Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for June 1 through June 5. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player.
Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering.
A chirping of hacks. A crazy partner in a war of moderate ceasefiring. A powers vote with no power. A slush fund still slushing. An enforcement bill that outlasts the revolt. A jobs number nobody saw coming. A Manhattan of bees underground, a ghost up on the mountain, and the screwworm is back thanks to the world’s first trillionaire.
Let’s take it day by day.
Monday June 1
Monday was about leverage and who actually has it — a president learning that more bombs don’t buy more obedience, neither does allyship with Israel, a slush fund his own party wouldn’t swallow, ten thousand government lawyers who decided the work wasn’t worth their names, and five and a half million bees who’ve held the same patch of cemetery since before any of them were born.
Bored
The president of the United States occupied many parts of the register Monday on the war he started in Iran.
He told CNBC’s Eamon Javers he’d lost interest.
“If they’re over, honestly, I don’t care,” he said, referring to peace talks. “I could care less. If they’re over, they’re over. If they’re not, you know — I think they took too much time. Frankly, I thought they started to get very boring.”
(Isn’t that the metric you want for peace talks? Boring? War is exciting. Peace talks you want to be boring.)
The president criticized Republican “hacks” for “chirping” about his handling of the war.
Wait till he learns what happens to him at the hands of his own party later in the week!
And on Truth Social he claimed credit for stopping something: that he’d personally kept the Israelis from striking the southern suburbs of Beirut.
The public posture was boredom.
The private posture, according to two U.S. officials and a third source briefed on the call, was rage.
This is all Axios reporting.
Summarizing the president’s remarks to Benjamin Netanyahu, one official said Trump told the Israeli leader:
And you’ll want to cover the ears of young ones:
“You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”
A second Axios source said Trump at one point yelled, “What the fuck are you doing?”
This does not sound like the transcript of a victory party.
Remember, the public posture from the president is that the United States has “met and exceeded all military objectives” and achieved “total and complete victory” in the war in Iran.
Netanyahu’s office disputes the personal remarks.
The deal the president said was close last Friday wasn’t close.
After a Situation Room meeting, he sent the preliminary framework — a 60-day extension of the April 7 ceasefire — back for changes.
He wants tougher language and more promises from Tehran before any of its frozen funds are released.
As a candidate, Trump hammered Barack Obama for unfreezing Iranian money under the 2015 nuclear deal.
Now that he can launch the bombers and has, he is discovering what Obama discovered: bombs only get you so far.
The Strait, slightly ajar
Before the war, more than 100 commercial ships a day passed through the Strait of Hormuz.
They carried everything from the fertilizer that helps feed corn crops to the helium that goes in MRI machines.
These are container ships about 1,000 feet long — half the size of the reflecting pool in Washington, this week’s most popular unit of measurement.
Over the last three weeks, the U.S. has guided about 70 through total. An average of three a day.
To make the passage, most ships are turning off their Automatic Identification Systems and running dark.
A Greek supertanker carrying two million barrels of crude crossed that way last week. So did a Chinese-owned vessel loaded with fertilizer.
This pokey pace won’t refire the global economy.
But it might mean that whatever is being learned moving these ships through can be scaled up later.
The painstaking work reminds us how ridiculous it was for some — including the president — to suggest that countries who rely on the strait should just hop in and escort their own ships.
They didn’t start the war, so it was a tough ask in the first place.
And given how hard this has been even for the U.S. military, it puts the lie to the armchair pundits who said other countries could just snap their fingers and watch the traffic come roaring back.
Cord cutters in the Strait.
A few weeks back we wrote about Iran’s idea of charging a toll for the internet cables under the Strait of Hormuz.
On Monday, DealBook reported that Silicon Valley has concerns about this.
In early May an Iranian military spokesman said the country might demand license fees from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta to use the cables they operate under the strait — and hinted the cables could be cut.
So the tech giants are running what one adviser called “intensive back-channel engagement” to protect their subsea networks.
Usually we don’t go in for that kind of jargon here at Stack the Week.
What the hell does “intensive back-channel engagement” mean anyway?
But we’ve been unable to learn anything more. It sounds kinda weak.
Iran’s own news agency puts the traffic at about $10 trillion a day.
The cables carry roughly 99 percent of the world’s internet, according to the International Telecommunication Union.
And there aren’t many people who can fix a cut.
Four companies lay undersea cable.
Maybe twenty repair ships exist, most of them weeks from the Middle East.
In 2024, a single cut in the Red Sea took down a quarter of the region’s internet for weeks.
It took months.
But let’s not make this sound like a fella could dive in the water with a kitchen knife in his teeth.
Combat divers, the most effective way to cut the lines, would nevertheless have to use specialized equipment, because modern fibre-optic cables are protected by dense engineering armour comprising galvanised steel wires and insulating materials.
The slush fund goeth
This next story about the president’s slush fund is going to change by the end of the week.
But here at Stack the Week, we have a theory: that walking through the news day by day adds context a Friday summary can’t.
A story delivered all at once on Friday flattens things.
It front-loads the latest and the loudest, and that can bruise your understanding.
We might be wrong. So weigh in, if you have a view.
Monday, the Trump administration said it would pause the $1.8 billion fund built to compensate the president’s allies.
It was complying with a court order — and bowing to a revolt among Republicans.
The fund would have paid people who said the federal government wrongly targeted them.
In practice, that meant January 6th defendants and Trump associates.
Majority Leader John Thune said Monday he hoped the White House would shut it down on its own.
His words: “The best way to handle it is if the administration decides to shut it down themselves.”
A pause is not a death. So this will likely go a few more rounds.
But even if the fund disappears, don’t reach for the eraser to update your commemorative Stack the Week Destruction of Norms tracker.
The norms are broken even if the fund never pays out a cent.
Because in defending the fund the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and the acting attorney general would not rule out that the money might go to convicted defendants — people who assaulted police officers.
Ten thousand lawyers
One in five lawyers who worked for the federal government at the end of 2024 had left by March 2026.
That’s an exodus of more than 10,000 attorneys, according to a New York Times analysis of federal employment data.
Some retired. Some were cut. Some quit over the administration’s policies.
The effect is the same: the federal government is no longer the place an ambitious public-interest lawyer wants on a résumé.
Many are taking their experience to Democratic state attorneys general and the nonprofits suing the administration.
George Washington University’s law school is a fifteen-minute walk from the White House.
It’s now steering public-service students toward state legislatures and city councils instead.
