Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for May 11th through the 15th. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player.
Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering.
A summit with two leaders claiming two outcomes. A war with no outcome, a UK administration with ministers coming out, Cuba is just plain out. The battle of prices vs. wages, tech bro vs. tech bro and ICE against the judiciary. Hey, Neanderthals are smarter than we thought but smart cars are dumber. All things you can talk about with your neighbor.
Let’s take it day by day.
Monday May 11
Which will collapse faster? The ceasefire in Iran or the UK Prime Minister? Or will it be citizens melting on the streets of India? Gas prices are making the president sweaty so he’s offering the equivalent of a paddle fan. Young Americans are glum about jobs. Maybe they should go outside and play. We all should.
Iran
Day 73 of the war.
Twenty-nine days since the president said Iran was desperate to make a deal.
Twenty-five days since he told CBS News that Iran had “agreed to everything.” On Monday, the president called Iran’s actual response “garbage” and said he hadn’t finished reading it.
He did, however, finish describing the ceasefire. “I would say the ceasefire is on massive life support,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, adding that it was “unbelievably weak.”
Iran’s formal response to the administration’s one-page peace proposal is not materially different than Iran’s position before the bombs started falling. Indeed, Iran is asking for reparations for the bombs, so Iran is asking for more that it would have before the war.
The rest of the list: a regional ceasefire — including no Israeli strikes in Lebanon. Sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, requiring all commercial vessels to coordinate with the Iranian Navy. Lifting of all U.S. sanctions, removal of the naval blockade, and an end to the ban on Iranian oil sales.
On the nuclear question — the most often stated reason in the carousel of justifications the US has put forward for the war — Iran reportedly proposed a moratorium on enrichment far shorter than the 20 years the U.S. demanded, offered to export only a portion of its highly enriched uranium while diluting the rest, and refused to dismantle its nuclear facilities.
Iranian leaders also demanded a formal guarantee of non-aggression. In other words, you can’t hit us if we don’t comply.
There’s also a third player in this discussion of an Iranian end state. In an interview with Major Garret on 60 minutes, the Israeli Prime Minister said the war would not be over until all enriched uranium was removed from Iran, its enrichment sites dismantled, its proxy networks dissolved, and its ballistic missile production curtailed. Tall order.
Gas Tax
On Monday the president said he plans to suspend the federal gas tax “for a period of time.” “I think it’s a great idea,” he said. Several Democratic lawmakers have already introduced legislation to either pause or lower the tax.
But suspending the excise taxes — 18.4 cents off a $4.52 gallon on gas and 24.4 cents on diesel — requires an act of Congress and would cost the federal government roughly half a billion dollars a week.
The lost revenue would land on a federal debt that crossed 100 percent of GDP mark this spring for the first time outside of an emergency like a pandemic or war.
Hantavirus cruise
The cruise brochures don’t usually highlight the biocontainment units.
On Monday, two of the 17 Americans airlifted from the MV Hondius cruise ship— that’s the one bristling with clouds of virus whipped up from rodent droppings— arrived sealed inside portable isolation pods — negative-pressure units where the air inside is kept lower than the air outside, so nothing contaminated can leak out through a seam or tear. Everything passes through HEPA filters that trap 99.97 percent of particles.
The Andes variant of hantavirus is far less communicable than Covid-19, but three passengers on the cruise ship Hondius have died from the hantavirus, which WHO has linked to rodent exposure during the voyage. It starts with flu-like symptoms and then floods the lungs with fluid until the patient drowns from the inside.
The Americans were transported to the National Quarantine Unit in Nebraska — one of the few facilities in the country built for exactly this.
Since patients exposed may not develop symptoms for over a month, their quarantine period could last up to 42 days, according to the Times. This presents psychological challenges. The NQU is windowless and high-containment, which creates its own problem: patients in strict isolation lose track of time, and losing track of time makes people lose their minds.
The facility counters this with a circadian lighting system that shifts the color temperature throughout the day — warm ambers at night, vivid greens and blues during daylight hours. The green light suppresses melatonin more effectively than other wavelengths, resetting the body’s clock when the body has no other cues. It’s a small, strange detail: a building designed to keep the deadliest diseases from getting out, engineered down to the color of the light to keep the people inside from falling apart.
This is Nuts
This all sounds very complicated, but nothing as complicated as the operation to deliver medical supplies to one of the passengers quarantined on the remote volcanic island of Tristan da Cunha, a British territory in the south Atlantic. If you’ve ever looked at a globe and wondered about those little flecks in the middle of the vast ocean, this is one of those flecks.
Tristan da Cunha is Britain’s most remote inhabited overseas territory. It is accessible only by boat, has no airstrip, and has a population of 221 inhabitants.
Oxygen supplies on the island were at a critical level, so there was no time for delay getting care to the patient who had disembarked from the plague ship and was quarantined in the hospital on the island. A two‑bed facility with a two‑person medical team.
So British soldiers dropped out of the sky to help. First, they flew almost 7,000 km to the closest airbase and then 3,000 more km to waddle to the end of the back bay of their lumbering plane and parachute down on to Tristan carrying oxygen canisters and 3 tons of medical equipment. (or I guess they pronounce it tonnes; at least that is how it’s spelled here.)
Oh and the plane had to refuel in mid-air because the island is just so damn remote. And the average wind speed is 25 MPH so you can imagine what a joy that was to drop down into. The mission was a success. But the soldiers had to wait for a boat since you can’t parachute up and out.
Keir Starmer
That is a story of extraordinary achievement from the good people of Great Britain.
Less smooth-running Monday, was the operation of the British government. Things were extraordinary there, but not for the same good reasons.
On Monday it appeared that the British Prime Minister was about to Keir over. Keir Starmer gave a speech to an audience of Labour party lawmakers and activists in an attempt to save his political life.
Now, before we go too much further on this, I’d like to take a tiny little detour (which, when you add them together, will add up to an hour and forty five minute podcast.) All week long, you probably have been hearing about the predicament of Keir Starmer. But what’s been totally absent, and the reason I find Stack the Week meaningful, if you’ll pardon this personal interlude, is that it forces intentional thinking about what’s really going on here.
What’s happening in Britain is a version of what’s happening in the United States. Both are liberal democracies. Liberal democracies find it difficult to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. The situations faced by the governments in the UK and the United States include managing immigration, inequality, the high cost of the routes to prosperity, misinformation, the distracting appeal of the attention economy.
All that we experience in the United States, they also face in the UK. And just as in the United States, populist leaders are making big promises to the voters who are fed up with the collapse of the institutions that have promised them so much and that seem full of elites out of touch with their lives.
So, I don’t think it’s too much to say that all of these stories about Keir Starmer falling down the stairs of his prime ministership are an echo of what we experience here in the United States. It would have been so useful if, during the week, in all of the reporting about what’s happening to Starmer, that kind of context could have been given to people, so they could see it in their own lives instead of as some distant circus with hard to pronounce players like Plaid Cymru.
The proximate cause of Starmer’s predicament was a disastrous showing by Starmer’s labour party in council elections. They lost over 1,500 councilors. Councils are the local government, but whereas in the United States, a city council falls under State power, in the UK they are creatures of Parliament. So in the UK, local councils and the national Parliament are like two floors of the same house, whereas in the US, they are more like separate buildings on the same street.
So the “fortunes” of a British council are almost entirely tethered to the national party’s brand. Hence, a bad result there runs all the way up to the head of the political body.
So when 40 MPs called for Starmer to resign after Thursday’s losses, it’s because those MPs know that the “council fortunes” are a direct preview of their own. If the voters are firing the local Labour councillors today, they are planning to fire the Labour MPs tomorrow.
Why the losses?
