Stack the Week

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for June 15 through June 19. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player. Thank you for those who have reviewed it on Apple Podcasts.

Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering.

The MOU with not much U, a G-7 that crosses a low bar, the UK bans social media for growing brains and one of its mayors may get an upgrade, Growing brains on SNAP have it tougher, Claude sounds French but being American is its problem. In France the high schoolers earn their berets and cigarettes, they must have given a mouse a cookie in Australia, and a heavy week of mourning for trees.

Let’s take it day by day.

Monday, June 15th

Memorandum of Misunderstanding

For what purpose did this war in Iran take place? One of the goals of this here podcast has been to try to keep that question at the center of what we do, both with respect to the Iran war, but also in general. Trying to find the balance between keeping you updated on the latest developments while also keeping in mind the basic question: What is the point of this enterprise we are delivering you the latest news on?

Don’t let the swarm of daily developments distract our focus from the key question.

Events on Monday brought that question back to the center– that is, why this war had started– as the world evaluated the Sunday announcement by the president that a deal had been reached with Iran to end the war.

What kind of deal was a secret on Sunday and Monday. But as the sun went down Monday night a few things were clear:

The first was that the stated goals at the start of the war– regime change in Iran, unconditional surrender, verifiable destruction and ending of Iran’s nuclear program had all not happened. Sure, The regime had changed in the sense that the previous members of it were all dead, but the current members share the same ideological bent, and so for all practical reasons there has been no regime change.

As to the details:

The Strait of Hormuz will open—a critical waterway that only got a kink in it once the war started— and Iran will profit from oil sales in exchange for promising not to develop nuclear weapons. This core commitment echoes the famous line from the preamble of the 2015 JCPOA that President Trump cancelled in 2018. As Bloomberg noted of the new interim framework: “It seems the US president’s negotiators have solved only the problems Trump himself has created.”

‘Memorandum of misunderstanding.’ That’s what Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called it. Because on some key details, the two sides said were saying different things. Take the situation in Lebanon. Iranian state media announced that the deal secureds a permanent ceasefire on all fronts, interpreting the agreement as a U.S. obligation to force Israeli troops out of Lebanon and end the bombing. But the view from Washington and Jerusalem wasis entirely different: the U.S. frameds the deal as a mechanism to neutralize Iran’s regional proxy warfare, while Israeli officials hadve already publicly declared that Trump’s agreement doesn’t bind them and their troops aren’t leaving Lebanon.

Then there is the issue of transit. The Trump administration touted a completely open, toll-free international waterway, but Tehran told its domestic audience that the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened exclusively “under Iranian arrangements.”

As Axios first reported, intercepted communications show Iranian officials telling one another they have zero intention of agreeing to a final deal on U.S. terms or allowing the physical removal of their enriched uranium stockpile. Instead, Tehran’s private strategy is to treat the 60-day interim window as a mechanism to immediately break the U.S. naval blockade and pocket early economic lifelines—like legalized oil exports—while dragging out technical talks and resisting any enforcement that actually reduces their nuclear capabilities.

During Operation Epic Fury, the name the administration gave to the operation while it was in its heavy bombing phase, Trump administration officials and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent maintained that Iran would receive no sanctions relief or access to its estimated $100 billion in frozen foreign assets prior to completing verified nuclear concessions. Bessent explicitly stated that paying transit tolls to Tehran was illegal and warned that any damages inflicted on Gulf allies would be compensated using funds confiscated from Iranian accounts.

Hot talk.

Under the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) the U.S. granted immediate sanctions waivers for Iranian oil and fuel sales—alongside necessary banking, insurance, and transport services.

$100 billion in frozen assets will be available to Iran if they play ball during the 60 day negotiations.

Additionally, the text of the MOU includes a framework for a $300 billion international reconstruction and economic development fund for Iran. This erupted into a spat over whether the United States was paying off Iran. The administration said no, the performance-based money would be funded by the Gulf Coast Coalition rather than U.S. investment.

Two notes: The concern with paying off Iran has always been that they will use the money to just rebuild their capabilities and these structured payments look an awful lot like the kinds of payments that were once savaged by Trump and others when the Obama administration was also releasing Iranian money frozen by sanctions.

Judging by the details of the accord Israel who was in on the take off of this war– some would say Israel was flying the plane.-- was not there for the landing. As of Monday, Israel had neither been a party to the talks or seen a copy of the Memorandum of Understanding. That’s in part because it deals with almost none of Israel’s concerns.

G-7: a fragile balance

President Trump landed in France Monday for a summit America’s allies had spent months engineering around him.

The Group of Seven met this year in Évian-les-Bains, on the French shore of Lake Geneva, with a host who pushed the summit back a day — France originally scheduled it for June 14, Trump’s 80th birthday — and who rescinded an invitation to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa after administration aides warned Trump would boycott the summit if Ramaphosa attended. The two countries had been at war over South Africa’s genocide suit against Israel at the International Court of Justice and a land reform law Trump called persecution of white Afrikaners. France denied acting under U.S. pressure. And Macron also arranged for Trump a private dinner at Versailles — among the gilded halls built for Louis XIV — a bauble to keep the American president from leaving early.

The G-7 — a gathering of the world’s seven advanced economies — was built in 1975 precisely to limit this kind of diplomatic rushing around. French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing wanted a small, informal room where the leaders of the major democracies could coordinate without the carbuncular bureaucracy in the way.

That architecture assumes the participants want the same basic thing, which was easier to assume after the Second World War.

European leaders have largely concluded they can no longer count on that with the United States. After the tariff wars, lukewarm support for Ukrainian democracy, footsie with Russia and hostility toward NATO, the Greenland episode — at one point some European governments believed Trump was preparing to send troops to seize the island from Denmark — and the U.S. strike on Iran without allied consultation. You can see why the calculation has shifted.

European leaders are now trying to ride two horses: building a structure that functions without the U.S. and not irritating Trump.

None of the leaders gathered in Évian want an open rupture with Washington. The U.S. still provides the nuclear umbrella, the intelligence architecture, and most of NATO’s logistical backbone. Oh and its markets, access to capitol, customers and more are part of the global economy.

A summit like the G-7 is always a collision between the calendar and the crisis — between the long-range problems that demand collective attention and the immediate emergency that actually has everyone’s focus. This one was no different. The formal agenda that France had carefully assembled — AI cooperation; critical minerals, the lithium, cobalt, and rare earths that China controls and the West needs for defense hardware, semiconductors, and batteries; and development partnerships, the loans and infrastructure financing meant to counter China’s influence in the Global South — was pushed to the margins by the Iran war’s aftershocks. Energy prices are elevated. Supply chains are rattled.

DOJ Newsom snoop

In July 2019, Donald Trump pressed the Ukrainian president to announce an investigation into Joe Biden — who was likely to be his 2020 opponent — and find proof that Biden had done something– anything– illegal. The House impeached Trump for using his office for personal reasons and warping the obligations of national security. The Senate acquitted him, 52 to 48, with Mitt Romney the only Republican voting to convict.

Two-term California Governor Gavin Newsom claimed Trump was running the same play on him. Newsom, who is widely believed to be running for president, announced Monday that the Trump Justice Department is investigating him and his wife.

Federal agents have knocked on the doors of friends and former associates and subpoenaed documents spanning years, according to the governor’s office. Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, have not themselves received subpoenas.

The scope is unclear. A person familiar with the matter — speaking anonymously to the Associated Press— confirmed multiple federal probes involving people around the governor, including one examining his wife’s finances, but told the Associated Press they were initiated by federal law enforcement in California after whistleblower complaints, not launched from Washington for political purposes.

Siebel Newsom runs two nonprofits and a film production company. The California Partners Project, which promotes gender equity, has received $5.1 million in behested payments — donations that public officials direct to favored causes, which California requires them to disclose — including $1.8 million from a Native American tribe with a state casino agreement. Her film production company, Girls Club Entertainment, is also a paid contractor of her other nonprofit, the Representation Project, collecting $161,250 in 2024. Critics have raised self-dealing concerns for years. No public evidence of wrongdoing has surfaced.

The investigation arrives in the wake of a related corruption case. Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, pleaded guilty last month to three felonies, including lying to the FBI about passing confidential state litigation information to a former business partner — information that touched a case involving Activision Blizzard, a client of Williamson’s consulting firm before she joined the governor’s office. Newsom has not been implicated.