Scott Bourque, who just finished his first year at Georgetown Law, turned down a Justice Department internship.
“A lot of people I’ve spoken to just in the last few months have said that they would look down on a person if they had a federal job on their résumé that they started during this administration,” he said.
“Some people have explicitly said they would see a person willing to go to work at this D.O.J. as somebody they couldn’t trust.”
Graham Platner’s accounting
The Republican party transformed itself for Donald Trump, changing its once-ironclad views on personal morality, trade, and democracy abroad. Democrats, whose party did a smaller-bore version of morality-tailoring to defend Bill Clinton, now face the question again: what conduct is so inconsistent with party values that its worth risking the party gaining power?
Graham Platner is a Marine veteran with no political experience who has surged ahead in Maine’s June 9 Senate primary, drawing big crowds and endorsements from Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego. He has also weathered, in order: a Reddit history denigrating women; a tattoo recognized as a Nazi symbol, which he has since covered; and now the texts.
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal report that shortly after Platner launched his campaign last year, his wife, Amy Gertner, flagged to staff that he had exchanged sexual messages with other women. Gertner said Saturday she was “deeply hurt,” and accused a former campaign confidante of betraying her by making the messages public.
The race is a toss-up, and control of the Senate may run through it — which is the whole problem. Platner led Susan Collins by nine points in a University of New Hampshire poll last week.
So the question Democrats are asking is whether anything is disqualifying anymore — or whether Trump, who survived scandals that ended other careers, has reset the floor. “I find that tattoo and his commentary about it to be personally disqualifying,” Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts said on CNN. Senator Cory Booker, asked about the texts: “Yeah, I have concerns. That guy has questions to answer, and that’s what campaigns are for.”
The biggest concern at the start of the week was whether there were more shoes to drop about Platner’s past.
Trapped before you start and before 40
Two new studies, released Monday, reveal a harsh reality about the modern career: the first five years matter more than ever, but a structural trap in the office is making them much harder to navigate.
The first study, from the New York Fed, looks at the starting line. It found that young college graduates are struggling to get hired because of a fundamental breakdown in how offices work now.
Young grads actually want to be in the office to learn, but they are being forced into remote work by default because the people who are supposed to train them aren’t there. Senior managers and experienced staff now have the leverage to work from home, leaving the physical office empty.
When companies try to solve this by letting the new hires work from home too, they hit a wall: it is incredibly difficult to train and mentor an inexperienced worker entirely over a screen. Because both sides are rarely in the same room, companies have simply grown wary of hiring the inexperienced at all. In fact, the Fed estimates this empty-office mismatch—not generative AI—explains 64 percent of the recent rise in unemployment among young graduates.
The second study, from the Burning Glass Institute and NYU, shows why this matters long-term. Tracking 1.3 million careers since 2000, researchers found that roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a career wall before age 40, going five or more years without a raise or promotion.
While the study attributes these stalls to rigid career fields–some jobs just don’t have good advancement ladders– and low-value “paper” certifications– you go to school to train and then it doesn’t pay off in the real world– the most critical factor is early momentum. A mid-career plateau isn’t a sudden event; it is decided in the first few years on the job.
The Core Takeaway: The two findings form a troubling loop. Because senior mentors are working from home, young grads are either left sitting in an empty office or isolated behind a screen. This deprives them of the intense, in-person mentorship required to build early momentum—making them far more likely to hit a career ceiling before they turn 40.
The pancreas, cracked
An experimental pill nearly doubled survival time for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer — one of the deadliest cancers there is.
The drug, daraxonrasib, blocks a mutated protein that drives tumor growth in more than 90 percent of pancreatic cancer cases, a target that eluded treatment for decades. In a trial of 500 patients whose metastatic cancer had stopped responding to other treatment, the daily pill roughly doubled survival time with fewer severe side effects. +
The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is about 13 percent. It’s on track to become the second-leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. by 2040.
A trillion-dollar offering
There are many ways to measure the race for AI dominance: the size of the model, the chips you can get your hands on, and the money you can raise to pay for both. On Monday, Anthropic — whose chatbot, Claude, thinks this lede is doing real work — told regulators in an unsigned, two-paragraph blog post that it’s seeking an initial public offering.
It’s being referred to as a “trillion-dollar offering,” which is not official, but instead the loose, breathy journalistic shorthand for the possible valuation, not the literal money changing hands. A valuation is the number of shares times the stock price of each share.
Anthropic is racing primarily with Open AI and SpaceX.
Most of the money goes to “compute” — the raw computing power the models run on, which Anthropic rents from Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
In practice that means warehouse-scale buildings packed with specialized chips called GPUs, the processors Nvidia built for graphics and now sells for AI.
Thousands of them are wired together to work as a single machine — Nvidia’s CEO calls a data center one “unit of compute.” A single rack of these chips draws more than ten times the power of an ordinary server rack, enough heat that air can’t cool it and chilled water has to be piped directly to the chip.
The chips themselves run two to four times hotter than the processors in a normal computer. The constraint isn’t ideas. It’s silicon and electricity — there aren’t enough chips, and where there are chips there often isn’t enough power to run them.
The dead hang
How long do you think you could hang from a pull-up bar?
An 81-year-old arthritic widow set the Guinness World Record for the longest dead hang by a woman over 80, holding on for three minutes and three seconds. She took up dead-hanging to cope with grief after losing her husband of 60 years.
Most healthy adults manage thirty to sixty seconds. Grip strength, it turns out, is one of the better predictors of how long a person lives — possibly because a strong grip is a sign of overall strength, possibly because a weak one is a symptom of cells aging faster than they should.
Five million bees
A cemetery in Ithaca, New York, holds one of the largest and oldest known colonies of ground-nesting bees ever documented — an estimated 5.5 million of them packed into an acre and a half. That’s more than three times the human population of Manhattan, living under a single graveyard.
And their lives are much like those of us who live in Manhattan, they’re always confused by the constant breakdowns and shifting schedule of the C train. No, they are like city dwellers in that they are autonomous, not members of a hive.
They’ve just chosen to live in the place because it suits their lifestyle. They are born, go out into the world and collect food for their offspring and do that until they die. The children essentially choose to live near where they were born.
They’re just like us! Nearly six in 10 young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up, and eight in 10 live within 100 miles.
They’re a solitary mining bee, Andrena regularis, the kind that nests underground rather than in hives — which describes about 75 percent of all bee species, a fact that surprises most people who only think about honeybees who somehow get into the office even though I’ve got the windows closed.
