Welcome to Stack the Week for July 8th, Wednesday, which is still not Friday.
The experiment continues. Thank you for the feedback and the reviews on Apple Podcasts. If you’re reading this instead of listening, remember this is also a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re driving, making dinner, or finally finishing that wooden boat you’ve been building in the basement since the Hoover administration.
Thank you to Laura Doan for helping me put this together.
We sort the news into sections to make it manageable. Foreign news over here. Markets over there. Elections down at the local level, run by county clerks. The world doesn’t work that way:
The Iran war is across the globe but hit us in our gas tank on Wednesday. A president gave away a private company’s license. Federal officials crossed the boundaries into state-level election decisions. In Maine, a candidate and the party are each drawing a different line. Detention centers can’t detain viruses. Viruses don’t stay inside detention centers…
… Only the inhabitants of the worst corners of the internet were content to stay inside their box.
The Iran war arrives on Wall Street
On Wednesday, President Trump declared the ceasefire with Iran “over” and promised to “hit them hard again tonight.” Speaking at the NATO summit in Ankara, he called Iran’s leaders “scum,” “sick people,” and “vicious, violent people,” adding: “And if they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it.” Tehran answered that it would not negotiate under military threat. “The era of bullying and extortion is over,” said Iran’s parliament speaker. “It leads nowhere. We don’t fold.”
Events on Wednesday proceeded from the exchange of fire on Tuesday. Iran fired on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. forces answered by striking more than 80 Iranian targets—air defenses, coastal radar, and dozens of Revolutionary Guard boats. Iran then launched missiles and drones Wednesday at American bases in Bahrain and Kuwait.
Brent crude jumped about eight percent—its largest one-day increase since this phase of the conflict began. Earlier spikes in this conflict had been roughly two to three percent.
The Dow fell roughly 800 points. Higher oil prices eventually reach trucking companies, airlines, manufacturers, farmers, grocery distributors, and ultimately consumers. Traders were no longer pricing isolated attacks. They were pricing the possibility of a prolonged conflict that could repeatedly disrupt oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. How much will corporate profits sink, or will they pass along the higher prices?
NBC News reported Tuesday that the Defense Department, with a budget of nearly a trillion dollars, is running out of cash. Defense officials asked Congress for more than $67 billion. Lawmakers haven’t approved it, in part out of frustration over how little the administration tells them about the war.
Ukraine gets a license, not missiles
Russia fired ballistic missiles at Kyiv Tuesday night into Wednesday—the third attack on the capital in less than a week. The strikes exploited the shortage we talked about Monday: Ukraine can shoot down ballistic missiles only with Patriot interceptors, and it is running out of them. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has spent six months asking Washington both for more Patriot interceptors and for permission to build his own.
Lockheed Martin builds roughly 600 Patriot interceptors a year. Russia builds roughly 120 ballistic missiles a month—and recently fired 30 in a single night. Everyone defending against ballistic missiles draws from that same limited supply. Gulf states have fired more than 1,100 Patriots defending against Iran, and every interceptor the production line replaces for the Gulf is one that can’t protect the golden church domes of Kyiv.
At the summit Wednesday, President Trump granted the license—while ruling out more American missiles, because “we need them for ourselves too.” He announced the license before telling Lockheed Martin, the company whose technology he had just promised away.
A license, however, is not a missile. Trump claimed new U.S. plants could stand up production in two to three months. Lockheed Martin’s expansion of its existing line will not reach 2,000 interceptors a year until 2030. It remains unclear whether the license covers interceptors, the full Patriot system, or where production would happen. And a missile factory in Ukraine would sit inside the range of the weapons it is meant to stop. Or, Russians could seize production and use it themselves.
In the main, the Trump complain was mainly aimed at Spain. The U.S. president continued his long-running push for NATO members to increase defense spending. Spain is the only alliance member that has not committed to spending 5 percent of GDP on defense by 2035.
“I don’t want anything to do with Spain,” he said. “Cut off all trade with Spain, please, including visits.”