The new inquiries into Newsom’s associates began around the time Trump nominated Todd Blanche as attorney general. Blanche, who previously defended Trump in three criminal cases, has since pursued investigations or prosecutions against James Comey, Letitia James, John Brennan, and Jerome Powell, among others. He is now the acting attorney general and Trump’s nominee for the permanent post.

Is habeas corpus a foreign word?

Habeas corpus is the right, older than the Constitution, to make the government prove to a judge why it deserves to be able to lock you up. The framers considered it so foundational they put it in Article One, before they got to the president.

The Trump White House spent the early months of 2025 debating whether to suspend that right.

The story comes from a confidential memo obtained by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for their forthcoming book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.” The memo was dated April 29, 2025, and written by Will Scharf — the White House staff secretary, a Harvard-trained lawyer who had helped get Trump’s indictment for keeping secret documents at Mar-a-Lago thrown out and argued the presidential immunity case that won at the Supreme Court. He sent the memo to chief of staff Susie Wiles arguing the administration should not suspend habeas corpus.

The idea had come from Stephen Miller — deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, not a lawyer, but the chief architect of the administration’s effort to remove people in the country illegally and to block entry to those seeking to come in legally who are not of the kind of heritage Miller prefers.

The Supreme Court had ruled that migrants facing deportation under the Alien Enemies Act retained habeas rights — because the Constitution does not say those rights belong only to citizens. That ruling meant detained migrants could go to a judge and demand the government justify their removal, substantially slowing the deportation machinery. Miller’s solution: have Trump claim the power to suspend habeas corpus entirely for unauthorized immigrants. No hearings. No judges.

Habeas corpus has been formally suspended four times in American history — after Pearl Harbor, during Reconstruction to stop Klan violence, in the Philippines during an armed rebellion, and by Lincoln at the start of the Civil War. Lincoln’s suspension was the most contested: Congress was in recess and couldn’t act, Chief Justice Taney ruled from the circuit bench that Lincoln had acted illegally, and Lincoln ignored him. Taney is also the author of the Dred Scott decision— the ruling that Black Americans could never be citizens. When people say history will judge you, they’re thinking of someone like Roger Taney. And that history is a far better judge than Roger Taney.

But the larger point is that every suspension came during war or armed rebellion. Only Congress can do it legally. Courts have said so repeatedly.

The word Miller kept using to justify suspension was “invasion,” according to the Times reporting — the constitutional trigger that might, in theory, unlock the power. Three federal judges had already rejected the argument that unauthorized immigration constitutes an invasion. Border crossings had fallen to multidecade lows. Miller kept using the word anyway.

Some White House officials privately called the idea “insane.” The White House counsel was skeptical. After weeks of uproar the proposal faded — not abandoned, just set aside. The administration got much of what it wanted through a quieter method: ICE began treating immigrants arrested inside the United States as if they had just been stopped at the border, making them eligible for mandatory detention without a hearing.

By November 2025, at least 225 judges — appointed by presidents of both parties — had ruled in more than 700 cases that the policy was a likely violation of law. The administration frequently ignored them.

The Insurrection Act was Miller’s second lever. If habeas corpus let judges spring detainees, street protests were slowing the roundups themselves. The Insurrection Act would let Trump deploy the military to enforce immigration sweeps over the objections of governors and courts. Miller had been pushing it for months. In late January, after federal agents shot and killed two American citizens protesting deportation operations in Minnesota, Vice President Vance walked into Susie Wiles’s office and told the room they needed to invoke it immediately. (Worth noting for the “history will judge,” section of your Stack the Week educational supplement: A likely future presidential candidate choosing the most extreme option when two unarmed Americans were killed in the street.)

The meeting ended without action.

Why did the founders think habeas corpus was so important? They knew that the corrupting power of authority would always seek to trample individual liberty. No matter how virtuous the president or members of Congress. And if they lacked even one thin drop of character, whooo boy…

In the 250th celebration of America’s founding, the administration is celebrating fundamental American ideas not so much by lifting them up but by imperiling them. Shooting fireworks at the Constitution not up in the air in celebration of it.

Anthropic kill switch

Anthropic makes the artificial intelligence that eight of the ten largest companies in America rely on. It is valued at nearly a trillion dollars and is preparing to go public. On Monday, it was still trying to figure out why the administration four days earlier had effectively told it to shut off its latest model.

The model is called Fable 5. It is a public version of Mythos, an AI so capable at finding vulnerabilities in software that Anthropic announced in April it would share it only with a small group of vetted organizations — a story Stack the Week covered at the time and that allowed you to seem winning and knowledgeable at dinner parties.

Fable 5 is a piece of software so good at the kinds of thinking humans do that the government decided it was dangerous because I don’t know if you know humans, but they can get up to some pretty rummy thinking and so duplicating that and putting it in charge might be dangerous.

To understand exactly what happened though, you need to hold two stories at once. They look like the same story but they aren’t.

The first is about artificial intelligence — about what these models can actually do, who should decide when they’re safe, and how you write rules for a technology advancing faster than the rule-writers can read and write, a task so difficult it would make you turn to AI for help, but you can’t because that would be circular and self-defeating.

These questions matter regardless of who is in the White House — though a president and his or her team who had thought carefully about these questions beforehand might not be facing this crisis now at least in the acute fashion of its present form. One of the challenges at Stack the Week and in public conversation is attending to those things that are not immediately evidently urgent but are nevertheless important.

The second story is about this administration and this company — a political and personal fight with its own history and its own cast of characters with grievances that predate any concern about national security.

Here is what is not in dispute. The Trump administration ordered Anthropic on Friday to shut Fable down within 90 minutes. The tool the administration used was export control — a mechanism normally reserved for weapons and semiconductors — which made it unlawful for any foreign national to use Fable, including Anthropic’s own immigrant employees. Since there is no way to check a user’s passport at the login screen, Anthropic pulled it for everyone.

The triggering event was a research paper by Amazon. Amazon researchers found that Fable, when prompted in a certain way, would identify vulnerabilities in software code — the thing defenders use AI to do. Amazon shared the finding with administration officials. The officials called it scary.

I ran out of time before I could answer why Amazon, which has a $13 billion stake in Anthropic and supplies the chips that power its models, would drop the time on Anthropic. Even that loaded language might be cheap and wrong. So, I leave that question for you to work out in your reading.

Anyway, this is the second time in six months the administration has reached for a blunt instrument against Anthropic. In February, after the company refused to approve its AI for use in mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, the Pentagon labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk” — a designation never before applied to an American company. Anthropic is suing over that one too.

The White House has long viewed Anthropic with suspicion. David Sacks, the president’s former AI czar, called it a “Resistance organization” trying to “backdoor Woke AI” – which sounds like something from Stephen Miller’s magnetic refrigerator poetry.

The administration is close to two of Anthropic’s biggest competitors: OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI. A source told Axios the dispute partly reflected Anthropic’s failure to appreciate the administration’s “ideological differences” — a phrase that has nothing to do with software vulnerabilities and why it should be considered as an AI story and an administration vibes story.

The National Security Agency reportedly carved out an exception to its own supply chain risk designation so it could keep using Mythos. The administration wants the tool. It just wants Anthropic to play ball with the Pentagon first. That’s the administration story, not an AI story.

UK social media ban

Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced Monday that the United Kingdom will ban social media for children under 16 — with the law expected to take effect in early 2027.

Nine in ten British parents support the move.

Australia introduced a similar ban in December. Six months in, roughly seven in ten children who had accounts before the ban still have them. No tech company has been fined for non-compliance, though several are under investigation.

Starmer’s answer to the enforcement problem was that laws get broken and we pass them anyway. “They get around other laws, too,” he said. “We don’t say, ‘Oh, look, a teenager managed to get a drink somehow, so let’s not bother banning alcohol sales to children.’”

Meta said bans risk pushing teenagers toward unregulated platforms with fewer built-in protections.

Ian Russell, whose fourteen-year-old daughter Molly took her own life in 2017 after viewing suicide and self-harm content online, called it a “politically expedient blanket ban” — and said the real fix was forcing platforms to remove harmful content, not locking children out of the door.

Forcing platforms to remove harmful content runs into a wall built by the platforms themselves — decades of lobbying have produced laws in the United States and elsewhere that shield them from liability for what their users post, and the companies have spent lavishly on lawyers to contest every regulation that has tried to go further.

Lincoln “Witness” tree

A witness tree is a tree that was alive during a significant historical event and still stands — a living filament back to a moment that is otherwise only available to us through documents and imagination. The Burnside sycamore in Maryland survived the 1862 Battle of Antietam. The elm at the Oklahoma City National Memorial absorbed glass and metal from the 1995 bombing and still grows.