The “big losses” stemmed from voter dissatisfaction on the left and right. On the right, Reform UK, the nationalist party led by Nigel Farage capitalized on a weak economy, stagnant GDP growth (hovering near 0.1%) and high interest rates and immigration concerns, to flip traditional labour areas in the heartland. Farage is promising a very Donald Trump-like mass deportation scheme, an end to liberal cultural interventions— what might be called wokeness in the United States— and he’s promising to cut the foreign aid budget in half.
On the left, the Green Party and Plaid Cymru (Plied Kum-ree) (in Wales) – That was me speaking Welsh there– surged as progressive voters rebelled against Starmer’s centrist pivot dropping high-spending socialist pledges in favor of “fiscal discipline.”
Add into the mix a declared ‘national emergency’ over rising antisemitism and a fierce backlash against Starmer’s appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington— despite Mandelson’s considerable ties to Jeffrey Epstein — which cost him support from both flanks at once.
In his speech Monday, Starmer vowed that he would prove his detractors wrong, promised economic reforms to deepen ties with the EU, help younger workers, and nationalize British Steel to save roughly 4,000 jobs.
India is hot
On April 27, every one of the planet’s 50 hottest cities was in one country: India. Average peak temperatures across all 50 hit 112.5 degrees Fahrenheit. The air quality monitoring platform AQI, which compiled the data, said there is “no modern precedent.” But the most dangerous number wasn’t the daytime peak — it was the nighttime low. Cities like Banda recorded minimums near 94 degrees. When the night never drops below 90, the body never resets. Core temperatures stay elevated, organs accumulate stress, and the demand for cooling becomes round-the-clock — which is exactly what the grid can’t handle.
India gets about 4 percent of its power from gas-fired plants, and 60 percent of its liquefied natural gas imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz, which is closed. With gas-fired generation now economically unviable, coal picks up the slack: coal-fired power rose to 164.9 average gigawatts in April, up 3.5 percent from the month before.
To survive heat driven by global warming today, India burns more of the fuel that guarantees worse heat tomorrow. Experts warn temperatures may cross the survivability limit for healthy humans by 2050.
In the meantime, the adaptation is preindustrial: across Delhi and Kerala, community-run water kiosks called thanneer pandals distribute water and oral rehydration salts to laborers and rickshaw drivers who have no choice but to work through it. In the last week of April, two schoolteachers died of heatstroke — not construction workers, not rickshaw drivers, but teachers. Roughly 380 million Indians, about three-fourths of the workforce, labor in heat exposure.
The youngs are pessimistic
If you have a young person in your life who has just graduated from college, give them a hug. In most countries, young people think the job market is better than their parents do. In the United States, it’s the opposite — by the widest margin Gallup has measured anywhere.
Only 43 percent of Americans aged 15 to 34 said it was a good time to find a job locally — 21 points below Americans 55 and older. Since 2023, optimism among younger Americans has dropped 27 points — a plunge comparable to the 2007–2009 financial crisis.
The mechanics explain the mood. From 2023 to 2025, the sectors that usually absorb college graduates — information services, finance, professional services — shed an average of 9,000 jobs a month. Before the pandemic, those same industries added 44,000 jobs a month.
Layoffs are low, companies are holding onto existing staff, and without churn there are no entry-level openings. Graduates apply to hundreds of listings that stay posted but never result in a hire.
Computer engineering, once the safe bet, now carries a 7.8 percent unemployment rate among recent grads as AI automates the junior work that used to be the on-ramp to longer-term employment.
So they compromise. About 69 percent of the Class of 2026 say they’ll settle for less than their ideal role. In 2012, recovering from the Great Recession, roughly 45 percent of graduates reported a similar concession — but they treated it as a temporary setback.
Seventy-five percent of this cohort would take a job they plan to quit within a year just for immediate income. Fifty-two percent of recent graduates are already working jobs that don’t require a degree — the highest mismatch since the 1990s.
The result: degree holders now make up 25 percent of the total unemployed population — double the share in 2008. Oxford Economics estimates a million more young adults are living with their parents than pre-pandemic trends predicted, spending roughly $1,200 less a year than peers who move out.
Cutting paid family leave
And jobs ain’t what they used to be. This week, Zoom cut parental leave to 18 weeks from 22 for most birth mothers and to 10 from 16 for other parents. Deloitte halved paid family leave for certain employees — eight weeks instead of 16. Both companies explained the cuts in the same dialect of corporate euphemism: Zoom cited the “long-term health and sustainability of our business”; Deloitte said it was tailoring benefits to “better align with the marketplace.”
The marketplace they’re aligning with is getting worse.
The share of U.S. employers offering paid family leave dropped two percentage points in 2025, to 31 percent. The United States remains the only wealthy country with no federal paid family leave. What it offers instead is 12 weeks unpaid — and many workers don’t even qualify for that.
Long live recess
Do you need a break? Is it spring where you are? Let’s hold Stack the Week outside today shall we? Better yet, let’s break for recess.
The American Academy of Pediatrics would approve. It just released its first guidance on recess in 13 years. Here it is: “Recess is a necessary break in the day for optimizing a child’s social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development. In essence, recess should be considered a child’s personal time, and it should not be withheld for academic or punitive reasons.”
The guidance is necessary because recess has been in retreat for two decades. After No Child Left Behind introduced high-stakes testing in 2002, roughly 44 percent of school districts cut time from recess, PE, art, and music to make room for more reading and math. The logic was intuitive and wrong: if scores are low, add more instructional minutes.
When you have recess matters too. Teachers and researchers have noted improved behavior and attention once students resume classroom work when recess occurs before lunch. One reason is that it shifts the lunch mindset from a “rush to play” to a “relax to eat” mindset. When they play first they arrive hungry and eat more calories and vegetables. Walking into class from lunch is calmer than walking in from the playground.
But my favorite reason is something called “cognitive spacing.” The brain consolidates learning during breaks — but only if those breaks actually feel like breaks. Memory and focus improve when instructional blocks are punctuated by genuine shifts in environment and activity. Unstructured time lets the prefrontal cortex rest. When a child spends lunch scrambling for a spot in a soccer game or rushing to finish a sandwich, that rest never happens.
And here’s one more fun fact for the dinner table: in one study, schools that replaced one long recess with four 15-minute breaks spread across the day saw cortisol levels — the body’s stress hormone — drop by 70 percent compared to traditional schools. Chronically elevated cortisol in children is linked to executive function deficits, sleep disruption, and the kind of emotional volatility that gets a kid sent to the principal’s office.
Tuesday May 12
Inflation ate your raise, and sent people running from healthcare. Iran is eating the budget. Canadians are bailing and so are Starmer’s allies. And why can’t the benevolent be given the keys to the doom machine?
Iran
Tuesday, Pentagon officials briefed the Senate on the growing cost of the Iran War: $29 billion, up about $4 billion from just two weeks ago. That figure does not include repairing American military facilities damaged in Iranian attacks — another $4 billion estimated.
The Secretary of Defense testified Tuesday to defend the administration’s proposal to raise Pentagon spending by more than 40%, to around $1.5 trillion in 2027.
Mr. Trump was asked whether Americans’ financial situation was motivating him to make a deal with Iran. “Not even a little bit,” he said. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran — they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”
The man asking Congress for $1.5 trillion of Americans’ money says he doesn’t think about their financial situation.
This got a lot of attention as a symbol of the President’s callousness. But a President fighting a war should only care about the war. Where the concern should come in is before a president launches a war, as he considers whether war is really justified and weighs the consequences.
Turning the question of war into a domestic economic issue is natural because it’s an election year and gas prices are how voters feel the war in their lives. But in terms of presidential decision making, it cheapens the overwhelming cost of a war to shrink it down to an election year nuisance.
The Strait of Hormuz gets the attention, but Iran has increased the pain in the world economy in another way. By hitting America’s allies in the Persian Gulf it has choked off oil and gas. Saudi oil exports have fallen by a third, UAE exports by half, and Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait have dropped to nearly zero.
