Welcome to Stack the Week for July 22, 2026.
The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, the feedback, the emails, and the notes. And the Apple podcast reviews help keep us from hiding under a bushel. (They introduce us to a wider audience.)
Remember, this is a podcast too. Listen while you sail through Copenhagen, reorder your holy cards or plan your ascent, vaulting on the bones of your enemies.
So here we go:
1. One Bridge at a Time
Did you ever play sandlot football as a kid? The quarterback would call everyone into a huddle, then draw the play on his chest with his finger. “Joey, you go left at the fire hydrant. Billy, you go long toward Mrs. Mcgillicuddy’s house.”
Watching the administration’s rapidly evolving strategy for the Iran war Wednesday feels a little like that. The play keeps getting redrawn in public as the war unfolds.
President Trump announced that every time Iran attacks a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, the United States will destroy one Iranian bridge or power plant. Some of the targets he identified lie near Tehran. That moves the threatened retaliation closer to Iran’s largest population center and appears intended to make ordinary Iranians—and therefore their leaders—feel a greater price for attacks in the strait. It would also put civilians at risk when electricity, transportation, water and medical systems depend on the infrastructure being struck.
The announcement raises immediate practical questions. What happens if a proxy group acts on its own, a local commander ignores orders or American intelligence gets it wrong? Under the president’s formula, any of those events could lead to the destruction of infrastructure that millions of civilians depend on. On the other hand, if there is an attack and the president does not respond as promised, he suffers a loss of credibility.
The policy could also give Iran additional leverage. Tehran already has the ability to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. If every attack automatically triggers a larger American response, Iran—or groups acting in its name—would gain more influence over the pace of escalation.
Is this a standing policy or a negotiating tactic? International law prohibits deliberately attacking civilian objects unless they have become military objectives, and any attack must avoid disproportionate civilian harm. If bridges and power plants are now legitimate targets, what prevents Iran from broadening its own target list? And how does this policy reopen the Strait of Hormuz?
2. The cost of France’s heat wave.
Extreme heat can sound like an inconvenience: uncomfortable sleep, crowded beaches, another photograph of children running through a fountain.
It can also be deadly.
During the heat wave from June 17 to July 2, the affected parts of France recorded 21,674 deaths. Based on previous years, public-health officials would ordinarily have expected 15,910. The difference—5,764 people—is what epidemiologists call “excess deaths”: people who probably would not have died during those weeks under normal conditions.
That does not mean every death certificate will say “heat.” Extreme temperatures can cause dehydration or heatstroke. They can also place additional stress on the heart, lungs and kidneys. An older person with heart disease may die of a heart attack brought on by the heat, but the certificate may record only the heart attack.
France recorded 36 percent more deaths than expected during the heat wave—the country’s highest excess mortality during a heat wave since 2003.
Funeral directors struggled to find room for the bodies. Some mortuaries filled and began turning them away. About one-third of the people who died across the affected regions died at home. About two-thirds of the excess deaths were among people 75 or older.
3. Saudi Arabia Gets What Iran Can’t Have
Saudi Arabia wants nuclear power. It also wants permission to make the fuel itself. The Trump administration may let it.
President Trump has now approved a proposed 30-year civil-nuclear agreement with the kingdom, according to officials familiar with the negotiations. It has not yet been signed, published or reviewed by Congress.
Nuclear reactors use uranium as fuel. Before uranium can go into a reactor, centrifuges enrich it. At low levels, enriched uranium can produce electricity. At much higher levels, it can help produce a nuclear bomb. Getting from one to the other is not simple, but the same machines and much of the same knowledge are involved.
A country that can enrich uranium for a reactor is closer to making bomb material than a country that has to buy its fuel from someone else. The United States and Israel have justified the war in large part as an attempt to keep Iran from turning its uranium-enrichment program into a nuclear weapon. Now Washington may allow another country in the same region to acquire the underlying technology.