We find these things romantic because a physical object does something a fact cannot. It closes the distance between our earnest struggling efforts and those of our ancestors.

The last witness tree at Abraham Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Illinois was damaged beyond saving last Thursday when winds gusted to sixty miles an hour and toppled its upper half. It was an American linden. It had been there when Lincoln bought the house in January 1844 and was still there when he left for Washington sixteen years later — having in the interim buried a child, built a law practice, served in Congress, and won the presidency.

Part of what we try to do at Stack the Week is resist the flattening of time — the way the news cycle makes everything feel equally present and equally disposable. A witness tree is the opposite of that. It is time made physical.

Australia mouse plague

In Morawa, a town of 660 people in Western Australia, residents check their kettles for mice before making tea. They set traps at bedtime and clear the bodies each morning. When they drive at night, they can hear the tires pop on the scurrying gray hoards.

A mouse plague is defined as more than 800 mice per hectare. In parts of Western Australia in May, there were 8,000 per hectare. Mice can give birth and fall pregnant again within days, which is why their rom coms are so predictable and it’s how a nuisance becomes a biblical event.

The snakes, we should note, are fat.

Grain grower Geoff Cosgrove described the smell that has settled over the region as a combination of urine, feces, and decaying bodies. One farmer spent $31,500 trying to control the mice on his property. A councillor has been pulling walls off his house to find the dead ones. At the height of the plague, mice ran along the shelves of the local grocery store, ate the labels off the liquor bottles, and nibbled the stock.

In late May, students at a local agricultural college were sent home for two weeks after a stronger rodenticide — not approved for residential use — was accidentally spread on school grounds. Ninety-six birds were found dead or dying at a nearby golf course and school oval as a result.

Scientists describe mouse plagues as uniquely invasive disasters because there is no refuge. With a drought, you can at least go inside. Same with a downpour. Mice follow you in — into your house, your bed, your food. There is no refuge.

Australia and China are the only two countries where mouse plagues occur. Scientists are not sure why.

Experts say there is a moment in every plague where the tide turns — the scratching in the walls stops and the mice vanish almost as suddenly as they arrived. Whether Morawa is approaching that moment or merely the halfway point is unknown.

These two stories at the end of Monday are related, by the way. The tree is time made physical; the plague is the news cycle made physical — swarming, without refuge, impossible to get ahead of. The tree resists the flattening of time. The plague is flattening — it obliterates everything else.

When I was in the television news business there would be little amusing stories at the end of a broadcast, which you might think we’re replicating here at the end of every day, but we have larger ambitions: we are erecting marble staircases of philosophical connection. So don’t do what you do when watching the news, which is groan and check your smartphone.

Connecting the Dots

Here’s where we see the connections between these stories on Monday at Stack the Week: I used to put this kind of thing at the start of every day as a way to tease what was coming. But I think because Stack the Week has become a bullion cube of information, that the better thing to do is some bow tying at the end of each day. You let me know.

Here are Monday’s bows:

The gap between declared reality and actual reality (sometimes referred to as just “reality”):

- The Iran deal says one thing in Washington and another in Tehran.

- The G-7 communiqué will project unity that doesn’t exist.

- The DOJ says the Newsom investigation wasn’t launched from Washington; the timeline suggests otherwise.

- The Anthropic shutdown was framed as a national security measure; the NSA kept using the model anyway.

-Britain bans social media, but a similar ban in Australia still means seven in ten kids still have it.

Has it always been this way? Have we always had these gaps? And we just haven’t noticed it because we didn’t have as much information as we do now? Or are we living in a hastened world where there are indeed more instances of the announced version of events and the operational version having almost nothing to do with each other.

The enforcement gap:

- Starmer’s “laws get broken and we pass them anyway.”

- Judges ruling 700 times that ICE policy is likely illegal and the administration ignoring them.

-Intercepted Iranian communications showing zero intention to honor the deal.

-The Anthropic export control that can’t actually check a passport and makes the company shut down its model.

We’re measuring the gap between measures taken and results achieved.

What institutions are actually being used for:

-The G-7 was built assuming participants want the same basic thing.

- Habeas corpus assumes the government will answer to a judge.

- Export controls assume foreign actors, not domestic AI companies, are the threat.

Institutions in Monday’s digest are being used for something other than their original purpose, or breaking down because the conditions that made their formation sensible no longer hold.

Tuesday, June 16

Iran economic fallout

Trump declared the Strait of Hormuz open Sunday. As of Tuesday, seven ships had passed through it. More than 580 were waiting in the Gulf. Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, said it was not rushing vessels back in.

The obstacles are mines — Iran seeded the strait and nobody knows exactly how many or where they are — insurance rates that remain prohibitive because no insurance company wants to pay for ships at the bottom of the strait as a result of those mines, and a standoff over tolls. Iran says it will charge fees for passage. Trump says it opens toll-free. Those are not the same thing. Energy experts say it will take months for shipping volumes to return to anything resembling pre-war norms.

As a reminder, the average price of regular gasoline hit $4.56 a gallon before Memorial Day — up roughly 50 percent since the war began in February. It has since eased to just above $4.

Even if the strait reopens cleanly, gas prices will not fall like a rocket even though they went up like one.

Refineries buy crude oil a month or more in advance, which means the gasoline being sold today was refined from expensive crude. Economists say meaningful relief is weeks away at minimum and possibly months. One analyst told the Atlantic that before the war, oil prices were headed toward $40 to $50 a barrel. Now, he said, getting below $70 would be miraculous — because every producer and shipper in the world now knows Iran can close the strait whenever it wants, and that risk gets built into prices permanently.

By the way, if you’re totaling up the cost of the war and the new dynamic after the war: pricing in the risk that Iran might shut down the strait was not something that was done before the war at the high price it is now.

How will this play out politically? Why don’t you just ask me to chew on aluminum foil, why doncha?

Stack the Week listeners know the penchant to run all economic activity through the political lens is one of the great weaknesses of American journalism. But that’s the way the world is right now, so, with the caveat that the economy is a much larger thing than gas prices: the principal claim against the president and his party in this midterm is that they took their eye off the ball when it came to lowering high prices. The cost of gas is a convenient daily reminder that the president’s war of choice in Iran is consistent with that existing disappointment over his scattered focus, so even if prices go down some day, people are not happy. Polls show that Trump’s approval rating on the economy is bouncing in the low 30s.

G-7 progress?

The G-7 ended its first full day Tuesday with European leaders cautiously optimistic — not because anything was resolved, but because Trump didn’t blow it up. The American president accepted a soccer jersey from the German chancellor, an olive branch Trump accepted from Chancellor Merz who had called the Iran war “ill-considered” and said the Americans “clearly have no strategy,” remarks that earned him a Trump Truth Social attack and the withdrawal of 5,000 U.S. troops from German soil.

And the president announced he would reimpose sanctions on Russian oil, which the administration had temporarily eased earlier this year to keep energy prices from spiraling further as the Iran war choked off global supplies. ( A reminder of one of the costs of the war in Iran: temporarily enriching Russia which made it easier for Russia to kill Ukrainians.)

All of this collegial and alliance-like behavior may have been motivated by the president’s desire to get European help clearing mines from the Strait of Hormuz, which requires specialized slow-moving minesweeper vessels and weeks of painstaking underwater survey work before commercial shipping can safely resume.

Ballroom shell game

Trump has been inconsistent about the price of his plan to demolish the White House East Wing and replace it with a ballroom and underground bunker — the number has moved from $200 million to $300 million to $400 million. On one thing he has been consistent: who pays. “This is taxpayer-free,” he told reporters in March. “We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents.”

The Washington Post obtained the contractor’s internal estimate from that same month. It put the total cost at $600 million. More than half was expected to come from taxpayers.

By the time Trump made his taxpayer-free claim, the federal government had already approved more than a dozen payments to the contractor, Clark Construction, totaling tens of millions of dollars in public funds. A White House lawyer had already sent an email to colleagues explaining that she was adding language to the contract to tie the project “more closely to security-related issues” — because the Secret Service was providing the funding. “We believe this edit is important to comply with fiscal law principles,” she wrote. The language was retrofitted to make the taxpayer money fit the project.

The administration’s answer is that security enhancements are properly paid for by the Secret Service and the military. Three independent contracting experts who reviewed the documents told the Post that the argument doesn’t hold — you can’t disentangle the entertainment space from the security infrastructure. It is one structure, so saying that public funds are going to the security portion but it’s still true the ballroom isn’t being paid for with public funds is like saying the public is paying for the wheels of the car but the car is not being paid for with public funds.

