Welcome to Stack the Week for July 9th, Thursday.
The daily 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 concluding that you really haven’t done enough to decide what your new look for summer is going to be.
Thank you to Laura Doan for helping me bolt all of this together.
I usually start with a big thought connecting the day’s events that I can roll at you to say I am Lazarus, come from the dead. I’m not seeing it in the entrails today. I don’t want to force one and then have one, settling a pillow by her head, say, “That is not it, at all.”
So, get yourself a peach and follow along with what happened, sorted through our way.
Iran is a big mess again
The ceasefire stopped organizing the Iran war. Now we’re back to a more dangerous process of watching each side calculate which has more leverage and how to get more.
For the last few weeks, every new development was measured against the question: Would the ceasefire hold?
Now we are back to a familiar formula: Iran cannot match the United States bomb for bomb. It doesn’t have to. It has its hand around the throat of something the rest of the world cannot afford to lose: the Strait of Hormuz.
I won’t bore you with the shipping math. The world needs what moves through that narrow stretch of water. And Iran doesn’t have to close the strait to use it. It only has to make ship captains, insurers, energy traders, and presidents nervous.
That’s why the June memorandum of understanding–—the ceasefire that lifted the American naval blockade, and reopened the Strait— mattered more than it first appeared. It wasn’t simply an agreement. It was an acknowledgment that the Strait itself had become one of the central prizes in the conflict. And as acute listeners will know, it was not a prize before the conflict because it was not an issue of contention.
Even as the formal truce collapsed into open conflict, high-level mediators from Qatar, Pakistan, and Egypt kept lines of communication open around the clock. The war and the negotiations are no longer alternating; they are happening simultaneously.
The problem was not that Washington failed to imagine Iran’s leverage. The problem was that it acted as if American military superiority could make that leverage irrelevant. That’s a big mistake and a big one for Donald Trump who presents himself as having a killer instinct that understands all possibilities.
So now that President Trump has declared the ceasefire over, what are the choices now? The United States can try to degrade Iran’s ability to threaten shipping, do the slow, hard work of reopening the Strait, and rob Iran of its leverage. Or it can escalate the bombing in the hope of forcing the regime to yield. The Iranian regime can continue asking its people to absorb the pain while betting it can disrupt the Strait long enough for pressure from the world economy—and perhaps from the approaching November election—to produce better terms.
Ukraine’s Strategic Shift
The lesson of the Iran war—if we can’t beat your army, we’ll attack the system that keeps it fighting—is playing out in Ukraine too.
Ukraine is going after the machinery that lets Russia keep fighting: oil depots, refineries, fuel terminals, tankers, rail links, and the supply lines that keep Crimea and the front fed.
On Thursday, Ukrainian drones hit more Russian oil facilities and set two oil tankers ablaze in the Sea of Azov. Fires broke out at oil sites prompting evacuations, while one tanker continued burning after its crew fled.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calls the campaign “long-range sanctions.” If sanctions are supposed to squeeze the revenue and supply lines that sustain war, Ukraine is now trying to do with drones what Western governments have tried to do with finance.
Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries and fuel infrastructure have helped trigger gasoline shortages, rationing, and long lines in multiple Russian regions. Foreign Policy reports that Ukraine has hit Russian oil refineries 194 times this year—11 times as often as during the same period last year—and that more than half of Russia’s regions have reported fuel shortages, rationing, or restrictions on civilian sales.
This is the change in the war. Ukraine is no longer only trying to stop Russian advances at the front. It is trying to make the front harder for Russia to supply. I don’t know what to do with this exactly, but for years, Ukraine’s allies worried that striking inside Russia would escalate the war. How worried should we be about escalation now?
The lesson isn’t being lost on the rest of NATO. On Thursday, at a NATO summit, Germany announced it will buy American Tomahawk cruise missiles, giving it—for the first time since the Cold War—a ground-based weapon capable of striking targets more than 1,000 miles away. Since NATO was created to counter the Russian threat, those 1,000 miles might be measured straight into Russia.
