Stack the Week

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for May 11th through the 15th. 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 summit with two leaders claiming two outcomes. A war with no outcome, a UK administration with ministers coming out, Cuba is just plain out. The battle of prices vs. wages, tech bro vs. tech bro and ICE against the judiciary. Hey, Neanderthals are smarter than we thought but smart cars are dumber. All things you can talk about with your neighbor. Let’s take it day by day. Monday May 11 Which will collapse faster? The ceasefire in Iran or the UK Prime Minister? Or will it be citizens melting on the streets of India? Gas prices are making the president sweaty so he’s offering the equivalent of a paddle fan. Young Americans are glum about jobs. Maybe they should go outside and play. We all should. Iran Day 73 of the war. Twenty-nine days since the president said Iran was desperate to make a deal. Twenty-five days since he told CBS News that Iran had “agreed to everything.” On Monday, the president called Iran’s actual response “garbage” and said he hadn’t finished reading it. He did, however, finish describing the ceasefire. “I would say the ceasefire is on massive life support,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, adding that it was “unbelievably weak.” Iran’s formal response to the administration’s one-page peace proposal is not materially different than Iran’s position before the bombs started falling. Indeed, Iran is asking for reparations for the bombs, so Iran is asking for more that it would have before the war. The rest of the list: a regional ceasefire — including no Israeli strikes in Lebanon. Sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, requiring all commercial vessels to coordinate with the Iranian Navy. Lifting of all U.S. sanctions, removal of the naval blockade, and an end to the ban on Iranian oil sales. On the nuclear question — the most often stated reason in the carousel of justifications the US has put forward for the war — Iran reportedly proposed a moratorium on enrichment far shorter than the 20 years the U.S. demanded, offered to export only a portion of its highly enriched uranium while diluting the rest, and refused to dismantle its nuclear facilities. Iranian leaders also demanded a formal guarantee of non-aggression. In other words, you can’t hit us if we don’t comply. There’s also a third player in this discussion of an Iranian end state. In an interview with Major Garret on 60 minutes, the Israeli Prime Minister said the war would not be over until all enriched uranium was removed from Iran, its enrichment sites dismantled, its proxy networks dissolved, and its ballistic missile production curtailed. Tall order. Gas Tax On Monday the president said he plans to suspend the federal gas tax “for a period of time.” “I think it’s a great idea,” he said. Several Democratic lawmakers have already introduced legislation to either pause or lower the tax. But suspending the excise taxes — 18.4 cents off a $4.52 gallon on gas and 24.4 cents on diesel — requires an act of Congress and would cost the federal government roughly half a billion dollars a week. The lost revenue would land on a federal debt that crossed 100 percent of GDP mark this spring for the first time outside of an emergency like a pandemic or war. Hantavirus cruise The cruise brochures don’t usually highlight the biocontainment units. On Monday, two of the 17 Americans airlifted from the MV Hondius cruise ship— that’s the one bristling with clouds of virus whipped up from rodent droppings— arrived sealed inside portable isolation pods — negative-pressure units where the air inside is kept lower than the air outside, so nothing contaminated can leak out through a seam or tear. Everything passes through HEPA filters that trap 99.97 percent of particles. The Andes variant of hantavirus is far less communicable than Covid-19, but three passengers on the cruise ship Hondius have died from the hantavirus, which WHO has linked to rodent exposure during the voyage. It starts with flu-like symptoms and then floods the lungs with fluid until the patient drowns from the inside. The Americans were transported to the National Quarantine Unit in Nebraska — one of the few facilities in the country built for exactly this. Since patients exposed may not develop symptoms for over a month, their quarantine period could last up to 42 days, according to the Times. This presents psychological challenges. The NQU is windowless and high-containment, which creates its own problem: patients in strict isolation lose track of time, and losing track of time makes people lose their minds. The facility counters this with a circadian lighting system that shifts the color temperature throughout the day — warm ambers at night, vivid greens and blues during daylight hours. The green light suppresses melatonin more effectively than other wavelengths, resetting the body’s clock when the body has no other cues. It’s a small, strange detail: a building designed to keep the deadliest diseases from getting out, engineered down to the color of the light to keep the people inside from falling apart. This is Nuts This all sounds very complicated, but nothing as complicated as the operation to deliver medical supplies to one of the passengers quarantined on the remote volcanic island of Tristan da Cunha, a British territory in the south Atlantic. If you’ve ever looked at a globe and wondered about those little flecks in the middle of the vast ocean, this is one of those flecks. Tristan da Cunha