When the United Arab Emirates signed a nuclear agreement with Washington in 2009, it promised never to enrich uranium or reprocess used reactor fuel at home.
Instead of banning Saudi enrichment, the agreement would reportedly create a two-year American-Saudi study of whether an enrichment plant should be built inside the kingdom. No plant has been approved. But the United States would be moving from “Saudi Arabia cannot have this” to “let’s decide under what conditions Saudi Arabia can have this.”
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Norah O’Donnell in a 2018 interview broadcast on *60 Minutes* that Saudi Arabia did not want a nuclear bomb. Then he named the exception: “If Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.”
Iran will notice the unequal treatment. Washington is trying to eliminate or sharply restrict Iran’s enrichment program while considering domestic enrichment for Iran’s principal regional rival. That gives Tehran another reason to resist American demands at the negotiating table: Iranian officials can ask why enrichment is unacceptable in Iran but potentially manageable in Saudi Arabia.
The Associated Press reports that the agreement is not expected to require the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Additional Protocol—the stronger inspection system that gives international monitors more information and access, including tools for looking for nuclear work a country has not declared.
Why accept that risk? Saudi Arabia has refused to renounce enrichment, and Washington wants American companies—not Russian or Chinese companies—to build a nuclear industry worth tens of billions of dollars. The administration also wants to preserve a strategic relationship strained by the Iran war. Earlier American negotiations treated nuclear cooperation as part of a larger bargain in which Saudi Arabia would establish relations with Israel. The agreement reportedly does not require Saudi recognition of Israel.
Israeli officials and security experts have reacted with alarm. A Saudi enrichment program could begin a regional competition in which Turkey and Egypt demand the same capability. It could also leave Israel facing two regional rivals with the industrial foundation for producing weapons material.
4. ICE Kept Filling Unsafe Rooms
“Covid man.” “A guy with monkeypox.” “Cardiac lady.”
Those were the names ICE officials used in text messages while deciding which sick people most urgently needed the limited medical care available inside a dangerously overcrowded Manhattan holding facility, according to an exhaustively reported Washington Post piece.
An ICE holding room is supposed to be a place where someone waits for a few hours after being arrested. The rooms have no beds or showers, and generally no full-time medical staff, because nobody is supposed to live in them.
At 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, people lived in them anyway.
One room was approximately 30 feet by 30 feet, with a hard floor, concrete benches and three toilets. It ordinarily held a handful of people. Last summer, ICE packed as many as 86 inside. At the worst point, each person had approximately ten square feet—the floor space of an old-fashioned telephone booth.
These conditions were not separate from the administration’s deportation policy. They were one of its results.
President Trump promised to remove the “worst of the worst.” But the administration also ordered ICE to make thousands of arrests a day. At 26 Federal Plaza, agents began arresting people immediately after their immigration-court hearings. Internal government data covering Trump’s first year found that fewer than 14 percent of ICE arrestees had been charged with or convicted of violent offenses; 42 percent had no previous criminal charge or conviction.
Those being held, according to the Post reporting, went days without showers. The room smelled of sweat, urine and feces. More than 60 people were held in the building for over a week, although the government’s original limit was 12 hours.
The facility accepted people with heart disease, diabetes, kidney failure, tuberculosis, dementia and other serious conditions. There was no doctor on site; one detainee was taken to a hospital with breathing problems.
Officials repeatedly warned one another. “This is insane,” an assistant field-office director wrote in June.
The Washington Post identified 177 facilities nationwide that ICE classifies as temporary holding rooms. Since last August, eight other facilities have held more than 200 people at once. In Mesa, Arizona, ICE placed more than 700 people in a facility with a stated maximum capacity of 203.