European allies also pledged billions of dollars to develop their own long-range strike systems. Europe is drawing the same lesson Ukraine has learned by necessity: in modern war, holding an enemy’s logistics, industry and infrastructure at risk may matter as much as defeating its armies at the front.
President Trump said Wednesday that the United States would give Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriot air-defense systems. A license is not a shield over Kyiv: A top Ukrainian official warned that it could take a year or more to produce Patriot interceptor missiles.
Fire in the Land of Shoes
China’s shoe capital became the site of one of the country’s deadliest industrial accidents in years Thursday.
A fire tore through the Huiteng shoe factory in China’s Fujian Province, killing 28 people. More than 200 workers escaped or were rescued, but many were trapped as flames spread through the multi-story building. The fire broke out in Jinjiang, a city whose factories produced more than 1.2 billion pairs of shoes last year—roughly one out of every five pairs made anywhere in the world.
Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered what state media called an “all-out” rescue effort and demanded that those responsible be held accountable. Authorities arrested the factory owner and other managers, froze the company’s assets, and opened an investigation into what caused the fire.
Preliminary findings suggest the blaze started on the building’s ground floor. Officials said materials such as rubber soles, adhesives, and chemical solvents used in shoe production helped it spread rapidly, while firefighters told state television that large quantities of stored materials had been piled into stairwells, slowing both evacuations and rescue efforts.
The speed of the government’s response reflects a familiar pattern in China. Major industrial accidents often produce an immediate promise of accountability, arrests of local managers, and a national investigation. The harder question usually comes later: whether the findings lead to broader changes in workplace safety or simply identify people to blame.
Perhaps not the Time for a Fruit Habit
Food has become remarkably good at traveling across America. Unfortunately, so have the things that sometimes come with it.
Health officials are investigating one of the country’s largest cyclospora outbreaks in years after nearly 1,000 people in Michigan and hundreds more in neighboring Ohio became sick with a parasite that causes severe diarrhea. More than 40 people have been hospitalized, but no one has died. Officials still don’t know what food caused the outbreak.
Cyclospora exposes a weakness in the modern food system. By the time people become sick—sometimes two weeks after eating contaminated food—the lettuce, basil, cilantro, berries or other produce that carried the parasite has long since been harvested, shipped, sold and eaten. One contaminated ingredient may have passed through multiple distributors into grocery stores and restaurants across dozens of states before investigators even know an outbreak exists.
Tracing the source is unusually difficult. The parasite cannot be grown in a laboratory, many routine tests don’t look for it, and investigators often discover that the only thing hundreds of patients shared was a single ingredient hidden inside dozens of different meals. Sometimes they never find the source.
The defenses are modest: Wash produce, though washing may not remove this parasite. Peel what you can. Skip pre-cut produce during an outbreak. And if diarrhea lingers after a meal of fresh produce, tell your doctor what you ate. Sometimes the most important clue isn’t in a lab result—it’s in your last meal.
Participation Puzzler
The unemployment rate tells you how many people are looking for work and can’t find it.
The labor-force participation rate tells you something different: How many Americans are even in the game? It measures the share of adults who either have a job or are actively trying to get one. Stop looking, and you disappear from both the labor force and the unemployment rate. Your family, however, will still expect you at dinner.
That’s why economists watch it so closely. A falling unemployment rate usually signals a healthy economy. A falling participation rate can mean people aren’t finding work, can’t work, or no longer think work is worth pursuing.
USA Today highlighted just how dramatic that shift has become. In June, roughly 720,000 Americans left the labor force, pushing the participation rate down to 61.5 percent. Outside the pandemic, that’s the lowest level in nearly half a century.
Why are they leaving? No one agrees. Some are retiring as America ages. Some have left work to care for children or aging parents. Some are living with chronic illness or disability. Others have concluded that after paying for childcare, transportation, housing, and food, a full-time job simply doesn’t add up.
Whatever the reason, those Americans haven’t disappeared. They still need income, housing, healthcare and food. The question is who now carries that burden: a spouse, parents, savings, credit cards, disability programs, or Social Security.
The labor market may have enough jobs. The deeper question is whether those jobs actually match the skills, pay expectations, and life circumstances of the people available to fill them—and whether enough Americans can, or want to, take them.