These countries cooperated with the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports — and Iran hit them for it, striking oil infrastructure, disrupting shipping routes, and turning the strait into a no-go zone for commercial tankers. The Gulf states are now losing billions in revenue to support a war whose purpose — eliminating Iran’s nuclear program — hasn’t advanced since the first bombs fell. Or hasn’t advanced much.
At some point a partner taking losses with no considerable return stops being a partner. The UAE’s largest gas plant, heavily damaged by Iranian strikes, won’t return to 80 percent capacity until the end of 2026 — meaning the infrastructure damage outlasts any ceasefire.
Here’s a little blockade update, just to remind us what’s going on while nothing’s going on at the negotiating table. CENTCOM redirected 65 Iranian commercial vessels and disabled four others on Tuesday. As for the negotiating table, maybe they could use it for paper football.
Senator Lindsey Graham and other lawmakers questioned Pakistan’s role as mediator after reports that Iran repositioned military aircraft — including an RC-130 reconnaissance plane — at Pakistan’s Nur Khan Air Force Base to shield them from U.S. and Israeli strikes.
If Iran can park military aircraft on a nominal U.S. partner’s airfield, the coalition holding this war together is fraying from more than one direction — Gulf states bleeding revenue for a war that hasn’t advanced, and now a mediator doubling as a shelter.
In Tehran, the IRGC’s internal security unit conducted exercises in preparation for potential domestic unrest. This is a good sign for the United States that the war is causing enough internal tension that the thugs are limbering up with the batons, such domestic pressure could make Iranian leaders a little more interested in a deal.
CPI
The most recent CNN poll found that 76% of Americans call cost-of-living issues their biggest economic problem. They got a new reason for concern Tuesday. Paychecks aren’t keeping pace with prices. The last time inflation outran average hourly earnings was April 2023. It’s doing it again now.
The consumer price index rose 3.8% in April from a year earlier, up from 3.3% in March — the highest reading in nearly three years. Annual wage growth slowed to 3.6%. In real terms, the average worker’s purchasing power shrank. This is the first time since the Iran conflict began that the inflation tax has fully consumed the average worker’s annual raise.
The headline number was driven by a 28.4% annual surge in gasoline, which traces directly to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and a 44% jump in Brent crude since the fighting started. But the energy shock is no longer staying in the energy column. It’s bleeding into everything that moves by truck or runs on power. Grocery prices jumped 0.7% in April alone — economists point to diesel and energy costs embedded in food production and transport. Shelter, the largest single line in most household budgets, rose 0.6% for the month. Airfares climbed 20.7%, a straight pass-through of jet fuel.
Pick up a tomato and you’re holding the whole mess at once. Tomato prices jumped nearly 40% from a year ago. Unseasonably wet weather in Mexico and freezes in Florida shrank the crop. Tariffs on Mexican tomatoes — roughly 17%, after the administration ended a free-import agreement last year — raised the floor. And war-driven fuel costs raised the price of getting whatever survived to your store.
Open a can of beans instead and you hit a different wall: canned fruits and vegetables cost 5.7% more than a year ago, largely because a tin can accounts for about a third of the wholesale price, and over 80% of the tin plate used in American cans was imported last year. Trump’s steel tariffs pushed those costs straight through to the shelf.
You might wonder why the Federal Reserve doesn’t step in. When wages slow, the Fed typically cuts interest rates to give the economy a boost. But it can only do that if inflation is cooling — and a particular slice of inflation isn’t. Strip out housing and energy, and look at what’s left: insurance premiums, haircuts, tuition, daycare. These are services set by contracts and labor costs, not by the price of a barrel of oil. Once they go up, they tend to stay up — even after the thing that pushed them up comes back down. That category of prices accelerated to a 5.5% annualized pace in April.
So the Fed is stuck. Cutting rates would make borrowing cheaper and give the economy a boost — but it would also risk pushing those already-stubborn prices higher. The medicine for slow wages would make the inflation disease worse.
The story a few weeks ago was that the war made gas expensive. The story now is that expensive gas is making everything else expensive, and the raises aren’t keeping up.
Ink shortage
In other crazy economic effects of the war news: Imagine the brightest packaging you’ve ever seen — a Japanese potato chip bag that could land planes in fog. Not anymore. An ink shortage caused by the Middle East conflict is forcing Japan’s biggest potato-chip maker, Calbee, to switch to black and white. Resins derived from naphtha, a derivative of crude oil, are typically used as a basic ingredient for commercial packaging inks.
Affordable Care Act Marketplace dropouts
Gas prices dominate the anxiety now, but before the war it was healthcare. Last year, 86 percent of Americans said access to quality health care was a part of the American dream, according to a poll by Investopia.
According to reporting from NOTUS, more than one in five Americans who enrolled in health insurance through HealthCare.gov this year were dropped for failing to pay their first month’s premium. Last year the dropout rate was 12%. The difference is the end of the pandemic-era subsidies that Congress — specifically, congressional Republicans — declined to extend in December.
Without them, a silver-tier plan that cost a 30-year-old $50 a month might now cost $300. The people disappearing from the rolls are disproportionately between 25 and 40 — old enough to need coverage, young enough to gamble they won’t.
If the pool shrinks and the people left in it are sicker, the premiums climb further, which drives out the next healthiest layer, which drives premiums up again. You may remember the term used to describe this from the Obamacare years: a death spiral.
Student loan defaulters
I’m just going to call it: Tuesday was the economic bummer marathon.
Here’s another one: For four years, pandemic-era protections drove student loan defaults to zero — not because borrowers got healthier, but because the government stopped reporting missed payments. Now 3.6 million borrowers have defaulted in six months.
The default rate has returned to roughly where it was in late 2019, though the pace of new defaults slowed slightly last quarter, suggesting the worst of the initial shock may have passed.
The average defaulter is 38.9 years old, two and a half years older than before, with a disproportionate spike among borrowers over 50 — student debt that was supposed to be a young person’s problem is following people into the years when they should be building wealth, not losing it.
Credit scores for these borrowers dropped 91 points on average — enough to lock them out of mortgages and auto loans at the point in life when they’d normally be qualifying for both.
And the numbers will get worse: Seven million borrowers haven’t made a payment in months — their repayment plan, the Biden-era SAVE program, was struck down by the Eighth Circuit as exceeding the Department of Education’s authority. Once the clock runs out on the transition window as a result of legal proceedings, they might default too.
The Canadians aren’t coming
A University of Toronto study using cell phone data found that Canadian visits to U.S. metro areas dropped 42% year over year — nearly double the decline that border crossing statistics capture. The snowbird destinations took the obvious hit: Florida, Las Vegas, Disney World. But the more telling losses are in cities where Canadians come to do business, not build sandcastles. San Francisco, Houston, and Grand Rapids — which has deep ties to Ontario’s auto industry — are all seeing sharp declines.
The causes: the Canadian dollar fell below 70 cents U.S. in late 2024 — down from 76 cents that summer — which means a Canadian family that booked a Florida trip in June watched their money lose 10 percent of its value before they ever got on the plane; the political relationship soured; and the 25 percent auto and truck tariffs that landed in mid-2025 mean there are fewer parts contracts to negotiate in Grand Rapids, fewer tech partnerships to pitch in San Francisco, fewer supply chains that require a Canadian engineer to walk an American factory floor.
I declined to insert a little riff on the relationship between the weak Canadian dollar and the weak American dollar, but you can tell me in the comments if you would have liked that kind of a detour.
Starmer
On Monday, UK Prime Minister Starmer gave a speech to save his job. On Tuesday, four ministers walked out while he was still talking about governing.
The urgency isn’t just that Starmer is unpopular — it’s that Labour MPs fear if they don’t find someone better, Nigel Farage and the hard-right Reform UK could actually take power.
The most senior departure was Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, who once said of Labour leaders: “I won’t knife you in the back. I’ll knife you in the front.” She kept her word. What is a safeguarding minister? Covers domestic abuse, child sexual exploitation, modern slavery, stalking, rape policy. Basically the government’s point person on protecting vulnerable people from violence. In her resignation letter, she called Starmer “a good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things” — then added that caring wasn’t enough.
