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