For generations, the American promise was simple: if you were willing to work, there would be a place for you—and that work would buy stability, independence, and a shot at something better. If hundreds of thousands of Americans are now stepping away—not because they are unwilling, but because the math no longer adds up—then this isn’t a labor-market story. It’s a question of whether work still works.
Platner Blindness
The New York Times has reconstructed the rise and collapse of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign, and its reporting suggests the implosion was not caused by one revelation but by a repeated failure of vetting. Again and again, campaign advisers, Democratic officials, donors and allied organizations asked Platner the same question: Is there anything else? Again and again, they were told no. Again and again, there was something else.
The allegations and controversies were different—a Nazi-linked tattoo, inflammatory online posts, sexual messages, accounts from former girlfriends, and finally a rape allegation that Platner denies. What linked them was not their subject matter but the campaign’s inability to anticipate them. The Times reports that key advisers believed a thorough background investigation had been done. In reality, much of the vetting depended on what the candidate disclosed about himself.
That distinction matters beyond one Senate race. Every campaign constructs a story about its candidate. Good vetting is an effort to destroy that story before opponents do. It assumes the candidate may be wrong, forgetful, embarrassed, or simply unwilling to tell the whole truth. The purpose isn’t to protect the candidate. It’s to protect everyone else who decides to invest their reputation in that candidate. In campaigns that call themselves movements, that means protecting the movement from becoming captive to one person’s blind spots—or the blind spots of the people closest to him.
By the time Democrats began asking whether there was “anything else,” the campaign no longer controlled the answer. The press did. The next question isn’t simply who replaces Platner on the ballot. It’s whether Democrats treat this as a lesson about better vetting or turn it into another chapter in the party’s long-running argument over whether outsider, grassroots candidates or establishment candidates make better nominees. If Platner’s collapse becomes evidence in that larger ideological fight instead of a lesson about how campaigns should examine their own candidates, the damage won’t end with one Senate race.
Cartel Drones
In Mexico, drones are not changing a war between states. They are changing what happens when the state is absent.
Cartels have used drones before—primarily for surveillance and, in recent years, to drop explosives—but attacks like the one in Guerrero show how routine and destructive that tactic has become.
At 6 a.m. Wednesday, as the sun came up over the mountains of Guerrero, bombs began falling from cartel drones on a cluster of rural communities. Residents had spent weeks warning state authorities that La Nueva Familia Michoacana was closing in. They posted videos of cartel drones overhead. They shared locations of cartel fighters approaching their homes.
Help did not come.
So a group of more than 70 residents hid in an abandoned medical clinic– women, children, and elderly residents– huddled while explosions and gunfire sounded outside. Others sheltered in churches. “While some are celebrating goals, others are getting massacred by drones carrying bombs,” one woman told the Associated Press. The World Cup cities in Mexico were secure; places like Guerrero were not.
Authorities have not confirmed how many people were killed in the attack, and early reports focused more on the scale of the assault and the displacement of residents than on a verified death toll.
Authorities initially denied the attacks, even as residents livestreamed gunfire and smoke from mountain lookout posts. After the AP asked about the reports, Mexico’s Security Cabinet said forces were heading to the area to verify the situation and strengthen the state presence.
In the absence of government protection, residents formed a self-defense group. But that solution carries its own corruption. The vigilantes have been armed by rival cartels fighting La Nueva Familia Michoacana for territory. They carry military-grade weapons smuggled from the United States, grenades, and drones of their own.
So the village is not choosing between the state and the cartel. It is choosing among armed powers, none of them fully protective, all of them dangerous.
Eswatini Immigration
Sometimes, when Americans are asked to care about a country far away, someone inevitably says, “Most people couldn’t even find it on a map.” I’ve always disliked that argument. Your inability to locate a country should not determine whether you care about actions taken there in your name.
Which brings us to Eswatini, a kingdom of about 1.2 million people, wedged between South Africa and Mozambique.
This week it accepted another 11 people deported from the United States, making this the fourth group of deportees Eswatini has taken in under an agreement with the Trump administration. None of them are citizens of Eswatini, which means they are being sent to a country where they likely have no family ties, may not speak the local languages, and have no established support networks. Many cannot easily be returned to their own countries. Under the agreement, they are expected to remain in Eswatini while their cases are worked out.
