Welcome to Stack the Week for Wednesday, July 15
The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, the feedback, the emails, and the steady stream of notes. And the Apple podcast reviews are helpful. They introduce us to a wider audience.
Remember, this is a podcast too. Listen while you mow the lawn, debone a filet, or wipe down the whiteboard on which you’ve been trying to sync the movement of the planets with your Google calendar.
Okay, let’s start.
Iran 2.0
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius calls this phase of the Iran war Iran Fiasco 2.0. His argument: the administration went back to bombing without solving the problem that made the first round fail. Iran doesn’t need to win. It only needs to keep threatening ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which it can still do after every American strike. Same campaign, same result.
Which is what David Sanger of the New York Times asked weeks ago on Air Force One, and got called a traitor for: if you start bombing again, why do you expect a different result?
The United States restored the naval blockade of Hormuz Wednesday and flew a fourth overnight round of strikes, hitting Iranian military sites including an army barracks. By late afternoon the US military said it was launching another wave of strikes, the third in 24 hours.
President Trump threatened bridges and power plants unless Iran negotiates. He would not rule out ground troops. The attacks continue until he decides they’re enough, he says.
Iran fired missiles and drones toward Jordan, which intercepted three. Alerts in Bahrain. In Kuwait, cruise missiles, a ballistic missile, and dozens of drones — the heaviest attack on that country so far — wounding naval personnel.
The Revolutionary Guard set its terms: energy exports stay open to everyone or to no one. If Iran can’t sell its oil, nobody sells theirs.
Gas prices are going up as you’d expect. Regular is at $3.89. Diesel is near $5, which is the number that matters more, because diesel moves the trucks that move the groceries.
John Ellis’s News Items points to a War on the Rocks analysis on how Iran built for this. After studying previous American wars, it designed a mosaic defense — a decentralized system in which local commanders and allied forces keep fighting after headquarters is gone.
Iran handed real authority to local commanders and to allies outside Iran — the Houthis in Yemen, militias in Iraq. They don’t need to be told what to do. So bombing Tehran doesn’t stop the missile crew on the coast or the drone team in Yemen. There is no headquarters to destroy. That’s why each new round of bombing can leave the underlying military problem intact. The plan is already inside everyone’s head.
Military experts told NPR the strikes so far have not destroyed enough of Iran’s missiles, drones, and small boats to make the water safe. Even optimistic military assessments describe a campaign measured in weeks, not days.
That is a much larger and much longer war than the administration has described.
ICE Deaths
A 28-year-old Mexican national ran from federal agents at a St. Augustine gas station and was struck by a tractor-trailer. He is the third man to die in an immigration-enforcement encounter in eight days.
The other two:
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Houston. Agents followed his work van. DHS said he weaponized the vehicle and tried to run over an officer. Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said the agents’ actions resembled no law-enforcement tactic he’d seen, and that they were either untrained or putting themselves where firing into a car could be justified. Araujo was here illegally. He was not the target of the operation.
Johan Sebastián Guerrero, Biddeford, Maine. Video caught shouting, gunfire, and his car turning in a circle before agents pulled him out while his wife and young daughter watched. His father said he had legal status and worked two jobs.
Neither agent who fired wore a body camera. They were not required to. DHS now requires each arrest team to include at least one — the team, not each officer, and not necessarily the officer who fires. About half of DHS field officers have cameras. ICE has released no footage from Houston or Maine and has not named the shooters.
Neither dead man was armed. Alex Pretti and Renée Good died in Minneapolis before these three, and they were described as aggressors too. They were not.
Since Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, agents in the immigration crackdown have shot at least 22 people. Six died. Three were American citizens. Nearly all involved officers firing into cars. The Washington Post names the recurring question: whether officers step into a car’s path and then call the moving car a weapon.
Trump’s answer: ICE personnel are doing a “GREAT job,” and the government cannot give up what he called one of its most effective crime-fighting tools.
After Pretti and Good, the administration changed personnel, discussed body cameras, promised less controversy. Then Congress approved multiyear funding with no mandatory accountability provisions.
