Welcome to Stack the Week for July 14th, Tuesday.
The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, feedback, the emails, and the steady stream of notes. Oh and the Apple podcast reviews are helpful. They introduce us to a wider audience.
If you’re reading this text on a screen instead of listening to the audio, remember that this is also designed as a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re commuting, folding laundry, or simply reclining into the posture that allows you to be delivered from the uncertainties and cares and illusions that beset the people of the world.
Okay, let’s start.
Drop the Toll Keep the Blockade
Clap on. Clap off. The Clapper!
If you are a certain age, you may remember that advertisement for a device that allowed you to turn on the light by simply clapping. You clapped it on and clapped it off. The Iran war is the Clapper war.
Mostly it’s been clap on. The U.S. military says it hit dozens of Iranian targets Monday, then struck six coastal cities and islands early Tuesday. Iran fired back at Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait and hit three tankers, killing two mariners and wounding 14, according to the International Maritime Organization. Before the war, 147 ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz in a day. Last week the count was 22, according to Kpler, a firm that tracks global shipping.
Then came the clap off: the president’s Monday idea of charging a 20 percent toll for passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump announced he would replace the fee with trade and investment deals from Gulf states, saying kings and emirs had called him. “I don’t think anybody should be able to charge a fee for the strait,” said the man who proposed the fee the day before.
Yesterday, when I presented the president’s plan for a 20 percent fee, I mused out loud about how such a thing might be calculated. A basic question. Nothing fancy about it. The president didn’t quite get there. Neither did his administration. The Wall Street Journal reports that hours after Trump announced the toll, aides rushed to figure out who would collect it — some officials assumed the Treasury Department, others argued for the Energy Department, since the cargo in question is oil. Officials were planning meetings on how to carry out the policy when the president abandoned it. Semafor, citing a White House official, reported that Trump ordered up the toll over the objections of advisers who had talked him out of the idea before. Axios reported that Gulf governments, whom the plan was supposedly built around, learned of it by surprise and called the White House asking what it meant. The toll also contradicted the president’s own secretary of state, who said weeks ago that international law forbids any country from charging tolls on an international waterway.
And then clap on again. Even as the toll vanished, the United States resumed a naval blockade of Iranian ports Tuesday afternoon, attempting to choke off Iran’s trade by other means.
I would recommend Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, which outlines in detail the way Donald Trump makes decisions. The scramble on the 20 percent is the daily operating procedure in the White House: decisions made on a whim which everyone else has to scramble after. The authors report that a half-dozen people around Trump make decisions so fast that the Pentagon and State Department often learn what’s going on after the fact.
These are decisions about a war of choice whose consequences now extend well beyond the battlefield—to global shipping, energy markets and the movement of commerce through one of the world’s most important waterways. .
Inflation: A Bit of Good News—For Now
Inflation has two clocks. One asks, “What happened this month?” The other asks, “How much more expensive is life than it was a year ago?”
This month’s clock showed something unusual: prices, on average, fell 0.4% from May to June—the biggest monthly decline in four years. Imagine walking into the grocery store on June 1 and buying a cart full of groceries. Then imagine buying that same cart on July 1 and finding it cost a few dollars less. That’s unusual. Prices don’t normally move down across the whole economy. They usually keep creeping upward, just faster or slower than before.
But the yearly clock still showed prices were 3.5% higher than they were a year ago. That’s what economists mean when they say “annual inflation” was 3.5%: the average basket of things Americans buy still costs 3.5% more than it did last June, even though prices eased during the most recent month.
One month doesn’t erase years of inflation. The cost of living is still high compared with what most people remember paying. But it does suggest businesses, on average, weren’t raising prices in June the way they had been.
Economists were also looking for signs that higher energy costs from the Iran war had spread into everything else—restaurant meals, clothing, rent, airline tickets and thousands of other prices. They largely hadn’t. Core inflation, which strips out the more volatile food and energy categories, was flat. As economist Michael Metcalfe put it, “Yes, gas prices went up, but nothing else did, more or less.”
