was hot, 8 percent when it rained, and 5 percent when it was simply cloudy — compared to mild, sunny days. Male visitors, the study found, were more sensitive to weather conditions than female visitors. The study was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is a serious institution that has now confirmed that a passing cloud may have determined where you spent four years of your life.

Friday, April 24

Iran War

At the end of the week, the United States was negotiating with Iran over the same points that have been at issue since 2015, when the Obama administration and five other world powers struck the JCPOA — the agreement designed to ensure Iran’s nuclear program stays peaceful. Same technical questions: how much enrichment Iran keeps, who inspects it, whether the stockpile goes to a third country. Same political question: what does Iran get in return.

Trump spent years mocking Obama for what he paid to get that deal. Now he’s spent considerably more. The New York Times reported this week that the war burned through roughly $28 to $35 billion — just under a billion dollars a day for 38 days. In the first two days alone, the military used $5.6 billion in munitions.

The U.S. fired more than 1,100 JASSM-ER cruise missiles — long-range stealth weapons designed not for Iran but for a war with China. Roughly 1,500 remain in inventory. More than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles, at $4 million each. The U.S. produces about 600 Patriots a year. Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said reconstituting what was expended “could take years.” Admiral Paparo, head of Indo-Pacific Command, told the New York Times: “There are finite limits to the magazine.”

Trump has been adamant in private that his deal must be better than Obama’s. But “better” isn’t just a measure of the document. The calculation requires subtracting what the JCPOA would have delivered, then weighing that delta against the full cost of getting here: the dead, the debt, the depleted Pacific posture, and whatever chilling effect this war has on America’s willingness to intervene the next time.

Dominic Tierney, writing in Foreign Affairs, offers the frame: the American way of war doesn’t reward tactical dominance. Americans believe winning requires decisive success — which means the definition of winning isn’t only Iran’s to give or the administration’s to give. Trump has to sell it to an electorate that already doesn’t believe him.

Support for continuing the war sits at 31 percent. Seventy-eight percent of Americans say the U.S. has not met its goals; 21 percent say it has. The president’s handling of the conflict draws 32 to 34 percent approval, with disapproval as high as 61 percent in Pew and YouGov tracking. Pew found that by nearly two to one, Americans say the war is not going well. Forty percent believe it will leave the country less safe. Sixty-six percent say the U.S. should find a way out, even without achieving its stated objectives.

Two thirds of the country have already decided that getting out matters more than winning.

For all of president Trump’s marketing genius.(that is how he became president, after all) he is slouching under the weight of two wars– a trade war and the war in Iran. Though he is trying to convince the public that the economy is doing great and that America has won in Iran, he is not succeeding.

Criminal inquiry into Jerome Powell closed

The Justice Department closed its criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Friday — clearing the way for Kevin Warsh’s confirmation as Powell’s successor. The probe centered on cost overruns in the Fed’s headquarters renovation: a project that grew from $1.9 billion to roughly $2.5 billion, which the Fed attributed to a sinkhole, asbestos, and inflation. Powell had called the investigation an attempt to pressure the Fed into cutting rates — currently at 3.6% — toward the 1% the president wanted. In March, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg quashed the DOJ’s subpoenas, finding “essentially zero evidence” Powell had committed a crime. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro closed the file Friday, handing the renovation questions to the Fed’s Inspector General, with the option to reopen if the IG finds fraud rather than mismanagement. Republican Senator Thom Tillis had vowed to block any Fed nominee while the probe remained open. With it closed, Tillis signaled he’d support moving Warsh to a full Senate vote.

Judge’s Ruling on Asylum.

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that Trump’s declaration of an “invasion” at the southern border was illegal — effectively reopening the U.S. to migrants seeking asylum for the first time since the first day of his second term.

The administration will almost certainly appeal. Asylum processing hasn’t resumed, and the court didn’t set a timeline. But the ruling lands as a rebuke: Congress, the court found, never gave the president the power to waive asylum law by proclamation. The ruling doesn’t mean open borders — it means the U.S. rejoins nearly every other country in the world in giving people fleeing persecution a hearing.

The question of who this country keeps its promises to surfaced elsewhere this week. The Trump administration is weighing whether to send roughly 1,100 Afghans — translators, guides, people who worked alongside American troops against the Taliban — to the Democratic Republic of Congo rather than honor the visa program Congress authorized for them. The alternative the administration is also floating: return them to live under the Taliban. Lawmakers in both parties objected. “We made promises to those fighting by our side to bring them to the U.S.,” said Republican Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska. “We should keep our promises.”

And if you’re charting the tussle between the branches this week, you have the independent Fed on slightly firmer footing, the tariff money being repaid for executive overreach, and now this asylum ruling. Three rulings, one direction. Almost like the founders planned it that way.

World Cup final tickets listed for more than $2.2million

In economics, a Veblen good is one where demand increases alongside the price because the cost itself functions as a status symbol. This explains the psychological theater behind the news that a single 2026 World Cup ticket has been listed for $2.3 million. While no one is likely to actually pay that “moonshot” price, its mere existence serves a strategic purpose. By abandoning the resale price caps used in previous tournaments, FIFA has created a wild-west secondary market where they collect a 15% fee from both the buyer and the seller. This 30% combined “tax” gives the governing body a direct incentive to let wacky pricing stand.

From a psychological standpoint, however, this outlier functions as an anchor. It recalibrates the fan’s sense of value: once you’ve processed the idea of a $2 million seat, the actual $11,000 price tag for Category 1 seats—itself an astronomical sum—suddenly feels like a bargain.

I will offer some of my own thoughts later, but I agree with Oliver Darcy and all other panelists that we’re only going to get the journalism we want if we pay for it. So I am very grateful to all of you out there who have subscribed to my work here which, as regular readers are painfully aware, includes some finger exercises, sketches and experiments about news delivery. Like Stack the Week, which just posted.

This weekend in Washington a series of parties will take place in connection with the White House Correspondents Association dinner. We have donated to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Anne arrives tomorrow so I have 18 hours to cook dinner and clean up which is about what it will take.

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Iran on pause. Schrodinger’s Strait was both opened and closed. Kash Out Crash Out at the FBI and cash out from the Treasury Department. Virginia voters turned 3-d chess into checkers. A soldier bet on the wrong war. And in the UK Smoke ‘em while you got ‘em.

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So let’s take it day by day.

Monday April 20

Iran War

In Islamabad, Pakistan, the high-security Red Zone surrounding the Serena Hotel was sealed off by traffic police. Billboards went up. Security checkpoints multiplied. All in anticipation of a face-to-face meeting between Vice President Vance and Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf — a meeting that, by Monday night, had become a ghost summit. The Iranians refused to show, citing the ongoing U.S. naval blockade as a violation of the ceasefire.

The president called Iran’s leaders “indecisive.” Regional experts saw something different: an Iranian government waiting for a unified signal from Washington that never came.

Friday had looked different. The president told CBS News that Iran had “agreed to everything,” describing a joint operation to remove enriched uranium: “Our people, together with the Iranians, are going to work together to go get it. And then we’ll take it to the United States.” Within hours, Tehran disputed the president’s claims and said there was no such deal.

By Sunday, familiar terrain. The president posted that his representatives would arrive in Islamabad the following evening, warning that if Iran rejected what he called a “very fair and reasonable DEAL,” the United States would “knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran.” “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!” he wrote.

While gas prices climbed, it felt like the gas went completely out of the president’s war effort.

An administration official told Axios that the president is “over it” and willing to give Iran a window of only “three to five days” to “get their shit together.” He doesn’t want to fight anymore, the official said, but will if he feels he has to.

Two questions keep surfacing. Did the president’s negotiating tactics — the public threats and the premature claims of a total surrender — poison whatever progress existed? And is this a repetition of what preceded the initial strike: a fundamental misreading of where the Iranians actually stood? One of the rotating justifications for the war was that Iran refused to negotiate in good faith. There were suggestions at the time that the U.S. had simply misread the internal fractures of the Iranian leadership. Career diplomats exist precisely to anticipate these gaps — to know the difference between posturing and a genuine impasse before the shooting starts.

This also returns us to the unanswered questions at the center of the entire war: Was Iran truly close to a weapon, and was military action the only remedy? Only one person claims to know the answers, and he is an unreliable narrator — perhaps even to himself.

Monday proved that in the Trumpian theater of war, the Negotiator and the Commander-in-Chief are often on stage at the same time, speaking over one another.

Gas Prices

President Trump told The Hill on Monday his Energy Secretary Chris Wright got it wrong when he said gas prices might not fall below $3 a gallon until next year. “No, I think he’s wrong on that. Totally wrong,” Trump said, adding that prices would drop “as soon as this ends”—meaning the Iran war. The president offered no mechanism, no timeline, just confidence overriding his own appointee’s assessment.

But Wright has the better of the argument. Reopening the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t flip a switch. It starts a clock. Tankers need weeks to reach refineries, refineries that cut capacity or shifted schedules during the disruption need time to ramp back up, and the fuel still has to move through the distribution chain to local stations. “Gas prices go up like a rocket and come down like a feather,” as independent oil analyst Tom Kloza put it to CNN.

Why? Gas station owners bought their current inventory at peak prices and won’t eat the loss until they’re confident the drop will stick. Consumers, meanwhile, stop comparison-shopping once prices dip even slightly, which removes the competitive pressure that might force stations to cut faster. And none of this accounts for OPEC+, which controls supply independent of any shipping lane. If the cartel holds production cuts to defend an $80 or $90 floor, American drivers pay that price regardless of what happens in the Strait. Peak summer driving season arrives on top of all of it, pushing demand higher just as supply tries to normalize.

SCOTUS on Catholic Preschools

The Supreme Court decided to wrestle this: A gay parent wants to send their four-year-old to a neighborhood preschool—with money the state set aside for exactly that purpose. The school says no, because the people who run it believe, at the core of who they are, that enrolling that child would be wrong.

The Supreme Court justices agreed on Monday to decide whether Catholic preschools in Colorado that decline to enroll 4-year-olds with gay or transgender parents can participate in a publicly funded state program. A Colorado program pays for families to send their children to the preschool of their choice, public or private, including faith-based programs.Two Catholic parish preschools in the Denver area said admitting such children would require them to violate their religious convictions. The state said the schools can’t block the kids. The church sued. The church lost—twice. Now the Supreme Court will decide.

At bottom, this is a fight about two things the government does when it makes that call: it decides who belongs, and it decides whose conscience counts. For a gay parent, a state that allows that exclusion when distributing tax dollars is a state that has decided who belongs. For a believer, a state that overrides their conviction is a state that has decided whose conscience counts.

FBI Director Kash Patel sues The Atlantic

Kash out. The FBI director announced Monday that he was suing The Atlantic for a story over the weekend that asserted that Patel drank to such excess that it was affecting his ability to do his job and that as a result, his job might be in danger. The magazine also reported that he is sometimes so out of pocket (that’s not a euphemism) that key decisions cannot be made and, in the article’s most colorful passage: “On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated.” A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors.” If the FBI director were to carry this suit to its conclusion, The Atlantic would be able to depose Patel and administration officials under the penalty of perjury.

Detroit Ballots

The Justice Department demanded that Wayne County, Michigan — home to Detroit — turn over more than 860,000 ballots, envelopes, and receipts from the 2024 election. DOJ cited three fraud convictions and five lawsuits as evidence of the county’s “history” of election problems. But the three convictions were from 2020, involved individuals caught forging signatures, and were prosecuted by the state — in other words, cases where the system worked exactly as designed. The five lawsuits were almost entirely dismissed by Michigan judges for lack of evidence. The Republican-led state Senate also investigated and found no widespread fraud. None of it had anything to do with 2024.

This fits a pattern. In January, the FBI raided the Fulton County, Georgia, elections office and seized hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots. Last May, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s team seized voting machines in Puerto Rico, finding no evidence of the Venezuelan interference they were looking for. The Justice Department has sued 24 states for refusing to turn over unredacted voter rolls. In each case, the administration cites election integrity; in each case, the predicate is thin or nonexistent.

One detail worth noting: Trump won Michigan in 2024. He lost Wayne County by nearly 250,000 votes. The DOJ is investigating an election its own boss won, in a county where he didn’t.

Whether any of these inquiries turn up actual fraud is almost beside the point. As Trump’s own attorney general William Barr testified in 2022, he told the White House at the time that its election fraud theories were “crazy stuff” doing “grave, grave disservice to the country.” Trump and his allies lost dozens of lawsuits challenging 2020 results. But Trump has repeatedly, across decades, raised the specter of election fraud where none exists — not necessarily to prove it, but to create enough confusion that the claim itself becomes the point.