The math on Tuesday: roughly 90 Labour MPs calling for Starmer to go, just over 100 who signed a letter urging him to stay. Starmer told his cabinet he would “get on with governing” and pointed out that no one had triggered the formal process to remove him. That process requires a challenger to secure the backing of 81 MPs — 20% of the parliamentary party. If the 90 dissenters can agree on a single name, the threshold is already met. But they can’t.
Starmer’s position resembles Boris Johnson’s in his final days: insisting the government functions while the ministers who make it function head for the exits. Deputy PM David Lammy urged colleagues to “take a breath.” That might help them relax or give them more air in the lungs for a louder scream.
Trump Administration Churn
It’s churny on this side of the pond too. Over the weekend, the president criticized the two Supreme Court justices he put on the bench for not being loyal to him. I wrote about that on Substack. But loyalty — who has it, who lost it, who never had it — was the organizing principle of the entire week’s personnel chaos.
Start with Cameron Hamilton, whom the president just nominated to lead FEMA. Hamilton is a former Navy SEAL and combat medic with no professional background in emergency management.
Last year, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem subjected him to a polygraph test to find out who leaked details of a meeting about dismantling the agency. Then he told a House subcommittee that eliminating FEMA was not in the country’s best interest. The president had said it was. He was fired the next day. Noem was herself fired in March 2026. Now that she’s gone, Hamilton is back — renominated for the same job he was fired from for doing honestly. FEMA, meanwhile, has operated for more than 15 months without a Senate-confirmed leader.
The agency has had a rough stretch even by its own standards. Earlier this year, the administration fired FEMA’s on-call disaster response staff in what employees called a “New Year’s Eve Massacre,” leaving regional offices nearly empty. A federal judge had to order the administration to stop withholding disaster aid from states that voted against the president.
Then there’s Kari Lake, the failed gubernatorial and Senate candidate who was installed as interim head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, where she attempted to shutter Voice of America. In March, a federal judge ruled she had been serving illegally — never Senate-confirmed — and voided all of her official actions, including mass layoffs. The reward for having her tenure declared null by a court: Trump nominated her this week as Ambassador to Jamaica.
And the doctor is out at the FDA, vanished in a cloud of strawberry-scented vape smoke. Dr. Marty Makary resigned Monday as FDA commissioner, reportedly after refusing to authorize fruit-flavored e-cigarettes that Trump and industry lobbyists wanted approved. Trump also complained: complained that Makary hadn’t done enough to carry out his “Right to Try” legislation aimed at getting experimental therapies to terminally ill patients, according to WSJ reporting. Trump repeatedly brought up a cancer drug he said Makary wouldn’t approve, the people said.
The pattern: install loyalists, skip Senate confirmation, fire anyone who contradicts the president’s position even once, replace them with someone who watched what happened to the last person, and if the original firing becomes inconvenient, rehire the same person.
Charges in Key Bridge collapse
Federal prosecutors charged the Singapore-based operator of the Dali container ship and a senior employee in the 2024 collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, which killed six construction workers. Men doing the necessary mundane work of public life, filling potholes.
The indictment says the ship lost power twice in four minutes as it left port — and the second blackout was preventable. A fuel pump that could have restarted the generators in time wasn’t used because a different pump, one not designed to restart after a blackout, was running instead. The company then covered it up.
Musk v. Altman
Sam Altman defended himself in court Tuesday against Elon Musk’s claim that Altman betrayed OpenAI’s founding mission as a nonprofit that would make AI safe for the world.
It might be easy to see this as a battle between tech behemoths, but the distinction at the heart of this case matters because a nonprofit answers to a mission — in OpenAI’s case, the mission was to develop AI carefully, with safety as the priority, not shareholder returns. A for-profit answers to investors.
When the technology you’re building might be the most powerful and dangerous thing humans have ever created— other than the atom bomb— who you answer to determines how fast you move and how many guardrails you leave in place.
OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit specifically because the people who started it — including Musk — believed AI was too dangerous to build on a profit motive. The question in this trial is whether Altman dismantled that safeguard, and if so, whether he did it with everyone’s knowledge or behind their backs. If it was behind everybody’s backs, yikes! He’s the guy who’s got the keys to the death ray.
The trial offers something else: a map of how powerful people respond to pressure — who gave in, who maneuvered, who looked away. The same kinds of pressures — money, ego, speed, competitive fear — will shape every major AI decision from here forward. How these men handled the small version of the question is a preview of how the big version gets answered.
Altman’s defense: Musk knew the company was heading toward a for-profit model and wanted in — he just wanted to run it. Musk is asking the court to block OpenAI’s conversion to for-profit and remove Altman from the board. If he wins, it’s a gift to OpenAI’s competitors — including Musk’s own AI company, xAI. If he loses, Altman consolidates control of a company now valued at $730 billion and clears the path toward what could be one of the largest IPOs in history.
Altman and his internal operating source code get to determine the future.
Musk brought a stress ball to the witness stand and squeezed it while he testified. Last week his lawyers read the diary of OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman aloud in court — entries written in 2017, before a meeting with Musk. “Can’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight,” Brockman wrote. “His story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end about still wanting to do the for-profit just without him.” Then, after the meeting went better than expected: “If we accomplish it, then we’ll really have shown him that we can outperform him even at something he’s great at. If we fail, well, we’ll deal with it then.”
The diary of a man who knew he was being dishonest with his partner and decided to win the argument before the partner figured it out.
Myanmar Ruby
That is a lovely pigeon blood globule you have on your finger, madame.
There is a kind of sweet spot where the most rarefied jewels of the most rarefied people intersect with civil war, child labor, and smuggling networks — and that sweet spot is currently sitting in a mine in Myanmar looking like a jumbo hamburger someone didn’t quite finish mashing into a patty.
Miners near the town of Mogok, in upper Mandalay, unearthed an 11,000-carat ruby — 4.8 pounds, roughly the size of a fist. It’s the second-largest ever found in Myanmar, but likely more valuable than the first because of its superior color: a purplish-red with yellowish undertones, high transparency, and a reflective surface that gemologists describe as exceptional. When it’s buffed up and set by a master jeweler it will no doubt look exquisite as it swans across a ballroom on an oligarch’s favorite. For now, it looks like something you’d return at a butcher counter.
It’s what the trade calls a “pigeon blood” ruby — a vivid red with a subtle blue undertone and a fluorescent glow. Fewer than 1 percent of all rubies qualify. The name comes from the Burmese word “ko-twe,” which translates directly to “pigeon blood.” One legend traces it to the first two drops of blood from a killed pigeon. Another says it matches the color at the center of a pigeon’s eye. Either way, the marketing department was not involved.
Myanmar produces 90 percent of the world’s rubies, primarily from Mogok and Mong Hsu — regions that have seen intense fighting in the country’s civil war. Gemstones, both legitimately traded and smuggled, are a major revenue source for the military junta. So somewhere between the mine and the auction house, between the hamburger patty and the velvet case, this stone will quietly fund the war it was pulled out of.
Wednesday May 13
Iran won’t stay obliterated. More inflation signs greet the new Fed chair, ICE can’t stop losing in court. The Senate shoots blanks in the US but not in the Philippines. That line wouldn’t get you an A at Harvard but since it wasn’t written by AI at least it might get a smile at Princeton.
Iran
The New York Times reported Wednesday that classified U.S. intelligence assessments find Iran has regained operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait. Ninety percent of its underground missile facilities are partially or fully operational. Seventy percent of mobile launchers intact. Seventy percent of prewar missile stockpile intact.