That’s why this report surprised economists. Many expected both higher oil prices and President Trump’s tariffs to push inflation more broadly through the economy. June’s numbers suggested that hadn’t happened—at least not yet. Some economists think businesses have absorbed part of the higher tariff costs instead of passing them on to consumers. Others think the effects simply haven’t worked their way through the economy yet. The prediction has not yet come true, and economists don’t yet agree why.
Investors liked what they saw. The nation’s biggest banks also reported stronger-than-expected earnings. Banks make money when consumers keep spending, businesses borrow to expand, companies sell stock and bonds, and investors continue making deals. Strong bank profits don’t mean every American is thriving, but they do suggest that much of the economy is still moving. Together, the inflation report and the bank earnings lowered expectations that the Federal Reserve would need to raise interest rates to keep inflation from accelerating, which would increase the cost of economic activity.
Maine ICE Shooting
Suppose I told you that a young Latino immigrant had been shot and killed by federal immigration agents. He wasn’t the person they were looking for. He was in a vehicle. Agents said they were forced to shoot. There is no body-camera footage.
Which case am I describing?
You can’t know, because those details now describe two fatal ICE shootings in the last week.
That is an extraordinary sentence to be able to write.
The latest happened Monday in Biddeford, Maine. Twenty-six-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero (pronounced yo-HAHN seh-bas-tee-AHN doo-RAHN geh-REH-roh), a Colombian immigrant who lived with his wife and young daughter, was killed after ICE agents attempted to stop his vehicle during surveillance of another man with a final deportation order. Authorities now acknowledge Durán Guerrero was not the target of the operation.
The Department of Homeland Security says an officer fired because he feared for public safety after Durán Guerrero attempted to flee in his vehicle. And by flee in his vehicle, I mean leave a place in the same manner you would to go to the store.
One witness heard the wounded driver say, “I tried to stop.” Security camera footage shows officers pulling his body from the vehicle afterward, but not the shooting itself. The agents were not wearing body cameras, leaving investigators to reconstruct the encounter from witness testimony and the officers’ own accounts.
The Houston shooting last week ran along the same lines: a bystander, not the target, dead in a vehicle, no footage.
These shootings come as ICE has dramatically accelerated enforcement. The agency arrested more than 10,000 people in five days at the end of June—roughly 2,000 arrests a day—as the administration pushed agents to sharply increase arrests.
In response, ICE has ordered agents to suspend most vehicle stops while it reviews the incidents and provides additional training.
Ebola Is Moving Faster Than Public Health
The World Health Organization issued one of its starkest warnings yet Tuesday: eastern Congo’s Ebola outbreak continues to outpace efforts to stop it.
Nearly 2,000 people have been infected and more than 700 have died. The outbreak, caused by a rare strain with no approved vaccine or treatment, has become the fastest-growing Ebola epidemic ever recorded in Africa.
If you’ve been following this story with us, that may sound familiar—and in one sense it is. We’ve told you about the conflict, the attacks on health workers, the lack of a vaccine and the invisible spread. Today’s development is different. The WHO is no longer describing obstacles. It is saying, plainly, that those obstacles are now winning.
Four out of five new infections are coming from people who were never on any contact-tracing list. In other words, health workers are no longer interrupting chains of transmission—they’re discovering many of them only after they’ve already spread.
That’s an important threshold in any epidemic. Public health works by getting ahead of a virus. Once doctors, laboratories and contact tracers are mostly discovering infections after they happen instead of preventing the next ones, the outbreak begins dictating the pace of the response instead of the other way around.
That’s why today’s WHO statement matters. It isn’t simply another update on Ebola’s growth. It’s the moment the world’s leading public-health agency publicly acknowledged that, despite expanding treatment centers and laboratories, it is losing the race.
Justices Ask Congress for Protection
“I had to explain to my 12-year-old why I was wearing a bulletproof vest.”
That’s how Justice Amy Coney Barrett explained the Supreme Court’s growing security needs as she and Justice Elena Kagan appeared before Congress Tuesday to request a larger budget.
One measure of political polarization is what institutions have to buy. As the Supreme Court has become more politically consequential, the cost of protecting the people who serve on it has grown with it.