Tariff Refunds. (New York Times)

Even though president Trump said tariffs were paid by other countries, it was always Americans who paid the import taxes. That’s why this Monday, exactly two months after the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s most sweeping tariffs, American importers started applying for reimbursement. They are owed $166 billion in refunds plus interest. It is estimated that 30,000 to 35,000 firms will apply. Everything from precision manufacturers to pharmaceutical importers will be eligible to upload proof of the levies they paid. It’s a deluge. Some companies have up to 5,000 individual entry lines to reconcile.Refunds will be issued 60 to 90 days after approval. The court ruled that the president had usurped Congress’ power to tax through his tariff program. Economists note that while the money is coming back, it doesn’t account for the “lost opportunity cost.” That is all the things that couldn’t be done while trying to avoid the import taxes– Companies reported moving senior logistics managers off of product development and into “tariff mitigation” full-time for over 18 months– and now another opportunity cost: all the stuff that isn’t being done in order to keep up with this paperwork nightmare that was easily avoidable. Many small businesses, unable to float the 25% tax, went under; they will not be able to request refunds.

In an interview, the president said he will “remember” companies that don’t claim their money.

While the president’s signature economic policy is being dismantled in keeping with the Supreme Court ruling, his standing on the economy continues to drop. An Associated Press poll puts approval on the economy at 30 percent in April, down from 38 percent in March. Only about a quarter of adults approve of his handling of the cost of living — a Marquette Law School survey puts that number at 24 percent. The New York Times has him at his highest disapproval rating ever: 58 percent.

Gaza needs $71 billion to rebuild

“Domicide” is the systematic destruction of the ability to call a palace home. That is what a new study by the European Union, United Nations and World Bank shows has happened in Gaza. It says the Israeli destruction in retaliation for the Hamas attack on October 7 has knocked the civilization back eight decades. Over 371,000 housing units are damaged or destroyed. That is roughly 92% of all pre-war residential structures. A daily average of four people are still killed and 24 wounded every day during this “ceasefire” period due to unexploded ordnance and lingering skirmishes.

Six months into the ceasefire, the “reconstruction” hasn’t actually begun for most. Nearly the entire population is squeezed into a sliver of land along the coast, while the rest of the territory is occupied or under displacement orders.

over 50% of hospitals non-functional. Because Israel still restricts fuel, half of all families are now burning hazardous waste and plastic to cook their food, leading to a surge in respiratory illnesses among children. There is an estimated 40 million tonnes of debris to clear. To put that in perspective, if you lined up the trucks needed to move it, the line would stretch from Gaza to New York and back.Over 80% of croplands are destroyed. The soil is now “decimated” by munitions and noxious gases, meaning Gazans cannot even grow their own vegetables to offset the aid shortages. The World Health Organization’s emergency minimum water ration is 15 liters per person per day. Gazans are currently averaging 8.4 liters—less than a single 10-minute shower for an entire day of drinking, cooking, and washing.

Drought in the US

In context that is so different I can’t make obvious transition, there are water shortages in the U.S. too. More than 61% of the nation is now in a drought, the highest percentage in nearly four years, according to the most recent U.S. Drought Monitor. In all, 45 of 50 states are enduring drought, with only Alaska, North Dakota, Michigan, Connecticut and Rhode Island completely drought-free.In Texas and the Southern Plains, soil moisture levels are at historic lows, which typically leads to higher crop insurance claims and potential spikes in food pricing for corn and wheat. In Virginia and the Carolinas, summer droughts significantly increase the risk of “dry lightning” and forest fires in the Appalachian region. Power plants (thermal and nuclear) require massive amounts of water for cooling. Low water levels in reservoirs can lead to reduced power output or temporary shutdowns during peak summer heat.

North Korean Missile Launch: Father and Daughter Affair.

What are intergenerational dictators wearing to missile launches this season? Black leather jackets. Not exactly a departure from menace wear, but that’s what North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his teenage daughter were both wearing as they watched a missile test launch from a coastal observation point as a projectile soared over the water, trailing gray smoke. No fuchsia for the next generation, but it was far more stylish than the four elderly military officers standing behind them in regulation brown, peering up into the sky, all of them holding small booklets and writing instruments like they were all recording their golf scores. South Korea’s spy service recently assessed that the daughter, reportedly named Kim Ju Ae, could be considered Kim’s heir. North Korea has tested cluster bomb warheads before. But observers say the Iran war may have prompted North Korea to display that it has cluster munitions and accelerate efforts to develop better ones.

Labor Secretary Steps Down

Monday, the Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer stepped down amid an accordion file of accusations such as sending staff to pick up liquor and attempting to use business trips as excuses for personal travel including for example, a UFC fight in Chicago, a Morgan Wallen concert and to see friends and family in various states. She reportedly asked staff to design work trips that would provide her openings to attend those events. For months, the Labor Department’s Inspector General’s Office has been investigating these claims as well as a complaint that Chavez-DeRemer was having a sexual relationship with a member of her security team. She now joins former Homeland Security Secretary Christie Noem who was accused of similar business and former Attorney General Pam Bondi, as the highest profile ejections from the Trump administration.

Tim Cook to Step Down

Apple — the world’s most valuable company, one of the Magnificent Seven that drive the S&P 500, a $4 trillion enterprise whose devices sit in the hands of 2.5 billion people — will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2026, and this week announced its most significant leadership transition in a generation. CEO Tim Cook will step down September 1, moving to Executive Chairman. Cook transformed Apple from a premium computer maker into a global utility — revenues nearly quadrupled to $400 billion under his watch. But his final years were shadowed by a perceived AI gap, with Apple trailing Microsoft and Google.

His successor: John Ternus, the 50-year-old hardware chief who has been with Apple since 2001 and led the transition to Apple Silicon, the move that unified the company’s chips and software architecture. Where Cook was the operations and supply chain master, Ternus is a product engineer — an amateur rally car racer known for taking teams to off-road tracks to practice precision under pressure. The choice signals Apple believes its AI problem is ultimately a hardware problem.

While Apple figures out its AI strategy, a Chinese smartphone company just built a robot that outruns every human who has ever lived. One year ago it finished a half marathon in two hours and forty minutes. This year: fifty minutes. So, if Apple licks its AI problem, the next Apple CEO might be a robot.

Tuesday April 21

Iran War

“Vacate your engine room. We are prepared to subject you to disabling fire.” This message sent Sunday by the USS Spruance preceded the disabling the Touska, an Iranian-flagged container ship, which like a child at college, had been ignoring messages. For six hours warnings were sent until finallyprecision rounds were fired directly into the ship’s propulsion compartment. This surgical strike allowed the Marines from the 31st MEU to board via helicopter and secure the vessel.

Why am I putting it on a Tuesday? First of all, it’s just an amazing story. And second of all, the seizure underscored the extreme tension in the Strait of Hormuz, where commercial traffic has effectively vanished; only three tankers transited the waterway that entire day, all of which carried non-Iranian cargo and were only permitted passage after pre-coordinating with regional authorities to avoid similar engine room events.

On the diplomatic front, the engine also seemed to be disabled. This somewhat bouncy transition brought to you by the bouncy cab in which it was written.

Tuesday, President Trump told CNBC that he expected a “great deal” with Iran but signaled he will not extend the ceasefire and was ready to resume bombing. By the end of the day he had announced an indefinite ceasefire.

In what is becoming common practice, $500 billion in oil trades were placed just before Trump made the ceasefire announcement.

In the CNBC interview the president said, “We’ve taken out their leaders…but these leaders are much more rational.”

This is an ongoing matter. Are the leaders of Iran really more rational? What evidence is there of that? These are the leaders whose civilization Trump was promising to destroy. Why would he have wanted to destroy the reasonable leaders? Why would he wing out civilization destroying threats if they were responding to reason. But let’s accept the president’s assertion that he changed the regime. What is the point of regime change if the regime that is in power is still very hostile to the United States or more hostile?

What is fair to say is that the U.S. strikes effectively ended the “Theocratic” era of Iran, replacing it with a Militaristic Autocracy led by the IRGC. The “regime change” Trump refers to is the transition from a government of clerics to a government of survivalist generals. Whether they are “rational” or simply “desperate” remains the central question of the current ceasefire negotiations.

Finally, because the Iran war has not gone as easily as the president expected, he’s taken to declaring that he would have had an easier time with other wars. Vietnam, for example, the war he did not decide to fight when he had the chance. “I would have won Vietnam very quickly. I would have, if I were president, I would have won Iraq in the same amount of time that we won, because essentially, we won here.

Just a week after Artemis II took humans farther from earth than any had ever been, this assertion traveled an even greater distance from life on earth as we know it.

Drone Boost

The Pentagon’s largest-ever budget request earmarks $75 billion for drones and the technology to counter them. The centerpiece: the Defense Autonomous Working Group, a little-known office working with U.S. commandos, would jump from $226 million this year to $54.6 billion — likely the largest single year-over-year boost of any defense program in history, and certain to draw scrutiny inside an already eye-catching $1.5 trillion request that’s 42 percent larger than this year’s budget.

The numbers amount to a verdict on how effective cheap drones have been in this conflict — and in Ukraine before it. The math is brutal: the U.S. routinely uses million-dollar Patriot and THAAD missiles to intercept drones that cost a few thousand dollars. Roughly $21 billion of the request targets that imbalance directly, funding directed-energy weapons — lasers and high-power microwaves — designed to kill drone swarms at a cost of a few dollars per shot rather than a few million.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Airline Iran War Fallout Spreads

Global jet fuel prices are up more than 70 percent, and the Iran-war-based pain is spreading across the airline industry. American Airlines lowered its earnings target, warning it may post a loss in 2026 after $4 billion in additional fuel costs. United Airlines says fares may rise 20 percent. In Europe, where airlines are the largest consumers of fuel shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, low-cost carrier Ryanair said last week it could only guarantee jet fuel supply through May.

Passengers are adapting in their own way. Travel experts report that frequent flyers are hedging against cancellations and route disruptions by using miles to make overlapping bookings across multiple routes for the same trip. Because award tickets carry minimal or no cancellation fees compared with cash bookings, travelers can drop the extra reservations at the last minute.

Those who stay home are staying home — and drinking there.

Nearly a third of Americans who still drink say they now pregame before going out because drinks cost too much. The practice, once associated with college, is showing up on spreadsheets. Suntory, which makes Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark, reports higher demand for its small-format bottles. Among drinkers who say prices influence whether they go out at all, 41 percent have switched to water or non-alcoholic options. Thirty-seven percent are pregaming.

Condom prices

Also potentially grounded as a result of the war: Malaysian company Karex told Reuters Tuesday that the company may be forced to raise condom prices at least 20 to 30 percent. Condom production requires materials that also arrive by ship through the waterway that has become the center of this conflict. The company, which produces Durex and Trojan makes 5 billion condoms annually and exports to more than 130 countries. The company’s CEO Goh told Reuters that along with higher costs for manufacturing and packaging, there are delays in shipping. “We’re seeing a lot more condoms actually sitting on vessels that have not ⁠arrived ​at their destination but are highly required.”

Pentagon Flu Vaccine

The Pentagon is no longer requiring those who serve to get the annual flu vaccine. For decades, the consensus was that a flu outbreak in a barracks or on a carrier could take a unit “off the board” just as effectively as an enemy strike. The new priority argues that the intangible cost to morale and the political cost of coercion are now higher than the biological cost of the virus. It frames the mandate not as a shield against disease, but as a “compliance test” that alienates the very demographic the military needs to recruit. This isn’t really about the flu; it’s a retroactive battle over the COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The resistance that formed during the pandemic has been industrialized into a broader skepticism of all mandatory medical interventions. By removing the flu shot—a long-standing, relatively uncontroversial requirement—the administration is signaling a “demilitarization” of public health, treating medical decisions as private choices rather than command directives.

Congressional Expulsions:

Last week two men accused of sexual predation were bounced from the house and this week on Tuesday, there were two more motions in the bouncy House. House Democrats prepared to expel Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-FL) for, among other things, funneling $5 million in COVID relief funds to her campaign, but the Congresswoman resigned before they could make it official. Rep. Nancy Mace introduced a measure to expel Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) who has been accused of campaign finance violations and sexual misconduct.

Fed Independence:

For months Donald Trump has used his administration to target the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and member of the fed board of governors Lisa Cook. He didn’t like their reluctance to lower rates fast enough. They, along with most economists, worried inflation would rise.

Tuesday, the president’s replacement appeared as a part of his Senate confirmation. Much of the intense questioning Kevin Warsh faced regarded his independence from the White House. The Fed is an independent agency to keep politics out of interest rate decisions in order to safeguard the economy. But even a president booing from the sidelines has economic impacts.

Southern Poverty Law

A federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday — 11 counts including wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The DOJ’s theory: the SPLC, a 55-year-old civil rights organization best known for fighting the Klan, defrauded its donors by secretly funneling more than $3 million to paid informants inside the very extremist groups it claimed to be dismantling.