The bees have been at East Lawn Cemetery since at least the early 1900s. The cemetery dates to 1878. The bees, in other words, have outlasted nearly everyone buried above them.
The discovery came because a Cornell lab worker named Rachel Fordyce used to cut through the cemetery on her way to work. One spring morning in 2022, she noticed the ground was moving. She caught a few in a jar and brought them to her supervisor.
They don’t sting.
Bespoke flour
It used to be that when a wealthy urban striver carried a bag of white powder around, they were looking to party. Now they’re looking to bake. Premium millers are riding a convergence of health trends — fiber-maxxers, GLP-1 users, and the Make America Healthy Again crowd all hunting for food that’s less processed and more nutritionally dense.
A five-pound sack of Cairnspring Mills’ Sequoia T85 all-purpose flour runs $18, against about $5 for the supermarket brand. The Oregon company’s CEO, Kevin Morse, wants to “do for flour what Blue Bottle did for coffee” — build a premium-but-reachable middle tier in a business that’s all giants at the top and tiny independents at the bottom.
Still, for fluffy biscuits nothing really can replace the cocaine Mom used to use.
Tuesday June 2
Tuesday asked what a job is even for: a spy chief who knows real estate, a press office sealed shut to keep information in, a list of admirals scrubbed of women and Black men in a Navy full of both, and a retirement that didn’t fit.
Massive Kyiv Attack
Russia launched one of its deadliest attacks in months early Tuesday — about 600 drones and dozens of missiles on Kyiv and the central city of Dnipro. At least 22 people were killed and more than 100 wounded.
Russia warned a week ago that it would hit the capital, and then made the city wait. For days it launched planes in patterns that mimicked a large attack, setting off alarms and wearing people down. Families slept in subway stations and parking garages for nights on end — tents and yoga mats on the station floors, dogs barking, children unable to sleep. More than 41,000 people, including nearly 4,500 children, sheltered in the Kyiv metro overnight, a record in recent years.
A BBC reporter two floors underground felt the explosions through the building: missiles, then drones, then more missiles. People came up to find their neighborhoods rearranged — windows gone, cars turned to twisted, black popovers of metal.
Russia called it retaliation for a Ukrainian drone strike on a dormitory in Russian-held Luhansk that it said killed 21 students; the toll couldn’t be verified.
Ukraine has had the better of the war lately, hitting Russian oil facilities and reaching Moscow itself with long-range drones while the front line stays frozen.
No Experience necessary
President Trump named Bill Pulte, the 38-year-old head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, acting Director of National Intelligence — a job that coordinates 18 intelligence agencies and oversees the President’s Daily Brief.
Pulte has no known background in intelligence, defense, or national security. He is a real-estate scion and Trump loyalist who, even in his housing job, found ways to pursue the president’s enemies: he referred Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and New York Attorney General Letitia James for prosecution over mortgage-document errors so ordinary that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had made them too.
He replaces Tulsi Gabbard, who resigned last month after her husband’s cancer diagnosis. Trump announced it on Truth Social and praised Pulte’s grasp of “the safety and soundness of the Markets.”
The skepticism on Capitol Hill crossed party lines. “We don’t need a weaponized D.N.I.,” said Majority Leader John Thune. “We need professionals there.” He added that if Trump wants Pulte in the job permanently, “he’s got a lengthy road ahead of him” — a reminder that this is an acting appointment, which avoids a confirmation vote and runs, by law, about 210 days.
The job was created in the wake of the attacks of 9/11 to coordinate the government’s vast information-gathering capabilities because, to use a phrase popular after those attacks, the dots had not been connected between the various silos gathering intelligence.
The job has very little real estate dealings.
The audit shield lives
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told House appropriators Tuesday that the administration is permanently scrapping the $1.8 billion fund meant to pay people who claimed the federal government wrongly targeted them — mostly January 6 defendants and Trump associates. A federal judge had blocked it, a bipartisan revolt had stalled the GOP’s own immigration bill over it, and a second judge threatened to investigate whether the president’s lawyers had abused the courts.
But the acting attorney general would not agree to put it in writing, as he did with the formation of the fund.
What does survive is a provision authored by Blanche shielding Trump, his family, and his businesses from IRS audits. Senator Thom Tillis flagged it, noting that the family’s net worth has nearly doubled in eighteen months since Trump took office.
AI’s 30-day window
President Trump signed an executive order Tuesday asking technology companies to voluntarily give the government a look at new AI models before releasing them — up to 30 days — a turn for an administration that had mostly taken a hands-off approach to AI meddling.
“Excessive regulation of the A.I. sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off,” JD Vance had said last month. “The A.I. future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety. It will be won by building.”
That’s changed now.
The order also asks the Treasury secretary to build an AI “cybersecurity clearinghouse” to review vulnerabilities the models find.
Last month Anthropic announced a model called Mythos, so good at finding security flaws in software that the company warned it could trigger a cybersecurity “reckoning” and declined to release it publicly.
The NSA has used Mythos to probe the U.S. government’s own software. The White House, people in the industry and the administration said, wants to avoid the blame if an AI-enabled attack ever lands.
The 30 days started as 90 — the president scrapped the stricter version hours before a signing ceremony with executives already invited.
The final language closely resembles the voluntary deals the Biden administration struck with OpenAI and Anthropic in 2024, the ones this administration had trashed.
Crossed off Hegseth’s list
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blocked the promotions of nine Navy officers that a board of senior admirals had already selected — three of them women, two of them Black men.
The result is a slate of 22 nominees for one-star admiral that looks little like the Navy it will help lead. No women made the new list, though women are about 21 percent of the active-duty Navy. Only two nonwhite officers made it, though racial minorities are about 38 percent.
Pentagon rules say a defense secretary is supposed to pull officers from a promotion list only for moral, mental, physical, or professional failings — not for who they are.
Five current and former defense officials, speaking anonymously, described the intervention as driven by Hegseth’s anti-diversity politics.
In his life before this job, Hegseth was on record opposing women in combat. Nearly 60 percent of the senior officers he has fired are female or Black, according to Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.
Glamour, the shopping list
For nearly 90 years, Glamour mixed fashion and beauty with award-winning journalism — it won a National Magazine Award in 2023 for coverage pushing for federal paid family leave. That era is over.
Condé Nast is refocusing the publication on shopping posts — “Granny Sandals Are the Secret to a Stylish Summer Look,” “The Best Spray Sunscreens for Easy Reapplication” — built to earn commissions when readers click through to Amazon and Nordstrom.