is Britain’s most remote inhabited overseas territory. It is accessible only by boat, has no airstrip, and has a population of 221 inhabitants. Oxygen supplies on the island were at a critical level, so there was no time for delay getting care to the patient who had disembarked from the plague ship and was quarantined in the hospital on the island. A two‑bed facility with a two‑person medical team. So British soldiers dropped out of the sky to help. First, they flew almost 7,000 km to the closest airbase and then 3,000 more km to waddle to the end of the back bay of their lumbering plane and parachute down on to Tristan carrying oxygen canisters and 3 tons of medical equipment. (or I guess they pronounce it tonnes; at least that is how it’s spelled here.) Oh and the plane had to refuel in mid-air because the island is just so damn remote. And the average wind speed is 25 MPH so you can imagine what a joy that was to drop down into. The mission was a success. But the soldiers had to wait for a boat since you can’t parachute up and out. Keir Starmer That is a story of extraordinary achievement from the good people of Great Britain. Less smooth-running Monday, was the operation of the British government. Things were extraordinary there, but not for the same good reasons. On Monday it appeared that the British Prime Minister was about to Keir over. Keir Starmer gave a speech to an audience of Labour party lawmakers and activists [https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/world/as-he-faces-calls-to-step-down-starmer-pledges-to-bring-britain-closer-to-eu] in an attempt to save his political life. Now, before we go too much further on this, I’d like to take a tiny little detour (which, when you add them together, will add up to an hour and forty five minute podcast.) All week long, you probably have been hearing about the predicament of Keir Starmer. But what’s been totally absent, and the reason I find Stack the Week meaningful, if you’ll pardon this personal interlude, is that it forces intentional thinking about what’s really going on here. What’s happening in Britain is a version of what’s happening in the United States. Both are liberal democracies. Liberal democracies find it difficult to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. The situations faced by the governments in the UK and the United States include managing immigration, inequality, the high cost of the routes to prosperity, misinformation, the distracting appeal of the attention economy. All that we experience in the United States, they also face in the UK. And just as in the United States, populist leaders are making big promises to the voters who are fed up with the collapse of the institutions that have promised them so much and that seem full of elites out of touch with their lives. So, I don’t think it’s too much to say that all of these stories about Keir Starmer falling down the stairs of his prime ministership are an echo of what we experience here in the United States. It would have been so useful if, during the week, in all of the reporting about what’s happening to Starmer, that kind of context could have been given to people, so they could see it in their own lives instead of as some distant circus with hard to pronounce players like Plaid Cymru. The proximate cause of Starmer’s predicament was a disastrous showing by Starmer’s labour party in council elections. They lost over 1,500 councilors. Councils are the local government, but whereas in the United States, a city council falls under State power, in the UK they are creatures of Parliament. So in the UK, local councils and the national Parliament are like two floors of the same house, whereas in the US, they are more like separate buildings on the same street. So the “fortunes” of a British council are almost entirely tethered to the national party’s brand. Hence, a bad result there runs all the way up to the head of the political body. So when 40 MPs called for Starmer to resign after Thursday’s losses, it’s because those MPs know that the “council fortunes” are a direct preview of their own. If the voters are firing the local Labour councillors today, they are planning to fire the Labour MPs tomorrow. Why the losses? The “big losses” stemmed from voter dissatisfaction on the left and right. On the right, Reform UK, the nationalist party led by Nigel Farage capitalized on a weak economy, stagnant GDP growth (hovering near 0.1%) and high interest rates and immigration concerns, to flip traditional labour areas in the heartland. Farage is promising a very Donald Trump-like mass deportation scheme, an end to liberal cultural interventions— what might be called wokeness in the United States— and he’s promising to cut the foreign aid budget in half. On the left, the Green Party and Plaid Cymru (Plied Kum-ree) (in Wales) – That was me speaking Welsh there– surged as progressive voters rebelled against Starmer’s centrist pivot dropping high-spending socialist pledges in favor of “fiscal discipline.” Add into the mix a declared ‘national emergency’ over rising antisemitism and a fierce backlash against Starmer’s appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington— despite Mandelson’s considerable ties to Jeffrey Epstein — which cost him support from both flanks at once. In his speech Monday, Starmer vowed that he would prove his detractors wrong, promised economic reforms to deepen ties with the EU, help younger workers, and nationalize British Steel to save roughly 4,000 jobs. India is hot On April 27, every one of the planet’s 50 hottest cities was