The Department of Homeland Security says temporary rooms are necessary because it lacks sufficient detention space to carry out the president’s order. DHS’s defense amounts to: We were ordered to arrest at this pace, and we had nowhere to put people. That is an honest math problem. It is also a choice—holding the arrest rate fixed while capacity stayed fixed, rather than the reverse. Any administration that sets an execution target without funding the infrastructure to execute it humanely is making that same choice, regardless of the policy behind it. The test for citizens and legislators is not whether the gap existed. It is whether it was knowable in advance. Here it was: Officials described it in writing, in real time, months before the Post obtained the documents.
DHS declined to answer the Post’s detailed questions about the conditions, citing an ongoing lawsuit.
5. The Models Left the Sandbox
When companies test whether an advanced artificial-intelligence model can hack a computer system, they wall it off from the internet. The model may be more capable than its makers realize. So they place it in a sandbox: a closed practice environment containing computer systems it is allowed to attack.
It is like teaching someone to investigate burglaries by encouraging them to break into mock houses. The locks are real enough to test their skills, but the houses contain nothing valuable.
OpenAI placed two models inside such an environment: GPT-5.6 Sol and a more powerful model that had not yet been released. Their assignment was to solve difficult hacking challenges called ExploitGym. OpenAI reduced some of the models’ normal safety restrictions—the rules that would ordinarily cause them to refuse a hacking assignment—because the company wanted to see what they could do.
The sandbox was not sealed. One service inside it was allowed to retrieve approved software. The models discovered a previously unknown weakness in that service and used it to reach a computer with unrestricted internet access. They had broken into the mock house and discovered a hidden passage into another house with a whole bunch of gold in it.
Hugging Face was one of the houses in that neighborhood. It is a real company that stores AI models and datasets. The OpenAI models reasoned that it might also be storing the answers to ExploitGym. They broke into Hugging Face’s production systems, stole working login credentials and found restricted test solutions in a database.
OpenAI says the models were not told to attack Hugging Face. They were told to solve ExploitGym. Without a human describing that route, the models found the exit, selected Hugging Face as a target and stole what they needed. Attacking Hugging Face became useful along the way.
I would just like to interject that a story about possibly apocalyptic things happening at a company called Hugging Face suggests the scriptwriters got a little too excited.
This does not mean conscious machines decided to escape, and it does not mean robots will be controlling us tomorrow—though I wouldn’t talk smack around the toaster just to be safe.
But it does demonstrate the danger of a machine capable of pursuing a narrow objective through methods its operators did not expect and would not have approved.
6. The Tariff on the Medicine Cabinet
President Trump announced a plan Tuesday that seeks to bring pharmaceutical manufacturing back to the United States. Imported generic drugs will remain free of tariffs for two years beginning August 1. In August 2028, the tariff would rise to 100 percent. One year later, it would rise to 200 percent.
A generic is the less expensive version of a medicine whose patent has expired. Generics account for more than 90 percent of American prescriptions and more than 80 percent of existing drug shortages, according to the Food and Drug Administration. That is partly because generic prices and profit margins are extremely low. Production often becomes concentrated among only a few suppliers, leaving little spare capacity when a factory fails an inspection, closes or stops making an unprofitable drug.
Trump’s proposal is intended to force drugmakers to manufacture those medicines in the United States. Make it here and you pay no tax, says the president.
There is a national-security argument for producing more medicine here. The United States depends heavily on factories in India and China for finished generic drugs and their ingredients. A future pandemic, natural disaster or confrontation with China could interrupt medicines Americans need every day.
But moving a drug factory is not like moving an office.
Pharmaceutical plants require specialized machinery, trained workers, reliable ingredient suppliers and FDA inspections. One industry executive told Bloomberg that getting a new American facility operating would probably require at least three years—longer than the two-year period before the first tariff takes effect.
The economics are also difficult. Generic manufacturers make very little money on each pill. American construction, labor and regulatory costs are generally higher than costs in India or China. A company must decide whether an American factory will remain profitable for years, even though a future president could change or cancel Trump’s tariff policy.