Anthropic allies

On Tuesday, more than 150 cybersecurity experts signed an open letter to the Commerce Secretary and the White House cyber director demanding they lift the export control on Fable. Their argument: the capability the administration flagged as dangerous exists in OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, which faces no restrictions. Chinese models can do the same.

An unnamed administration official told Politico that the longer the fight drags on, the more likely it becomes that the White House approach to AI turns into a de facto licensing model — where tech companies must seek Washington’s permission before releasing their most powerful tools. That would contradict everything the administration said it believed about regulating AI and with free market principles about non-interference in commerce. On the other hand, it would provide the President with an extraordinary bit of leverage over what arguably may be the most powerful industrial tool in American history. He won’t just get a soccer jersey from the richest companies in America seeking his thumb’s up.

NYT look into Epstein death

The New York Times published Tuesday the most exhaustive accounting yet of Jeffrey Epstein’s death in federal custody in August 2019 — drawing on tens of thousands of pages of newly released documents, Epstein’s own handwritten jail notes obtained by the Times, and interviews with dozens of people connected to the case.

The official finding was suicide. The conspiracy theory — that Epstein was murdered by someone with an interest in his silence — has persisted for seven years, held by people who agree on little else. The Times found no evidence of a plot. What it found instead was a cascade of institutional failures so complete they look, at first glance, like something designed.

It’s worth pausing here to grasp a lesson that perhaps can be applied more broadly, which is that If you are the kind of person who believes in conspiracies, an alternative might be to hook yourself up to a theory that has more plausible evidence in the world in which we actually live. Use your common experience with the human creature, including yourself, and reflect on how often it is that everything you plan in life goes exactly according to plan. And then add that to the idea that it is more plausible that a series of screw-ups can accumulate into what looks like a master plan, but that a master plan of that complexity has rarely been achieved on the planet on which you currently spin because it’s really complicated and humans rarely achieve 100 percent success on sweeping complex operations.

Epstein wrote about suicide in his jail notes. His first cellmate, a man awaiting trial for four murders, told the Times he caught Epstein preparing to hang himself twice and reported both incidents to guards who laughed him off. A suicide note was found by that cellmate, hidden for years in sealed court documents, and only made public this May after the Times petitioned a judge to unseal it. His second cellmate, who died of COVID in 2020, told investigators Epstein said he knew he would never see the street again.

On the day Epstein died, that cellmate was transferred to another facility. No one found Epstein a new cellmate to replace him, in direct violation of standing orders. The two guards on duty falsified their records to show they had conducted rounds they never made.

The cell, when investigators arrived, was filled with linens Epstein was not supposed to have, and multiple nooses made from orange jail fabric. The wrong noose was logged as evidence. The scene was so contaminated that investigators didn’t collect DNA.

Whether the medical evidence points to suicide or homicide remains genuinely contested among pathologists. The Times consulted nine of them. None was willing to rule either out based on the available evidence alone. What is clear, the Times concluded, is that a murder would have required an elaborate conspiracy involving multiple jail operations, precise knowledge of which security cameras were malfunctioning, and the willingness to risk the death penalty for killing a federal inmate — with no indication from scores of interviews and thousands of pages of documents that any such plot existed.

So you’re saying there’s a chance?

Working parents

A Pew Research Center survey of 2,242 working parents released Tuesday found that 70 percent handle parenting tasks during the workday and 59 percent handle work tasks during family time. Fifty-four percent say balancing the two is difficult. Sixty percent say they spend too little time with their children. Nearly half miss events their children are involved in.

One mother in the survey put it plainly: “I’m supposed to work like I don’t have kids and supposed to parent like I don’t have a job.”

Mothers carry more of it. Sixty-two percent of full-time working mothers say balance is difficult, compared to 47 percent of fathers.

Though we know of course in our bones that mothers carry more of the burden than fathers, this finding could also suggest that fathers are just unconcerned about balance and therefore give pollsters answers that are a reflection of their muddled mind.

In couples where both parents work full time, 52 percent say the mother does more parenting. Ten percent say the father does more.

The parents who have it hardest are the ones with the least flexibility — low-income workers who cannot predict their hours, cannot work from home, and cannot afford to miss a shift. More than half of low-income working parents say they worry about losing pay if they have to take unplanned time off for a child. A third worry about losing their job.

And as Stack the Week listeners know, this group is the one suffering the most in the current so-called K-shaped economy.

Do we tell them again what K-shaped means? They should know by now. What if they’re new listeners? Then they should listen regularly. Also, there is a benefit to sending listeners and readers to engage with the news more deeply. Yeah, but I’ve kind of never really understood exactly how the K works in the K-shaped economy. So you’re saying that we should explain that when different groups recover along different trajectories — the top half of earners increasing wealth and income, while the bottom half falls behind– that’s where the K comes from: two lines diverging from the same point, one climbing, one sinking. Exactly. Yeah, I don’t think we should explain that again.

Japan’s historic interest rate hike

Japan is the fourth largest economy in the world and holds more American government debt — about $1.1 trillion worth — than any other country on earth. When its central bank moves, the ripple reaches American wallets. On Tuesday it moved.

Japan’s central bank raised interest rates to one percent — the highest level in 31 years — citing inflation driven by the Iran war’s disruption to oil supplies. Japan imports roughly 90 percent of its crude from the Middle East. Higher Japanese rates give Japanese investors a reason to bring money home rather than park it in U.S. Treasury bonds, which puts upward pressure on American borrowing costs — mortgages, car loans, credit card debt. The Bank of Japan’s deputy governor acknowledged that the U.S.-Iran deal had reduced risks, then added: “We don’t know what will happen next.”

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has spent her tenure pressing the Bank of Japan to keep rates low and the yen weak. The Bank raised rates anyway — a small act of institutional independence at a moment when central banks around the world are navigating the same pressure from their political leaders that the Federal Reserve has been navigating from the White House.

South Korean Starbucks to close for history lesson

Closed, for a history lesson. That’s the message South Koreans could face if they turn up at any of the 2,000 Starbucks in the country next week. This week the company announced they’ll temporarily shutter stores to give employees and executives mandatory sensitivity and history training after a disastrous, short-lived marketing campaign that was criticized for making light of an infamous massacre.

Here’s what those employees are going to hear a lot about: On May 18, the anniversary of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising when a military dictatorship used tanks to crush pro-democracy protesters, Starbucks tried to sell tumblers with the tagline “Tank Day.” That was a bad idea. Backlash was immediate and Starbucks Korea fired its CEO that day. But in the weeks since, there’s been a persistently large downturn in business. Starbucks payment volumes in South Korea — the company’s third-largest market in the world — are still 25 percent below pre-scandal levels.

Venus and Serena

Serena Williams will play Wimbledon for the first time in four years, teaming with her sister Venus in the women’s doubles as a wild card entry. Serena is 44. Venus is 45. Together they have won the Wimbledon doubles title six times. Between them they have won the singles title twelve times at the All England Club. If they win this one, they will shatter the world record for oldest combined age of a Grand Slam-winning doubles team. The previous record holders had a combined age of 74 years and 303 days when they won Wimbledon in 2023. Serena and Venus have a combined age of 89. They would shatter it by nearly 15 years. Wimbledon begins June 29.

Wednesday, June 17

Trump speaks at G-7

The G-7 ended without Trump leaving early — which, given his history at these summits, counts as news. At the 2018 summit in Canada he left before it was over and pulled his signature from the joint communiqué by tweet from Air Force One. Last year in Alberta he left a full day ahead of schedule. This time, French President Emmanuel Macron sweetened the stay with a private dinner at Versailles, and Trump stayed through the closing curtain.

He also signed the joint communiqué — the formal statement all seven leaders agree to at the end of every summit. Trump has walked away from these before when the language on trade or climate didn’t suit him. This one praised his Iran deal three times, calling it “historic” and crediting his “strong leadership.” It read, in places, as if his own staff had written it.

Still, the summit’s underlying tension could not be entirely papered-over. It surfaced in a hot-mic exchange. European Council President António Costa turned to Trump between sessions and said, “We are friends again.” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — who had publicly criticized the Iran war and endured a public dressing-down from Trump in response — quickly interjected: “We have always been friends.” The room laughed.