But it is unclear whether Trump could single out Spain, the European Union’s fourth-largest economy, without threatening the broader U.S. trade relationship with the EU’s 27 member countries. The president has made similar threats toward Spain before without following through.
The DOJ sends 51 letters
The Justice Department warned every top election official in the country Tuesday that they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting.
The threat targets a crime that, like overcrowding at a seance or unicorn stampedes, doesn’t exist. Noncitizen voting is already a federal crime—punishable by prison and, for the voter, deportation. That is why it rarely happens. State audits, including in Republican-led states, have found noncitizen voting to be extremely rare, and every state already has procedures to prevent it.
So why would the head of the Civil Rights Division bang out a directive on the keyboard? For the same reason World Cup Soccer players flop all over on the ground and pretend they’ve been fouled.
President Trump has spent years claiming that elections he loses are rigged. Republicans are not favored in November’s midterms. If the Justice Department is already telling states they could be prosecuted for allowing noncitizens to vote, then after the election it can point to those warnings and argue that any Republican loss was caused by illegal noncitizen voting.
The pushback is bipartisan. Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state called the letters insulting to county recorders. Utah’s Republican chief election official, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, described “another love letter” from the DOJ and called the threats “truly bizarre behavior” from “the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”
The letters follow a losing streak. The department has sued 30 states and D.C. for their voter rolls and has yet to win a case. Eleven federal courts have dismissed its demands, and the department lost its first appeal. Courts also blocked key parts of Trump’s executive order that sought to restrict mail voting. The department keeps losing for the same reason: the Constitution assigns the running of elections to the states.
Five Days
You can tell a live oyster from a dead one with a tap. A live oyster snaps shut. A dead one gapes. Within hours the meat begins to rot, announcing itself to everyone huddled over a Red Stripe looking for solace.
Which brings us to the dying candidacy of the Democratic nominee for Maine’s Senate seat.
Graham Platner farms oysters for a living. Since Monday, Democrats have been tapping. Even Stephen King, Maine’s most famous Democrat, deleted his post defending Platner. No snap. Platner was silent Wednesday, and the smell of a dead campaign has reached every passerby since Monday’s rape allegation—which he denies.
His campaign held a staff call that set no timeline for a decision. A person close to the campaign told CNN: “I think he knows it’s over,” but “he thinks ‘I built this thing’”—and wants a say in who gets the nomination.
The Maine Democratic Party is already designing a replacement process. It rebuffed Platner’s attempts to shape the pick. His campaign insists it wants “voters and volunteers” choosing a successor, “not the political establishment.” The party’s answer: nothing starts until he withdraws.
The candidates aren’t waiting. Troy Jackson, the former state Senate president who campaigned alongside Platner, filed exploratory paperwork Tuesday—the first to do so. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows is considering a run. So is Nirav Shah, the former CDC director.
Platner has until 5 p.m. Monday to withdraw; the party has until July 27 to name someone.
A virus inside, a shooting outside
Measles is loose in federal custody. DHS confirmed seven active cases among detainees at the Florence Detention Center in Arizona. It’s the second cluster in Arizona federal custody this year.
The system is designed to spread it: ICE constantly transfers detainees from one facility to another—to open up beds, to stage deportations—so an infection doesn’t stay where it starts. It rides the bus to the next facility. In June, one infected detainee from the Arizona network arrived at Fort Bliss in Texas, and the facility had to quarantine nearly 180 people. That’s the arithmetic of measles, among the most contagious viruses we know: one case in a crowded building means everyone unvaccinated nearby is presumed exposed.
A detention center gives measles everything it wants: people packed in close quarters, a population that turns over constantly (fresh virus shipments daily!), and no reliable record of who’s been vaccinated. In response, ICE has stopped in-person visits at Florence, stopped moving detainees around inside the facility, and quarantined anyone suspected of contact with an infected person.