The informants were known internally as “field sources” or “the Fs.” Between 2014 and 2023, at least eight were paid through shell companies with names like “Center Investigative Agency,” “Fox Photography,” and “Rare Books Warehouse,” with payments loaded onto prepaid cards. One informant affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance received more than $1 million. Another, paid $270,000, sat in the online leadership group that planned the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville — attended the rally at the SPLC’s direction, made racist posts under their supervision, and coordinated transportation for other attendees. After Charlottesville left one person dead and dozens injured, SPLC donations nearly tripled, from $50 million to $132 million in a single year.

The SPLC calls it a “weaponized prosecution,” saying its informants risked their lives and shared intelligence that saved others. The core problem with the DOJ’s theory: paying confidential sources inside criminal organizations is what federal law enforcement does routinely. Multiple legal scholars called the indictment thin and questioned whether it makes out the elements of a crime.

That’s the legal question. The political question is broader. The SPLC’s “Hate Map” has been used for decades by the FBI, banks, and tech companies to track, de-platform, and investigate extremist groups. It has also been used to label conservative organizations — a fact Republicans have hammered for years. This indictment arrives under an acting attorney general who is under reported pressure from the president to deliver wins against perceived political opponents. Whether the underlying conduct was criminal or standard investigative practice, the charges alone freeze the SPLC’s operations and credibility at a moment when the organization sits on a $750 million endowment that the DOJ could target through forfeiture.

Florida and AI

Florida launched a criminal investigation into OpenAI on Tuesday after chat logs revealed the suspect in last April’s Florida State University shooting — two killed, six injured — asked ChatGPT what gun and ammunition to use, where and when on campus he’d find the most people, and whether school shooters go to maximum security prison. The chatbot answered. The state’s attorney general said if a human being had provided that advice, prosecutors would charge them with murder. The question with no precedent: does the same apply when the advisor is software?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ticks sending people to the ER

While city dwellers move to the country for the warmer months, ticks are moving in the opposite direction. Lyme disease cases in Michigan nearly quadrupled between 2022 and 2025 in part because ticks are moving to suburban and urban areas. The CDC reports that bites are sending Americans to the emergency room (ER) at the highest rate in nearly 10 years. It’s not just the city’s broadway plays and used bookstores that are causing the spike, however. The earlier onset of warm weather means more people are out and about outside.

Wednesday, April 22

Iran War: Six Months to Sweep Mines.

On Wednesday, Iran attacked three ships in the Strait of Hormuz and escorted two to Iranian waters. The dueling naval operations strained the ceasefire and exposed a key sticking point in negotiations: Iran’s chief negotiator says reopening the strait is impossible while the U.S. blockade remains.

That blockade was no longer the concern of Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, fired Wednesday, three weeks after Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George got the same treatment. The dispute reportedly pit Phelan—a political appointee—against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over management style, personnel, and the pace of shipbuilding.

The Washington Post reported that in a classified briefing to the House Armed Services Committee, Pentagon officials said completely clearing the Strait of Hormuz of Iranian-laid mines could take six months.

This is what makes the war so tricky. Wednesday morning the president boasted about destroying the Iranian navy. True enough—92% of the fleet, 140 to 158 vessels. But military analysts and the Pentagon distinguish between the “conventional navy”—which is indeed “gone”—and Iran’s “asymmetric” capacity, which remains potent.

Iran deploys hundreds of small, civilian-style boats and midget submarines difficult to track. These launch from hidden coastal facilities and seed small numbers of mines even during a ceasefire or active blockade. Iran has GPS-enabled “floating” mines that can be released remotely, making their location unpredictable once they hit the current. Iran’s sea mine inventory numbers in the hundreds—enough to seed the Strait faster than the U.S. can clear it.

Specialized mine-countermeasure vessels are slow-moving and vulnerable. The U.S. uses unmanned underwater vehicles like Knifefish to minimize risk to personnel, but these drones still require support ships that are targets for Iranian missiles, drones, and fast-attack craft. The Navy must first establish a “sanitized” zone to protect clearing operations—difficult when Iran can fire land-based anti-ship missiles from coastal batteries and hidden tunnel networks.

And clearing has to be near-total to matter. Shipping firms suspended operations in late February after 21 confirmed attacks on merchant vessels. The uncertainty has driven insurance premiums to prohibitive levels.

Ukraine gets Cash

The war in Ukraine continues — another conflict the president said he would solve in short order. Since he hasn’t, the Ukrainians took what help they could get: the European Union will finally disburse a €90 billion loan after Hungary lifted its veto, ending months of deadlock over funding that Ukraine needs within weeks to keep both its military and its government running. The breakthrough came with a trade — Ukraine repaired the Druzhba pipeline and resumed Russian oil flows to Hungary and Slovakia, and in return, both countries dropped their blocks on the loan and a fresh package of Russian sanctions.

Can we pause here for a minute? Has any artist other than Jimi Hendrix done more with Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” than Dave Matthews? Did I say that out loud? Sorry, that’s on my headphones.

No, the reason I wanted to pause is that what we have here is Ukraine repairing a pipeline so their enemy can sell oil — profits that fund the very missiles being fired at Ukrainian cities. They did it anyway, because they needed the money more than they needed the principle. That’s the paradoxical math of relations among nations.

On the battlefield, the money arrives at an unexpectedly strong moment. Ukraine’s foreign minister said the country’s frontline position is the strongest it has been in a year, driven largely by drone superiority and improved air defense. An analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War confirmed that Russian troops made almost no territorial gains across the frontline in March — the first time that has happened in two and a half years.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Virginia Redistricting & 2026 Midterms

Reform minded states and voters have put independent redistricting commissions in place to keep the party in power from drawing maps that keep it in power. In 2020, 65 percent of Virginia voters approved exactly that — a bipartisan commission to draw the state’s congressional lines. This week, Virginia Democrats threw it out.On Tuesday, voters narrowly approved a referendum — 51.5 to 48.6 percent — to temporarily return redistricting to the Democratic-controlled legislature, which has already drawn a map favoring Democrats in 10 of the state’s 11 House districts. Virginia currently splits 6-5.

The new lines could flip four seats. Democrats aren’t pretending this is principled. They’re calling it necessary. The redistricting arms race started last summer, when President Trump pressured Texas to redraw its congressional map mid-decade — something states almost never do between censuses. Texas obliged, targeting five Democratic seats. Missouri and North Carolina followed. The Supreme Court allowed the Texas map to proceed 6-3, despite a lower court finding it was a racial gerrymander.

California responded with its own Democratic-friendly redraw. Virginia followed. Trump’s original calculation was straightforward: gerrymander enough red states to insulate the Republican House majority heading into the midterms. Instead, he triggered a chain reaction. Democrats now argue they can’t unilaterally respect nonpartisan commissions while Republicans dismantle the maps in every state they control. All of this activity nets out to mean that Democrats have actually picked up a seat.

The legal fight isn’t over. A Tazewell County judge — the same Republican appointee who tried to block the referendum twice before, and was overruled by the Virginia Supreme Court both times — declared the vote void the day after it passed. The attorney general is appealing. The state Supreme Court will likely have the final word before August primaries.

More districts drawn to be safe for one party means more representatives who answer only to their base, more primaries decided by the most partisan voters, and less incentive for anyone in office to negotiate with the other side. The commissions were supposed to prevent exactly this.

Ten Commandments in Texas classrooms

Texas can require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools, a U.S. appeals court ruled. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, called the ruling “a major victory for Texas and our moral values.” “The Ten Commandments have had a profound impact on our nation, and it’s important that students learn from them every single day.” Paxton’s wife of 38 years filed for divorce last year “on Biblical grounds” and in the filing claimed that he had committed adultery, proof of the ongoing need of moral reminders. Similar laws in Arkansas and Louisiana are also before the courts.

U.S. Rep. David Scott dies

U.S. Rep. David Scott, a Georgia Democrat and the first Black chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, died on Wednesday. He was 80. His office described the death as “unexpected,” – indeed he had voted Tuesday on the House floor– and while no specific cause was immediately released, he had recently dealt with declining health. Scott, who was seeking his 13th term in Congress despite challenges from within his party, was once a leading voice for Democrats on issues related to farm aid policy and food aid for consumers and a prominent Black member of the party’s moderate Blue Dog caucus.

CDC won’t publish report

The Washington Post reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had blocked the publication of a scientific study showing that COVID-19 vaccines significantly reduced hospitalizations and emergency room visits this past winter by approximately 50% to 55%. In public health terms, cutting the risk of hospitalization in half is at the high end of what is usually hoped for from a seasonal flu shot.

Acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya—who also leads the NIH—halted the publication citing “methodological concerns.” The Post cited sources familiar with the matter who noted the study used the same process—the “test-negative design” and VISION network data—the CDC recently used to publish flu vaccine effectiveness data.

The decision has sparked internal concern that scientific data is being suppressed to align with the views of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent critic of the COVID-19 shots whose critiques have been received with withering criticism from experts across all scientific fields, who point out that his positions contradict the consensus of nearly every major global health body.

UK smoking ban

The UK Parliament passed the Tobacco and Vapes Bill on Tuesday — legislation that ensures anyone born on or after January 1, 2009, can never legally buy tobacco in their lifetime. Not at 18, not at 30, not ever. Starting in 2027, the legal purchasing age rises by one year, every year. The door closes behind today’s 17-year-olds and stays closed.

The scope goes well beyond cigarettes. The bill bans snus, the oral tobacco popular in Scandinavia, and extends to smoking accessories — including cigarette papers, meaning the 2009-and-after generation can’t buy the materials to roll their own. On vaping, the government still treats e-cigarettes as a quitting tool for adults but moved to strip away everything that makes them appealing to children: new powers to restrict candy-like flavors, packaging, and store displays, plus a ban on vaping in cars when children are present. Smoke-free and vape-free zones now extend to playgrounds and the areas outside schools and hospitals.

A clerk who fails to check ID faces a £200 on-the-spot fine. Shops that repeatedly violate the law can be banned from selling tobacco or nicotine products for a year. The bill cleared its final legislative stage between the Commons and the Lords on Tuesday and awaits Royal Assent from King Charles, expected next week.

While we’re in Britain: the Times published a quiz this week asking whether you can tell real British regional insults from fake ones. “Bampot” (Scottish: lunatic), “wazzock” (Northern English: idiot), “numpty” (Scottish: fool), and “mardy” (Midlands: soft, cowardly) are all apparently real words that real people say to other real people. The quiz is in the show notes, you jammy dodger.

Carter Page settlement.

The Trump Justice Department agreed Wednesday to pay $1.25 million to Carter Page, the 2016 campaign adviser the FBI wiretapped during the Russia investigation — settling a lawsuit the government had already won in lower courts. Two things are true about Carter Page, and the settlement works hard to obscure one of them. The FBI did botch its surveillance applications — an inspector general found serious errors and omissions across four rounds of court orders. Page had a legitimate grievance. But settling a case you’ve already won is almost unheard of in the history of the Justice Department. The government fights these cases precisely to avoid setting precedents that invite more lawsuits against taxpayers.

Walking away from a victory means something else is driving the decision. And this follows a pattern. Last month, $1.25 million to Michael Flynn, who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI before being pardoned. Last year, nearly $5 million to the estate of Ashli Babbitt, shot while breaching the Capitol on January 6th. In each case, the DOJ bypassed normal procedures to carve out settlements for people aligned with President Trump. The administration calls it combating the “weaponization of government.” But taken together — an unprecedented legal surrender, combined with payouts that track loyalty rather than legal merit — it starts to look less like fairness and more like an effort to discredit the entire Russia investigation. An investigation corroborated by the U.S. intelligence community, the Mueller probe’s 34 indictments, and even the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee.

Spirit Airlines Bailout

We’ve talked about airlines absorbing the fuel costs of the war with Iran. For Spirit Airlines, the war didn’t just hurt — it made the airline’s existing bankruptcy exit plan mathematically impossible. Unlike the major carriers, Spirit does no fuel hedging — no pre-buying at lower rates — and its entire business model depends on filling cheap seats in volume. When fuel prices spike, the big airlines absorb the hit. Spirit drowns in it.

Now the Trump administration is negotiating a $500 million rescue package that could leave the federal government owning 90 percent of the airline. Remember last August, the government converted Biden-era grants into a 10 percent ownership stake in Intel, arguing that without it, the U.S. would depend on chip factories in Taiwan for everything from fighter jets to iPhones. In January, a similar stake in USA Rare Earth. The logic: don’t just give grants to firms, take equity because taxpayers share in the upside, and the government keeps strategic assets from failing or falling into foreign hands. For an administration that campaigned on getting government out of the way of business, it’s a striking turn — the federal government deciding which companies live and which ones don’t.