in one country: India. Average peak temperatures across all 50 hit 112.5 degrees Fahrenheit. The air quality monitoring platform AQI, which compiled the data, said there is “no modern precedent.” But the most dangerous number wasn’t the daytime peak — it was the nighttime low. Cities like Banda recorded minimums near 94 degrees. When the night never drops below 90, the body never resets. Core temperatures stay elevated, organs accumulate stress, and the demand for cooling becomes round-the-clock — which is exactly what the grid can’t handle. India gets about 4 percent of its power from gas-fired plants, and 60 percent of its liquefied natural gas imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz, which is closed. With gas-fired generation now economically unviable, coal picks up the slack: coal-fired power rose to 164.9 average gigawatts in April, up 3.5 percent from the month before. To survive heat driven by global warming today, India burns more of the fuel that guarantees worse heat tomorrow. Experts warn temperatures may cross the survivability limit for healthy humans by 2050. In the meantime, the adaptation is preindustrial: across Delhi and Kerala, community-run water kiosks called thanneer pandals distribute water and oral rehydration salts to laborers and rickshaw drivers who have no choice but to work through it. In the last week of April, two schoolteachers died of heatstroke — not construction workers, not rickshaw drivers, but teachers. Roughly 380 million Indians, about three-fourths of the workforce, labor in heat exposure. The youngs are pessimistic If you have a young person in your life who has just graduated from college, give them a hug. In most countries, young people think the job market is better than their parents do. In the United States, it’s the opposite — by the widest margin Gallup has measured anywhere. Only 43 percent of Americans aged 15 to 34 said it was a good time to find a job locally — 21 points below Americans 55 and older. Since 2023, optimism among younger Americans has dropped 27 points — a plunge comparable to the 2007–2009 financial crisis. The mechanics explain the mood. From 2023 to 2025, the sectors that usually absorb college graduates — information services, finance, professional services — shed an average of 9,000 jobs a month. Before the pandemic, those same industries added 44,000 jobs a month. Layoffs are low, companies are holding onto existing staff, and without churn there are no entry-level openings. Graduates apply to hundreds of listings that stay posted but never result in a hire. Computer engineering, once the safe bet, now carries a 7.8 percent unemployment rate among recent grads as AI automates the junior work that used to be the on-ramp to longer-term employment. So they compromise. About 69 percent of the Class of 2026 say they’ll settle for less than their ideal role. In 2012, recovering from the Great Recession, roughly 45 percent of graduates reported a similar concession — but they treated it as a temporary setback. Seventy-five percent of this cohort would take a job they plan to quit within a year just for immediate income. Fifty-two percent of recent graduates are already working jobs that don’t require a degree — the highest mismatch since the 1990s. The result: degree holders now make up 25 percent of the total unemployed population — double the share in 2008. Oxford Economics estimates a million more young adults are living with their parents than pre-pandemic trends predicted, spending roughly $1,200 less a year than peers who move out. Cutting paid family leave And jobs ain’t what they used to be. This week, Zoom cut parental leave to 18 weeks from 22 for most birth mothers and to 10 from 16 for other parents. Deloitte halved paid family leave for certain employees — eight weeks instead of 16. Both companies explained the cuts in the same dialect of corporate euphemism: Zoom cited the “long-term health and sustainability of our business”; Deloitte said it was tailoring benefits to “better align with the marketplace.” The marketplace they’re aligning with is getting worse. The share of U.S. employers offering paid family leave dropped two percentage points in 2025, to 31 percent. The United States remains the only wealthy country with no federal paid family leave. What it offers instead is 12 weeks unpaid — and many workers don’t even qualify for that. Long live recess Do you need a break? Is it spring where you are? Let’s hold Stack the Week outside today shall we? Better yet, let’s break for recess. The American Academy of Pediatrics would approve. It just released its first guidance on recess in 13 years. Here it is [https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/doi/10.1542/peds.2026-077025/207527/The-Crucial-Role-of-Recess-in-School-Policy?autologincheck=redirected]: “Recess is a necessary break in the day for optimizing a child’s social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development. In essence, recess should be considered a child’s personal time, and it should not be withheld for academic or punitive reasons.” The guidance is necessary because recess has been in retreat for two decades. After No Child Left Behind introduced high-stakes testing in 2002, roughly 44 percent of school districts cut time from recess, PE, art, and music to make room for more reading and math. The logic was intuitive and wrong: if scores are low, add more instructional minutes. When you have recess matters too. Teachers and researchers have noted improved behavior and attention once students resume classroom work