Quarantining the building doesn’t quarantine the outbreak, because immigration detention isn’t a prison sentence—people leave all the time. They post bond. They win their cases. Judges order them freed. When someone who’s been exposed walks out the door, local health officials and the migrant shelters that receive them need to know, so they can watch for symptoms and trace contacts. The shelters say ICE isn’t telling them. The virus’s trail goes cold at the gate.
Around 6:30 Tuesday morning in Houston’s Magnolia Park, a historic Mexican-American neighborhood, ICE officers attempted a traffic stop on Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who had lived in the United States for nearly 35 years, worked construction, and was in the legal process of obtaining a work permit. An officer shot him in the abdomen. He died shortly after reaching the hospital.
ICE says Araujo tried to evade arrest, rammed a law-enforcement vehicle, and “weaponized his vehicle” against an officer, who fired in self-defense. Business surveillance footage didn’t capture the shooting, but it recorded Araujo afterward, handcuffed face down on the ground, groaning. Neighbors heard him cry out in Spanish: “They’re killing me!” The League of United Latin American Citizens says he was on his way to work to pick up his employees.
ICE accounts of vehicle-ramming in past shootings have been contradicted by video, producing dropped charges and lawsuits.
How an insurance pool dies
Health insurance works by pooling money. Everyone pays premiums; the money covers whoever gets sick that year. Healthy people pay in more than they use. Sick people use more than they pay in. The insurer needs enough healthy people paying to cover the sick ones’ bills.
A death spiral is what kills that arrangement. Premiums rise. Healthy people look at the new price and decide they’d rather risk it—they’re not sick, so insurance feels like money spent on nothing. They cancel. But the sick people can’t cancel; they need the coverage. Now the insurer is collecting less money and paying the same medical bills. To cover the gap, it raises premiums on everyone left. That new price drives out the next-healthiest group. Fewer payers, same bills, higher premiums, more cancellations. Each round the pool gets smaller and sicker, and the price climbs until almost no one can afford it.
That is now happening in the individual insurance market. Insurers are proposing a median 14 percent premium increase for 2027 Affordable Care Act plans, according to a KFF and Peterson Center report out Wednesday—the second consecutive year of double-digit hikes. Congress triggered it. Federal subsidies had been paying part of everyone’s premium, which kept the price low enough that healthy people stayed. The subsidies expired at the end of 2025. Prices jumped, healthy people canceled, and the pools got sicker. The 14 percent is the insurers’ forecast: they expect the people still buying coverage next year to be sicker and more expensive, and they’re setting premiums high enough to pay those bills.
The people who will pay the higher premiums are the roughly 20 million Americans no employer covers: contractors, farmers, gig workers, people who retired before Medicare kicks in.
The 14 percent is a proposal, not the final price. Two things could still lower it. State insurance regulators review these requests every summer and often force them down. And Congress could bring back the subsidies that kept healthy people in the pool in the first place. What won’t change is the timing: the final prices arrive in mailboxes this fall, a few weeks before the midterm elections.
50,000 people watched and no alarm rang
A Berlin court on Wednesday sentenced a 32-year-old medical professional, identified as Zhiting S., to five years in prison as an accessory to aggravated rape. He never assaulted the victims himself. Instead, he used his medical training to teach men in a Telegram network which drugs, and in what doses, would render women unconscious without leaving evidence. He is the fourth member of the network’s inner circle convicted this year. The ringleader received 14 years in February for serial rape and attempted murder.
An Associated Press investigation reveals what the network had become. About two dozen Telegram channels, operating under the innocuous name “German Driving School for Experts,” used coded language—women were “cars”—to evade automated moderation. Behind the code, eight core members, mostly Chinese nationals living in Germany, drugged and raped Chinese women studying and working across Western Europe, filmed the assaults, and distributed the videos to channels that eventually drew 50,000 members who bought, traded, and reviewed them.
The network survived for at least four years because its design defeated detection. Telegram permits groups of up to 200,000 members with little internal moderation. The coded language slipped past keyword filters. No participant reported the channels because every viewer was implicated, and the victims often had no memory of the assaults because of the drugs.