Why is a discount airline strategically critical? The administration argues if Spirit dies, the Big Three lose their primary low-cost competitor, and ticket prices for working-class travelers spike during an already inflationary war. The president also cited the loss of 14,000 jobs. A wrinkle: Spirit flies nothing but Airbus — 76 European-made planes. If this deal closes, the “Buy American” administration becomes the majority owner of an airline that doesn’t fly a single American-made aircraft, while simultaneously locked in trade tensions with the EU. Bottom line: will the U.S. gain leverage or become owner of an airline nobody else wanted.

988 Hotline Success

In July 2022 the 988 mental health crisis hotline launched, and over the next two and a half years there were 11 percent fewer suicide deaths among 15- to 23-year-olds than researchers had expected — nearly 4,400 lives. This, according to a study published Wednesday in JAMA. As a gut check, researchers looked at England, which had no comparable hotline launch during the same period — and saw no similar decline in youth suicides.

The reduction tracked directly with usage: the ten states with the largest increases in call volume saw an 18 percent drop in suicide deaths; the ten states with the smallest increases saw only 11 percent. The more a community used the service, the more lives were saved. The 988 program represents roughly $1.5 billion in federal investment, one of the largest in suicide prevention history. But that 11 percent drop was achieved with specialized sub-networks in place — including partnerships like the Trevor Project’s dedicated line for LGBTQ+ youth, a population at significantly elevated risk.The administration’s July 2025 termination of the dedicated LGBTQ+ sub-network has sparked warnings from researchers that the 2026 data could show a rebound in suicide rates among queer and trans youth, who previously utilized the ‘Press 3’ prompt for counselors specifically trained in their unique stressors.

Thursday, April 23

Iran War

Thursday it was the battle of the blockades.

The U.S. military intercepted two Iranian oil supertankers that had attempted to slip through the dragnet but were unable to because, well, they are supertankers, one definition of which is the largest self-propelled vehicles ever built. Very hard to be stealthy.

While the U.S. successfully interdicted the outward flow of Iranian crude, Tehran struck back. In a direct retaliation, Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) commandos seized two Western-linked vessels.

Senate Adopts G.O.P. Budget

The Senate passed a Republican budget blueprint early Thursday morning to end the longest Department of Homeland Security shutdown in American history. DHS has been partially paralyzed since mid-February, when federal agents fatally shot a 37-year-old man, Alex Pretti, during an immigration operation in Minneapolis. Democrats used the 60-vote filibuster threshold to block all DHS funding, demanding use-of-force reforms the administration refused to consider.

Republicans turned to budget reconciliation — a mechanism that lets them bypass the filibuster and pass the funding bill with a simple majority. The goal: unlock up to $70 billion for ICE and Border Patrol, putting the administration’s immigration agenda on autopilot for the next three and a half years.

Democrats couldn’t stop the bill, but they used the mandatory vote-a-rama — a marathon of rapid-fire amendments — to force Republicans on the record rejecting restoration of SNAP benefits, school meal funding, and energy-cost relief.

The larger story is what reconciliation costs. Congress generally gets only one reconciliation bill per budget cycle. By spending the 2026 slot to reopen a shuttered department and fund ICE, Republicans forfeit their best tool for passing tax cuts or deregulation later this year. That tradeoff likely drove the only two Republican defections: Rand Paul, who called it a fiscal gimmick that adds billions to the deficit, and Lisa Murkowski, who objected to abandoning the Senate’s tradition of bipartisan cooperation.

Epstein DOJ

The Justice Department’s internal watchdog opened a review Thursday into whether the department defied the law Congress wrote specifically to prevent it from doing what it did. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed by the president late last year, stripped the DOJ of its usual discretion — no withholding records for “political sensitivity,” “reputational harm,” or the “embarrassment” of public figures. Release everything within 30 days. The only exception: protecting victim identities.

The DOJ blew past the December deadline, producing a fraction of the documents and citing “logistical hurdles” that drew bipartisan contempt. When the department finally dumped millions of pages in late January, it managed a special kind of achievement. It failed in both directions: tens of thousands of pages still missing, while the rushed redaction process left the names and personal details of several victims exposed. The Inspector General now wants to know whether the department used privacy as a shield to hide records while simultaneously failing to protect the people the law existed to shield.

Marijuana Classification

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order moving state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I, the same classification as heroin, to Schedule III, alongside ketamine and Tylenol with codeine. The most significant shift in federal drug policy since 1970 legitimizes the medical programs of 40 states in one stroke while leaving recreational marijuana exactly where it was: federally illegal.

Medical dispensaries can now deduct rent, payroll, and operating costs on their taxes for the first time — a provision the old Schedule I classification blocked, costing the industry billions.

Researchers who spent years trapped in a bureaucratic paradox — needing federal approval to study a drug the federal government insisted had no medical value — can now access state-licensed cannabis for clinical trials without risking prosecution.

The legal result is stranger than the policy. The same plant, grown in the same facility, can now be a Schedule III medication when sold to a patient with a medical card and a Schedule I narcotic when sold to an adult for recreational use next door. The administration calls this common sense. The DEA will hold hearings in June on whether to reschedule marijuana more broadly.

Soldier arrested for Polymarket bets

He was the soldier who turned Operation Absolute Resolve into Operation No You Didn’t. A U.S. Army Special Forces master sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke was arrested for allegedly using classified information to make extremely profitable bets on the Polymarket prediction market related to the American military mission that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, the Department of Justice said Thursday.Van Dyke, 38, wagered a total of about $33,000 in 13 or so bets in the week leading up to that operation, with the knowledge that the United States was secretly planning military action against Maduro. The bets won Van Dyke nearly $410,000, the indictment alleges.

Meta layoffs and Microsoft buyouts

Last week we told you that Meta was creating an AI replica of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg so that employees could interact with the AI boss to get a better sense of what he was thinking. 8,000 of those employees – or 10 percent of its workforce– will be denied that delicious conversation. They are being let go, the company said Thursday so Meta can ramp up spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure and highly paid AI-expert hires. Also Thursday, Microsoft said it was offering voluntary buyouts to thousands of its U.S. employees. The software giant plans to make the offers in early May to about 8,750 people, or 7% of its U.S. workforce.

College Tours

A study published this week by researchers at Amherst College found that the weather on the day of your campus visit meaningfully affects whether you apply. Applications dropped 10 percent when the tour was hot, 8 percent when it rained, and 5 percent when it was simply cloudy — compared to mild, sunny days. Male visitors, the study found, were more sensitive to weather conditions than female visitors. The study was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is a serious institution that has now confirmed that a passing cloud may have determined where you spent four years of your life.

Friday, April 24

Iran War

At the end of the week, the United States was negotiating with Iran over the same points that have been at issue since 2015, when the Obama administration and five other world powers struck the JCPOA — the agreement designed to ensure Iran’s nuclear program stays peaceful. Same technical questions: how much enrichment Iran keeps, who inspects it, whether the stockpile goes to a third country. Same political question: what does Iran get in return.

Trump spent years mocking Obama for what he paid to get that deal. Now he’s spent considerably more. The New York Times reported this week that the war burned through roughly $28 to $35 billion — just under a billion dollars a day for 38 days. In the first two days alone, the military used $5.6 billion in munitions.

The U.S. fired more than 1,100 JASSM-ER cruise missiles — long-range stealth weapons designed not for Iran but for a war with China. Roughly 1,500 remain in inventory. More than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles, at $4 million each. The U.S. produces about 600 Patriots a year. Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said reconstituting what was expended “could take years.” Admiral Paparo, head of Indo-Pacific Command, told the New York Times: “There are finite limits to the magazine.”

Trump has been adamant in private that his deal must be better than Obama’s. But “better” isn’t just a measure of the document. The calculation requires subtracting what the JCPOA would have delivered, then weighing that delta against the full cost of getting here: the dead, the debt, the depleted Pacific posture, and whatever chilling effect this war has on America’s willingness to intervene the next time.

Dominic Tierney, writing in Foreign Affairs, offers the frame: the American way of war doesn’t reward tactical dominance. Americans believe winning requires decisive success — which means the definition of winning isn’t only Iran’s to give or the administration’s to give. Trump has to sell it to an electorate that already doesn’t believe him.

Support for continuing the war sits at 31 percent. Seventy-eight percent of Americans say the U.S. has not met its goals; 21 percent say it has. The president’s handling of the conflict draws 32 to 34 percent approval, with disapproval as high as 61 percent in Pew and YouGov tracking. Pew found that by nearly two to one, Americans say the war is not going well. Forty percent believe it will leave the country less safe. Sixty-six percent say the U.S. should find a way out, even without achieving its stated objectives.

Two thirds of the country have already decided that getting out matters more than winning.

For all of president Trump’s marketing genius.(that is how he became president, after all) he is slouching under the weight of two wars– a trade war and the war in Iran. Though he is trying to convince the public that the economy is doing great and that America has won in Iran, he is not succeeding.

Criminal inquiry into Jerome Powell closed

The Justice Department closed its criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Friday — clearing the way for Kevin Warsh’s confirmation as Powell’s successor. The probe centered on cost overruns in the Fed’s headquarters renovation: a project that grew from $1.9 billion to roughly $2.5 billion, which the Fed attributed to a sinkhole, asbestos, and inflation. Powell had called the investigation an attempt to pressure the Fed into cutting rates — currently at 3.6% — toward the 1% the president wanted. In March, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg quashed the DOJ’s subpoenas, finding “essentially zero evidence” Powell had committed a crime. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro closed the file Friday, handing the renovation questions to the Fed’s Inspector General, with the option to reopen if the IG finds fraud rather than mismanagement. Republican Senator Thom Tillis had vowed to block any Fed nominee while the probe remained open. With it closed, Tillis signaled he’d support moving Warsh to a full Senate vote.

Judge’s Ruling on Asylum.

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that Trump’s declaration of an “invasion” at the southern border was illegal — effectively reopening the U.S. to migrants seeking asylum for the first time since the first day of his second term.

The administration will almost certainly appeal. Asylum processing hasn’t resumed, and the court didn’t set a timeline. But the ruling lands as a rebuke: Congress, the court found, never gave the president the power to waive asylum law by proclamation. The ruling doesn’t mean open borders — it means the U.S. rejoins nearly every other country in the world in giving people fleeing persecution a hearing.

The question of who this country keeps its promises to surfaced elsewhere this week. The Trump administration is weighing whether to send roughly 1,100 Afghans — translators, guides, people who worked alongside American troops against the Taliban — to the Democratic Republic of Congo rather than honor the visa program Congress authorized for them. The alternative the administration is also floating: return them to live under the Taliban. Lawmakers in both parties objected. “We made promises to those fighting by our side to bring them to the U.S.,” said Republican Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska. “We should keep our promises.”

And if you’re charting the tussle between the branches this week, you have the independent Fed on slightly firmer footing, the tariff money being repaid for executive overreach, and now this asylum ruling. Three rulings, one direction. Almost like the founders planned it that way.

World Cup final tickets listed for more than $2.2million

In economics, a Veblen good is one where demand increases alongside the price because the cost itself functions as a status symbol. This explains the psychological theater behind the news that a single 2026 World Cup ticket has been listed for $2.3 million. While no one is likely to actually pay that “moonshot” price, its mere existence serves a strategic purpose. By abandoning the resale price caps used in previous tournaments, FIFA has created a wild-west secondary market where they collect a 15% fee from both the buyer and the seller. This 30% combined “tax” gives the governing body a direct incentive to let wacky pricing stand.

From a psychological standpoint, however, this outlier functions as an anchor. It recalibrates the fan’s sense of value: once you’ve processed the idea of a $2 million seat, the actual $11,000 price tag for Category 1 seats—itself an astronomical sum—suddenly feels like a bargain.

Often people respond to an action taken by this president by suggesting some variation of “he suffers no consequences.” This number invites a chance to pin down what that means.

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A president with a disapproval rating that high is suffering consequences. The daily verdict of the country is that the president is doing a bad job. On specific issues like his handling of the economy or rising prices, the reasons he was elected, the verdict is truly dismal. In a new AP poll, 76% of Americans now disapprove of the president’s handling of the cost of living.

What has gone missing are the institutional consequences that disapproval used to trigger. Public opinion is working. The machinery that once converted public opinion into accountability is not. The jury came back. The foreman spoke and then everyone went out to lunch, including the accused.

What used to happen is that lawmakers would feel this public disapproval and respond, for fear of being voted out of office. They would call out a president, hold oversight hearings, comment publicly about a deteriorating economy, national security risks, and the dignity of the public square. With so many safe districts, that intermediate mechanism of transmission no longer functions as designed. Members of the president’s party in safe districts worry more about primary challenges, where a key — if not the key — factor is loyalty to the president. The very disapproval that should loosen their allegiance tightens it.

So the question for the 2026 midterm elections is whether the transmission lines still carry current. There is early evidence that they do. In the seven congressional special elections held during the 2025-2026 cycle, Democrats have overperformed their 2024 baselines by an average of seventeen points. Since January 2025, Democrats have flipped thirty state legislative seats while Republicans have flipped none. In state legislative special elections, Democrats have retained roughly 38 percent of their 2024 general election turnout; Republicans have retained only 28 percent. The signal is already being sent.