when recess occurs before lunch. One reason is that it shifts the lunch mindset from a “rush to play” to a “relax to eat” mindset. When they play first they arrive hungry and eat more calories and vegetables. Walking into class from lunch is calmer than walking in from the playground. But my favorite reason is something called “cognitive spacing.” The brain consolidates learning during breaks — but only if those breaks actually feel like breaks. Memory and focus improve when instructional blocks are punctuated by genuine shifts in environment and activity. Unstructured time lets the prefrontal cortex rest. When a child spends lunch scrambling for a spot in a soccer game or rushing to finish a sandwich, that rest never happens. And here’s one more fun fact for the dinner table: in one study, schools that replaced one long recess with four 15-minute breaks spread across the day saw cortisol levels — the body’s stress hormone — drop by 70 percent compared to traditional schools. Chronically elevated cortisol in children is linked to executive function deficits, sleep disruption, and the kind of emotional volatility that gets a kid sent to the principal’s office. Tuesday May 12 Inflation ate your raise, and sent people running from healthcare. Iran is eating the budget. Canadians are bailing and so are Starmer’s allies. And why can’t the benevolent be given the keys to the doom machine? Iran Tuesday, Pentagon officials briefed the Senate on the growing cost of the Iran War: $29 billion, up about $4 billion from just two weeks ago. That figure does not include repairing American military facilities damaged in Iranian attacks — another $4 billion estimated. The Secretary of Defense testified Tuesday to defend the administration’s proposal to raise Pentagon spending by more than 40%, to around $1.5 trillion in 2027. Mr. Trump was asked whether Americans’ financial situation was motivating him to make a deal with Iran. “Not even a little bit,” he said. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran — they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.” The man asking Congress for $1.5 trillion of Americans’ money says he doesn’t think about their financial situation. This got a lot of attention as a symbol of the President’s callousness. But a President fighting a war should only care about the war. Where the concern should come in is before a president launches a war, as he considers whether war is really justified and weighs the consequences. Turning the question of war into a domestic economic issue is natural because it’s an election year and gas prices are how voters feel the war in their lives. But in terms of presidential decision making, it cheapens the overwhelming cost of a war to shrink it down to an election year nuisance. The Strait of Hormuz gets the attention, but Iran has increased the pain in the world economy in another way. By hitting America’s allies in the Persian Gulf it has choked off oil and gas. Saudi oil exports have fallen by a third, UAE exports by half, and Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait have dropped to nearly zero. These countries cooperated with the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports — and Iran hit them for it, striking oil infrastructure, disrupting shipping routes, and turning the strait into a no-go zone for commercial tankers. The Gulf states are now losing billions in revenue to support a war whose purpose — eliminating Iran’s nuclear program — hasn’t advanced since the first bombs fell. Or hasn’t advanced much. At some point a partner taking losses with no considerable return stops being a partner. The UAE’s largest gas plant, heavily damaged by Iranian strikes, won’t return to 80 percent capacity until the end of 2026 — meaning the infrastructure damage outlasts any ceasefire. Here’s a little blockade update, just to remind us what’s going on while nothing’s going on at the negotiating table. CENTCOM redirected 65 Iranian commercial vessels and disabled four others on Tuesday. As for the negotiating table, maybe they could use it for paper football. Senator Lindsey Graham and other lawmakers questioned Pakistan’s role as mediator after reports that Iran repositioned military aircraft — including an RC-130 reconnaissance plane — at Pakistan’s Nur Khan Air Force Base to shield them from U.S. and Israeli strikes. If Iran can park military aircraft on a nominal U.S. partner’s airfield, the coalition holding this war together is fraying from more than one direction — Gulf states bleeding revenue for a war that hasn’t advanced, and now a mediator doubling as a shelter. In Tehran, the IRGC’s internal security unit conducted exercises in preparation for potential domestic unrest. This is a good sign for the United States that the war is causing enough internal tension that the thugs are limbering up with the batons, such domestic pressure could make Iranian leaders a little more interested in a deal. CPI The most recent CNN poll found that 76% of Americans call cost-of-living issues their biggest economic problem. They got a new reason for concern Tuesday. Paychecks aren’t keeping pace with prices. The last time inflation outran average hourly earnings was April 2023. It’s doing it again now. The consumer price index rose 3.8% in April from a year earlier, up from 3.3% in March — the highest reading in nearly three years. Annual wage growth slowed to 3.6%. In real terms, the average worker’s purchasing power shrank. This is the first time since the Iran conflict began that the inflation tax has fully consumed the average worker’s