The Iran Deal

At a press conference at the end of the G7, president Trump returned to January 2020, when he ordered the killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani at the Baghdad airport. Soleimani was the commander of Iran’s Quds Force — the architect of its network of proxy militias across the Middle East and, Trump said Wednesday, “the father of the roadside bomb.”

“If I didn’t kill General Soleimani,” Trump said, “we probably wouldn’t be talking right now about this deal. He was a mad genius. They never were able to replace him.”

Trump appeared to be taking credit for shaping the Iranian government that ultimately agreed to the deal, though the logic was hard to follow, because if Suleimani were still alive, he probably would have been killed in the strikes that decapitated the Iranian leadership in the early hours of this war. And if it was merely the lack of Suleimani that caused the deal to happen, then why didn’t Iran strike a deal before the bombs started falling, when the U.S. and Iran were negotiating before the war, since Suleimani was long dead?

This might sound a little pedantic, and I apologize if it does. However, I’ll take the opportunity to make the claim that in order to really evaluate the outcome in Iran we have to look at three different kinds of measurement which take place across time and shifting circumstances.

So basically what I mean is that the Iran deal that concludes this adventure has to be measured against either the JCPOA that the Obama administration negotiated or the status of U.S.-Iranian negotiations at the end of February before the U.S. decided to attack. In other words, what was possible then and how different is that from whatever is in the final deal at the end of this war. And then also, whatever the final deal is at the end of this war has to be measured against the claims made by the President and his aides at the start of the war to determine whether it was a success.

The text of the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran was released Wednesday, after public outcry that nobody had seen it. A senior U.S. official read it aloud.

Fourteen points. The broad outlines: Iran commits to allowing commercial vessels safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days at no charge. The U.S. begins lifting its naval blockade within 30 days. Iran commits, as it has many times before and did before the war started, to not developing nuclear weapons and to neutralizing its enriched uranium stockpile under IAEA supervision. The U.S. commits to lifting all sanctions — unilateral, UN, and IAEA — on an agreed timetable. The U.S. commits to working with regional partners to develop a reconstruction fund of at least $300 billion for Iran’s economy.

At his press conference Wednesday, Trump was asked about the $300 billion reconstruction fund. He said it was “false.” Then he said other countries could invest if they wanted to. “What am I going to do, say no one is ever allowed to invest?” he said. “We’re not investing, we’re not putting up 10 cents.”

It is Point 6 of the agreement his administration signed. The question is not exactly who pays the money, but that the money is being paid. In other words, it wasn’t the bombs, but the dollar bills that got the deal done. Dollar bills that presumably were available before you had to start dropping the bombs.

Among the reasons most often cited for going to war was denying Iran the ability to threaten its neighbors with ballistic missiles. It was also considered one of the central weaknesses of the Obama deal. Asked about it Wednesday, Trump said Iran had to have some missiles because other countries have them. “What am I going to do?” he said. “Am I going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?” That is now U.S. policy.

He was also asked whether the deal included immediate sanctions relief for Iran. He said “no.” Then, when asked again, he said: “They have to behave well.”

If the Iranians do get money that was frozen as a result of sanctions, the payment mechanism will be nearly identical to the one that Trump criticized so heavily during the Obama administration.

A reporter asked the most direct question of the afternoon: there is nothing legally enforceable in the deal itself, correct? “Doesn’t have to be,” Trump said. “I let them know — if you don’t adhere to the agreement, we’re going to bomb the hell out of you. What else am I going to do? Am I going to take you to court? Let me sue you.”

Trump acknowledged Wednesday that the economic consequences of the war he launched shaped his decision to end it. He said he did not want to be compared to Herbert Hoover — the president whose name is synonymous with the 1929 crash and the Depression that followed.

“He was always the one I didn’t want to be,” Trump told reporters. “I didn’t want to see an economic catastrophe.”

The war Trump launched drove up global energy costs during a midterm election year, turned some of his own allies against him, and prompted accusations that he had abandoned the America First economic priorities he campaigned on. The stock market’s movements, Trump said, guided him as he worked toward a resolution. Every time peace seemed possible, he said, stocks went up. Every time it seemed to fall apart, they went down. He took that as counsel.

Last month, when a reporter asked to what extent the financial pain Americans were feeling had motivated him to make a deal, Trump replied: “Not even a little bit.”

Trump was less concerned about the other costs of war.

On the first day of the war in Iran, a U.S. airstrike hit a school. More than 120 children were killed.

Trump was asked about it Wednesday and he bristled. That was a long time ago, said the man still falsely adjudicating the 2020 election. “Mistakes are made,” he said. “A war is nasty.”

That is accurate as far as it goes. Wars do produce mistakes. The question of what process existed to prevent this one, and what accountability follows from it, was not answered. The administration said the strike is under investigation. No one has been charged. No findings have been released. The president, asked whether anyone in his administration would be held accountable, said no.

The school strike has received less sustained attention than almost any other significant event of the war. It happened on the first day, when the news was moving fast and the initial wave of strikes dominated coverage. It involves dead children in a country the United States was bombing. Those are not easy things to stay with. But 120 children is not a rounding error, nor are the 240 parents.

Then Trump signed his copy of the memorandum of understanding at the Palace of Versailles before leaving France, a palace whose entrance gates alone contain 100,000 gold leaves, an attraction for a president who affixes gold applique to the Oval Office wall himself with super glue, according to the New York Times this week.

Versailles is a peculiar place to sign a peace agreement. The last time a major international settlement was signed there, in 1919 at the end of the First World War, the terms were so punishing to Germany — reparations so enormous, territorial losses so vast, humiliations so deliberate — that historians have spent a century arguing about whether the Treaty of Versailles made the Second World War inevitable.

Not everyone was celebrating. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana called the deal “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades” and said Ronald Reagan was “rolling over in his grave.” Former Vice President Mike Pence called it “Obama-style appeasement” on Fox News. The MAGA hawk revolt that had been building all week was now in the open — conservatives who had cheered the war’s opening strikes now arguing that the country that started the war was not the country that ended it.

Trump blows up Clayton confirmation

From the G-7 summit in France, in the middle of the night, Trump posted on social media that he was pulling his own nominee for national intelligence director from his confirmation hearing — hours before it was scheduled to begin.

The president was in France trying to conclude a war that a majority of Americans oppose, that has driven up gas prices, that has rattled the global economy, and that his own allies have said he launched without a plan for getting out. The moment called for a display of national security seriousness. Instead he blew up his own intelligence nominee from a hotel room at 3 a.m.

The nominee is Jay Clayton, a federal prosecutor with bipartisan support. The outgoing director is Tulsi Gabbard, whose term ends Friday. Trump’s interim pick to replace her is Bill Pulte, who runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has no known national security experience, and has used his current position to target perceived enemies of the president. Republicans and Democrats alike had been racing to confirm Clayton before Pulte took over.

To put Clayton back in contention, Trump’s post added conditions. He wants the Senate to attach a voter ID bill to the renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — the law that allows the NSA to monitor the communications of targeted foreigners. Section 702 already expired. Republicans have said the voter ID measure does not have the votes to pass in the Senate, where it needs 60. Trump also said he won’t move Clayton until his replacement as U.S. attorney is confirmed, a process that will take weeks and faces Democratic resistance.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, asked Wednesday what Trump was trying to achieve, said: “Good question.”

Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina called Pulte a “sycophant” and said Trump’s move was “undermining our ability to produce the results that he wants.” Senator Tom Cotton, who chairs the Intelligence Committee, postponed the hearing and called it “regrettable.”

In the American system, Congress is a co-equal branch. Just a reminder.

Section 702 is the legal authority that allows the National Security Agency to collect the communications of foreign targets — terrorists, spies, hostile foreign governments — from American technology companies like Google, Microsoft, and Verizon, without a warrant.

It has been used to disrupt actual plots: the 2009 attempt to bomb the New York City subway, Iranian cyber operations against American infrastructure, Chinese espionage inside U.S. defense contractors. When intelligence officials say its lapse creates a national security risk, they mean the government loses the legal authority to compel American companies to hand over communications that may contain information about people actively trying to kill Americans. That law is now expired.

Primary Results

Trump’s preferred candidates won Senate primaries in Alabama and Oklahoma, and his last-minute endorsement of Representative Mike Collins in Georgia’s Senate runoff proved decisive. Collins defeated Derek Dooley, a former football coach recruited by term-limited Governor Brian Kemp — the same Brian Kemp who refused Trump’s demand to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results, a state Trump lost but has never conceded losing, even though he lost it as thoroughly as the San Antonio Spurs, who will not presumably be visiting the White House for a victory party on the theory that by scoring fewer points that they were victorious.