The Court says threats against the justices are expected to rise another 38% this year. It is asking for six additional security agents for each justice, a new residential security office, expanded cybersecurity and stronger threat-assessment capabilities. Those requests come after the attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022, the swatting of Justice Barrett’s home this spring and a wave of threats invoking Daniel Anderl — the 20-year-old son of federal Judge Esther Salas, shot dead in 2020 by a man who came to their home to kill her. His name has since become a kind of grim shorthand among those who threaten judges: a reminder that the danger is real and has already killed.
The Supreme Court isn’t alone. Congress has expanded the Capitol Police. Election officials around the country now receive security once reserved for far more prominent public officials. Polarization has a price tag. You can decide which political movements have produced more violence. You can also ask whether the Court’s increasingly consequential decisions—and the way it sometimes hands them down—intensify the sense that national policy is being imposed from above.
But Congress belongs in the picture too. When lawmakers fail to settle immigration, voting, climate, war powers and other major questions through durable legislation, presidents act on their own and opponents turn to the courts. Nine justices then become the place where the country’s unresolved political fights are decided. The Court has sometimes enlarged that role through its own decisions, but Congress’s paralysis helps explain why so much power, attention and anger now collect there.
Economists AI Warning
More than 200 economists and artificial intelligence researchers have signed an open letter warning that governments and institutions need to prepare now for AI’s economic disruption. The group includes 16 Nobel Prize winners, as well as employees of Anthropic, Google and OpenAI. The letter compares AI to the Industrial Revolution, as many have before, but argues that this transformation could happen over years rather than generations. That could bring enormous gains in productivity and living standards—but also large-scale job displacement.
You’ve heard this warning before. What’s different is who’s making it. Economists usually argue that technological revolutions destroy some jobs but ultimately create even better ones. Technology companies usually emphasize the opportunities AI will unlock. Here, leaders from both groups are acknowledging that market forces alone may not distribute those gains fairly. If that language sounds familiar, it echoes the moral argument Pope Leo has made about AI: markets create wealth, but they cannot by themselves decide how that wealth should be shared.
Economists have spent two centuries arguing that labor markets eventually adapt to technological change. This letter suggests many of them are beginning to question whether AI may move faster than workers can.
The letter itself offers few specifics. It calls for new incentives, guardrails and institutions but leaves the details to governments. Ideas already circulating include helping workers retrain, temporarily replacing part of the wages lost when someone takes a lower-paying job after being displaced, making benefits like health insurance and retirement savings easier to carry from one employer to another, and changing tax incentives so companies have stronger reasons to use AI to augment workers rather than simply replace them. (Portability of health insurance was what the Affordable Care Act was supposed to address. As STW listeners know, the ACA is under considerable strain right now).
At the heart of the debate are three questions: How quickly do jobs disappear? How quickly do new ones appear? Who carries the cost in between? The optimistic camp says technological revolutions destroy some jobs but create even better ones. The pessimistic camp says that may be true—but the long run can be a very long time if you’re the person who just lost your job.
Tylenol lawsuits revived
More than 500 lawsuits alleging that taking Tylenol during pregnancy contributed to autism or ADHD can move forward after a federal appeals court revived the cases Tuesday.
The ruling does not say Tylenol causes autism. It does not resolve the underlying science. Instead, the appeals court ruled that a lower-court judge dismissed the cases too early by excluding the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses before a jury had a chance to hear the disputed evidence.
That’s an important distinction. Courts decide what evidence juries are allowed to consider. Scientists decide whether a hypothesis withstands scrutiny. Those are different questions.
For now, the scientific picture remains unsettled. Large reviews have not established a causal relationship between acetaminophen and autism or ADHD, and physicians continue to note that untreated fever and severe pain during pregnancy also carry risks. Tuesday’s decision changes the legal fight, not the scientific consensus.
Trump backs down on child care funding freeze
The Trump administration has backed away from a plan to freeze roughly $10 billion in child-care and social-service funding for five Democratic-led states after suffering repeated defeats in federal court.
The administration said it was trying to prevent fraud and stop federal money from benefiting undocumented immigrants. The states argued the White House lacked the authority to withhold money Congress had already appropriated, and federal judges repeatedly agreed.
Critics also saw the freeze as an effort to pressure Democratic-led states that have opposed the administration’s immigration agenda by withholding billions of dollars in federal aid. Those five states account for roughly a third of the nation’s population, meaning millions of families could have been affected if the freeze had remained in place.