But a signal sent is not a signal received. It could get clogged in several places at once — in districts drawn to be immune to national mood, in media environments that reframe a collective verdict as a partisan attack, in an electorate that has sorted itself so thoroughly by geography and identity that presidential performance barely registers against party loyalty. General apathy could dull the charge further. At the moment Republicans show more of it than Democrats, but widespread disillusionment — the feeling that political signals are simply broken — remains possible if no correction arrives.1

These clogging factors do not all carry equal weight, but we will not know the proportion until November. (And even then we’ll be arguing about what mattered and what didn’t as everyone shapes interpretations with an eye toward the 2028 race). But the blockage itself creates a secondary problem. To the extent that the transmission system fails — to the extent that fifty-eight percent disapproval produces no visible political consequence, or an insufficient one — it allows President Trump to cast his poor standing as the product of a scheme or a plot rather than a genuine national judgment. That claim has no basis in fact or history. But it finds a readier audience among voters shielded from the current political trajectory, voters who never hear the foreman’s verdict read aloud.

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I first heard that quote from General James Mattis. I profiled him several years before he served as Secretary of Defense for a series I wrote about risk.

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At the time Mattis was known for his famously efficient and successful command of the ground invasion of Iraq. When the war went to hell after the insurgency rose up in Fallujah, he was called in to fight again. Later he co-wrote with David Petraeus the book on how to fight an insurgency.

The key insight for counterinsurgency is that might does not make success. You can have all the tanks and guns in the world, which the Americans did in Iraq, but it was not able to subdue the insurgents. In Iran, American military dominance has not ended the war.

What I learned from Mattis was that certainty about risk is itself a warning sign. When you think a battle is going to be quick and easy, be worried.

“It is not scientifically possible to accurately predict the outcome of an action,” said Mattis. “To suggest otherwise runs contrary to historical experience and the nature of war.”

The Nobel laureate economist Kenneth Arrow arrived at the same place from a different direction. “Vast ills have followed a belief in certainty,” he wrote, “our knowledge of the way things work, in society or in nature, comes trailing clouds of vagueness.”

Arrow came to learn the danger of false certainty as a weather analyst during World War II. He was assigned to the Long Range Forecasting Group, charged with predicting the number of rainy days in particular combat areas — a month in advance. Being rigorous men, his team tested whether their forecasts were any better than random guessing. They were not.

When they asked to be relieved of the useless duty, superiors responded: “The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good. However, he needs them for planning purposes.”

In the Wall Street Journal Sunday, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey write about President Trump’s evolution on the Iran war:

After a persuasive February briefing from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Situation Room, and repeated conversations with a group of outside allies that included Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), he said he trusted the military to pull it off. Look, he said to advisers, at how quickly they had “won” in Venezuela, where the U.S. had, in a matter of hours, captured its president and ended with his more compliant deputy in his place.

Here’s how Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman write about the same period in the New York Times:

[General Caine] also flagged the enormous difficulty of securing the Strait of Hormuz and the risks of Iran blocking it. Mr. Trump had dismissed that possibility on the assumption that the regime would capitulate before it came to that. The president appeared to think it would be a very quick war — an impression that had been reinforced by the tepid response to the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June.

Venezuela was not a credential. It was a warning.

I am also grateful to Whistler’s Trouville at the Art Institute of Chicago which withstood long-looking today as Anne and I visited. It kept giving up new things, which was great because my focus has been on the microscopic this and that at the end of my nose. (With the exception of this late night plane flight interruption).

Now that this week’s Stack the Week has posted, we are headed to dinner. Thank you all for being out there and for subscribing. Have a great weekend.

John

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Some of you may remember the Face the Nation Diary. Same instinct, new form. I think it’s probably best experienced if you listen to me read the audio version. Please let me know what you think — and what you like and don’t like relative to the daily Stack Stories experiment.

Narrative of the Week.

The president thanked Iran for opening a strait the US was still blocking, Gospel believers argued with the Gospels, a shoe company made bank by not selling shoes, and the man in Paris who didn’t believe he’d won a Picasso was the only person all week wrong to be suspicious.

So let’s take it day by day.

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Monday, April 13

Iran War

Talks went down, the blockade went up, and the ceasefire flickered all week.

Monday started in the shadow of failed talks at ending the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran. The war felt like it was winding down — hard to prove, but one marker: the U.S. president was no longer promising to wipe out Iranian civilization as he had the week before.

Vice President JD Vance emerged from 21 hours of talks with Iranians Sunday night declaring they “chose not to accept our terms.” Iran blamed “excessive demands.” The sticking point, reporting would later suggest, was Tehran’s refusal to provide an “affirmative commitment” to permanently end its nuclear enrichment program and disagreements over continued Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz.

One thing the meeting confirmed that last week’s bombing had left uncertain: there was still an Iranian government. Or at least enough of one that it could field a roster and send representatives to Islamabad, Pakistan for talks with the Americans who had killed all their friends and colleagues.

Reuters reported that the new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei was recovering from severe facial disfigurement and serious injuries to one or both legs from the airstrike that killed his father. He attends meetings with senior officials via audio conference. His wife, father-in-law, and sister-in-law were also killed in the raid.

On Monday, President Trump said that despite round one of talks ending, negotiations might start up again. He also told reporters “they’d like to make a deal very badly.” The president has used this specific language before — most notably during the 2019 trade war with China, the 2018 lead-up to the North Korea summit, and throughout his first-term maximum pressure campaign against Tehran, when he repeatedly claimed sanctions had left Iranian leaders desperate to deal.

In negotiations, framing the other side as the desperate pursuer projects dominance — it devalues the opponent’s leverage in the eyes of the world and establishes a narrative where any eventual agreement looks like a personal victory won through sheer toughness. It also functions as a trap. If Iran is so desperate to deal, then any agreement they sign can be framed as capitulation — which makes it harder for their leadership to sell domestically, which gives them reason to walk away.

That was the dance. On the reality side of the action — which is to say, something you could actually accept as reality and not spin — President Trump announced that the U.S. The Navy would block the 21-mile-wide opening to the Strait of Hormuz. An operation that involved over 10,000 U.S. personnel and more than a dozen warships.

Blockading had previously been Iran’s job, so this was a blockade to block a blockade. What the president sought to do was shut down the Iranian toll system — the Ayatollboth — that brought money to prop up the country’s crippled economy.

Trump warned any Iranian ships approaching the blockade would be “immediately ELIMINATED.” Iran called it piracy. A retired U.S. admiral, speaking to NPR, called it an act of war — technically, he said, blockading a country’s exports meets that definition. China’s Defense Minister warned the U.S. not to interfere with Chinese vessels: “The Strait of Hormuz is open to us.” One Chinese vessel tested that notion, but Central Command said it turned it back. In a call to Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, the president said prices “should be around the same” in November — and might be “a little bit higher.”

In Lebanon, an Israeli drone struck a Lebanese Red Cross center Monday, killing one paramedic. The death brought the total number of medics killed in Lebanon to at least 57 in six weeks. Israel said Hezbollah uses ambulances for weapons transport.

POTUS on Pope Action

Here ends the rational straightforward news on Monday for a moment.

Also on Monday, the President continued attacking the leader of the Catholic church, the Pope, which was merely one front in the two-front ecclesiastical struggle he fought this week.

Mr. Trump was also being sought for comment over the AI generated image he posted in which he depicted himself as Jesus Christ in white robe with a red shawl healing a patient in bed by touching the man’s forehead.

The row started when the Pope, whose church believes he is the direct successor of St. Peter declared that no reason can justify the shedding of innocent blood and that God does not bless any conflict, calling the president’s recent threats to “wipe out” Iranian civilization “truly unacceptable.”

Pretty standard stuff for a man charged with promoting the word, life and teachings of Christ, who is often referred to as the prince of peace.

The president responded Sunday by calling the Pontiff “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy,” later telling reporters he was “not a fan of Pope Leo.”

Monday the pope responded: “I have no fear of the Trump administration, or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do…I don’t ​think that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused ​in the way that some people are doing.”

Trump as Jesus

Little noticed, except perhaps in theological circles, was the president’s assertion that Pope Leo XIV was elected “because he was an American” and the Vatican thought that would be “the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump.”

Catholics, including the Pope and Cardinals, believe the Holy Spirit chooses the Pope. So those keeping a Trump Trinity checklist at home — the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — can put a tick mark next to the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, signifying the president’s claim over that body.

As for the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity: on Monday Trump removed from his social media an AI-generated image that had appeared Sunday evening. It depicted Mr. Trump in a white robe and red shawl — reminiscent of traditional “healing of the sick” iconography — performing a miracle by touching a bedridden man’s forehead, with fighter jets and eagles soaring in the background.

Trump told reporters he thought the picture was depicting him as a doctor in the Red Cross, an organization that does not, as of press time, outfit their doctors in red cardigans with electric poultice to slather on patients in the field.

Though the president said only dishonest reporters would assume he’d portrayed himself as Jesus, House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office was reportedly flooded with calls from GOP leadership and religious groups horrified by the “blasphemous” nature of the image. “I did ask him to delete it,” the Speaker said of the president.

Orbán falls.

In Hungary On Monday they were still appraising the fallout after Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán lost Sunday’s election in a landslide.

Turnout was the highest since the fall of communism — more than 5.9 million registered voters participated. Roughly 77–80%.

Anne Applebaum, writing in The Atlantic, argued the loss punctures the assumption of inevitability that has pervaded the MAGA movement and Putin’s rhetoric alike — the belief that illiberal parties are destined to hold power forever because they alone speak for the “real” people.

The victor Péter Magyar, was a 45-year-old lawyer who until two years ago had been an Orbán government insider — and who, as a boy, kept a poster of Orbán on his bedroom wall.

Over 16 years, Orbán came to control, through his party, much of the judiciary, bureaucracy, and universities, and a network of oligarchic companies that controlled much of the economy. He gerrymandered electoral districts to ensure permanent majorities, purged independent judges, and neutralized the free press by funneling state advertising only to loyalist outlets. Hungary is the most corrupt country in the EU, according to Transparency International. Orbán criminalized those providing aid to asylum seekers, stripped LGBTQ+ citizens of basic legal recognition, described liberal democracy as a “virus,” and cast himself as the last defender of “European Christendom” against “Muslim invaders” and a “mixed race” Hungary.

Vice President Vance had recently visited Orbán to boost his electoral chances. That he, along with the American president and majority party would work so hard to keep Orban in power meant that the leaders of a country that once considered itself both the beacon of liberalism, and the architect of the global order that believed liberalism led to peace, were cheering for the other team. When Magyar won, Trump said nothing.

Magyar, who could take office as early as May 5, promised to break with Orbánism and fix the slowest-growing economy in Europe. Orbán had blocked EU assistance to Ukraine, worked to water down sanctions on Russia, and framed Ukraine as Europe’s principal threat. Magyar is expected to clear the way for a €90bn frozen loan to Ukraine that Orbán had been blocking for weeks.

House Ejections

Two members of Congress resigned this week under allegations of sexual misconduct — one Democrat, one Republican, which the leadership of both parties called bipartisan housecleaning and which was, more accurately, a simultaneous removal of two men who had run out of road.

Eric Swalwell fell fast. Monday he left the California governor’s race after a former staffer alleged rape and sexual assault. By Tuesday he had resigned from Congress. By Wednesday a second woman had come forward with a rape allegation. His lawyer Sara Azari became famous by offering this defense on NewsNation: “Regret is not rape. The fact that, you know, a day later, years later, or whatnot, you maybe had shame around what you did, or maybe you were in a relationship and shouldn’t have done what you did, doesn’t make it rape.”

That Swalwell’s behavior appeared to be some kind of open secret among certain Democrats left questions lingering about what kind of behavior is tolerated when political power and fortunes are at stake.

Republican Tony Gonzales resigned on Tuesday. A staffer with whom he had an extramarital affair died by suicide. The San Antonio Express-News later reported he had also solicited nude photos and a sexual relationship from a staffer during his 2020 campaign. House Republican leaders had pressured him to drop his reelection bid in March but kept him in his seat — his departure would have shrunk a GOP majority already sitting at 217. With expulsion resolutions looming from both parties and Swalwell’s exit providing cover, Gonzales filed his paperwork Tuesday.

Iran and Housing

Now, from the business of the House to the Housing business. The U.S. housing market, which analysts predicted would finally thaw in 2026, is another casualty of the war with Iran. New figures from the National Association of Realtors show home sales slumped 3.6% in March—reaching a nine-month low—as the cost of borrowing climbed with the conflict. Average 30-year fixed mortgage rates, which sat at a manageable 5.98% before the February strikes, jumped to 6.37% last week. The Fed is not able to cut rates because it’s worried about inflation from rising energy costs, so help isn’t coming from that quarter soon.