Collins now faces Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff in what is expected to be one of the most expensive Senate races of the midterms. Ossoff is sitting on $32 million in campaign funds. Collins enters the general with less than $1 million after a costly primary. Ossoff, 39, is increasingly mentioned as a 2028 presidential prospect — which means Republicans understand that defeating him would do double damage, and Democrats understand that losing him would do the same.

A billionaire health care executive with no political experience defeated Trump’s chosen candidate for Georgia governor Tuesday night.

Rick Jackson spent more than $100 million, most of it his own money, to defeat Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones, whom Trump had endorsed more than a year ago and called repeatedly in the final days. It wasn’t enough. Trump posted Wednesday morning: “Congratulations to Rick Jackson, who very successfully campaigned on being ‘TRUMP,’ and won.”

One more result from Tuesday’s Georgia primary night that got lost in the returns: Georgia Republicans, called into a special session by Governor Brian Kemp, backed down on a redistricting plan that would have redrawn the state’s political maps in ways critics said would hurt Black representation ahead of 2028. They said they didn’t have enough time to draw new maps.

Rideshare prices investigation

A Consumer Reports investigation released Tuesday found that Uber and Lyft routinely charge different customers dramatically different prices for the same ride, requested at the same time, on the same route. The median gap between the lowest and highest quoted fare across the routes tested was 50 percent. In Kansas City, 55 volunteers checking one route at nearly the same moment generated 29 different prices. In Austin, fares for one route ranged from $25 to $65 — a 160 percent difference.

Uber and Lyft say the differences are explained by real-time marketplace conditions: driver supply, demand, traffic, GPS precision, the time it takes your app to load. Consumer Reports designed its tests specifically to eliminate those variables — volunteers checked the same route within the same minute, in many cases within the same second. The dramatic price differences remained. The companies’ explanation doesn’t hold up against the data.

So what is driving the differences? That’s where it gets interesting and uncomfortable. Both Uber and Lyft have filed patents revealing the kinds of data their algorithms can use to build a profile of each customer. Uber has patented the ability to track your typing speed, your walking gait, the angle at which you hold your phone, and your full ride history. Lyft has patented something it calls a “willingness-to-pay score” — a prediction of the maximum amount you’d pay before you’d close the app. Neither company will confirm whether these tools are actually used to set prices. They won’t say what is driving the differences, and they won’t allow independent audits to find out. Opacity, in other words, is part of the business model.

Consumer Reports also found that nearly 11 percent of all discounts advertised on both platforms appeared to be fake — what regulators call fictitious discounts, where the “original” price being crossed out was never the real price to begin with. You see a fare of $82, crossed out, with a new price of $65.95 below it. Forty other riders on the same route at the same time were quoted $65.95 with no discount at all. The discount was invented to make you feel like you were getting a deal.

Uber now takes between 43 and 50 percent of each fare. In 2022 it was taking 32 percent. Drivers’ share has fallen accordingly. One driver in Portland, whose six test trips generated $126 in fares, took home $66.73. Uber took $58.41.

Job insecurity

Global unemployment has been near historic lows for three years. By that measure, workers should feel secure. They do not.

Only 22 percent of workers globally say they strongly agree their job is safe from elimination, according to an ADP survey of more than 39,000 workers across 36 countries.

In the United States the figure is 28 percent. In Japan it is 5 percent. No country in the survey had a majority of workers who felt confident. The survey doesn’t tell us whether that insecurity is new or longstanding. What it tells us is that a tight labor market, which is supposed to give workers leverage, isn’t making them feel safe.

Sixty-two percent of workers worldwide said they put in up to five unpaid hours a week. Another 26 percent said they work six to fifteen unpaid hours without pay. The workers putting in the most unpaid time were also the most engaged in their jobs — and the most likely to be looking for another one. In other words: the hardest workers are the ones already planning to leave. That is not what employers want to hear, and it is probably not a coincidence. When you work that hard and still don’t feel secure, you start looking for the door.

Warsh’s first Fed meeting

Kevin Warsh held his first meeting as Federal Reserve chairman Wednesday. The Fed left interest rates unchanged at 3.5 to 3.75 percent. Nearly half of Fed policymakers said they could support a rate hike before the year is out — a sharp change from March, when the committee as a whole forecast a cut. What changed their minds: inflation. The Iran war drove up energy prices, energy drives up the cost of nearly everything else, and the Fed’s job is to keep prices stable. When prices rise faster than the target, the Fed’s tool is to make borrowing more expensive — raise rates — so that people and businesses spend less, demand cools, and prices follow. That is where the committee is now pointing.

Warsh’s fingerprints were visible in two ways. The post-meeting statement shrank from 341 words to 130. That matters because every word in a Fed statement is parsed like a legal document by traders, analysts, and economists trying to figure out whether interest rates — the price of borrowing money — are going up or down. A single changed phrase can send markets moving. Warsh has argued the Fed talks too much, gives too many signals, and paints itself into corners it then has to escape. He took a hatchet to the statement.

The second fingerprint: one dot was missing from the Fed’s “dot plot” — the anonymous grid showing where each of the 19 policymakers expects rates to go. Fed watchers widely expect the missing dot is Warsh’s. He has previously criticized the dot plot for the same reason he hates the long statements: it locks the Fed into positions before anyone knows what conditions will actually require.

The statement that remained said inflation “remains elevated relative to the Committee’s 2 percent goal, in part reflecting supply shocks that have driven price increases in certain sectors, including energy. The Committee will deliver price stability.” Inflation is currently running at 4.2 percent annually, its highest level in three years, driven largely by the Iran war’s disruption to energy markets.

Trump has demanded rate cuts. He has also, in recent weeks, said he wants Warsh to be independent. The Fed did not cut rates. Jerome Powell, whose term as chairman ended last month but who remains on the board as a governor, voted with the majority.

700,000 fewer kids on SNAP

More than 776,000 children have lost access to food stamps since Congress passed changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program last year, according to a ProPublica analysis of data from 12 states that break down participation by age. A separate analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put the number at 700,000.

When the bill passed, Republican backers said repeatedly that children would be unaffected. “If you have young children at home, your benefits are unaffected by this bill,” said Representative Dusty Johnson of South Dakota on the House floor.

Arizona has seen the largest decline — 205,000 children no longer receiving benefits, a 55 percent drop. St. Mary’s Food Bank in Phoenix has seen a 15 percent increase in need this year, translating to 300,000 more visits.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the 700,000 figure was “not correct” and that most people removed from the program were “fraudulent.” ProPublica independently verified the figures reported by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The children were not the intended target of the law’s changes, which imposed new work requirements on adults and shifted more administrative costs to states. But as states struggle to comply with new paperwork requirements under staffing constraints, families are falling through the gaps. In Massachusetts, the share of SNAP applicants who called an assistance line and couldn’t reach a worker rose from 61 percent in November to nearly 81 percent in March.

The great hydration break debate

FIFA introduced mandatory three-minute hydration breaks at the midpoint of each half of this summer’s World Cup, citing player welfare in summer heat across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Critics have noticed something else: every major broadcaster cuts to commercials the moment play stops. Fox goes to ads immediately. A 30-second spot during early group-stage matches runs roughly $200,000. When the U.S. plays, it runs $750,000.

The breaks have also changed games. In eight of the first 16 matches, goals were scored within ten minutes of a hydration break. Curaçao, the smallest nation by population ever to qualify for the World Cup, equalized against Germany in the 21st minute. The hydration break came 30 seconds later. Germany scored twice before halftime and won 7-1. “I actually felt sorry for them,” former England striker Alan Shearer said. “They scored and then it was maybe 30 seconds after that it stopped. So it’s killed their momentum.”

Coaches have embraced the breaks as tactical timeouts. Netherlands coach Ronald Koeman said he was using them to pass instructions he wouldn’t otherwise be able to give mid-half.

The breaks are mandatory at every match regardless of conditions. Spain played Cape Verde in Atlanta — indoors, air-conditioned — and the break happened anyway. FIFA says uniformity requires it. Medical experts say three minutes is not nearly long enough, and that five to six minutes would be necessary to meaningfully reduce heat risk.

FIFA has not said whether the breaks will become permanent. Given that they generate premium advertising inventory at the world’s most-watched sporting event without requiring any structural change to the game, the answer is probably one you don’t need a three minute break to ponder.