The company cut much of the already-thin U.S. editorial staff in April and parted with editor-in-chief Samantha Barry without a plan to replace her.
The bet is that display ads and affiliate links can carry the site without the cost of making the fussy journalism.
Fortunately women looking for an editorial voice to match their intelligence can find it in newsletters and podcasts.
Serena, on grass
Six months ago Serena Williams posted, “Omg yall I’m NOT coming back.” OMG y’all, she’s coming back.
Thursday she accepted a doubles wild card for next week’s HSBC Championships at Queen’s Club in London — the grass tune-up for Wimbledon, where she’s won seven singles titles.
It’s her first competitive match in nearly four years, since she “evolved away” from the sport after the 2022 US Open. Whether Wimbledon itself is next, she didn’t say.
She is 44. Her partner, the Canadian Victoria Mboko, is 19 and already ranked ninth in the world — a quarter-century between them on the same side of the net.
Williams won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, one shy of Margaret Court’s all-time record of 24, a number she’s been parked next to since 2017.
But every match she plays at 44 nudges a different record: the oldest woman to win a Grand Slam. The youngest players she’d have to get through weren’t born when she won her first.
Wednesday June 3
Coping to crazy, ballroom dancing, a tariff backdoor, showing bureaucrats the door, and the bathtub analogy that might explain next year.
Crazy, on the record
The president confirmed what Axios reported Monday — that he’d called Benjamin Netanyahu crazy on the phone — and said out loud that Israel is complicating his peace talks with Iran. The private fury became public acknowledgment in the space of two days.
It came with a result. Israel and Lebanon agreed Wednesday to renew their fragile ceasefire and to set up a number of “pilot” security zones inside Lebanon, areas from which Hezbollah fighters would be banned.
In an oval office availability with reporters the president displayed a chart he had asked for. It’s title: “Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers.” It showed the reflecting pool, which the president has ordered renovated, compared to the size of the Empire State Building, World Trade Center, Sears Tower.
“In that part of the world, ceasefire is when you’re shooting in a more moderate manner,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday. He said the current situation was under control and peace talks with Iran were advancing.
CA Gov.
California’s top-two primary sent a Republican and a Democrat to a November runoff for governor: Steve Hilton, the British-born former Fox News host Trump endorsed, and Xavier Becerra, the former HHS secretary and state attorney general.
Becerra held second place ahead of Tom Steyer — the billionaire climate activist who spent more than $200 million running to the left of the field.
Becerra’s path opened only when Representative Eric Swalwell’s campaign collapsed in April amid sexual-assault allegations, and when Democratic voters — who’d spent months splitting among candidates they found uninspiring — finally consolidated.
That splitting was the danger: polls had shown two Republicans might sweep the primary in one of the bluest states in the country, because Republicans had lined up behind Hilton while Democrats hadn’t lined up behind anyone.
The fear was real enough that it launched a spring campaign to repeal the top-two system California has used for fifteen years.
Senate drops ballroom
Senate Republicans pulled up to a billion dollars in Secret Service funding for President Trump’s ballroom out of their immigration enforcement bill Wednesday.
Two things killed it. First, the rules. The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, ruled the ballroom money didn’t belong in a bill Republicans were trying to pass on a simple majority — it had nothing to do with immigration, which was the bill’s whole point. Keep it in, and Democrats could have filibustered the entire package.
Second, the politics. Several Republican senators said out loud they didn’t want to fund a ballroom in a bill about border enforcement. And the mood soured further after Trump endorsed Ken Paxton over sitting Senator John Cornyn in the Texas primary runoff. Funding the president’s ballroom while he’s picking off your own colleagues is a hard sell.
Trump called Majority Leader John Thune and urged him to fire her, claiming she was put there by Obama. Senate parliamentarians are chosen by the Senate, not the White House, which he knows, so this was a lie.
Speaking of which.
Trump said he’d cover the cost himself. When it was announced in July at $200 million, he said it would be private — “some donors or whatever.” By late March, with the price doubled to $400 million, he was still insistent: “This is taxpayer-free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents.” Then, after the April attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner, some Republicans cited security and proposed public money.
Taxpayer-free became a billion-dollar federal line item — and now, not even that.
Schedule F is for firing.
For most of the 19th century, federal jobs were handouts, given to the president’s friends and supporters, which bred corruption and incompetence. Then in 1881, a man who’d been denied a government post shot and killed President James Garfield. You can watch a very good account of this on Netflix. Death by Lightning. After that, Congress began building the protections — a series of laws meant to shield government workers from being fired for politics, so the work would carry from one administration to the next regardless of who won.
Wednesday, President Trump signed an executive order stripping civil service protections from roughly 8,000 senior career federal workers. Division heads, IT chiefs, the people who write regulations, the analysts who tell agencies what the evidence says like toxicologists and epidemiologists. The people who track what’s making us sick. They are now at-will employees. They can be fired without a reason.
To keep your job in one of these positions now, the practical test shifts from doing the job well to staying aligned with the president’s agenda.
The administration says that’s the point — and frames it as accountability, not politics. Every other organization, for-profit or nonprofit, is run by a CEO who sets priorities and hires people accountable to them. Members of both parties have complained about this constraint for years.
Everett Kelley, head of the American Federation of Government Employees, says the practical effect is fear: workers who once reported waste, fraud, and abuse because they were protected from retaliation will now think twice before speaking up. When the order was first proposed, more than 40,000 people filed public comments. About 94 percent opposed it.
The press office becomes a cone of silence
The Pentagon on Wednesday locked up the press room even tighter. It designated its public-affairs office a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility — a SCIF, a secured classified space — and barred reporters from it. The stated reason: speechwriters handling classified material now share the room.
The practical effect is that the Iranian nuclear program is in better working order than the accountability in the American form of government. By converting a public-facing office into a literal vault, reporters are physically locked out.
Even journalists with permanent building badges can no longer walk in to ask a question. And that press corps was already thinned out.
After the administration forced reporters to sign a loyalty pledge against gathering “unauthorized” information, legacy media walked out.
They were replaced by handpicked partisan cheerleaders. Now, even the pom-pom shakers are locked out.
Musk sets a record not on his list
SpaceX set the terms of what would be the largest public offering in history: a target valuation of about $1.75 trillion. The valuation would make SpaceX the seventh-largest company in America, above Tesla, and the offering more than triple the size of the largest U.S. IPO before it.
It also puts a number on Musk’s path to becoming the first trillionaire.