Carney in Charge

While Hungary is undergoing upheaval, Canadians are settling in. Mark Carney consolidated power. After originally being handed a minority mandate in 2025, Carney secured a formal parliamentary majority for the Liberals this week following a sweep of three key byelections Monday — an achievement made possible by a combination of electoral wins and strategic defections from rival parties.

Those defections — known as floor-crossings, five in total, from the center-left New Democratic Party and the Conservatives — are a highly unusual move in Canadian parliamentary tradition.

Donald Trump can take some credit for this development too. Carney has positioned himself as the “steady economic hand” needed to navigate the Trump administration’s protectionist trade agenda — a framing that has led some to call him a “wartime leader.” With his new majority, the Prime Minister will be able to more easily pass budgets and bills that align with his ultimate goal of making Canada less dependent on the United States

The “Trump DoorDash” Summit

The president’s approval rating on the economy– in the high 30s– is as low as it has ever been. His administration has been working to show voters their sour opinion of his stewardship is mistaken. This has mostly taken the posture of mere assertion, but Monday the hope was to draw a direct link.

“This doesn’t look staged, does it?” The president asked Monday as he greeted a DoorDash delivery woman at the door of the Oval Office. Sharon Simmons, an Arkansas-based “Dasher” with over 14,000 career deliveries, wore a red DoorDash Grandma t-shirt and handed the leader of the free world a McDonald’s bag filled with, as she said, “all your favorites.”

Simmons told reporters she saved over $11,000 thanks to the president’s “No tax on tips” policy.

The president encouraged her to say this, but it’s not correct.

The policy is an above-the-line deduction from your income that is taxed.. To save $11,000 in taxes from a tip deduction, she’d need roughly $50,000 in tips annually at the 22% bracket, or over $90,000 at 12%. Neither squares with the portrait of a dasher in a Grandma t-shirt. Later, Door Dash said that she had earned a total of $11,000 in tips, which meant iIf she’s in the 12% bracket and earns $11,000 in tips, her maximum tax relief would be around $1,300.

The display was meant to convey that Trump was for the working person, although only three percent of Americans have jobs where they receive tips. And 37 percent of tipped workers owe no federal income tax because they fall below the standard deduction, meaning the policy offers them no net gain.

Previous efforts to deliver a clear economic message have been stymied by the president’s habit of free-associating on camera until affordability is the one topic left uncovered.

The delivery was imprecise in this case as well. The interaction took a sharp turn when Trump used the appearance to pivot to the Strait of Hormuz blockade and pressed Simmons for her opinion on transgender athletes; Simmons told the President, “I’m here about no tax on tips.”

Simmons, on message! She also explained that her husband had recently completed chemotherapy, emphasizing that the flexibility of gig work and the tax savings on her tips were vital for managing his care and their mounting medical bills.

After accepting the burgers, Trump handed her a $100 bill.

Pride Flag Waves

The Trump administration reversed course Monday, agreeing to maintain the rainbow Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument after its removal in February sparked a lawsuit from LGBTQ+ and historic preservation groups. Stonewall is the Greenwich Village site where, in 1969, police raided the inn and sparked days of protests that became the foundational moment of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. The flag — the first Pride banner to fly permanently on federal land — was installed in 2022. The National Park Service took it down earlier this year under a January 21 memo restricting the agency largely to displaying the U.S., Interior Department, and POW/MIA flags. The same order prompted removals elsewhere: panels describing George Washington’s enslaved workers at Independence National Historical Park, exhibits on Indigenous history at Muir Woods, and signage at Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park, among others. The same guidance that took down the Pride flag at a civil rights monument explicitly preserved Confederate flags at sites where they provide “historical context.”

Tuesday, April 14

Iran War

On Tuesday, as the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz held, the Secretary of the Treasury re-centered the reason for the war. “I wonder what the hit to global GDP would be if a nuclear weapon hit London,” said Secretary Bessent in an interview with the BBC. “I am saying that I am less concerned about short-term forecasts, for long-term security.”

In the carousel of justifications for the war, Bessent was returning global focus to the nuclear threat — which returns to the central question: was the threat as imminent as the Treasury Secretary suggested, how real was a strike on London, and was military action the only way to remove it. There is no external evidence to support either case. They are entirely contained in the head of the president — his reading of intelligence the public cannot see, and his alone. His understanding of the evidence, and his determination that conditions meant war was the only solution.

By increasing the stakes, the Treasury Secretary justifies any action.

In 2002, National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice did something similar did something similar when she told Wolf Blitzer — on September 8, 2002, the Sunday before the Bush administration’s full public push for war — about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capabilities: “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

Key distinction: Bessent’s case is being made after the fact. Rice’s claims could be assessed, debate could take place, the democratic and diplomatic process — presumably — could change course.

Bessent’s claim makes for easy accounting when people ask: was the war worth it? It always will be if the balance is measured against a nuclear crater in downtown London.

The more the war continues, the further we get from ever examining that front-end question: were nukes imminent;was war the only way?. And the more it costs — in treasure, in readiness, in economic pain — the easier it becomes to argue backward. Surely the threat must have been as grave as claimed, or they wouldn’t have paid so much to meet it.

How a Blockade Works?

U.S. Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, said that “during the first 24 hours, no ships made it past the U.S. blockade and 6 merchant vessels complied with direction from U.S. forces to turn around to re-enter an Iranian port on the Gulf of Oman.” By the end of 48 hours, nine ships total had turned back. It is not a total closure of the Strait but a targeted effort to stop “any and all ships” traveling specifically to or from Iranian ports.

Which raises a question worth pausing on: how does a blockade actually work? The key mechanical detail is in the NBC/Washington Post reporting: the U.S. fleet isn’t sitting at Iranian ports or in the Strait itself — it’s waiting in the Gulf of Oman. The strait is mined by Iran and too shallow and narrow to safely position warships. So the method is: surveillance aircraft and radar track ships leaving Iranian ports, the ships transit the Strait of Hormuz, and then U.S. warships in the Gulf of Oman contact them by radio and order them to turn back. No shots fired, no boarding. At least five of the nine were carrying oil. The ships are directed back to Iranian ports via the Gulf of Oman rather than back through the strait, because that’s where U.S. assets are concentrated.

And it’s not only the ships that are being blocked. The war is creating other strains, as Bloomberg tells us: LVMH Sales Disappoint as Middle East War Crimps Dior Demand. LVMH Sales Disappoint as Middle East War Crimps Dior Demand. The brand had been expecting to emerge from an extended slump. Instead, the war next door is keeping Dubai’s shoppers home.

China Supplying Iran

A single person carrying a five-foot tube can take out a plane worth millions of dollars. That’s the asymmetric logic of the MANPAD — Man-Portable Air-Defense System — which sounds like a man-purse but functions like a one-person air force. The U.S. shipped thousands to Ukraine, where they proved effective against Russian aircraft and drones.

On Tuesday, China’s Foreign Ministry dismissed a CNN report that Beijing is preparing to ship MANPADs to Iran, calling it “groundless smears” and warning that the leak itself was a “dangerous move” by the U.S. to undermine the fragile ceasefire.

Trump threatened a 50% tariff on all Chinese goods if the deliveries are confirmed. Analysts warn the penalty would hit American consumer prices almost immediately — turning a regional proxy battle into a direct charge on the domestic economy

Here’s how the weapon works: a sensor in the missile’s nose tracks the heat from an aircraft’s engines. The launcher emits a tone — a high-pitched growl — when it’s locked. The operator pulls the trigger, a small motor ejects the missile from the tube, the main engine ignites, and the operator drops the tube and runs. The missile finds the heat source on its own.

Stinger missiles became famous when the Afghan Mujahideen used them against the Soviets. Charlie Wilson, the congressman behind the operation, said “We never really won a set-piece battle before September 26,” their first use in 1986,” and then we never lost one afterwards.” He was given the first spent launch tube as a gift and kept it on his office wall. They brought down nearly 270 aircraft — analysts coined a term for it: “the Stinger effect.” Colin Powell later said there was “no threat more serious to aviation.”

Pope and JD Vance

There was another round of Pope action Tuesday. The Vice President, whose book about his conversion to Catholicism titled “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith” is out in June, said: “In the same way that it’s important for the vice president of the United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy, I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

“Vance Says the Pope Should Be More Careful When Talking About Theology” read the NYT headline, which made the whole thing sound ridiculous — but the question it did raise: upon what authority does the Vice President find support to tell the Pope what to do?

The debate was about staying in your lane. The Pope is doing his job — articulating a moral framework against killing. The president is doing his — prosecuting a war and marginalizing critics. Where things get messy is when one side veers into the other lane.

In this case the warriors claimed that Jesus was on their side. The Pope, cruising exactly at the speed limit in the religious lane, said: well, now that you’re over here, you’ve got it wrong. Jesus doesn’t take sides.

It was here that JD Vance merged into traffic.

In the promotional material for his book, Vice President Vance says: “I’m a Christian, and I became a Christian because I believe that Jesus Christ’s teachings are true.” If we use that to illuminate what the Pope actually said with respect to the Iran war — “God does not bless any conflict; to cry out to the world that whoever is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, never stands on the side of those who yesterday wielded the sword and today drop bombs” — the position becomes hard to escape. The Pope is just quoting the man whose teachings Vance says he follows.

One way people check themselves is by maintaining standards — moral standards, institutional standards, standards of belief. Those standards have changed in the Republican Party to accommodate Donald Trump, whose personal behavior, ongoing conduct, and policy positions directly contradict longstanding commitments. If accommodations must be made, when do they stop? What prevents supporters from endorsing whatever comes next?

Religion is one of the forces that can create genuine barriers to self-interested action. That is, arguably, why it exists.

So when a politician who has made his faith a public credential turns around and tells the head of that faith to stay in his lane, it is not just an argument about theology. It is a signal about what religion is being used for — and what it is no longer being asked to do.

Lebanon Ceasefire talks

Israel and Lebanon met in Washington on Tuesday for diplomatic talks aimed at securing a ceasefire in Lebanon. The Lebanese ambassador to the United States met her Israeli counterpart for talks hosted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. These were the first direct talks between the countries in more than thirty years

IMF Downgrade

The International Monetary Fund said the economic outlook has “abruptly darkened” because of the war. The Washington-based lender of last resort, which monitors the stability of the global financial system and provides emergency loans to struggling nations, downgraded its global growth forecast for 2026 to 3.1 percent, down from a pre-war projection of 3.4 percent. Even if the guns go quiet tomorrow, a lot of the damage has been done: the initial shock has already triggered a massive spike in energy costs, disrupted critical shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz, and created a climate of uncertainty that has caused businesses to pull back — delaying hiring, shelving expansion, and waiting to see what comes next.

An additional example of damage already being done - according to a Farm Bureau survey earlier this week, nearly six in 10 farmers reported worsening finances, reflecting rising fertilizer and fuel costs during spring planting resulting from the conflict in the Middle East.

Producer Price Index

Wholesale inflation surged to a three-year high in March as higher prices for energy affected the component parts of finished goods. The Bureau of Labor Statistics– which tracks the Producer Price Index to identify costs businesses pay before goods reach consumers to signal where future retail prices are headed– reported that it hit an annual rate of 4%. While a 15.7% spike in gasoline prices drove nearly half of the monthly increase, the monthly rise of 0.5% was actually lower than the 1.1% economists had feared. This tamer-than-expected result was largely a matter of timing: the data was collected on March 10 — just two weeks after the initial strikes — meaning the full weight of the subsequent blockade and the resulting $100-a-barrel oil prices had not yet been captured.

We’re still waiting to see if the tariff shoe will drop. For now, businesses are absorbing tariff and shipping costs rather than passing them on to consumers — eating the higher prices to keep goods moving. They can afford to do this because they stocked up on imported goods before the tariffs took effect, buying non taxed materials ahead in bulk and warehousing the inventory. Once those stockpiles run out, they face a choice: raise prices, or keep eating the import taxes. To be determined.

Proud Boys

While Donald Trump proposes a 250-foot arch for Washington and a 90,000 square-foot White House ballroom, he is erasing less visible American monuments — like the rule of law.

The Justice Department moved Tuesday to dismiss the seditious conspiracy convictions — won at trial — of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers members who led the January 6 attack on the Capitol. These are the most serious charges to emerge from one of the largest federal investigations in American history.

Trump pardoned over 1,000 January 6 defendants on his first day back in office. He spared 14, commuting their sentences instead. Trump later pardoned one outright. Another had his conviction dismissed earlier this year. The remaining 12 — eight Oath Keepers, four Proud Boys — are now the subject of Tuesday’s motion. If a judge approves, the seditious conspiracy charges disappear entirely.