annual raise. The headline number was driven by a 28.4% annual surge in gasoline, which traces directly to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and a 44% jump in Brent crude since the fighting started. But the energy shock is no longer staying in the energy column. It’s bleeding into everything that moves by truck or runs on power. Grocery prices jumped 0.7% in April alone — economists point to diesel and energy costs embedded in food production and transport. Shelter, the largest single line in most household budgets, rose 0.6% for the month. Airfares climbed 20.7%, a straight pass-through of jet fuel. Pick up a tomato and you’re holding the whole mess at once. Tomato prices jumped nearly 40% from a year ago. Unseasonably wet weather in Mexico and freezes in Florida shrank the crop. Tariffs on Mexican tomatoes — roughly 17%, after the administration ended a free-import agreement last year — raised the floor. And war-driven fuel costs raised the price of getting whatever survived to your store. Open a can of beans instead and you hit a different wall: canned fruits and vegetables cost 5.7% more than a year ago, largely because a tin can accounts for about a third of the wholesale price, and over 80% of the tin plate used in American cans was imported last year. Trump’s steel tariffs pushed those costs straight through to the shelf. You might wonder why the Federal Reserve doesn’t step in. When wages slow, the Fed typically cuts interest rates to give the economy a boost. But it can only do that if inflation is cooling — and a particular slice of inflation isn’t. Strip out housing and energy, and look at what’s left: insurance premiums, haircuts, tuition, daycare. These are services set by contracts and labor costs, not by the price of a barrel of oil. Once they go up, they tend to stay up — even after the thing that pushed them up comes back down. That category of prices accelerated to a 5.5% annualized pace in April. So the Fed is stuck. Cutting rates would make borrowing cheaper and give the economy a boost — but it would also risk pushing those already-stubborn prices higher. The medicine for slow wages would make the inflation disease worse. The story a few weeks ago was that the war made gas expensive. The story now is that expensive gas is making everything else expensive, and the raises aren’t keeping up. Ink shortage In other crazy economic effects of the war news: Imagine the brightest packaging you’ve ever seen — a Japanese potato chip bag that could land planes in fog. Not anymore. An ink shortage caused by the Middle East conflict is forcing Japan’s biggest potato-chip maker, Calbee, to switch to black and white. Resins derived from naphtha, a derivative of crude oil, are typically used as a basic ingredient for commercial packaging inks. Affordable Care Act Marketplace dropouts Gas prices dominate the anxiety now, but before the war it was healthcare. Last year, 86 percent of Americans said access to quality health care was a part of the American dream, according to a poll by Investopia. According to reporting from NOTUS, more than one in five Americans who enrolled in health insurance through HealthCare.gov this year were dropped for failing to pay their first month’s premium. Last year the dropout rate was 12%. The difference is the end of the pandemic-era subsidies that Congress — specifically, congressional Republicans — declined to extend in December. Without them, a silver-tier plan that cost a 30-year-old $50 a month might now cost $300. The people disappearing from the rolls are disproportionately between 25 and 40 — old enough to need coverage, young enough to gamble they won’t. If the pool shrinks and the people left in it are sicker, the premiums climb further, which drives out the next healthiest layer, which drives premiums up again. You may remember the term used to describe this from the Obamacare years: a death spiral. Student loan defaulters I’m just going to call it: Tuesday was the economic bummer marathon. Here’s another one: For four years, pandemic-era protections drove student loan defaults to zero — not because borrowers got healthier, but because the government stopped reporting missed payments. Now 3.6 million borrowers have defaulted in six months. The default rate has returned to roughly where it was in late 2019, though the pace of new defaults slowed slightly last quarter, suggesting the worst of the initial shock may have passed. The average defaulter is 38.9 years old, two and a half years older than before, with a disproportionate spike among borrowers over 50 — student debt that was supposed to be a young person’s problem is following people into the years when they should be building wealth, not losing it. Credit scores for these borrowers dropped 91 points on average — enough to lock them out of mortgages and auto loans at the point in life when they’d normally be qualifying for both. And the numbers will get worse: Seven million borrowers haven’t made a payment in months — their repayment plan, the Biden-era SAVE program, was struck down by the Eighth Circuit as exceeding the Department of Education’s authority. Once the clock runs out on the transition window as a result of legal proceedings, they might default too. The Canadians aren’t coming A University of Toronto study using cell phone data found that Canadian visits to U.S. metro areas dropped 42% year over year — nearly double the decline that border crossing statistics capture. The snowbird destinations took the obvious hit: Florida, Las Vegas, Disney World. But the more telling losses