For generations, immigration detention has largely happened inside the American legal system. People were held in American detention centers, under American rules, with access—however imperfect—to American courts.
Now another model is emerging. The United States is increasingly asking other countries to perform part of that function instead.
We’ve seen versions of this before. Australia has processed asylum seekers offshore. Britain tried to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. Italy has pursued migrant processing in Albania. The details differ, but they all ask the same institutional question: When governments run into legal, political, or practical limits at home, do they move the function somewhere else?
The Trump administration has reached agreements with nearly two dozen countries to accept third-country deportees. Eswatini is one of the most active participants. Human-rights groups say the secrecy surrounding these arrangements makes it difficult to know where people are being sent, what conditions they face, or what legal protections they have once they arrive—raising the possibility that individuals could be held for long periods with little oversight or recourse, even as the Eswatini government says it is acting lawfully and on humanitarian grounds.
As an example of the kinds of thing that can go wrong, migrants deported from the U.S. and detained in a hotel in Equatorial Guinea say that authorities there also have used the facility to quarantine at least one suspected Ebola patient, deportees and lawyers representing them said Thursday.
Peanut Butter Floor
One of the easiest ways to make people look at something is to tell them it’s important. Dutch artist Wim T. Schippers spent a career trying the opposite.
A museum in Rotterdam this week covered a 270-square-foot floor with more than 800 pounds of peanut butter—enough for roughly 15,000 sandwiches—to recreate one of Schippers’ best-known works after his death last month. Museum staff told visitors simply to “follow the smell.”
The work, first created in 1969, has no hidden message. Schippers insisted the peanut butter be spread “as smoothly and boringly as possible.” He once said, “Isn’t it fantastic that we are all standing here looking at peanut butter?”
Schippers believed art had become too serious, too eager to declare everything profound. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, he spent decades directing people’s attention toward things that seemed almost aggressively unimportant: a bottle of lemonade poured into the sea, a floor covered in peanut butter, absurd television programs, even voicing Ernie and Kermit the Frog in the Dutch version of Sesame Street.
Most artists try to persuade you that ordinary things contain hidden meaning. Schippers asked a different question: What if simply paying attention is enough? In 1969, that was a prank on profundity. Then the world changed around the joke. In an economy engineered to harvest every spare second of human attention, standing in a room looking at peanut butter is no longer nothing. Schippers spent a career insisting his work meant nothing. In celebrating him, we have discovered that the work is also useful.
Update
A little update on that Manhattan skyscraper that listeners have been following closely. We’ll let the New York Times take it from here.
“A developer behind the Midtown office conversion project that suffered structural damage on Tuesday played down the problems in an interview, saying there was never a danger of a building collapse and that he expected the project to be delayed for only a few weeks.
“This incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap,” Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, said on Tuesday evening. “It happens unfortunately far too often on construction sites: falling cranes, people — God forbid — falling off buildings, windows falling out.”
God forbid.
Editorial Note
One editorial note before we go.
President Trump ended the NATO summit sounding markedly warmer toward America’s European allies than he had when he arrived. He spoke of the “respect and the love in the room,” adding, “They like the job I’m doing,” and described the summit as showing “tremendous unity.”
We could spend the next ten minutes asking whether he meant it, whether it was tactical, whether European leaders believed it, or whether it signals another turn in American foreign policy.
I decided not to.
There is simply too much else to understand. What countries actually do matters more than what everyone spends a day guessing the president really meant. Germany is buying Tomahawks. Europe is investing billions in long-range strike weapons. Ukraine is trying to manufacture Patriots. Iran is trying to use the Strait of Hormuz as leverage. Those are durable facts. They will shape events long after today’s interpretations of presidential tone have disappeared.
One of the hardest editorial decisions every day is deciding what not to chase. With a President who lies as often as you and I receive and expel breaths, the challenge is greater. He is a deeply consequential figure, but his words are not. Today, I chose to spend our time on the machinery rather than the mood.