What gets erased isn’t just the convictions. It’s the legal finding, established at trial, that these men conspired to stop the peaceful transfer of power by force. That’s the sentence the Justice Department is now asking a court to strike from the record.

META AI Version of Zuckerberg

Meta is building an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with employees in his place — trained on his mannerisms, tone, public statements, and current thinking on company strategy. The goal, per the FT, is to make staff “feel more connected to the founder.” Zuckerberg is personally involved in training and testing his own replica.

We here at Stack the Week are working on a similar project in the hopes that we might create a more human product than interaction with our founder will allow.

Wednesday, April 15

Iran War

Wednesday felt like a war holding its breath. The ceasefire hit its midway point, the blockade had not caused an incident, and President Trump seemed anxious to get a deal. Iran showed no particular indication it was moving toward one — CNN reported that Iran was quietly clearing buried missile launchers from underground tunnels during the ceasefire. Thousands of additional troops were headed to the Middle East, set to arrive at the end of the month — which military analysts read as a buildup timed to coincide with the ceasefire’s expiration on April 22.

A new Quinnipiac poll found that 65% of voters blame the president “a lot” or “some” for the recent spike in gas prices. Trump’s overall job approval remains at 38%; his approval on the economy has matched an all-time low of 38%. Sixty-four percent of voters deemed the president’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight” unacceptable, and 65% oppose the bombing of Iranian civilian infrastructure — a distinction voters appear to be drawing clearly.

New intelligence reports circulated Wednesday suggesting that Iran has relocated key centrifuge components to deep-bore tunnels in the Zagros Mountains. On Tuesday, the Israeli Defense Minister said the total removal of enriched uranium from Iran is now a “threshold condition” for any permanent peace deal.

The Financial Times reported Wednesday that Iran secretly acquired a Chinese spy satellite that gave the Islamic Republic a powerful new capability to target U.S. military bases across the Middle East.

Three consecutive targeted strikes killed four Lebanese rescue workers and wounded six others — just one day after the historic Israel-Lebanon talks in Washington. The attacks hit the first group of medics responding to wounded civilians, a second group trying to help the first, and a third group rushing to aid both. Since the Israel-Hezbollah war began March 2, at least 91 Lebanese medical workers have been killed. The overall death toll in Lebanon reached 2,167.

Senate War Powers Vote

For the fourth time this year, the Senate voted Wednesday not to end the war. The measure failed 47-52, with Rand Paul the lone Republican voting to invoke the War Powers Act, and John Fetterman the lone Democrat voting against it. Jim Justice, Republican of West Virginia, didn’t vote. The tally was identical to the March 24 vote.

The resolutions are largely symbolic — Trump could veto any that passed — but the harder test is approaching on a fixed schedule. Under the War Powers Act, the president must terminate military operations after 60 days unless Congress has voted to authorize the use of force. That deadline arrives around May 1. Congress can end the war, approve it, or watch the administration proceed in defiance of the statute.

Arriving at roughly the same moment will be the war funding request — a supplemental spending bill to pay for the conflict on top of the regular defense budget. The Pentagon originally asked for $200 billion — a non-starter even with Trump’s own party. Fiscal conservatives led by Rand Paul and members of the Freedom Caucus balked at adding that sum to the deficit without equivalent spending cuts, arguing that even a necessary conflict shouldn’t be a blank check. A second faction was wary of the number’s implications: $200 billion doesn’t signal a surgical campaign, it signals a multi-year ground engagement — the kind of open-ended commitment that haunted the supplemental funding bills for Iraq and Afghanistan. The administration has since trimmed the ask to between $80 and $100 billion.

The request still hasn’t been formally sent to Congress. When it is, Sen. Jim Lankford called it “the big vote” — because unlike the War Powers resolutions, the power of the purse is one Congress actually holds. Approving the supplemental would mean voting to finance a war that was never formally authorized. Rejecting it would mean deciding to starve it.

“It takes money to kill bad guys,” Hegseth said when the $200 billion figure surfaced last month.

Mike Johnson and Pope Leo

On Wednesday, Speaker Johnson said he was “taken a little bit aback” by Pope Leo’s suggestion that God doesn’t hear the prayers of those who wage war. “It’s a very well-settled matter of Christian theology,” Johnson said. “There’s something called the just war doctrine.”

The Pope wasn’t making an argument about whether this war meets the criteria for justification. He’s making a theological argument that God doesn’t take sides in human violence. Render unto Caesar means the state has its domain — it doesn’t mean God endorses what Caesar does in it. Leo is not saying war is wrong by the standards of international law. He’s saying don’t recruit Jesus into it.

Johnson appears to be invoking just war doctrine as if it were a checklist — fill out the criteria, get the blessing, proceed with the incendiary devices. That’s precisely what just war doctrine isn’t. Augustine developed it as a set of questions designed to create moral friction — to make violence harder to justify, not easier. The criteria aren’t a green light. They’re a gauntlet. A serious just war thinker doesn’t say “we’ve met the criteria.” He asks: have we, really? At what cost? Are we sure? What happens next?

It’s a set of constraints meant to limit violence, to make Christians reluctant warriors rather than enthusiastic ones, and to hold them morally accountable for every life taken even in a justifiable cause. Augustine didn’t think war was good. He thought it was sometimes unavoidable in a fallen world — and that the framework existed to ensure it was never comfortable.

The traditional criteria for a just war are just cause, right intention, proper authority, last resort, probability of success, and proportionality. The Iran war has challenges on at least three: whether diplomatic exhaustion preceded military action, whether the stated objectives are achievable, and whether threatening to destroy “a whole civilization” falls within any definition of proportionality.

Pope Leo XIV belongs to the Order of Saint Augustine — the same religious order Augustine himself founded — this means he didn’t just study Augustine’s theology, he took vows to live by it.

Augustine wrote the framework. Johnson, a Baptist, cited Augustine to correct him.

Stock Market Happy.

The stock market showed signs Wednesday that it is betting the war is almost over — Trump said so, and the ceasefire signals were convincing enough to push the S&P and Nasdaq to record highs. But oil stayed near $100 a barrel, which means the energy market isn’t so sure. On the other hand, Energy stocks fell because if the war ends, the price spike ends. Tech rose because cheap energy and a stable world are good for growth. The two are moving in opposite directions because they’re pricing in different outcomes.

JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon warned that inflation may not be fully under control, calling it the “skunk at the party,” and flagged that an energy shock could force rates higher again.

Mortgage applications dropped another 5% on Wednesday as the 30-year fixed rate officially touched 7.02% at several major lenders. This is the first time rates have crossed the 7% threshold in 2026, driven directly by the fear of people who lend money in the bond market that energy prices will stay high, raising overall prices, and therefore making every dollar they lend worth less when they get it back.

The Commerce Department released preliminary March data Wednesday showing a 1.2% decline in retail sales. It turns out that when gas prices spike, people stop buying clothes and electronics.

Sudan in its Fourth Year of War

Sudan entered its fourth year of civil war this week. The United Nations calls it the world’s most severe humanitarian crisis — an “atrocities laboratory” where weaponized sexual violence and ethnic cleansing have become commonplace. At least 400,000 people are dead. Two out of three Sudanese — 34 million people — need outside assistance to survive. Eight hundred thousand face severe acute malnutrition, the kind that kills. Fourteen million have been driven from their farmland, leaving much of the population of 50 million surviving on one meal a day or less. At a malnutrition center in Port Sudan, the number of children arriving each week has doubled since the war began. The center has 16 beds. It sees 60 children a week. Several share a mattress.

The war in Iran is making it worse. The spike in fuel and fertilizer prices has pushed food out of reach for a population already starving. A donor conference in Berlin pledged $1.53 billion in aid Wednesday. Officials say it doesn’t matter — no amount of money stabilizes a country where gold-funded militias are still fighting.

Denise Brown, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Sudan: “Please don’t call this a forgotten crisis. I’m referring to this as an abandoned crisis.”

Judicial Firings

The ongoing clash between executive and judicial branches took another turn Wednesday. On Monday, Trump fired the two immigration judges who blocked the deportations of student activists Rümeysa Öztürk and Mohsen Mahdawi. Unlike federal judges in the independent judicial branch, immigration judges are part of the Justice Department and can be hired or dismissed by the attorney general.

In a rare show of defiance from the right, three Republican-appointed judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — long considered the most conservative in the federal system — issued a joint statement Wednesday expressing “deep concern” and characterizing the dismissals as direct “interference with judicial independence.” The American Bar Association labeled the firings an “unprecedented assault on the separation of powers.”

If a judge knows that ruling against the administration results in immediate termination, the bench ceases to be a check and becomes a department of the executive. By Wednesday, the legal community had begun to frame this not as a policy dispute over deportations, but as a stress test for judicial independence itself — and whether the courts can remain a separate branch of government.

Visit to the Fed

The week’s most jarring separation of powers visual occurred Tuesday at the Federal Reserve’s headquarters. Prosecutors from U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office made an unannounced visit to the Fed’s $2.5 billion renovation site, reportedly attempting to “check on progress.” After questioning construction workers, Pirro’s deputies were blocked from the site and referred to the Fed’s legal team.

The investigation focuses on Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s 2025 testimony regarding the project’s costs which the president says was fraudulent. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg has already characterized the Justice Department’s subpoenas related to the case as “pretextual” — suggesting the criminal probe is a thinly veiled attempt to pressure Powell into resigning or bend the Fed’s interest-rate policy to suit the president. The job site visit tested a new tactic: using the DOJ’s investigative power not just in court, but physically, to intimidate an institution the law is designed to keep independent.

The Fed’s outside counsel, Robert Hur– the former special counsel who looked into Joe Biden’s treatment of classified materials– objected in writing: “It is not appropriate for you to try to circumvent” the court’s finding that the probe is pretextual. Trump has threatened to fire Powell if he remains on the board after his chair term expires May 15.

Italy and Israel

Italy suspended its military cooperation agreement with Israel this week after Israeli forces fired on a convoy of Italian UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, damaging an armored vehicle. No one was hurt, but Italy summoned the Israeli ambassador and Prime Minister Meloni called it “irresponsible and unacceptable.” The peacekeepers are part of UNIFIL — a UN force stationed in southern Lebanon since 1978 to keep the peace between Israel and Hezbollah. Italy has roughly 1,200 soldiers there.

Trump responded by attacking Meloni : “I’m shocked at her. I thought she had courage, but I was wrong.” His complaint wasn’t about Israel — it was that Italy had refused to join the U.S. in its attacks on Iran. Meloni, once one of Trump’s closest European allies, is now being publicly rebuked by him for not going to war.

Turkey school shootings

A 14-year-old student killed 9 people — 8 students and a teacher — and wounded 13 others at a middle school in Kahramanmaraş on Wednesday, using five guns and seven magazines he brought in his backpack, believed to belong to his father, a former police officer. It is the deadliest school shooting in Turkish history, occurring 28 hours after another shooting in Siverek that injured 16. School shootings are rare in Turkey, which has strict gun laws requiring licensing, registration, and mental and criminal background checks.

Live Nation/Ticketmaster

A Manhattan jury found Live Nation and Ticketmaster liable Wednesday for operating an illegal monopoly, using its ownership of amphitheaters to coerce artists into using its own promotion services and blocking independent competitors from the market. Internal messages proved damaging: one executive referred to customers as “so stupid” and boasted about “robbing them blind, baby.” Recorded calls showed CEO Michael Rapino threatening the Barclays Center in Brooklyn — use Ticketmaster, or Live Nation stops routing major artists to your venue.

The trial took a remarkable detour in March when the Trump administration’s DOJ attempted to settle mid-trial for $280 million and the divestiture of 13 amphitheaters — negotiated in private, without the court’s knowledge. Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia rejected it as a “drop in the bucket” and continued the litigation without the federal government. The judge, reportedly furious, let them proceed. They won.

The jury found Ticketmaster overcharged fans by an average of $1.72 per ticket over four years — which sounds small until you multiply it across hundreds of millions of transactions. The judge can levy financial penalties or force a breakup reversing the 2010 Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger.

Allbirds and AI

Allbirds — the company that built an empire on “sustainable wool sneakers” — officially became NewBird AI.

Allbirds didn’t pivot to AI. It died as a shoe company, kept the stock ticker, and started a completely different business. Two weeks ago it sold the actual Allbirds brand — the name, the wool, the whole sustainability story — for $39 million. The shoes you see in stores have nothing to do with the company trading on the stock market. That company is now called NewBird AI, and it plans to buy Nvidia chips and rent them out to businesses that can’t get computing power from Amazon or Microsoft. They also quietly asked shareholders to remove environmental conservation from their corporate charter, because running massive energy-hungry data centers is the opposite of their founding mission. The stock jumped 700% in a day — not because anyone thinks a failed shoe company knows anything about artificial intelligence, but because “AI” is currently the only sector where the up button still works. It is the Ship of Theseus: replace the product, the mission, the leadership, and the name, keep the ticker. Wall Street doesn’t care whether it’s the same company. It cares that the price went up.