Ahead of SpaceX’s planned initial public offering this month, a New York Times analysis of Elon Musk’s public claims over the last 15 years reveals a massive gap between his rhetoric and reality.
Of more than 600 goals Musk laid out across his businesses, he delivered on time just 19 percent of the time. The rest? He was late or failed to deliver 35 percent of the time, and left another 33 percent too vague or abandoned without a public update.
Nowhere is this “Musk Time” math clearer than in his grandest obsession: colonizing Mars. Founded in 2002 to make humanity “multiplanetary,” SpaceX has seen its Martian timeline constantly shift:
2011: Musk claimed SpaceX would reach Mars in 10 years, or “worst case, 15 to 20 years.”
April 2024: He told employees he expected one million people to live on Mars in 20 years, quietly directing staff to sketch out blueprints for a Martian city.
February 2026: Musk moved the goalposts yet again, admitting a Martian city would take “20+ years.”
Instead, he announced a pivot: SpaceX would focus on colonizing the moon first. Shoot for Mars; if you miss, you might land on the moon.
Tariff wall workaround
If you had to guess, would you say that president Trump is deeply concerned about forced labor overseas?
He is now.
The administration proposed new tariffs on 60 countries, citing forced labor. After an investigation under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, the U.S. Trade Representative found that none of the 60 countries adequately enforces a ban on goods made with forced labor, and proposed duties of at least 10 percent — with China, India, Japan, and about 40 others facing 12.5 percent.
It’s the biggest effort to rebuild the tariff regime since the Supreme Court struck down most of the “Liberation Day” levies in February. The court ruled the administration had overreached its emergency powers, and Section 301 grants explicit statutory authority instead — far harder to overturn.
A European Union official called the forced-labor finding “utterly absurd.” The EU has some of the strictest labor and supply-chain laws in the world, and being swept in with the other 59 reads to Brussels as a pretext — a way to push tariffs back above the 15 percent rate Europe had already negotiated in exchange for lowering its own duties.
They might find the timing suspicious too. The new duties are timed to take effect as the temporary 10 percent global baseline tariff expires in late July. It’s basically the old plan by another route.
Super El Niño possibly developing
Imagine the Pacific Ocean as a giant bathtub with the wind blowing across the top of it. Most of the time, that wind blows steadily from the Americas toward Asia, and it pushes the warm surface water along with it — so warm water piles up on the Asia side, and cold water from way down deep rises up to fill in along the South America side.
In an El Niño, the wind gets tired and stops pushing. So all that warm water that was piled up on the far side comes sloshing back toward the Americas, like water in a tub when you stop pushing the scalding water from the tap away from you and it rolls back at you. Now there’s a huge stretch of ocean that’s way warmer than it should be.
That’s what we can expect if forecasters are right and a strong — possibly “super” — El Niño is on the way. The UN’s weather agency puts the odds at 80 percent before September, 90 percent before November, with most models calling it at least moderate and some saying it could be the strongest this century.
All that ocean heat in the Americas doesn’t stay in the water; it bleeds into the air, which is why an intense El Niño nearly guarantees a record-hot year.
And it doesn’t stop at temperature — it rearranges the weather for the whole planet at once. Warm ocean throws more moisture into the sky and bends the jet stream, the high-altitude river of wind that steers storms. Where the storms get steered toward, it floods — the U.S. Gulf Coast and Southeast usually catch the wet end.
Where the storms get steered away from, the ground dries out and burns; that’s the story across much of the Pacific and into the drought-prone tropics. Harvests fail in the dried-out places.
And the same heat that’s warming the air is cooking the shallow water where coral lives, until the coral starves and bleaches white — which collapses the reefs that a quarter of all sea life depends on for food and shelter.
The “El Niño of the Century” in 1997–98 — the one forecasters are using as the model for this one — did damage measured in the trillions. And it doesn’t end when the water cools: a 2023 study in Science found El Niño can drag down a country’s economic growth for years afterward.
El Niño isn’t caused by global warming — it’s a natural cycle that’s been swinging for thousands of years. But it now swings on top of a hotter baseline created by global warming. Each El Niño briefly releases a load of stored ocean heat into the air, and when that spike lands on an already-warmer planet, it tends to set the global temperature record — which is why forecasters are watching 2027.
Americans soften support of LGBTQ+ issues
American support for LGBTQ+ rights has stalled and begun to slip after two decades of climbing, according to a new Gallup survey.
Support for same-sex marriage has dropped six points from its recent peak to 65 percent, while moral acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships has hit a decade-long low at 62 percent. And the share who consider changing one’s gender morally acceptable has fallen eight points in five years, to 38 percent.
Between 1996 and 2022, support for same-sex marriage rose 44 points, from 27 to 71 percent. Gallup ties the decline to the conservative pushback against diversity programs built to foster acceptance.
National park fees for July 4 celebration
The administration is taking money meant for the national parks and spending it on the Fourth of July in Washington.
At least $90 million in park entry fees — money paid at the gates of places like Yellowstone and Yosemite — is being routed to the capital. That’s according to internal Park Service documents obtained by the Washington Post.
Some of it pays for fireworks — a $1.6 million display, more than five times the usual. Most of the money — $76 million — goes to fixing fountains, including the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Meanwhile, the parks that money came from are sitting on a $24 billion repair backlog.
Retro tech comeback
Unlike bucket hats and baggy jeans, clunky tech is a 90s relic coming back that serves a purpose other than to embarrass the user.
The companies building artificial intelligence need somewhere to put it. AI doesn’t run on a phone or a laptop — it runs in data centers, warehouse-sized buildings packed with computers, and those buildings have to be built and filled.
That means somebody has to make the unglamorous guts: the servers that do the work, the chips that store the memory, the cables and gear that wire it all together.
For years almost nobody invested in making more of that stuff, because demand was flat. Now demand is exploding, and there isn’t enough to go around.
So the companies that make the guts are suddenly worth a fortune — and a lot of them are names you’d have called washed-up. Dell, Nokia, Lenovo, Cisco, Intel — the giants of the 1990s tech boom, the ones that faded when the dot-com bubble burst and a flashier generation took over. They’re back, because the AI boom needs exactly the boring, physical, deeply unsexy things they’ve always made.
The numbers are staggering. Seven of these old-guard companies are up an average of 158 percent this year — meaning if you’d held their stock since January, your money would have more than doubled. Together they’ve gained $1.7 trillion in value. Dell rose 33 percent in a single day, the biggest one-day jump in its history. Nokia is up 124 percent on the year. Lenovo had its best month in more than 25 years.