The reason: when the U.S. struck Iranian missile facilities, it sealed tunnel entrances rather than destroying entire sites — to conserve bunker-buster munitions for a potential conflict with North Korea or China. The U.S. has expended 1,100 long-range stealth cruise missiles — roughly the remaining stockpile — and 1,300 Patriot interceptors, more than two years of production. The Pentagon is rationing, and Iran knows it. A threat you can’t afford to carry out isn’t a threat.
The Senate voted 49-50 to reject a resolution to end the war. Three Republican senators — Rand Paul, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski — voted with Democrats. Democrat John Fetterman voted with Republicans. The antiwar position is now one Republican defection away from a majority.
Israel conducted a wave of drone strikes on the coastal highway south of Beirut, killing twelve people, including a woman and her two children. This under a ceasefire that Israel and Lebanon agreed to in November 2024.
IRGC Brigadier General Mohammad Akrami Nia declared that Iran will no longer allow U.S. weapons or warships bound for regional bases — including the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain — to transit the Strait of Hormuz. Whether Iran has the naval capacity to enforce that is unclear, or maybe this is saber-rattling for the home crowd. We’ll have to see.
ABC reports the Army is cutting training across the force to cover a $4 to $6 billion budget shortfall driven by the Iran war, the border mission, and the $1.1 billion National Guard deployment in Washington. The hardest hit: III Armored Corps, which commands 70,000 soldiers and nearly half the Army’s combat power. Internal documents warn its aviation units will deploy next year at “a lower state of readiness” and that rebuilding combat proficiency will take a full year.
The president has called the war an “excursion.” The math calls it a $33 billion budget hit, a depleted missile stockpile meant for China, and an army cannibalizing its own readiness just to keep the excursion going.
10,000 losses
How many times would you have to lose at something before you might rethink what you were doing? 30%, 40%, 50%? Federal judges have now ruled against ICE detention practices more than 10,000 times, according to a Politico analysis. That’s a 90% loss rate for the administration.
How did they achieve such excellence in losing? Federal law says people “seeking admission” to the country must be detained. Every previous administration read that to mean people caught at the border. Last July, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons signed a memo saying it also applies to millions of immigrants who have lived here for years — meaning they get locked up with no hearing, no bail, no chance to see a judge.
Courts keep saying that’s not what the law means. More than 425 judges have reached the same conclusion, including a majority of Trump appointees. The case files include a nursing mother with active refugee status, a five-year-old detained on his way home from school, parents of U.S. servicemembers. ICE has defied orders by transferring detainees to new states, forcing them to refile with new lawyers — generating more litigation, more losses.
The administration doesn’t care about 10,000 losses because it only needs one win — at the Supreme Court. Courts in Texas and Minnesota have backed the administration. Courts in New York, Atlanta, and Cincinnati have not. When appeals courts split like that, the Supreme Court steps in to settle it. The court almost certainly will.
PPI
Tuesday you heard about the Consumer Price Index, inflation. Why are you telling me about another thing on Wednesday? Can’t we get a rest? I’m sorry, the answer is no. Today we must talk about the Producer Price Index. The PPI measures what businesses pay each other — for steel, for chemicals, for shipping containers full of clothes. It matters because businesses don’t eat those costs. They pass them on. When it costs Target more to stock the shelves, it eventually costs you more to fill your cart. The CPI measures the price of your cart. The PPI tells you what’s coming for your cart next.
The story with the Producer Price Index, or PPI as it is known, was that at the beginning of the year, economists wondered whether companies had stockpiled their inventories before the tariffs hit in order to keep prices low, but that at some point in the year 2026, the inventories would run out and companies would be paying import taxes, which they would then pass along to consumers.
It’s happening. In February, core wholesale prices — stripping out food and energy — jumped 0.8% in a single month, nearly triple the forecast, pushing the annual rate to 3.6%. That meant the cheap inventory was running out. By April, the number had climbed to 5.2%. The stockpiles are gone. Businesses are now paying the full tariff price — and that price is heading to you.
And then a war landed on top of it. Seventy-five percent of April’s rise in goods prices came from energy — a direct consequence of the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz. Gasoline jumped 15.6%. But the more dangerous number is diesel, up 12.6%, because diesel moves everything else other than your car — every truck, every freight train, every container ship. Diesel is the invisible cost inside the price of groceries, of clothes, of everything that traveled to reach you.
Kevin Warsh confirmed to Fed
What a fun time to be chairman of the Federal Reserve. The Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh on Wednesday, 54-45 — the slimmest margin for a Fed chair in history, with only one Democrat, John Fetterman, crossing party lines. Bipartisan support for Fed picks used to be the rule; Alan Greenspan won unanimous confirmation in 2000.
Trump, asked on CNBC if he’d be disappointed if Warsh didn’t immediately cut rates, said, “I would.” Warsh vowed during his confirmation hearing that monetary policy would remain “strictly independent.” CME FedWatch gives a 1 percent chance rates come down this year. The market is betting on Warsh, not the president.
Philippines
The United States Senate can’t stop a war, but at least nobody’s shooting in the chamber. Chaos erupted Wednesday night in the Philippine Senate when gunfire rang out as authorities tried to arrest a senator who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for a charge of crime against humanity. Senator Ronald dela Rosa served as national police chief under President Rodrigo Duterte, leading anti-drug crackdowns that killed somewhere between 12,000 and 30,000. The ICC warrant accuses him of murdering “no less than 32 persons” between 2016 and 2018. Dela Rosa had barricaded himself in the chamber under the protection of allied senators and called on followers to gather and block his arrest.
Princeton Honor Code Change
For more than a century, Princeton prided itself on an honor code so revered that proctoring during exams was banned. A student’s pledge not to cheat was enough. Faculty voted to require proctors in all in-person exams starting this summer — reversing a policy set in 1893 — largely because of AI. The technology has made cheating both easier to commit and harder to detect. Students are afraid to report violations because they’ll get called out on social media, and anonymous reports are hard to investigate. Students will still sign the pledge. Now someone will be watching while they do.
A for everyone - Harvard debates limiting A’s
Harvard’s faculty began voting on whether to cap the number of A’s professors can give. The reason: in 2010, A’s accounted for a third of all grades. By 2025, that had doubled to over 60 percent. The proposal would limit solid A’s to 20 percent of a class.
One Harvard faculty member, Joshua Greene, writing in the Atlantic, put it this way: grade inflation “perversely deters students from taking classes that could threaten” a perfect GPA. “It’s as if students start college with a shiny new car and hope to go four years without a scratch. Who would dare go off-road?”
Murdaugh Killing
I hate this story because it’s gothic and it encourages the worst kind of gawking in cable TV land, but this legal angle is interesting so here goes: South Carolina’s Supreme Court unanimously overturned Alex Murdaugh’s double murder convictions. The court found that the clerk overseeing jurors had told them not to be “fooled” by Murdaugh and to watch his body language — what the justices called “shocking jury interference.” The clerk later resigned and pleaded guilty to misusing public funds and promoting her book about the trial. Murdaugh stays in prison for stealing millions from clients. He’ll be retried for killing his wife and son.
Thursday May 14
Pageantry in China, nothing to see here in Iran, Starmer’s cabinet gets thinner, Cuba is in the dark ages, which is where we’ll go to go long on Neanderthal teeth.
Trump in China
President Trump arrived in Beijing Thursday for his first China visit since 2017.
The pageantry was identical — 21-gun salute, marching soldiers so precise they looked like they’d come out of a box, flag-waving schoolchildren.
The circumstances have changed in the nine years. China is more powerful, the U.S. is at war with Iran, and Trump needs Xi’s help reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Trump says he doesn’t. Xi knows better.
On Wednesday — the day Trump landed — a Chinese supertanker carrying two million barrels of Iraqi crude sailed through the strait, the third known Chinese passage since the war began. Iran’s state media confirmed an agreement to let Chinese ships pass. Iran is now running its own transit authority and collecting fees in Chinese yuan. So while the American economy chokes on four-dollar gas, Chinese tankers sail through. Leverage, demonstrated on the eve of the summit.