This week ICE paused most vehicle stops after two fatal shootings. Border czar Tom Homan insisted it was a short review, not a policy change, and said agents would soon return to “doing what they do best.” Less than a day later, President Trump ordered the tactic resumed.
The question is what evidence a citizen should require before accepting the government’s claim that a car became a weapon — when the government holds the footage, the identities, and the narrative, and has released none.
Three men are dead in eight days, two of them shot by federal agents, the third chased into traffic. The agents work for the federal government and are paid by taxpayers.
A country gets to decide who lives in it, but the people who voted for deportations were told it would only be the worst of the worst. Neither of the men shot was. Araujo wasn’t the man they came for. Guerrero was here legally. These were mistakes, but no one in government is treating them that way. No regret from DHS, ICE, or the White House. No condolence to Guerrero’s wife, who watched. The response was to praise the agents and defend the tactic. An institution that thought it had made a mistake would say something.
Israel, Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank
Israeli and Lebanese officials concluded a sixth round of U.S.-mediated talks in Rome Wednesday. The subject: “pilot zones” in southern Lebanon, where Israeli forces would withdraw and the Lebanese Army would take over. The test is whether the Lebanese state can hold ground Israel gives up, which means keeping Hezbollah off it.
Trump told Netanyahu last Thursday to pull troops out of southern Syria and Lebanon, Axios reported: “They don’t want you there. You should redeploy.”
An Israeli strike in central Gaza Wednesday killed a man, his wife, and their six-year-old daughter. Days earlier, a strike on a police station in a northern Gaza refugee camp killed several people, including a senior police commander; Israel said the station was used for military activities.
In the West Bank, the Israeli government announced 34 new settlements. Ministers called it a historic expansion meant to prevent the creation of a future Palestinian state. Netanyahu himself endorsed a demilitarized Palestinian state in a 2009 speech. He spent the years after walking it back, and in 2019 campaigned on annexing the settlements instead. The land these 34 will sit on is the land that the state was supposed to occupy.
Todd Blanche Confirmation Hearings
Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, asked Todd Blanche a softball at his confirmation hearing: Is the president your friend?
“I’m his lawyer,” Blanche said. Then, almost instantly: “Was his lawyer. And now I’m the deputy attorney general.”
The whole hearing lived inside that correction.
Blanche defended Donald Trump in the hush-money trial and the federal prosecutions. Since Watergate, the attorney general has been expected to run the Justice Department independently of the White House.
The question before the Senate was whether someone who spent years serving one man can convincingly serve the institution and the Constitution instead.
Adam Schiff, a former federal prosecutor whom Trump has targeted for prosecution, asked, “What happened to the Todd Blanche who was a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York?”
Blanche asked to respond.
“I am still here. I am the same exact person I was when I was a federal prosecutor.”
Democrats argued his record now tells a different story. They pointed to the indictment of James Comey, investigations of John Brennan and Cassidy Hutchinson, an IRS settlement that a federal judge has since condemned as a bad-faith misuse of the legal process, and Blanche’s continued insistence that the 2020 election was rigged.
Some 16,000 employees have left the Justice Department during his tenure, including more than a quarter of its attorneys. More than 1,200 former Justice Department employees signed a letter opposing his confirmation. More than 100 former judges filed a disciplinary complaint against him.
Ten of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims sat in the hearing room. Senator Dick Durbin asked Blanche whether he would meet with them.
“They have lawyers,” Blanche replied. “I’m prohibited from meeting directly with them.”
Democrats noted that Blanche personally interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell last summer while she was represented by counsel. Senator Cory Booker called Blanche’s explanation “utter nonsense.”
Blanche raised his voice.
“You can ask the questions, but you cannot control my answers.”
Since three million pages of Epstein files were released—after Congress forced the disclosure—the department has prosecuted no one. Blanche’s predecessor, Pam Bondi, said Blanche was responsible for the release that publicly identified victims by name.
Republican Senator John Cornyn focused on another issue: the $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund created in Trump’s IRS settlement. Blanche insisted the fund was dead because no money had ever been transferred.
But he also acknowledged that the settlement itself remains “an enforceable document.”
Cornyn emerged unconvinced.