are in cities where Canadians come to do business, not build sandcastles. San Francisco, Houston, and Grand Rapids — which has deep ties to Ontario’s auto industry — are all seeing sharp declines. The causes: the Canadian dollar fell below 70 cents U.S. in late 2024 — down from 76 cents that summer — which means a Canadian family that booked a Florida trip in June watched their money lose 10 percent of its value before they ever got on the plane; the political relationship soured; and the 25 percent auto and truck tariffs that landed in mid-2025 mean there are fewer parts contracts to negotiate in Grand Rapids, fewer tech partnerships to pitch in San Francisco, fewer supply chains that require a Canadian engineer to walk an American factory floor. I declined to insert a little riff on the relationship between the weak Canadian dollar and the weak American dollar, but you can tell me in the comments if you would have liked that kind of a detour. Starmer On Monday, UK Prime Minister Starmer gave a speech to save his job. On Tuesday, four ministers walked out while he was still talking about governing. The urgency isn’t just that Starmer is unpopular — it’s that Labour MPs fear if they don’t find someone better, Nigel Farage and the hard-right Reform UK could actually take power. The most senior departure was Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, who once said of Labour leaders: “I won’t knife you in the back. I’ll knife you in the front.” She kept her word. What is a safeguarding minister? Covers domestic abuse, child sexual exploitation, modern slavery, stalking, rape policy. Basically the government’s point person on protecting vulnerable people from violence. In her resignation letter, she called Starmer “a good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things” — then added that caring wasn’t enough. The math on Tuesday: roughly 90 Labour MPs calling for Starmer to go, just over 100 who signed a letter urging him to stay. Starmer told his cabinet he would “get on with governing” and pointed out that no one had triggered the formal process to remove him. That process requires a challenger to secure the backing of 81 MPs — 20% of the parliamentary party. If the 90 dissenters can agree on a single name, the threshold is already met. But they can’t. Starmer’s position resembles Boris Johnson’s in his final days: insisting the government functions while the ministers who make it function head for the exits. Deputy PM David Lammy urged colleagues to “take a breath.” That might help them relax or give them more air in the lungs for a louder scream. Trump Administration Churn It’s churny on this side of the pond too. Over the weekend, the president criticized the two Supreme Court justices he put on the bench for not being loyal to him. I wrote about that on Substack. But loyalty — who has it, who lost it, who never had it — was the organizing principle of the entire week’s personnel chaos. Start with Cameron Hamilton, whom the president just nominated to lead FEMA. Hamilton is a former Navy SEAL and combat medic with no professional background in emergency management. Last year, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem subjected him to a polygraph test to find out who leaked details of a meeting about dismantling the agency. Then he told a House subcommittee that eliminating FEMA was not in the country’s best interest. The president had said it was. He was fired the next day. Noem was herself fired in March 2026. Now that she’s gone, Hamilton is back — renominated for the same job he was fired from for doing honestly. FEMA, meanwhile, has operated for more than 15 months without a Senate-confirmed leader. The agency has had a rough stretch even by its own standards. Earlier this year, the administration fired FEMA’s on-call disaster response staff in what employees called a “New Year’s Eve Massacre,” leaving regional offices nearly empty. A federal judge had to order the administration to stop withholding disaster aid from states that voted against the president. Then there’s Kari Lake, the failed gubernatorial and Senate candidate who was installed as interim head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, where she attempted to shutter Voice of America. In March, a federal judge ruled she had been serving illegally — never Senate-confirmed — and voided all of her official actions, including mass layoffs. The reward for having her tenure declared null by a court: Trump nominated her this week as Ambassador to Jamaica. And the doctor is out at the FDA, vanished in a cloud of strawberry-scented vape smoke. Dr. Marty Makary resigned Monday as FDA commissioner, reportedly after refusing to authorize fruit-flavored e-cigarettes that Trump and industry lobbyists wanted approved. Trump also complained: complained that Makary hadn’t done enough to carry out his “Right to Try” legislation aimed at getting experimental therapies to terminally ill patients, according to WSJ reporting. Trump repeatedly brought up a cancer drug he said Makary wouldn’t approve, the people said. The pattern: install loyalists, skip Senate confirmation, fire anyone who contradicts the president’s position even once, replace them with someone who watched what happened to the last person, and if the original firing becomes inconvenient, rehire the same person. Charges in Key Bridge collapse Federal prosecutors charged the Singapore-based operator of the Dali container ship and a senior employee in the 2024 collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, which killed six construction