Minutes into their meeting in the Great Hall of the People, Xi named his price: Taiwan. He called it “the most important issue” and warned that mishandling it would mean the two countries “will collide or even clash.” Then he invoked the Thucydides Trap — the theory that when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, war is the default outcome. Xi is telling Trump that China is the rising power, the U.S. is the incumbent, and avoiding conflict requires the incumbent to make room. Starting with Taiwan.
Trump did not respond. According to a White House official, he moved to the next topic without acknowledging the comment. The White House readout mentioned trade, fentanyl, and Iran. It did not mention Taiwan.
The administration has already postponed a $13 billion weapons package to avoid angering Xi. If Trump discusses the planned sales with Xi at all, he’d be violating one of the Six Assurances — Reagan-era commitments sent to Taiwan’s president in 1982, one of which says the U.S. will not consult with Beijing before selling arms to Taipei. Trump has said he’ll have the conversation. That pillar of U.S.-Taiwan policy, forty-four years old, may not survive the week.
Washington framed the day as a trade reset. Trump brought an airport courtesy bus full of heavy hitters from American industry: Apple’s Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Goldman’s David Solomon, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman, and Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg on the red carpet. It was a sign of respect and a sign that the U.S. is ready to do business in China.
The American wish list, per Montana Senator Steve Daines: “Boeing, beef, and beans.” U.S. soybean farmers and beef producers have been locked out of the Chinese market for a year. In an early signal, China renewed import licenses for hundreds of U.S. beef plants.
Before China can buy American beef, each U.S. meatpacking plant has to be individually certified by Chinese regulators. China had let hundreds of those certifications lapse during the trade freeze. Renewing them doesn’t mean beef is flowing — it means the door is unlocked. China can open it whenever it wants, or leave it shut.
And then there was Rubio. The Secretary of State was sanctioned by China in 2020 — banned from entering the country — for condemning Beijing’s internment of Uyghur Muslims and supporting sanctions over Hong Kong.
Thursday he stood in the front row in the Great Hall of the People. How? Beijing changed the spelling of his name. Chinese state media swapped one character in the transliteration — “Rubio” became “Lu” — and declared that the ban applied to Senator Rubio, not Secretary Rubio. The sanctions remain technically in force. The man is technically someone else. Strategic ambiguity doesn’t just apply to the U.S. position on Taiwan. It works for names too.
SCOTUS allows abortion by mail to continue
The Supreme Court just issued a prescription for the entire country, but didn’t bother to sign the note. The Supreme Court ruled in an emergency order that abortion medication can continue to be prescribed by telehealth and shipped by mail, blocking restrictions imposed by the Fifth Circuit while litigation continues. The majority offered no reasoning — standard for emergency orders. Thomas and Alito dissented. Alito called the order “remarkable” and “unreasoned.”
This is part of the shadow docket, which justices on both sides have complained about. When the Court decides the fate of medical access for millions in a single-page order, it leaves the law “in limbo” without a clear map for lower courts to follow. The case now goes back to the Fifth Circuit to be decided on the merits, which could take months, and will almost certainly end up back at the Supreme Court after that.
Nearly two-thirds of U.S. abortions now use pills. A quarter involve telehealth. The FDA approved telehealth prescriptions of mifepristone in 2021 after reviewing data showing the drug was safe without an in-person visit. More than 100 studies back that finding.
DOJ lawyers defended the FDA in lower courts but never said whether the administration actually supports mailing the pills. After losing at the Fifth Circuit, the administration made the unusual choice to file nothing at the Supreme Court — no brief, no position, no opinion. Silence as strategy: if the court protects access, the White House doesn’t have to.
By filing nothing, the White House avoided a “lose-lose” political situation. If they supported the pill, they would anger the religious base; if they opposed it, they would alienate the moderate voters who have approved 14 of 17 abortion-rights ballot measures since 2022.
Iran
The Pentagon fired the people responsible for counting the dead, then told Congress they have a near-perfect record of not killing anyone. Admiral Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, told senators Thursday that the U.S. military has avoided civilian casualties in Iran and that there was “no way” to corroborate reports of damage to civilian sites.
There is no way — because Defense Secretary Hegseth terminated dozens of Pentagon positions responsible for tracking civilian deaths, dismantling the Civilian Harm Mitigation Response office his predecessor created for exactly that purpose.
The New York Times has verified destruction at 22 schools and 17 health care facilities.
The Human Rights Activists News Agency estimates at least 1,700 Iranian civilians killed. The non-profit, U.S.-based agency relies on a network of activists inside Iran to confirm all reported fatalities.
Cooper acknowledged one incident — a school in Minab where Iranian officials say 175 people died, which he conceded may have been caused by a U.S. bomb. That was the only civilian casualty event he knew of.
22 verified schools, 17 health facilities, an estimated 1,700 dead — and the head of Central Command is aware of one incident. Big gap.
Cuba goes dark
The refrigerators in Cuba aren’t working, so food is spoiling. Hospitals are cancelling surgeries. The air is thick with the smoke of wood and coal as households burn what they can find. Blackouts have left Cubans sleeping on rooftops to escape the heat. Others wake at odd hours when the power briefly returns to make coffee, charge phones. Havana is now dark 20 to 22 hours a day. Power comes back for as little as 90 minutes.
The trigger is American. Cuba’s electrical grid has been failing for years — the infrastructure predates the current crisis. The U.S. actions accelerated a collapse that was already underway.
On January 3, the U.S. intervention in Venezuela cut off 25 years of Venezuelan oil donations. On January 29, Trump signed an executive order blockading oil shipments to Cuba. Mexico paused its own shipments under U.S. pressure. Cuba produces 40,000 barrels a day but needs 100,000. Venezuela and Mexico had been making up the shortfall.
By mid-May, Cuba’s energy minister announced the country had completely run out of fuel oil and diesel.
The squeeze is producing contact. CIA Director John Ratcliffe visited Havana Thursday and met with Raúl Castro’s grandson, the interior minister, and the head of Cuban intelligence. According to reports, he told them to take a lesson from what happened to Maduro.
Cuba was the first to announce the meeting — a government that has resisted Washington since 1959 publicly acknowledging it hosted the CIA director. It also released a political prisoner Thursday. Secretary of State Rubio has been running secret talks with Cuban leaders. A senior administration official’s assessment: “They have no fuel. They have no money. They have no one coming to rescue them.” The administration wants regime change but not a refugee crisis — officials say the goal is to ensure a “non-repressive security structure remains intact” to avoid unrest and mass migration to the U.S.
A third of Cuban households now report that at least one family member went to bed hungry in the last 30 days — up from a quarter last year. On Wednesday evening, residents across Havana banged pots and pans and set fire to trash cans in the dark in protest.
Starmer
UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting resigned Thursday morning after a Wednesday meeting with Starmer that lasted sixteen minutes. In his letter, he said he’d lost confidence in the Prime Minister’s leadership and called the rise of the nationalist Reform UK an “existential threat to the future integrity” of the country. He wrote: “Where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift.”
Streeting stopped short of formally triggering a leadership contest, but nobody read it as anything other than a starting gun. He’s the most prominent figure on Labour’s right. On the left, Angela Rayner — who resigned as deputy PM last year over a tax dispute — announced Thursday that tax authorities had cleared her of wrongdoing, removing the obstacle to her own candidacy. And in Manchester, Andy Burnham, the mayor who leads polls of who Labour voters actually want, was spotted boarding a train to London. Burnham’s problem: he isn’t a member of Parliament. Someone in a safe seat would have to step aside to let him run. The party has three plausible successors who appeal to three different factions, and no mechanism for choosing among them that doesn’t tear the coalition apart further.
Starmer has not resigned. The formal challenge has not been triggered. But the government is now losing ministers so fast it’s going to start showing up in the unemployment figures.