Thursday, June 18

SCOTUS on guns and pot

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday that the federal government cannot automatically strip gun rights from anyone who uses marijuana.

The law at issue was the Gun Control Act of 1968, passed after the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. It bars gun ownership by anyone who “is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.” For decades it was used sparingly. More recently, as marijuana use has spread — it is now broadly legal in roughly half the states — federal prosecutors began using it to charge people who had guns and smoked pot.

The court said that went too far. The original law was meant to keep guns away from people who were dangerous. A recreational marijuana user is not automatically dangerous. The government tried to argue that historical laws barring “habitual drunkards” from owning guns provided the relevant precedent. The court rejected that analogy. “The federal government has not just tolerated” the spread of marijuana use, Gorsuch wrote — it helped fuel it.

The case involves Ali Hemani, a Texas man whose home was raided by federal agents in 2022 after his family came under suspicion because of ties to Iran. Agents found a handgun in a safe and about 60 grams of marijuana. No other charges were ever filed.

The ruling drew an unusual coalition. On Hemani’s side: the NRA and the ACLU. Against him: the Trump administration and Everytown for Gun Safety, the Bloomberg-backed gun control group. Justice Samuel Alito — one of the court’s most conservative members — joined with liberal Justice Elena Kagan to write separately that marijuana today is essentially what alcohol was at the founding: widespread, increasingly tolerated, and a thin basis for stripping a constitutional right.

The decision left one door open. People addicted to drugs — not just users — can still be barred from owning guns under the law. That distinction mattered in the Hunter Biden case: Biden was convicted not of being a marijuana user but of buying a gun while addicted to cocaine. His father pardoned him before he could be sentenced. Thursday’s ruling does not disturb that part of the law.

Obama Presidential Center opening

The Obama Presidential Center opened Thursday in Chicago’s South Side, drawing four former presidents, Bruce Springsteen, Bono, and Jennifer Hudson — and conspicuously not drawing the current one. Trump was not invited. He has called the center “not too pretty,” “a total disaster,” and posted manipulated images depicting it as a giant trash can.

The $850 million campus — 19 acres in Jackson Park near the University of Chicago — is the most expensive presidential library in American history. It is also, by design, not quite a presidential library. Obama’s papers will be stored digitally by the National Archives. The foundation will run the physical campus itself, without government oversight, which gives Obama more control over his legacy and less accountability to outside review. Previous presidents who controlled their own exhibitions have used that latitude in ways historians later found embarrassing. Nixon helped curate the original Watergate exhibit at his library. It was later replaced.

Presidential libraries are a peculiar institution. Most democracies don’t have them. The United States enshrines in law the right of its former presidents to a federally supported archive — and then allows private donors to build increasingly elaborate monuments around it. The cost of building them has been rising for decades. Reagan’s featured a decommissioned Air Force One. Trump’s proposed Miami skyscraper, 47 stories tall — the height chosen to evoke his status as the 47th president — would include a hotel, a replica of the Oval Office, and space resembling his planned White House ballroom. A lawsuit has been filed alleging he is seeking to profit from land gifted to him by state officials.

Obama has described his own building as a community hub first — a basketball court, a public library, a sledding hill Michelle Obama insisted on because she never had one growing up nearby, a vegetable garden on the roof. Tickets are $30. They are already sold out through November. The neighborhood surrounding it, which experiences frequent gun violence, is watching to see whether the investment generates opportunity or just raises rents. The entire project harkens back to Obama’s start as a community organizer.

Franklin Roosevelt, who started all of this in 1939, said at the dedication of his library that a nation must believe in the past, believe in the future, and believe in its people’s capacity to learn from one and create the other. He donated his papers to the government and pledged part of his estate. He did not build a hotel.

In related Presidential monument news, the reflecting pool on the mall has turned into a kind of mess. When I was a kid we used to take an enormous jar and fill it with every liquid in the refrigerator and spice in the cabinet. Then we’d dare each other to drink it. It looked exactly like the reflecting pool does now. Algae has taken over the pool so that we cannot enjoy the brand new blue paint job. However on Thursday, that pleasure was returned to us because the paint became visible. The rushed application and maybe the hydrogen peroxide poured in to kill the algae was lifting it off the floor.

So, after all the controversy, one thing Americans can algae on is that the reflecting pool is a peeling.

Anthropic allies in Congress

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers sent a letter Thursday to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick demanding an explanation for the export controls the administration imposed on Anthropic’s AI models. The letter was signed by two Democrats and two Republicans, including Jay Obernolte of California, one of Congress’s leading Republican voices on AI.

Their core question was the one that has been hanging over this fight all week: why Anthropic and not anyone else? OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 can do the same things Fable 5 was accused of doing. It faces no restrictions. Chinese models including Kimi 2.7 can do the same things. They face no restrictions either.

The letter asked the Commerce Department to explain what principled distinction it was drawing and what guidance AI developers could rely on to know whether their own models might be next.

Ukraine drone attack

Ukraine sent nearly a thousand drones into Russian airspace Thursday — the largest such attack of the war — and Moscow felt it. Airports closed. A refinery supplying 40% of the city’s gasoline caught fire, sending black smoke and what residents described as oil-slicked rain across southeastern neighborhoods. Part of the highway ringing the capital shut down. No deaths reported, but 17 injured.

Volodymyr Zelensky, in a voice memo to journalists said: “If Ukraine burns, then your Moscow will burn as well.” He framed the strikes as retaliation for a Russian attack on one of Eastern Orthodox Christianity’s holiest sites in Kyiv — Russia claims it was an errant Ukrainian missile.

For three years Putin kept the war abstract for most Russians. That’s cracking. Fuel rationing has spread across dozens of regions. A man in a working-class neighborhood southeast of the burning refinery told the New York Times his neighbors wandered outside asking, “How is that possible?” Most still can’t connect the attacks to the invasion their government launched. “It’s like they were told for a long time not to look up,” he said, “and now it’s as if they have lifted their heads for the first time.”

Gas prices

Gas prices fell below $4 a gallon on average Thursday for the first time since March, according to AAA. The national average is $3.999. The drop followed the signing of the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding and a 15 percent decline in the price of crude oil this month.

The range across the country remains wide. In South Carolina the average is $3.58. In California it is $5.64 — a gap that reflects state taxes, refinery capacity, and the particular cruelty of California’s relationship with gasoline prices.

The cautions from earlier in the week still apply. Oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz again does not mean gasoline gets cheaper tomorrow. Refineries buy crude a month or more in advance. Ships are still waiting. The strait still has mines. The long-term price floor has moved up permanently, because every producer and insurer in the world now knows Iran can close the strait whenever it wants.

The sauerkraut diet

And in another story about the price of gas, a fermented cabbage diet is sweeping through the Trump cabinet.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Vice President JD Vance have all adopted a regimen built around sauerkraut, kimchi, grass-fed steak, and a strict ban on alcohol and sugar. The diet was designed by Dr. Sean O’Mara, a physician who specializes in visceral fat — the kind that wraps around organs and raises the risk of diabetes, heart disease, and metabolic syndrome.

The science behind the diet is real in outline and contested in specifics. Fermented foods contain live bacteria — probiotics — that can support gut health, and there is legitimate research suggesting that a healthy gut microbiome is connected to immune function, digestion, and possibly mood. Cutting alcohol and sugar and eating more protein are also broadly supported by nutritional science.

What is less established is whether eating sauerkraut specifically produces dramatic results, how much of any benefit comes from the fermentation versus the overall dietary changes, and whether the improvements people report are caused by the diet or by the fact that wealthy, motivated people who spend $8,000 on a consultation tend to make a lot of changes at once and pay close attention to how they feel afterward. O’Mara’s claims — that the diet reduces visceral fat, improves skin, eliminates atrial fibrillations, and produces “glowing” results within weeks — go beyond what the published research currently supports.

A consultation with O’Mara starts at $8,000. A direct session costs $18,000. He will accompany clients to the grocery store to explain where the best sauerkraut is kept — toward the back of the refrigerator section, away from the light that could degrade the live microbes.

Kennedy said he lost 20 pounds in 30 days. He travels with a personal stash of sauerkraut. His wife, actress Cheryl Hines, noted that he has asked her to carry it in her good handbag. She has declined.

Vance committed to the diet for Lent and has continued. On Air Force Two he eats grass-fed beef jerky or a hamburger with cheese, no bun, and a side of fermented vegetables.