Churchill and his brushes
A London museum, the Wallace Collection, has mounted the first major British retrospective of Winston Churchill’s paintings in more than 65 years — and makes the case that he was no weekend hobbyist but a painter worth taking seriously, and a leader whose vulnerabilities show on the canvas.
He started in 1915, in his early forties, at the lowest point of his career: blamed for the catastrophic failure of the Gallipoli campaign and demoted. He took a command post on the Western Front and brought his easel; one early canvas showed a bombed-out battalion in a Belgian village.
He later called painting a kind of therapy. “Painting is complete as a distraction,” he wrote in 1921. “I know of nothing which, without exhausting the body, more entirely absorbs the mind. Whatever the worries of the hour or the threats of the future, once the picture has begun to flow along, there is no room for them.”
He produced more than 500 canvases before he set the brush down in 1962, in his late eighties.
How many world leaders were painters on the side?: Artnet has a list of 10 famous politicians who painted. George W. Bush, Ulysses S Grant, Jimmy Carter, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Hitler, also, famously.
Thursday, June 4
The war powers vote has no power, neither do GOP slush fund scolds, oil’s nearly at bottom, but the AG is on the rise, more Platner shoes fall as does John Bolton.
House votes to limit Trump’s war powers
The Republican-led House did something this Republican-led House doesn’t do: praise the police who protected them on January 6th? No, nothing so grave as that. What the chamber did on Thursday was pass a war powers resolution directing an end to U.S. military engagement in Iran. Four Republicans crossed the aisle.
The resolution does not stop the war. It heads to a Senate where its path is unclear, and the president can ignore it.
What it does is put on the record that a chamber his party controls no longer trusts him to manage the fight.
The president treated it as betrayal: “Who would do such an unpatriotic thing, right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the War with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
The four Republicans split two ways: two are libertarians who oppose foreign wars on principle, one of them a longtime Trump antagonist already beaten in his primary by a Trump-backed challenger. The other two are mainstream Republicans from competitive districts where a war polling this badly is a liability — one of them a freshman and former Army helicopter pilot who’d voted with Trump on nearly everything, including the first two Iran votes, before switching in May.
We were struck here by someone from the other body: Republican leader John Thune said his members were “asking the right questions and trying to figure out the strategy going forward.” It read as anodyne when I first came across it in the Washington Post. But it was not. The president’s own allies in the Senate are saying, on the record, that they don’t know what the strategy in Iran is.
The ceasefire that didn’t last the day
The Trump administration announced an Israel–Lebanon ceasefire on Thursday, brokered in Washington and pitched as a possible first step toward winding down the three-month war on Iran. It did not survive the announcement.
Within hours Israel was hitting southern Lebanon with rounds of strikes, the leader of Hezbollah — who had not been at the table — rejected the deal outright, and his fighters fired rockets at Israeli forces inside Lebanon.
The collapse was written into the setup. You cannot end a war by signing a paper with everyone except the people doing the shooting. Hezbollah wasn’t a party to the talks, so the talks bound Israel and Lebanon’s government to a quiet that Hezbollah had no reason to keep.
The fund with no name.
The Senate spent Thursday morning stuck on a single fight inside a $70 billion immigration enforcement bill. The fight was over the $1.8 billion Justice Department settlement pot we told you on Monday was dead.
How it failed is the part worth understanding. Republican leaders had the votes to save the fund. But a straight party-line vote would force their most vulnerable members — senators up for reelection in states where a slush fund for people who beat up police officers is a loser — to go on record protecting it.
So leadership arranged the math. They leaned on a senator from a safe seat to vote no, locking in the outcome before the endangered senators ever voted. That freed the vulnerable ones to vote yes, against the fund, knowing their votes couldn’t actually kill it and spark the ire of President Trump.
A vote is supposed to be the moment a politician is accountable: you’re for the thing or against it, and the voters find out. This one was built so the accountability and the outcome came apart. The senators who’d pay a price at home got to look like they fought the fund. The fund survived anyway.
The president didn’t act like a man whose fund was in danger. Asked about it by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, he said he’d check with the lawyers, then praised it. He did not praise Collins. He told her to smile and complained that she didn’t smile — performing, in a rambling press availability, the exact leering behavior our mothers had to endure and that the rest of us thought had been shamed out of public life.
Tank bottom
Four executives told POLITICO that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has drained the world’s petroleum inventories toward levels that will send energy prices surging within weeks.
Global stocks now hold about 7.5 billion barrels, down roughly 500 million since the war began. That sounds like a cushion, but most of it already has buyers, and a chunk of the rest can’t actually be used — it’s the oil that has to stay in the pipelines and the bottoms of the tanks just to keep crude moving. Strip that out and the usable supply is thin. In some regions it’s nearing the point where there’s no spare barrel left to absorb a shock — which is exactly when prices spike.
“I’ve never seen inventory numbers fall so much so quickly,” said Jim Burkhard, who runs crude oil research at S&P Global. “It is stunning.”
Hold that in your mind. If you’re on a jog and you missed it, hit the ten second rewind. Now…
In late April the president said gas would “drop like a rock” the moment the war ended — “there’s so much of it, it’s all over the place, sitting all over the oceans of the world.” On May 5 he said it would “come crashing down.” Back in March, asked on Meet the Press whether gas would be under $3 a gallon by summer, the energy secretary allowed it was “a goal of the administration and very possible.”
A phoenix from under the bus
Last week, former Attorney General Pam Bondi threw her own deputy under the bus. The colossal mishandling of the Epstein files — the release that named victims and redacted the names of the men accused of abusing them — was, she said, Todd Blanche’s fault.
This week the deputy rose from under the Greyhound. At a Rose Garden dinner Thursday, the president announced he’ll nominate Blanche — the acting attorney general, and before that his own personal defense lawyer — to run the Justice Department for good.
Blanche is the man who set up the settlement fund. He’s also carried out a string of the president’s moves against the people he holds grudges against.
Blanche must be confirmed by the Judiciary Committee and then the whole Senate.. Democrat John Fetterman has already declared himself a no. Republican Thom Tillis tied his own vote to the settlement fund — the one Blanche built — warning that until the Senate deals with it, Blanche is “not going to have a very good time in Judiciary Committee.”
The president predicted the process would move “very quickly,” which has become an indication in this White House that in fact the opposite will take place.