Retail sales
Retail sales grew 0.5% in April, down from March’s 1.6%. Strip out gas stations and the number drops to 0.3% — which, adjusted for inflation, is a decline. The Iran war’s inflation tax is showing up in what Americans are no longer buying. Department stores: down 3.2%. Furniture: down 2%. Clothing: down 1.5%. Cars: down half a percent. Restaurant and bar spending rose 0.6% — Americans will still pay for a night out, but they’re stopping themselves from buying a new couch.
The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index, tracked since 1952, hit 48.2 in early May — the lowest reading in its 74-year history. Lower than the 2008 financial crisis. Lower than the 1980 stagflation trough.
About a third of respondents mentioned gas prices unprompted. And April’s numbers were artificially propped up: Trump’s tax cut legislation produced refunds $22 billion larger than last year, and most of that money landed between February and April. Tax refund season is now over. Gas prices are not.
The Hundred-Slide Pitch
During the Trump administration, one of the storylines has been about how the president has targeted law firms with lawyers who worked in any way associated with the many cases brought against him.
There is another side of this story: law firms whose lawyers helped the president. One such firm is Sullivan & Cromwell. The firm’s co-chairman, Robert Giuffra, is one of Donald Trump’s personal attorneys — the same lawyer helping Trump overturn his felony conviction for falsifying business records.
Earlier this year, Indian billionaire Gautam Adani quietly hired Giuffra to make a problem go away.
The problem: fraud and bribery charges the Biden Justice Department brought in late 2024 over an alleged scheme tied to solar power contracts that affected U.S. investors. Giuffra’s team met with senior officials at Main Justice and clicked through a 100-slide presentation arguing the case was jurisdictionally weak and evidence-thin.
The last slide was worth paying attention to. It promised that Adani would invest $10 billion in U.S. energy and infrastructure and create 15,000 jobs if the government walked away. DOJ officials told Giuffra the investment offer would “play no role” in their decision.
The Trump Justice Department is now moving to drop the charges. Adani is reportedly in talks to settle the related SEC civil case for $15 to $20 million — a rounding error against both the scale of the alleged scheme and a net worth north of $60 billion.
The pattern is legible enough to function as a manual: hire the president’s personal lawyer, offer a patriotic investment denominated in jobs, and let political gravity do the rest.
Won’t you be my neighbor?
Anne locked herself out on the porch Friday morning and had an incredibly busy day at the end of an incredibly busy week. She was at home alone without her usual hero to provide ready assistance. How did she solve the problem? She called a neighbor.
Thank you to our hero Brian Allen.
While her husband is less sociable, despite his chatty seatmate podcast persona, Anne is in a shrinking minority of people who are in touch with their neighbors. Only 40 percent of Americans talk to their neighbors regularly — down from 59 percent in 2012. Among young adults, the collapse is stunning: one in four, down from one in two.
The American Enterprise Institute’s new neighbor survey finds the usual culprits — screens, remote work, the slow replacement of sidewalk life with app-mediated everything — but the sharper finding is about class.
College-educated Americans are more likely to socialize with their neighbors, text them, trust them, and work with them to fix a problem on the block. They’re more comfortable asking a neighbor to watch their kid in an emergency.
Among mothers without a degree, fewer than one in three would ask. It’s not that less-educated Americans are less friendly. They’re less likely to live near a coffee shop, a park, or a community center — the places where you bump into people often enough that they stop being strangers. Americans with six or more of these gathering spots nearby talk to their neighbors at nearly twice the rate of those with none.
The other dividing line is the church door. Forty-nine percent of weekly churchgoers talk to their neighbors regularly. Among Americans who never attend services, it’s 31 percent. Among young adults, the gap doubles: weekly attendees are twice as likely to know the people next door.
Religious Americans are also more likely to believe that being a good neighbor means offering help without being asked. Most Americans — two-thirds — believe the opposite: that being a good neighbor means not getting too involved.
The default setting in American neighborhood life is now a polite mutual avoidance, and we’ve convinced ourselves it’s a virtue.
College pay off
A study tracking a million students through Texas public colleges finds that a bachelor’s degree still pays off — but the payoff is slower and more uneven than the brochure suggests. On average, graduates earned a cumulative $86,806 more than peers who skipped college, measured 15 years after enrollment. But it took nine years just to break even — factoring in tuition and the wages they didn’t earn while sitting in lecture halls. Architecture and engineering majors cleared $200,000 above their noncollege peers over that period. Liberal arts majors cleared about $35,000.
An NBC News poll last fall found only one-third of Americans think a four-year degree is worth the cost, down from 53 percent in 2013.
59,000 Years Before Novocaine
When the dentist asks, “Have you been flossing?” do you struggle with your conscience?
Do you think Neanderthals did? They might have. Archaeologists think they’ve found the earliest known instance of dental cavity intervention in human evolutionary history. In a cave in southwestern Siberia where Neanderthals lived almost 59,000 years ago, researchers found a molar — according to a report published in the scientific journal PLOS One — with a deep hole bored through the biting surface all the way down to the pulp chamber — the inner cavity that holds nerves and blood vessels.
… It’s a term that has always freaked me out. Pulp. I mean of all the weird names in science and medicine that bear no relationship to the thing it’s describing, suddenly the dentists rush into the room with the most gruesomely accurate description of something? No wonder people are nervous at the dentist.
A study published last September in the Journal of the American Dental Association: nearly 73 percent of U.S. adults report being afraid of going to the dentist, with about 46 percent describing moderate fear and 27 percent severe fear.
…all this loose talk about pulp is no doubt the reason.
Anyway, a micro-CT scan revealed microscopic radial grooves consistent with deliberate drilling. Basically a root canal says one of the authors of the study.
To test whether the procedure was even possible with Stone Age tools, the team replicated it on modern human teeth using a stone tool replica — including a tooth donated by one of the researchers because these guys know how to have fun.
Scratches on Neanderthal teeth had been documented before, suggesting they used toothpicks and chewed medicinal plants. But cavities were rare for Neanderthals — they had a richer oral microbiome and a low-carbohydrate diet, which meant fewer cavity-causing bacteria. Also fewer Pop Tarts which hold the sugar on the teeth for 59,000 years.
However, when a cavity did develop, it was apparently notable enough to warrant someone picking up a stone tool and drilling into a companion’s mouth.
This is more than just a fun story to tell at cocktail parties. It represents an evolutionary bend in the road. Chimpanzees treat themselves with medicinal plants — behavior experts call instinctual self-medication.
This is something else. As one of the study’s reviewers put it, it documents the transition “from instinctive self-medication to a truly intentional and deliberate medical strategy.” Someone looked at someone else’s pain, diagnosed the problem, fashioned a tool, and performed a procedure.
Unfortunately the problem was a hangnail. Still! A for effort. (This is not true).
The human animal is amazing.
Friday May 15
Trump flew home from Beijing on Friday with rose seeds, a Boeing order China hasn’t confirmed, and a Taiwan policy that may not survive the flight.
China
The summit ended with praise, vagueness, and a promise to meet again. Trump called Xi “one of the World’s Great Leaders” and “really a friend.” Xi called the visit “historic and symbolic” and declared they had established a “new bilateral relationship, based on constructive strategic stability.”
A set of operating rules, that’s what China wants. In just the way President Trump likes to say that deals have been agreed to when they actually haven’t, to put pressure on the person he’s negotiating with, the Chinese have their own version.
Xi touted a framework for the rest of Trump’s term — locking the U.S. into a posture of restraint on tariffs, sanctions, and Taiwan in exchange for the appearance of partnership. For Xi, stability means the U.S. stops surprising him.
Did he get what he wanted? Was the flattery of Trump enough? Why would Trump keep any promise? We’ll see.
The deliverables were thin judging by the market’s reaction.
The S&P 500 dropped more than 1 percent at the open. Oil jumped nearly 3 percent, with domestic crude hitting $104 a barrel. Thirty-year Treasury yields climbed above 5.1 percent — the highest since May 2025. Investors wanted progress on the Strait of Hormuz. They got nothing.