“The argument was that the anti-weaponization fund is dead,” he said, “and what he confirmed was that it’s not.”
One Republican vote against Blanche in committee would block his confirmation. Since Lindsey Graham’s death, Republicans hold an 11-10 majority on the panel. Senator Thom Tillis appears likely to vote yes.
But Blanche can continue serving as acting attorney general regardless of the committee vote. The confirmation won’t determine who runs the Justice Department. It will record whether the Senate approves of how he’s run it.
In other confirmation news, Jay Clayton, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be Director of National Intelligence, repeatedly refused to say Joe Biden won the 2020 election when asked directly. The job requires telling a president things he may not want to hear. That matters most when a president’s assumptions meet reality—as they are now in the Iran war. Senators were really asking a different question: if a nominee won’t acknowledge a settled fact under oath, but must cater to the president’s illusions at the cost of their self respect, what confidence should Americans have that he would be able to do his job when it matters most?
Floods and Fire
The Weather Prediction Center issued its highest flood risk — Level 4 of 4 — on back-to-back days over the Texas Hill Country. High-risk days come fewer than 4% of the time and account for more than 80% of all flood damage.
Six to 12 inches fell overnight into Tuesday, with 10 more possible by Wednesday morning at rates of 2 to 4 inches an hour. Four inches an hour is more than a car’s wipers can clear. Flood watches cover six million people. Game wardens photographed an empty vehicle floating away; the occupants had been rescued minutes earlier. Governor Abbott declared disasters in 59 counties.
This is the same ground, one year and eleven days after the Fourth of July floods that killed more than 130 people in the Hill Country, including 25 girls and two counselors at Camp Mystic. Steep slopes, shallow soil, exposed bedrock that sheds rain instead of absorbing it. The ground says no and the water goes somewhere else.
They could use the water in Minnesota. Seventeen wildfires are burning across the northeast corner of the state. The five largest cover 30,000 acres and none are contained.
The smoke would normally rise and disperse. It isn’t, because a heat dome — a lid of high pressure — is sitting over the eastern half of the country, holding the smoke down at ground level and pushing it east. That’s why Manhattan’s sky went hazy Wednesday from fires 1,200 miles away. The same lid has nearly 100 million people under major or extreme heat warnings from the Dakotas to New England.
Let Us Now Avoid Lettuce
2026 is now the worst cyclospora year on record. State data puts the count past 4,700 — the mark set in 2019 — across more than 30 states.
Michigan interviewed more than 1,000 patients and one item kept coming up: lettuce. Salad greens. Officials there now say buy whole heads, throw away the outer leaves, wash the rest and then throw it out and run from the house screaming. Not exactly, but you can never be too careful. True advice: skip the bagged lettuce and salad kits.
Two things make it hard to catch this parasite. Symptoms take days to weeks to appear, so patients are being asked to remember a salad from three weeks ago. And many standard food-poisoning tests aren’t built to detect it.
Law Firms and Administration
The New York Times reports the Justice Department has subpoenaed thirteen of the country’s biggest law firms.
Early last year, Trump signed executive orders against firms whose lawyers had crossed him. The orders stripped their security clearances, barred their lawyers from federal buildings, and threatened the government contracts of any client who kept them. The pressure wasn’t directed only at the firms. It was aimed at their clients.
Nine of the biggest capitulated, pledging nearly a billion dollars in free legal work for causes he supports. Four other firms fought in court instead. The firms that fought won. The administration eventually abandoned those cases.
One of the president’s personal lawyers, Boris Epshteyn, negotiated the deals. He is not a government employee.
The American Bar Association sued in June to stop the campaign and asked a judge to make the White House turn over communications about the deals. The Justice Department moved to quash that request. Then it subpoenaed the law firms for many of the same records the ABA was seeking, demanding documents about the agreements and depositions from firm leaders.
The firms that made peace with the White House got subpoenaed anyway. Some told the Times they fear objecting will trigger a new executive order. The four firms that fought remain in court, where they already were.