Many medicines assembled in American plants still use active ingredients made overseas. The administration has not explained whether those ingredients would be taxed.
A company unable to move production can pay the tariff and try to pass some of the cost to insurers, pharmacies and patients. It can accept a loss. Or it can stop selling that medicine in the United States.
Many generic medicines have only two or three suppliers. If one company leaves the American market, the remaining manufacturers may be unable to replace its production quickly. The result would not be a more expensive antibiotic, anesthetic or cancer treatment. It could be no supply at any price.
7. Measles Reaches a 35-Year High
The United States has recorded 2,295 measles cases this year, the most in 35 years.
Measles is not merely a childhood rash. Before the vaccine became widely available, measles hospitalized roughly 48,000 Americans and killed between 400 and 500 every year.
The United States declared measles eliminated in 2000. “Eliminated” did not mean the virus had vanished from Earth. It meant measles was no longer spreading continuously inside the country. When nearly everyone around an infected person was vaccinated, the virus had difficulty finding another person to infect and the chain usually stopped.
That protection requires vaccination rates of about 95 percent because measles is among the most contagious diseases known. National vaccination coverage among kindergartners has fallen from 95.2 percent in the 2019–20 school year to 92.5 percent. The national average also conceals communities where the rate is much lower. That is where one infected traveler can begin an outbreak.
Most of this year’s cases have occurred among people who were unvaccinated. But the consequences do not stop with the person who declined the shot. Babies too young for their first dose and people with weakened immune systems depend on those around them to keep the virus away.
8. Individualized Treatment Reduces Rare Epilepsy
Researchers designed separate treatments for two children whose severe epilepsy was caused by different mutations in the SCN2A gene. The drugs suppressed each child’s defective gene copy without permanently changing the genetic code. After two years, seizures declined 26 percent in one child and 90 percent in the other; both reduced medications and gained language and motor skills. The older patient walked independently for the first time at 15. These were two experimental, individualized trials, not evidence that the treatment is ready for general use.
9. EEOC Moves to End Workforce Demographic Reports
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is the federal agency responsible for enforcing laws against workplace discrimination. It investigates complaints and can sue employers accused of discriminating because of race, sex, religion, national origin, disability, age or other protected characteristics. The commission voted 2–1 to begin the regulatory process of ending a nearly 60-year requirement that large employers report workers’ race, sex and job categories. The EEO-1 data helps regulators and litigants identify possible discrimination patterns across companies and industries. The proposal would also eliminate related reporting by unions, schools and state and local governments. The commission says federal civil-rights law does not require the collection. Critics say enforcement becomes harder when the government stops measuring disparities.
10. The Wreck That Changed the Safety Briefing
Before an airplane takes off, a flight attendant points beneath the seats and explains how to use a life vest. Put it over your head. Fasten the straps. Inflate it only as you leave the airplane. Inflating it inside a flooding cabin can push you against the ceiling and prevent you from swimming down to an exit.
Most of us barely listen. But airlines did not always give passengers that demonstration. One reason they do now is a Pan Am flight that sank off Puerto Rico in 1952.
The wreckage of that airplane has just been found.
Pan Am Flight 526A—known as the Clipper Endeavor—left San Juan for New York on April 11, 1952, carrying 64 passengers and five crew members. Shortly after takeoff, it lost power in two engines and landed hard on rough water
Survivors told investigators that everyone survived the landing.
Then the airplane began to sink.
They had not been shown the exits or told what would happen after a water landing. There was a language barrier between some passengers and the crew. The flight attendants struggled to release the life rafts. Panic spread through the cabin as water came in.
The airplane sank in less than three minutes. Seventeen people escaped. Fifty-two drowned.
The Civil Aeronautics Board—*then the federal regulator and accident investigator*—responded by requiring airlines to explain emergency exits and demonstrate how to find and use flotation equipment. That safety speech eventually expanded into the routine presentation we hear today about seat belts, oxygen masks and life vests.