Trump said Xi had agreed to buy 200 Boeing jets, with a promise of up to 750 “if they do a good job.” Boeing’s stock fell nearly 5 percent. China’s Foreign Ministry, asked to confirm the order, said only that trade ties were “mutually beneficial.”
Trump’s trade representative, Jamieson Greer, said a new board would oversee tariff reductions on roughly $30 billion in goods and that China would make “double-digit billion” agricultural purchases over three years — but acknowledged the soybean calendar means nothing closes until fall.
Trump said he and Xi did not discuss extending the tariff truce. He said they did not discuss chip export controls. Jensen Huang, the Nvidia CEO who showed up at the Alaska refueling stop to hitch a ride to Beijing, stayed behind after the summit for a separate meeting. China still hasn’t approved purchases of Nvidia’s H200 chips. “They chose not to,” Trump said. “They want to try to develop their own.”
Taiwan
The most consequential exchange may have happened on Air Force One. Asked whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion, Trump said: “There’s only one person that knows that. You know who it is? Me. I’m the only person.” He said Xi had asked him the same question in Beijing and received the same answer. That’s a return to the traditional refusal to answer — Biden broke with it at least four times by saying yes. But the more significant moment came next.
Trump confirmed he discussed the pending $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan with Xi “in great detail.” A reporter asked whether that violated the Six Assurances — the 1982 Reagan-era commitments that include an explicit promise not to consult with Beijing on arms sales to Taipei. “Well, I think the 1980s is a long way,” Trump said. “That’s a big, far distance.”
He then added: “I think the last thing we need right now is a war that’s 9,500 miles away.”
Taiwan’s foreign ministry pointed to Secretary Rubio’s statement that U.S. policy “remains unchanged.”
Trump invited Xi to the White House on September 24. Analysts note the invitation gives Beijing a reason to delay anything it doesn’t want approved before then — starting with the arms sale. Every high-profile event gives China another chance to argue that a weapons announcement would “undermine the atmosphere.”
Iran - Shift?
Trump said he did not ask Xi for help reopening the Strait of Hormuz. “I’m not asking for any favors,” he said, “because when you ask for favors you have to do favors in return.” He predicted Xi would lean on Iran anyway. There is no evidence of that.
Beijing didn’t even mention Iran by name in its public statements about the summit.
Trump told reporters he’s weighing whether to lift sanctions on the Chinese companies buying that oil — a concession his own Treasury Secretary framed weeks ago as financing terrorism.
Buried in the Air Force One press gaggle was a significant change in the administration’s nuclear demand. Trump said for the first time that he would accept a 20-year moratorium on Iranian enrichment — dropping the insistence on permanent abandonment.
“Twenty years is enough,” he said, “but the level of guarantee from them is not enough. In other words, it’s got to be a real twenty years.” He added: “If they have any nuclear of any form, I don’t read the rest of it.” He also signaled the ceasefire may not hold. “We finished probably 70, 75 percent” of the bombing targets, he said. “We’ll go back and finish them off.”
It’s worth pausing to measure that shift against the administration’s own stated war goals. Ian Bremmer compiled the list of what Trump said he wanted out of the war: rescuing the Iranian people, choosing the next Iranian leader, taking the oil, ending Iranian ballistic missile capabilities, ending Iran’s support for regional proxies, removing Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles, and ending Iran’s nuclear enrichment capabilities. A 20-year moratorium satisfies exactly one of those — partially — and abandons the most absolute version of it. The rest of the list hasn’t moved.
The gap between The United States and Iran is the same gap not just before the war, but before the first Trump administration. It’s the original disagreement, the same set of questions the Obama administration and five other world powers addressed in 2015 with the JCPOA — how much uranium enrichment, who inspects, where the stockpile goes.
Before Trump pulled out of the JCPOA in his first term, Iran had slashed its enriched uranium stockpile by 98 percent, capped enrichment at 3.67 percent — a fraction of weapons grade — shipped more than 25,000 pounds of enriched material out of the country, cut its centrifuges by two-thirds, and submitted to continuous international inspections. Breakout time had gone from two months to more than a year. Iran was in verified compliance. The Obama deal never demanded zero enrichment, a core Trump demand.
The difference between whatever Trump gets Iran to agree to and the JCPOA isn’t just the terms of the two agreements — it’s the price of arriving at them. The JCPOA cost nothing like this: thousands dead, a depleted Pacific missile inventory, a closed strait, and gas prices that have climbed more than 50 percent since February 28, hitting $4.52 a gallon on Sunday.
The IRS Heist
While the president was abroad, ABC News reported that the White House is close to settling Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the 2020 leak of his tax returns — a leak carried out by a contractor who was caught and is serving five years in prison. The expected settlement would create a $1.7 billion fund to compensate “allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration.” That means January 6 defendants.
The commission overseeing disbursements would serve at Trump’s pleasure. Members could be removed without cause. There would be no obligation to disclose how the money was allocated. Trump himself would be barred from receiving payments directly, but entities associated with him would not be explicitly excluded.
The federal judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams, has been scrutinizing whether the government and Trump are genuinely adversarial parties. She gave both sides a May 20 deadline to submit briefs explaining in what sense they are actually in conflict. The White House response, according to the Times, has been to treat the deadline not as a legal obligation but as a settlement deadline — racing to finalize terms before the judge can rule that the case is a sham.
U.S. arrests Iraqi military commander
Federal prosecutors unsealed charges Friday against Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, a commander of an Iranian-backed militia accused of plotting to bomb a prominent synagogue in New York and Jewish centers in Los Angeles and Scottsdale, Arizona. Al-Saadi is accused of planning at least 20 attacks across Europe and Canada since the Iran war began in February. He was detained in Turkey and handed over to U.S. authorities. He is one of the highest-level figures tied to Iran known to have been arrested since the war started. His case represents exactly what U.S. officials have warned about since the first bombs fell: that the war would produce retaliatory terrorism on Western soil. The threat was always the reason critics said the costs of the war extended far beyond the Strait of Hormuz. Now it has a name, a criminal complaint, and a target list that included American houses of worship.
Egyptian mummy buried with the Iliad
Archaeologists in Egypt found a 2,000-year-old mummy with a clay-sealed papyrus packet resting on its wrappings. Inside the packet: a fragment of Homer’s Iliad — specifically, lines from Book 2’s “Catalogue of Ships,” the passage that inventories the fleet assembled to retrieve Helen of Troy. It is the first time a literary work has been found serving a functional, spiritual role in mummification — not decoration, not accident, but purpose. For this Roman-era Egyptian, a nonroyal male buried, the Iliad wasn’t entertainment. It was equipment for the afterlife.
Preliminary dating places the burials in the first or second century A.D., well after Rome conquered Egypt in 30 B.C.
The idea of literature as spiritual technology wasn’t new even then. Foy Scalf, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago, notes that the Greco-Egyptian magical formularies prescribed the Iliad as medicine. For a patient bedridden with malaria, the treatment was: press your head against a papyrus scroll of Book 4 to break the fever.
I always found that reading the Iliad gave me a headache, but that’s because I’m a Dad and I’m required by my role to make that joke.
Waymo’s Lost Weekend
And finally, a story that is not about geopolitics but may say something about the age we’re living in: residents of a cul-de-sac in northwest Atlanta reported that dozens of empty Waymo self-driving cars have been circling their dead-end street, mostly between 6 and 7 in the morning. One neighbor counted 50 in an hour. When a resident put a children’s-crossing sign in the road, eight Waymos got stuck trying to figure out how to turn around. Waymo said it has “already addressed this routing behavior.” The neighbors said they just want the cars to stay on main roads.
I feel like this is the opening scene in some apocalyptic thriller about how the robots come for us.
That’s it for this week’s Stack the Week. I hope you haven’t felt like it’s made you go round and round. Thank you for listening.