The president has a habit of declaring a thing done before it’s done, to make it harder to undo — the way he kept announcing, during the war, that Iran had agreed to a deal, or wanted one, before Iran had said any such thing. Say the outcome out loud, often enough, and resistance starts to look like obstruction. “Very quickly” isn’t a prediction. It’s pressure.
The blunt instrument
The Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank, delivered a report Thursday on the National Guard in Washington.
First: the deployment “was not a waste. It produced a significant reduction in property crime, and it did so quickly, which matters when residents and businesses are demanding visible action.”
But: it was “an expensive tool deployed in the wrong places for the wrong types of crime, at a daily cost per person 60 percent higher than an MPD officer,” with a hidden drag on the civilian economy — soldiers pulled from regular jobs to stand on corners.
Then the alternative: a well-designed deployment of city police at the same cost, “targeted to D.C.’s documented hotspots and oriented toward the violent crime problem that the Guard did not touch, would be expected to produce social benefits an order of magnitude larger.”
That gap — between what the Guard delivered and what smart conventional policing could deliver — is the case for treating where you put officers and what you point them at as the real levers of public safety, rather than the blunt instrument of military-style presence or sheer headcount.
What that means in practice: ten cops sent to the three blocks where the shootings actually happen will do more than a thousand soldiers spread across the city to be seen. The Guard cut “opportunistic” crime — property theft, car break-ins — by 24 percent. On violent crime, robberies and assaults, it had no measurable effect, and robberies were already falling before Trump returned to office.
John Bolton
John Bolton, the national security adviser Trump hired and then turned on, agreed Thursday to plead guilty to a single count of illegal retention of classified information — down from eighteen counts. He will pay a $2.25 million fine and could face up to five years in prison.
The charges grew out of diary entries Bolton kept during his time in the first Trump White House and stored at home, and from more than a thousand pages about his daily activities that prosecutors say he shared through a personal email account with two people not authorized to see them — his wife and his daughter, according to CNN’s reporting.
Another Platner shoe
The NYT on Thursday published a piece titled “Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior.” It included the accounts of six women who had been romantically involved with Platner and alleges a range of upsetting and inappropriate behavior, including one account of physical violence. Platner appeared on MSNow Thursday evening and denied that particular account while admitting that in the Times piece, “there’s a lot about my struggling, not being a good boyfriend, certainly self-medicating with alcohol. And I have been very upfront since the beginning of this campaign that that was a pretty dark period of my life after I came back from my combat service.” Platner has vowed to remain in the race.
The screwworm crosses
A flesh-eating parasite that the United States spent decades keeping out has turned up in a Texas calf. The USDA confirmed Wednesday — a day after saying there were no U.S. cases — that a three-week-old calf in Zavala County had New World screwworm, larvae found in the animal’s umbilical area. It is the first detection in U.S. livestock since the 1960s.
The screwworm is exactly as bad as its name. Females lay eggs in any open wound on a warm-blooded animal — a scrape, a fresh brand, a healing ear tag. The larvae hatch and burrow into living flesh with sharp mouth hooks, feeding and widening the wound until, untreated, the host dies.
The U.S. eradicated it once, in the 1960s, with an elegant trick: release millions of sterilized male flies, let them mate with wild females, and watch the population breed itself into infertile eggs.
The trick still works, but last year, the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency cut funding for a USAID-backed program that monitored and contained the screwworm in Central America. The cut came days before the U.S. lifted a temporary pause on cattle imports from Mexico — so livestock crossed the border with the surveillance gone. The pest then moved north past barriers that had held for decades.
Texas’s cattle industry is worth $15 billion, and beef prices are already at records with the U.S. herd at a 75-year low. The eradication tools are being scrambled now. As a result of a thoroughly predictable outcome from throwing the baby out with the bathwater, DOGE’s unofficial slogan.
Coal comes back
The administration is directing roughly $700 million toward reviving coal power, funding the construction of two new generating units. To put the number in context: the last new coal plant in the United States came online in 2013.
The industry’s decline was not chiefly a matter of regulation — it was that natural gas and renewables got cheaper. Reversing that with federal money is less an energy policy than a wager that the government can pay to make an old fuel competitive again.
It’s also the dirtiest bet on the board. Burn coal to make a unit of electricity and you put out about twice the carbon dioxide that natural gas does.
During The Oval Office press availability to announce this move, the president appeared to nod off while his director of the Environmental Protection Agency was making the case for this policy.
Jan. 6. second offensenders
A Lawfare study found that out of the more than 1,500 people granted clemency for the January 6 attack, at least 97 have since been arrested, charged, or convicted of separate crimes — roughly one in sixteen.
Some of those later offenses were made possible by the pardons themselves, which restored gun rights and erased the supervision that might have caught the next crime earlier.
In Denmark a cabinet majority
Denmark has a cabinet where women outnumber men for the first time. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen — herself the first woman to win a third term — named eleven women and ten men, putting female representation at 52 percent.
For comparison, the closest the United States has come was Joe Biden’s cabinet, where women held 12 of 25 seats. That’s 48 percent
Drama thatchers
Should traditional long straw or the more modern water reed be used in making thatched roofs? Are you stick of talking about this? Influencers clogging your feed going on about it?
Well, this is a very heavy and hot question among English master-thatchers, of whom there are roughly 800. Britain has about 60,000 thatched homes left, two-tenths of one percent of its housing.
The purists hold that the only true thatch is long straw — wheat stalks, threshed of their grain, the roof historians believe England started with. The modernists prefer water reed, which lasts longer. The catch is where the reed comes from. Before 1800, straw covered ninety percent of England’s thatched roofs. That ratio has now flipped to reed — except the reed isn’t pulled from the local river anymore. Much of it ships in from Eastern Europe and China.
A thatchers’ conference in Oxford in the late 1990s nearly came to blows, the academic chairing it threatening to adjourn if the feuding artisans wouldn’t settle down. One thatcher, who’s witnessed at least four brawls, offered an explanation: the work is solitary, done alone at the top of a ladder, and it draws a certain kind of person. “I’ll use the word ‘cantankerous,’” he said. “We know our own minds and we stick to things.”
Friday, June 5
The jobs number beat the forecast, immigration funding beat the blockade, the ceasefire kept shooting, Hollywood proves it can succeed without its superhero addiction, but one shows up on the mountain.
May jobs report
Job growth surged in May, and economists did not see it coming. Nonfarm payrolls rose a seasonally adjusted 172,000— down a hair from April’s upwardly revised 179,000, and more than double the 80,000 Wall Street expected. Unemployment held at 4.3 percent.