workers. Men doing the necessary mundane work of public life, filling potholes. The indictment says the ship lost power twice in four minutes as it left port — and the second blackout was preventable. A fuel pump that could have restarted the generators in time wasn’t used because a different pump, one not designed to restart after a blackout, was running instead. The company then covered it up. Musk v. Altman Sam Altman defended himself in court Tuesday against Elon Musk’s claim that Altman betrayed OpenAI’s founding mission as a nonprofit that would make AI safe for the world. It might be easy to see this as a battle between tech behemoths, but the distinction at the heart of this case matters because a nonprofit answers to a mission — in OpenAI’s case, the mission was to develop AI carefully, with safety as the priority, not shareholder returns. A for-profit answers to investors. When the technology you’re building might be the most powerful and dangerous thing humans have ever created— other than the atom bomb— who you answer to determines how fast you move and how many guardrails you leave in place. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit specifically because the people who started it — including Musk — believed AI was too dangerous to build on a profit motive. The question in this trial is whether Altman dismantled that safeguard, and if so, whether he did it with everyone’s knowledge or behind their backs. If it was behind everybody’s backs, yikes! He’s the guy who’s got the keys to the death ray. The trial offers something else: a map of how powerful people respond to pressure — who gave in, who maneuvered, who looked away. The same kinds of pressures — money, ego, speed, competitive fear — will shape every major AI decision from here forward. How these men handled the small version of the question is a preview of how the big version gets answered. Altman’s defense: Musk knew the company was heading toward a for-profit model and wanted in — he just wanted to run it. Musk is asking the court to block OpenAI’s conversion to for-profit and remove Altman from the board. If he wins, it’s a gift to OpenAI’s competitors — including Musk’s own AI company, xAI. If he loses, Altman consolidates control of a company now valued at $730 billion and clears the path toward what could be one of the largest IPOs in history. Altman and his internal operating source code get to determine the future. Musk brought a stress ball to the witness stand and squeezed it while he testified. Last week his lawyers read the diary of OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman aloud in court — entries written in 2017, before a meeting with Musk. “Can’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight,” Brockman wrote. “His story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end about still wanting to do the for-profit just without him.” Then, after the meeting went better than expected: “If we accomplish it, then we’ll really have shown him that we can outperform him even at something he’s great at. If we fail, well, we’ll deal with it then.” The diary of a man who knew he was being dishonest with his partner and decided to win the argument before the partner figured it out. Myanmar Ruby That is a lovely pigeon blood globule you have on your finger, madame. There is a kind of sweet spot where the most rarefied jewels of the most rarefied people intersect with civil war, child labor, and smuggling networks — and that sweet spot is currently sitting in a mine in Myanmar looking like a jumbo hamburger someone didn’t quite finish mashing into a patty. Miners near the town of Mogok, in upper Mandalay, unearthed an 11,000-carat ruby — 4.8 pounds, roughly the size of a fist. It’s the second-largest ever found in Myanmar, but likely more valuable than the first because of its superior color: a purplish-red with yellowish undertones, high transparency, and a reflective surface that gemologists describe as exceptional. When it’s buffed up and set by a master jeweler it will no doubt look exquisite as it swans across a ballroom on an oligarch’s favorite. For now, it looks like something you’d return at a butcher counter. It’s what the trade calls a “pigeon blood” ruby — a vivid red with a subtle blue undertone and a fluorescent glow. Fewer than 1 percent of all rubies qualify. The name comes from the Burmese word “ko-twe,” which translates directly to “pigeon blood.” One legend traces it to the first two drops of blood from a killed pigeon. Another says it matches the color at the center of a pigeon’s eye. Either way, the marketing department was not involved. Myanmar produces 90 percent of the world’s rubies, primarily from Mogok and Mong Hsu — regions that have seen intense fighting in the country’s civil war. Gemstones, both legitimately traded and smuggled, are a major revenue source for the military junta. So somewhere between the mine and the auction house, between the hamburger patty and the velvet case, this stone will quietly fund the war it was pulled out of. Wednesday May 13 Iran won’t stay obliterated. More inflation signs greet the new Fed chair, ICE can’t stop losing in court. The Senate shoots blanks in the US but not in the Philippines. That line wouldn’t get you an A at Harvard but since it wasn’t written by AI at least it might get a smile at Princeton. Iran The New York Times reported Wednesday that classified U.S. intelligence assessments find Iran has regained operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait. Ninety percent of its underground missile facilities are partially