For the families affected, though, the constitutional argument isn’t the first thing they notice. A child-care subsidy isn’t really about child care. It’s about whether a parent can keep showing up for work. Lose that support, and the dominoes can fall quickly: missed shifts, lost wages, even the loss of a job.
The larger question is one we’ve returned to repeatedly. Once Congress appropriates money, how much discretion does a president have to decide not to spend it? Federal courts have continued to answer: not nearly as much as this administration has claimed.
Four organs. Thirty-six hours. One second chance.
A 28-year-old Chicago woman with cystic fibrosis underwent a 36-hour operation to receive both lungs, a liver and a kidney in what doctors say was the first procedure of its kind in Illinois and only the sixth in American history.
Her name is Jasmine Jones. She thanked the anonymous donor with a sentence that captures what organ transplantation really is: “You gave your life to give a life.”
Manhattanhenge belongs to everyone now
Back in 2002, Neil deGrasse Tyson began telling New Yorkers about the evenings each year when the setting sun lines up perfectly with Manhattan’s street grid. He borrowed the name “Manhattanhenge” from Stonehenge and even recommended the best viewing spot: the Tudor City overpass, where you can look straight down 42nd Street without standing in traffic.
One evening he was there explaining the phenomenon to curious onlookers when someone behind him yelled, “Down in front, sonny!”
His first thought was, Without me, you wouldn’t even know this was happening.
What he actually did was apologize and sit down. We have the right to work but not the fruits of that work.
Update: E. Jean Carroll Gets a Check Finally Receives the Money
Now for a few updates on some previous stories we’ve presented you.
A federal court has released the $5,625,005.48 Donald Trump owed E. Jean Carroll after his efforts to block the payment failed. The money represents the original $5 million judgment—plus interest—from the 2023 civil trial in which a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll and defaming her after she publicly accused him of the assault. The money had been sitting in a court-controlled escrow account while Trump’s appeals worked their way through the legal system.
Carroll marked the moment with a celebratory post on her Substack titled “The Eagle Has Landed.” She thanked her legal team and, with evident sarcasm, one of Trump’s former attorneys, Alina Habba: “I could not have done it without you.”
Update: Air Force One and the Public Interest
A brief update on yesterday’s story. The New York Times is now arguing that its reporting wasn’t simply about a classified aircraft. It was about whether Air Force One’s defenses against missile attacks had kept pace with modern threats. The paper says that information belongs in the public interest because Air Force One carries not only the president but hundreds of government officials, members of Congress, military personnel, journalists and others.
Sparkle: Sky Mirror
And finally, In Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, Eärendil sails to the forbidden West to beg the gods for light in a dark age — and they set him in the heavens with a burning jewel on his brow, where he becomes the Evening Star. That was how you got light from the sky in the old stories: you pleaded, and heaven decided. The FCC is the one that decided now, giving a California startup clearance to shoot Eärendil-1 into the sky. It carries a square mirror 18 meters on a side that unfolds once in orbit and tilts to bounce sunlight back down after dark — a 5-kilometer circle of full-moon glow, steered across the ground for minutes at a time. The company plans to sell the beam to solar farms that want to generate past sunset, to rescue crews, to farms now burning diesel for light. You could imagine other uses: Say you’re on the lam. Deep in the national forest, dogs a ridge back, darkness your last remaining friend — when a circle of light five kilometers wide slides over the treetops and finds you, lighting you up like the noonday sun, Dr. Kimble. One mirror delivers only moonlight. To approach daylight, the company ultimately hopes to place as many as 50,000 mirrors in orbit. Nearly 1,900 people and institutions filed objections — more than SpaceX drew for a proposed million satellites. They warned that nocturnal animals need darkness to hunt, migrate, and breed; that light at night disrupts human sleep; that a stray flash could temporarily blind pilots and drivers; and — as the FCC itself acknowledged — that if the company loses control of the satellite at the end of its mission, the mirror could tumble and sweep random flashes across the Earth for up to a year. Astronomers calculate Eärendil-1 could shine brighter than Venus — the very star the first Eärendil became.