Leisure and hospitality led every sector with 70,000 jobs, five times its average monthly gain over the past year. Local government added 55,000. Health care, the steady engine of the past two years, added 35,000, about its usual pace. Social assistance added 12,000.
The leisure-and-hospitality spike is the part nobody fully expected, and the New York Times floats an explanation: the World Cup. Cities across the country are staffing up for the tourists coming to watch it. That means the jobs aren’t durable.
Air transportation shed about 9,000 jobs, the wreckage of Spirit Airlines folding and leaving 17,000 full- and part-time workers without a job.
Immigration enforcement passes Senate
The Senate pushed through a $70 billion bill early Friday to fund President Trump’s immigration crackdown through the rest of his term, then sent it to the House, which was expected to pass it fast. The vote was 52 to 47.
All the talk earlier in the week that Senate Republicans didn’t like this or that thing from the President didn’t amount to very much. Some voted with the Democrats to do things like shut down the President’s slush fund, but in the end all those amendments failed.
$1 billion May at the box office
The domestic box office cleared $1 billion in May for only the ninth time in movie history — and for the first time, it did it without a Marvel movie carrying the month.
The other eight billion-dollar Mays all leaned on a superhero. May 2026 got there on a different roster: Michael at $210 million, The Devil Wears Prada 2 at $209 million, The Mandalorian and Grogu at $137 million, Obsession at $104.7 million, and Backrooms at $81 million. A biopic, a sequel two decades in the making, Baby Yoda, and two horror movies.
Sherpa found alive
A Sherpa guide given up for dead on Mount Everest was found alive Thursday after six days alone on the mountain with no food and no bottled oxygen.
Hillary Dawa Sherpa, 52, was last seen May 29 resting above Camp 3, at around 7,500 meters — the altitude where the air is too thin to expect a person to last long. He got separated from his client and team, who had already descended with the last group of the season. The ladders across the Khumbu Icefall, fixed by Sherpas to get climbers through the most dangerous stretch of the route, had already been taken down. His family had begun his funeral rites.
Then a cleaning crew spotted him crawling through the icefall — frostbitten, exhausted, alive. His daughter, Mendo Lhamu, told the Associated Press the family asked for photos before they could believe it was him.
How he survived comes down to who he is. “Sherpas are built tough growing up in the mountains,” said Ang Tshering Sherpa, a leading figure in the community. “If there was someone else in his place they might not have survived.” From his hospital bed Friday, the man himself was plainer about it. He told BBC News Nepali he ran out of oxygen and got left behind, ate ice every day and the chocolate in his pockets, and didn’t think he would make it.
The rescue closed the busiest season Everest has ever seen — more than 1,000 climbers summiting the south side, a record 274 of them on a single day, May 20. Five people died this season. He was not one of them.
Health misinformation fuels Ebola outbreak
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, at least 63 people have died of Ebola out of 397 confirmed cases. A big challenge has been that many of the people in the outbreak’s path don’t believe the outbreak is real.
Residents of Ituri province have launched at least three attacks on health centers, demanding the bodies of the dead. During the attacks, some people believed to have Ebola walked out, and health workers lost track of where they went. The mistrust is not new. This is Congo’s 17th Ebola outbreak since the virus was first identified there in 1976, and resistance to public-health protocols has come with nearly every one.
Residents of one province were so doubtful that when a local religious leader died of Ebola, his parishioners– distrustful of the government and the hospitals– wanted to open the coffin and look. Ebola is contagious even in death.
As WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus put it Friday, launching a response plan with the Africa CDC: misinformation is almost as dangerous as the virus, and it travels just as fast.
60 Minutes
The news at 60 Minutes was not a drama we thought would benefit from a daily blow by blow so we’re going to wrap it all together for you Friday.
By Friday the survivors had planted a flag at 60 Minutes, the most decorated news program in television history.
Correspondents Leslie Stahl, Bill Whitaker and John Wertheim announced they were staying. The show would have died if they’d left, they said. That’s because after this week, they were the last correspondents standing.
Three days earlier, on Tuesday, CBS fired Scott Pelley the day after he confronted the show’s new executive producer, Nick Bilton, in front of the entire staff on Bilton’s first day.
Pelley accused CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” the show by ousting executive producer Tanya Simon, Simon’s deputy, a few producers and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega the week before. Last season the show grew its audience nine percent. He grilled Bilton, a technology journalist and best-selling author Weiss had installed, on running a legacy newsmagazine he’d never worked in and Bilton and Weiss’s qualifications given that they had never run organizations approaching the size and complexity of the ones they were now renovating.
Bilton responded: “I have been a journalist for 25 years, Scott.” The staff applauded Pelley.
Bilton fired him “for cause” the next evening, calling the confrontation a “performative display of hostility.” Then Pelley went public. He said management had told him to “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” and to include unverified claims — instructions which echo claims made by ousted correspondents Vega and Alfonsi, but which Pelly said he’d refused.
He said politicians were now being invited to pick which correspondents would interview them. Weiss denies the charges. When she told staff she’d tried to “find a way back” with Pelley, he called that false: no one, he said, had offered a way back at all.
Pelley tied it to the owners. Paramount Skydance’s David Ellison installed Weiss, encouraged her to shake up CBS News, and signed off on the firing. The legend of 60 Minutes, Pelley said, was being discarded “to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.”
Paramount, whose purchase of CBS was approved after the network settled a lawsuit brought by the president, is currently awaiting crucial Justice Department antitrust clearance and an FCC foreign-ownership waiver for its proposed $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Pelley spent 37 years at CBS. He reported from wars, covered the White House, anchored the evening news, and filed for 60 Minutes from places where the work could get you killed. His departure statement thanked the people who “encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives.” When he anchored the Evening News, Pelley kept photographs on the set of the CBS correspondents and crew killed in the line of duty, so he would not forget them.
You can read many more details elsewhere. It’s been covered a lot, as has Pelley’s extraordinary CBS career, perhaps the most decorated in broadcast television. It’s said it is better to live by what they’ll say in your eulogy than by what it says on your resume. Pelley doesn’t have to choose.
When his time at CBS came to an end, it was greeted with a flood of testimonials to the character and dedication he showed nurturing talent, providing a model of excellence, and stewarding the values that gave meaning to the daily labors of tens of thousands of people at CBS over the years, including your correspondent.
That’s it for Stack the Week. Thanks so much for listening. Your fortitude is a credit to you, and we are grateful for it.