Police uncovered the operation only after the ringleader escalated from women he knew socially to strangers he met online. Strangers knew something had happened and went to the police.
Telegram told the AP that sexual violence is prohibited on the platform and that it complies with European law, but declined to explain how channels with tens of thousands of members shared evidence of rape for years without intervention. Its founder was arrested in Paris in 2024 over allegations that the platform’s architecture facilitates organized criminal activity.
The German judges rejected the idea that this was an isolated group. They called it the “industrialization of abuse.” The description fit: the network had instructors, logistics, distribution, and customers. What it lacked, for four years, was anyone looking inside.
Generational roomates
One-third of Americans under 35 now live with their parents, according to a recent Realtor.com report highlighted by The New York Times. At 33 percent, the share has climbed back near the pandemic peak of 34 percent reached in 2020.
Young adults are more educated and broadly employed, but home prices, rents, and borrowing costs have risen faster than wages. Many working professionals are moving home not because they can’t find work, but because they can’t afford a household of their own.
What feels like a new social failure may actually be a return to an older economic pattern. For most of American history, young adults did not leave home at 18 or 21 to establish independent households. In the 18th and 19th centuries, they typically remained part of extended family economies or lived with other households while learning trades and accumulating savings. The expectation that young adults would quickly move into homes of their own was largely a product of the extraordinary prosperity that followed World War II. From that perspective, today’s living arrangements may say less about a generation failing to launch than about an economy that no longer supports a postwar exception.
Soccer advantage
Soccer socks are skin-tight by design—they anchor the shin guards and steady the ankle—but the calf muscle swells every time it fires, thousands of times a game, and the fabric squeezes back. Legs tingle. Legs go numb. So players cut holes in the socks, at the calf — the back of the lower leg, over the muscle, between the ankle and the knee to let the muscle breathe, and swear they run freer.
Science’s response: no. Wired reports there’s not a single study showing the holes help. The research on compression gear contradicts the folk wisdom —a snug sock, properly fitted, actually limits muscle inflammation. Sports medicine specialists say the benefit lives entirely in the player’s head.
Which doesn’t make it worthless. A player who believes his sock is strangling his calf plays like a man being strangled. Cut the hole and the belief goes away—performance unchanged, confidence restored.
The rules permit it, by the way. You can shred your socks so long as the shin guards stay covered. Tear your jersey and you have to change it. FIFA, an organization facing questions about heat, ticket prices, and stadium surveillance, has taken a firm regulatory line on shirts.
Trump ordered to pay E. Jean Carroll
It’s been roughly 30 years since Donald Trump sexually assaulted writer E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store dressing room, and three years since a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and awarded Carroll more than $5 million.
On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered Trump to finally pay that judgment, which has grown to $5.8 million with interest. The money had been held in a court-controlled account while Trump appealed. Last week, the Supreme Court let the 2023 civil verdict stand, clearing the way for Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to release the funds.
Trump’s legal team is still trying to delay payment by asking the Supreme Court to rehear the case, though such requests are rarely granted.
A much larger judgment remains unresolved. Trump is also appealing the separate $83.3 million verdict a jury awarded Carroll in 2024 after finding he defamed her after she publicly accused him of the assault.
Updates
Yesterday we told you about a skyscraper in Manhattan that was abruptly freaking everyone out as a result of structural failures created by the effort to turn it from an office building into a residential building. Engineers discovered buckling columns. The project is a byproduct of the post-COVID office glut: developers are trying to turn half-empty towers into housing. But converting offices into apartments isn’t like repainting the walls. Every kitchen and bathroom means more plumbing, more holes cut through concrete floors, and much more weight than the building was originally designed to carry. The Wednesday update: emergency crews spent the night installing temporary steel supports, and city officials now say the building has stabilized, with no further movement detected since Tuesday morning. Some nearby buildings have reopened, but several remain evacuated while engineers investigate what caused the failure and determine whether the project can safely continue.