Picasso Win

In America, a lottery ticket wins you buckets of cash. In Paris, where everything is a little more cultured, a raffle ticket wins you a Picasso. A Paris software salesman named Ari Hodara bought one for €100 last weekend and won a 1941 gouache called “Tête de Femme,” valued at more than $1 million, drawn at Christie’s. When the organizer called to tell him, he thought it was a phishing scam. It wasn’t. Picassos have sold for $179 million. He paid $117. The Alzheimer’s Research Foundation, which organized the raffle, raised €12 million from ticket sales. Everyone won.

Dolly Beats the World.

Dolly Parton is a winner. She beat every world leader in a University of Massachusetts poll that asked 1,000 Americans what they thought of more than 20 global figures. Dolly Parton won with a net favorability of 65%. Barack Obama was second at 14%. In a poll that included every living American president, the only ones with positive net favorability were Parton, Obama, and George W. Bush. Trump came in at -18%, one point ahead of Biden. Taylor Swift, the only other musician in the poll, scored 3%.

Thursday, April 16

Iran War

On Thursday, Israel and Lebanon agreed to a 10-day ceasefire.

The U.S. military said Thursday it had turned back 13 ships since launching its blockade of Iranian ports. Defense Secretary Hegseth warned Iran “we’re watching you” and said the U.S. was “locked and loaded” for renewed combat if Tehran didn’t agree to a peace deal.

“We have a very good relationship with Iran right now,” Donald Trump told reporters Thursday, suggesting talks toward an end to hostilities are continuing.

At least 3,375 people have been killed in Iran since the U.S. and Israel began strikes in February, according to IRIB, Iran’s state broadcaster

Airlines are facing higher costs, and Airports Council International Europe has warned of the risk of a “systemic jet fuel shortage” if traffic through the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t normalize by the end of month.

More Pope

Late Thursday, the president told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that he wasn’t angry with the Pope. He also said to ABC’s Rachel Scott: “I’m all about the Gospel. I’m about it as much as anybody can be.”

U.S. Net Crude Exporter

Reuters reported The US nearly turned into a net crude exporter last week for the first time since World War II. U.S. crude exports hit 5.2 million barrels a day as refineries in Asia and Europe, cut off from Middle Eastern supply by the Strait of Hormuz blockade, turned to American oil to keep their economies running. The last time the U.S. exported more than it imported consistently was 1943, when it was fueling the Allied war effort.

The math driving it is simple. International crude is trading nearly $21 higher per barrel than American crude, because there is almost no physical oil available in Europe or Asia at any price. So American oil gets loaded onto tankers and shipped across oceans while the U.S. simultaneously imports heavy crude from Canada and Mexico to keep its own refineries running — because American refineries are built for the thick oil we get from our neighbors, not the light crude we actually produce. We are exporting our best oil to the world while buying someone else’s to run our own gas stations.

There is a ceiling. Analysts say the U.S. can’t move much more than 6 million barrels a day out of the Gulf Coast — not enough pipelines, not enough tankers. The world needs more than America can physically deliver.

Russian attack on Ukraine

Russia unleashed its deadliest attack so far this year on Ukraine overnight Thursday — 659 drones and 44 missiles fired in waves at five cities simultaneously, designed to saturate air defenses across the country at once rather than concentrate on a single target. At least 18 people were killed, including a child, and 118 wounded. Ukraine intercepted 667 of the 703 projectiles — a 95% success rate that still left 32 getting through to dense residential neighborhoods in Kyiv and Odessa.

The math of modern missile warfare: even a nearly perfect defense is catastrophic at sufficient volume.

The timing was not accidental. The 32-hour Orthodox Easter ceasefire had just collapsed.

The strike is one of the most concentrated aerial assaults since the invasion began.

Europe is watching how the new Prime Minister in Hungary will change dynamics to support Ukraine. Peter Magyar is expected to stop blocking the €90 billion EU loan for Ukraine and the transit of NATO hardware through Hungarian territory. Maygar’s tone is already clearly in support of Ukraine, telling a crowd on Monday: “Ukraine is the victim of this war. Everyone knows that. No one should tell Ukraine under what conditions it must enter peace or sign a peace treaty. We cannot ask any country to give up its territory. If they do, they would be considered traitors.” In NATO, Hungary is moving from being a “troublemaker” to a “follower of the consensus,” which allows the alliance to plan long-term support for Ukraine without the constant threat of a Budapest-led derailment. This is particularly important as Europe figures out how to maintain its security with the United States stepping back.

Utah and Measles Cases

Nearly 600 people, mostly children, have been infected in a measles outbreak that began along the Utah-Arizona border last summer and has now spread into the broader population — not, as in past outbreaks, through an isolated religious community, but through ordinary Utah families. A third of those diagnosed have ended up in emergency rooms, mostly for severe dehydration. Forty-nine have been hospitalized. Utah allows parents to opt out of school vaccine requirements for personal or religious reasons; in the last school year, 11 percent of kindergartners were unvaccinated or undocumented — up from 7 percent before Covid. Measles needs 95 percent vaccination coverage to stop spreading. Utah doesn’t have it.

Dr. Trahern Jones, a pediatric infectious disease specialist in Salt Lake City, described the situation: “It’s kind of like if you were a firefighter trying to put out a house fire, and somebody is standing on the hose trying to have a philosophical debate with you about whether water is good or not.”

That debate had a scheduled venue Thursday. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared before Congress for his first budget hearing, where Democrats pressed him on vaccine-preventable diseases, proposed cuts of nearly $16 billion — 12.5% — to HHS, and the death of an unvaccinated child during last year’s Texas measles outbreak. Asked directly whether the measles vaccine could have saved that child’s life, Kennedy said: “It’s possible — certainly.” When a Democratic congressman said “kids have died because measles is running rampant under your watch,” Kennedy accused Democrats of being “the ones that gave us the chronic disease epidemic.”

In the hearing, Kennedy also said that the president’s threat to “end Iranian civilization,” was actually “a message of love and compassion to the Iranian people.”

South Africa Gunfire

A magistrate court gave South African opposition politician Julius Malema a five-year prison sentence for firing a rifle in the air at a rally. This may have been a decision based on mere gun possession and not that firing guns in the air is a dangerous thing to do. I couldn’t tell from the ruling. But I’ve always wondered about footage of people celebrating by firing their rifles up in the air and wondered what happens to the bullets? They come down. They can hurt people. A landmark study done in the 90s of celebratory gunfire in Los Angeles found that those hit by falling bullets faced a nearly 33% mortality rate, a figure over five times higher than the 6% rate for typical shooting victims. This extreme lethality is driven by physics: because the bullets descend from the sky, they strike the head in the vast majority of cases, and even at terminal velocity, they retain more than enough speed to penetrate the human skull.

Artemis II Crew Homecoming

The four astronauts of the Artemis II mission — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — gave their first major interviews Thursday. What came through was less a mission debrief than a collective attempt to translate the untranslatable. Glover described the moment a set of parachutes broke away and the capsule went into free fall: “If you dove off a skyscraper backwards, that’s what it felt like for five seconds.” Koch said that even after returning to Earth she was convinced she was still floating and had to talk herself out of it — and that when the hatch opened, she simply screamed. “It was just pure elation,” she said, “and just a visceral, emotional reaction to not only being home, but people there coming to us and bringing us out — just unspeakable joy.” Wiseman, asked whether the crew could have handled a longer mission, was matter-of-fact: “We would have gone another three months. If we were going to Mars, we would have been just fine on that spacecraft.” On all the medical testing waiting for them on the ground, he offered the cleaner formulation: “We are data.” But it was Glover who reached for something harder to measure — describing the moment on the Navy recovery ship when he sought out the chaplain, a man he’d never met. “I am not really a religious person,” he said, “but there was no other avenue for me to explain anything or to experience anything.” When he saw the cross on the chaplain’s collar, he broke down. “It’s very hard,” he said, “to fully grasp what we just went through.”

Friday April 17

Iran War

The Strait of Hormuz reopened to commercial shipping Friday, though Iran said ships must follow a “coordinated route” running close to its coast, just one way in which the terms remain unclear under the new agreement.

Trump initially celebrated Iran’s announcement with a social media post — misnaming the waterway “the Strait of Iran” — before clarifying that the U.S. naval blockade remains in “full force and effect” until a “transaction with Iran is 100% complete.” He specifically cited Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and a three-page memorandum of understanding currently being negotiated in Islamabad. Shipping analysts warn that Iranian mines laid in late March continue to deter some captains despite the ceasefire. The U.S. Navy has begun mine-clearing operations in a strait that typically handles more than 100 vessel crossings per day.

Markets treated the reopening as one of the most dramatic relief rallies in recent memory. Brent Crude dropped $12.87 — nearly 13% — to $86.52 a barrel. The Dow surged as much as 1,139 points. The S&P 500 rose 1.2%, its third straight week of gains and its longest such streak since October 2025.

House Spying Legislation.

Section 702 of FISA allows the government to spy on foreigners abroad without a warrant. However, if an American—like you—communicates with one of those foreign targets, your emails, texts, and phone records are “incidentally” sucked into a massive NSA database. Once that data is in the system, federal agencies like the FBI can search it using your name, email, or phone number without ever asking a judge for a warrant.

This loophole sparked a floor-fight in Congress this week. While the administration and Speaker Johnson pushed for a “clean” extension to keep the surveillance power intact during the war, an unlikely alliance of MAGA Republicans and progressive Democrats blocked the move. They worried that without a new warrant requirement—which would force the government to show a judge probable cause of a crime before searching an American’s data—the FBI would continue to use the database to bypass the Fourth Amendment and target citizens at will. This stalemate forced a frantic, 10-day stopgap just to keep the program from expiring while the two sides fight over whether the government should have to knock before entering your digital life.

Buying Starts At Home.

Tesla Cybertrucks are very popular with the company that makes Tesla Cybertrucks.

SpaceX alone accounted for 1,279 Cybertrucks — more than 18% of the 7,071 registered in the U.S. during the fourth quarter, according to S&P Global Mobility data provided to Bloomberg. Other Musk ventures, including xAI, Boring Co., and Neuralink, acquired another 60. Strip those out and fourth-quarter Cybertruck registrations fall 51%. Nearly one in five Cybertrucks registered during the period moved from one part of Musk’s empire to another — purchases likely exceeding $100 million in value, which have continued into this year. Consumer demand for the pickup, only two years into its commercial life, is faltering. Possible reasons include Musk’s political polarization, the car’s reputation for shoddy workmanship or that it looks like a matchbox car, which is to say a matchbox with wheels on it.

The trucks are selling. They’re just not selling to the public.

Not Your Fault

A woman who fell down a flight of stairs and injured herself after she drank at least 14 shots of tequila in just over eight hours on a Carnival cruise has been awarded $300,000 in damages by a federal jury in Miami. The woman, Diana Sanders, a nurse from Vacaville, Calif., sued Carnival in 2024. Sanders’ team argued that bartenders on her cruise had been negligent for continuing to serve her shots even though she was visibly intoxicated. Unlike a local dive bar where drinks are paid for in cash, cruise ships track every single transaction via the passenger’s “Sail & Sign” card. The timestamp of all the shots showed a pace of nearly two shots per hour for eight hours straight, arguing that any trained bartender should have cut her off hours before the fall. Sanders had asked for $250,000 in damages, but was awarded $300,000 on Friday, the result of a finding which allocated 60 percent of the responsibility to the cruise line and 40 percent to Sanders herself.

A lawsuit against gravity, the concept of consequences, and the general principle that actions produce outcomes may still be pending.

Thank you so much, all of you, for reading this far or listening to this week’s offering. If you’ve gotten this far you are a sturdy and worthy citizen.

The president’s depiction of himself as Christ in a social media posting calls to mind those people who would more closely fit that qualification. I think about Senator John Ashcroft’s line from so many years ago: If you were accused of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you.

If you believe in Christ you’ve no doubt met people who shine through with what you understand to be Christ-like love, charity, purity. Some of them may not even be believers. To witness that peace and grace is ruined by trying to fix it in words because that doesn’t do it justice. It is beautiful because whatever the faith of the person who displays these characteristics, it has the power to remind us who we are, what matters—and that this remains available to all of us. I write this as a Christian, but I know devout members of many other faiths who shine through like this.

I locate this feeling in my faith, which reminds me that for a lot of people, this isn’t abstract—faith is how they get out of bed, how they bury their parents, how they raise their kids. How they get through the dimming of the day. That’s not a meme.

I find these qualities overwhelming and their source out of reach sometimes, but even in my moments of greatest doubt I’ve always been drawn to the example of people who live their lives in sync with their beliefs to such an extent that you can see those beliefs shine through, and it makes you want to stand in that light.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​