Before the second term began, incoming White House counsel David Warrington wrote that Epshteyn’s conduct “must be stopped” and his proximity to Trump “terminated”—otherwise, “at best a scandal,” at worst “criminal indictments.” That’s from the new Haberman and Swan book. The Justice Department is now subpoenaing thirteen law firms for their correspondence with Epshteyn.
IBM
IBM lost $69 billion of market value Tuesday. Shares fell more than 25% — the largest one-day drop in the company’s history.
Which is strange, if you think AI is lifting everything with a chip in it. The AI boom is the reason IBM fell.
Companies have a fixed technology budget. This year they are spending it on AI, and the AI bill is large. So they buy servers, storage, and memory chips — the hardware that runs AI — and they stop buying what they used to buy. What they used to buy was IBM.
DealBook asked who’s next. Software companies fell with IBM on Tuesday — but was that a real fear or a momentary panic? IBM’s problem was mainframes nobody’s buying. What does that have to do with software?
A lot, if the IBM story is about limited budgets. Those budgets are limited for software too. Analysts at Evercore disagree; they say the mainframe miss doesn’t generalize, and the firms that should worry are the consultants — the ones you hire to build your software for you — because AI does what they charge for. They fell too.
One company went up 12%: CrowdStrike, which sells cybersecurity because AI models keep opening holes nobody knew were there.
France and Assisted Suicide
France’s National Assembly gave final approval to a bill legalizing assisted dying, voting 291 to 241 to let terminally ill adults end their lives with medical help — a step beyond current law, which allows only deep sedation. Patients must be 18 or older with an incurable, life-threatening illness in an advanced stage and suffering that can’t be relieved; psychiatric illness or Alzheimer’s alone doesn’t qualify.
The patient makes the request personally, a medical team reviews it for 15 days, and the patient confirms after a two-day waiting period. Patients take the medication themselves unless physically unable. National health insurance pays. The bill, a priority of President Macron, now goes to the Constitutional Council for a final review expected to take up to a month. Opponents, including disability advocates, warn the law could pressure the sick and elderly to choose death rather than become a burden; supporters call it a right to end unbearable suffering on one’s own terms. France joins Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Canada in permitting some form of assisted dying.
Elon Musk and Wisconsin
A bipartisan Wisconsin election panel found probable cause that Elon Musk broke the state’s election bribery law with his $1 million payments to voters in the 2025 state Supreme Court race. The Wisconsin Elections Commission — three Democrats, three Republicans — voted 5-1 to refer two voter complaints to the Brown County district attorney. The finding centers on a Musk social media post offering $1 million to people who voted in the election, which the commission says was made to induce them to vote. Musk handed checks to three Wisconsin voters. His PAC also paid $100 to voters who signed a petition against “activist judges.” Musk and allied groups spent at least $20 million backing the Republican-endorsed candidate, who lost by 10 points in the most expensive judicial race in American history. The state’s attorney general sued to stop the checks before they were handed out; the courts declined. The finding arrives fifteen months after the election it concerns. The door on the barn is firmly closed. The horse is on Mars.
Sak Tahn Waax
And finally, we’re just catching up to the news about Sak Tahn Waax (SAHK-tahn-wah-ash), but that’s true of mankind as well.
Twelve hundred years ago, Sak Tahn patiently tracked Mars and Venus across years of nights. He did the math and worked out the rules that coordinated the Maya calendars with the movements of those two planets.
He never got credit. We refer to it as a civilization’s achievement, as though a whole people leaned in at once. Like the Egyptian pyramids. Meanwhile we know the Greeks by name — Hipparchus (hip-AR-kus), Ptolemy (TOL-uh-mee) — the men who measured the same sky and got to keep their signatures on it.
Now we know Sak Tahn Waax, because an eighth-century inscription gives him the credit.
It was found at Xultun (shool-TOON), in Guatemala, in a small rectangular room archaeologists call Structure 10K-2. The walls are covered in microtexts — faint handwritten calculations and astronomical tables. They think the room was a workshop: a whiteboard where scholars drafted and refined the formulas before they went into the formal books.
It’s the first time anyone has identified a specific person from the Classic Maya period credited as a mathematician and astronomer.
His name translates to white-chested fox.