The president has held the line. At the NBA Finals earlier this month he ate pizza, french fries, and drank Diet Coke. He loves a well-done steak with ketchup which, according to senior officials in multiple administrations is not the way to eat steak at all.

Major oak tree of Robin Hood dies

The Major Oak of Sherwood Forest is dead.

The tree was between 800 and 1,200 years old — alive when the Black Death swept England, when the Wars of the Roses tore it apart, when six kings named Henry sat on the throne. Its trunk measured 36 feet around. Its canopy, at its widest, spread 91 feet. Legend held that Robin Hood hid himself and his loot inside its hollow core.

This spring, for the first time, no buds appeared. No leaves. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which manages Sherwood Forest, declared it dead Thursday.

There was no single cause. There never is with something that old.

Millions of tourists came to see the tree over the decades. Their footsteps compacted the sandy soil around its roots to a depth of nearly four feet, making it rock solid, cutting off water and nutrients. People tried to save it: iron rods were bolted to support the canopy, lead sheets fitted to seal wounds, fiberglass added later, concrete bases poured.

By the time modern conservationists understood the damage, the rods couldn’t be removed. Wood chip mulch spread to rehabilitate the soil bred a tree-killing honey fungus instead. Then came five consecutive hot, dry British summers — the kind that didn’t used to happen — and the tree, already weakened, could not recover.

“The climate is changing so fast in front of our eyes that these very old trees don’t seem to be able to keep up,” said Reg Harris, an arborist who had been monitoring the Major Oak for nine years.

The tree will stay in place. As it decays over the coming decades it will become a habitat — home to insects, fungi, birds. Its acorns have been planted across Britain. One sapling went to Dame Judi Dench, who planted it in her garden. Because legendary monuments that seem to have endless seasons should be in each other’s company.

Friday, June 19

Iran deal wobbles

The next round of talks nearly happened. Vice President Vance was set to fly to Switzerland to begin negotiating the implementation of the permanent nuclear deal following Trump’s initial signing of a 14-point memorandum of understanding on Wednesday. But by Thursday night, the trip was abruptly postponed. The White House blamed “difficult logistics,” but regional networks reported Iran refused to send its delegation after a fresh wave of Israeli strikes in south Lebanon and Hezbollah retaliations left at least 21 dead. Netanyahu has made clear he doesn’t consider himself bound by the deal’s call for a multi-front ceasefire, while Iran warns that continued fighting in Lebanon could collapse the entire framework.

The episode is sharpening a strange new dynamic. Trump this week criticized Israeli strikes for killing civilians at the G7 summit in France—”you don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody,” he said. Vance warned Israeli cabinet members to stop attacking “the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.” These are the kinds of things Iran’s allies say about Israel. That they’re now coming from the American president and vice president gives the broader critique of Israel a legitimacy it has never had from Washington, and suggests the war has reshuffled something more fundamental than just a peace deal.

Meanwhile, Iran made clear it intends to treat the Strait of Hormuz as its own. A new Iranian authority—the Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA)—issued guidance requiring all ships to register with it and reserved the right to introduce mandatory “insurance fees” after the 60-day toll-free window closes. U.S. allies, led by the U.K., are pressing Washington not to accept it. Shippers aren’t waiting to find out—visible tanker traffic has been volatile, and Oman’s Maritime Security Centre issued an official warning to mariners after spotting a suspected floating sea mine just west of the strait.

Fallout after G7

During the G7 summit, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told Donald Trump they “have always been friends.” By Friday, that friendship bracelet was at the bottom of the Atlantic.

The American president told an Italian television channel that Meloni had “begged” him for a photo at the summit. “I wouldn’t have done it, but I felt sorry for her,” Trump said. The Italian prime minister’s reply, posted to social media: “Italy and I never beg.” She went on to accuse Trump of showing more deference to America’s enemies than its allies, and Italy’s foreign minister canceled a planned U.S. visit in solidarity.

The break had been coming. The war with Iran soured Italian public opinion on Trump, putting intense political pressure on Meloni, who faces a national election next year. She originally broke with Trump when he attacked Pope Leo for condemning the war, and her government later denied U.S. military planes carrying weapons access to Sigonella, a key NATO airbase in Sicily. Trump told her directly at the G7 summit that he felt “abandoned.”

It’s the second major story this week of Trump claiming foreign leaders grovel before him. A new report by veteran journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan details the president showing off fawning text messages from tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos to anyone who would look. The pattern is consistent: to Trump, friendship means genuflection. Honest disagreement, even from an ally who has worked hard to maintain a close relationship with his movement, registers as betrayal.

Andy Burnham would not go to Dunsinane.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer won a landslide election just two years ago. Now, his own cabinet ministers are privately telling him it’s over.

The man positioned to replace him is Andy Burnham, the 56-year-old high-profile mayor of Greater Manchester. Burnham spent nine years transforming that city—taking a patchwork public transit system under public control, branding it the “Bee Network,” and championing the north of England so loudly against London’s centralized power that he earned the nickname “King of the North.” On Thursday night, Burnham won a special parliamentary election in a working-class district called Makerfield by 55 percent. It was an emphatic margin that doubled his predecessor’s majority and comfortably beat out the right-wing, anti-immigration parties. Crucially, the victory gives Burnham the seat in Parliament he legally needs under party rules to challenge Starmer for the Labour Party leadership.

Why is the prime minister so vulnerable? Starmer’s Labour Party is polling at just 19 percent nationally, trailing the surging Reform UK party. While Starmer has pushed through the renationalization of the railways and slowed Channel border crossings, the British economy remains deeply sluggish. After a recent backbench revolt defeated proposed welfare cuts, Starmer has struggled to articulate what he actually stands for. One adviser put it this way: the prime minister simply doesn’t seem to enjoy the job.

Burnham does. He campaigns casually in jeans and open shirts to a soundtrack of 90s rock bands like Oasis. His campaign posters in Makerfield featured his name prominently while entirely omitting the Labour Party logo. By Friday, British media reported that roughly 200 Labour lawmakers were already prepared to sign his nomination papers to trigger a leadership vote. As one cabinet source put it: “Everyone thinks it is over and everyone wants it to be a dignified, orderly exit.” Starmer, however, insists he is not walking away and will fight to retain his crown.

Dad jokes study

They make you groan. Sometimes they make you laugh despite yourself. And according to a new study, that might be exactly the point.

A psychologist at the University of North Carolina analyzed 32,000 dad jokes posted to a Reddit community and found that the best ones share three qualities: puns, literalization — turning a common phrase into a physical reality (”I’m worried about the calendar. Its days are numbered”) — and pedantic misdirection, where the setup promises one thing and delivers something bluntly literal instead (”What’s blue and smells like red paint? Blue paint”). Question-and-answer format lands better than statements. Jokes featuring family members — moms, dads, grandparents, animals — connect more than ones about politics or money.

Why do they work at all? A clinical psychologist at Pepperdine who studies therapeutic humor says even a joke that doesn’t make you laugh produces what he calls “mirth” — a low-grade emotional uplift that still does something real for the people in the room. Dad jokes, he argues, strengthen the bond between fathers and children the way peekaboo does for infants: a shared, slightly absurd ritual that says I’m here and I’m safe and we’re in this together.

The Washington Post asked readers to submit their favorites. One entry: “I was wondering why the Frisbee kept getting bigger and bigger. Then it hit me.”

French kids ponder

The sun has been out in France this week, glittering off the Seine. But hundreds of thousands of French high schoolers were bound to their desks, spending four hours answering questions like: Can one be happy when others are not? and Do we have control of our words?

This is the philosophy exam — the bac — and the French have been doing it since Napoleon introduced philosophy to high schools in 1809. Every student not in a vocational program takes a full year of philosophy before sitting down for four hours to write their answers. The average grade last year was 10.8 out of 20. They are not handing out A’s.

But to the French it’s a rite of passage, not a punishment. The idea, as an editor of Philosophie Magazine told the Times, is that “you have to go through this collective reflection on values — on justice, on freedom, on what is a state, on democracy — to become a good citizen.” Radio stations invite philosophers on air to work through their own answers. The education minister visits a high school on exam morning to hand out papers on camera. France’s current education minister said the exam was a revelation for him; his press secretary noted the minister graduated with an eight. The police officer standing outside said she’d failed it too, which is why she went into policing.

In case you’d like to spend your weekend as a French teenager, here are a few questions from past exams: Is the only purpose of working to be useful? Are we prisoners of the past? Do technological developments threaten our liberty? Is man condemned to create illusions about himself?

Bon week-end.