or fully operational. Seventy percent of mobile launchers intact. Seventy percent of prewar missile stockpile intact. The reason: when the U.S. struck Iranian missile facilities, it sealed tunnel entrances rather than destroying entire sites — to conserve bunker-buster munitions for a potential conflict with North Korea or China. The U.S. has expended 1,100 long-range stealth cruise missiles — roughly the remaining stockpile — and 1,300 Patriot interceptors, more than two years of production. The Pentagon is rationing, and Iran knows it. A threat you can’t afford to carry out isn’t a threat. The Senate voted 49-50 to reject a resolution to end the war. Three Republican senators — Rand Paul, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski — voted with Democrats. Democrat John Fetterman voted with Republicans. The antiwar position is now one Republican defection away from a majority. Israel conducted a wave of drone strikes on the coastal highway south of Beirut, killing twelve people, including a woman and her two children. This under a ceasefire that Israel and Lebanon agreed to in November 2024. IRGC Brigadier General Mohammad Akrami Nia declared that Iran will no longer allow U.S. weapons or warships bound for regional bases — including the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain — to transit the Strait of Hormuz. Whether Iran has the naval capacity to enforce that is unclear, or maybe this is saber-rattling for the home crowd. We’ll have to see. ABC reports the Army is cutting training across the force to cover a $4 to $6 billion budget shortfall driven by the Iran war, the border mission, and the $1.1 billion National Guard deployment in Washington. The hardest hit: III Armored Corps, which commands 70,000 soldiers and nearly half the Army’s combat power. Internal documents warn its aviation units will deploy next year at “a lower state of readiness” and that rebuilding combat proficiency will take a full year. The president has called the war an “excursion.” The math calls it a $33 billion budget hit, a depleted missile stockpile meant for China, and an army cannibalizing its own readiness just to keep the excursion going. 10,000 losses How many times would you have to lose at something before you might rethink what you were doing? 30%, 40%, 50%? Federal judges have now ruled against ICE detention practices more than 10,000 times, according to a Politico analysis. That’s a 90% loss rate for the administration. How did they achieve such excellence in losing? Federal law says people “seeking admission” to the country must be detained. Every previous administration read that to mean people caught at the border. Last July, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons signed a memo saying it also applies to millions of immigrants who have lived here for years — meaning they get locked up with no hearing, no bail, no chance to see a judge. Courts keep saying that’s not what the law means. More than 425 judges have reached the same conclusion, including a majority of Trump appointees. The case files include a nursing mother with active refugee status, a five-year-old detained on his way home from school, parents of U.S. servicemembers. ICE has defied orders by transferring detainees to new states, forcing them to refile with new lawyers — generating more litigation, more losses. The administration doesn’t care about 10,000 losses because it only needs one win — at the Supreme Court. Courts in Texas and Minnesota have backed the administration. Courts in New York, Atlanta, and Cincinnati have not. When appeals courts split like that, the Supreme Court steps in to settle it. The court almost certainly will. PPI Tuesday you heard about the Consumer Price Index, inflation. Why are you telling me about another thing on Wednesday? Can’t we get a rest? I’m sorry, the answer is no. Today we must talk about the Producer Price Index. The PPI measures what businesses pay each other — for steel, for chemicals, for shipping containers full of clothes. It matters because businesses don’t eat those costs. They pass them on. When it costs Target more to stock the shelves, it eventually costs you more to fill your cart. The CPI measures the price of your cart. The PPI tells you what’s coming for your cart next. The story with the Producer Price Index, or PPI as it is known, was that at the beginning of the year, economists wondered whether companies had stockpiled their inventories before the tariffs hit in order to keep prices low, but that at some point in the year 2026, the inventories would run out and companies would be paying import taxes, which they would then pass along to consumers. It’s happening. In February, core wholesale prices — stripping out food and energy — jumped 0.8% in a single month, nearly triple the forecast, pushing the annual rate to 3.6%. That meant the cheap inventory was running out. By April, the number had climbed to 5.2%. The stockpiles are gone. Businesses are now paying the full tariff price — and that price is heading to you. And then a war landed on top of it. Seventy-five percent of April’s rise in goods prices came from energy — a direct consequence of the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz. Gasoline jumped 15.6%. But the more dangerous number is diesel, up 12.6%, because diesel moves everything else other than your car — every truck, every freight train, every container ship. Diesel is the invisible cost inside the price of groceries, of clothes, of everything that traveled to reach you. Kevin Warsh confirmed to Fed What a fun time to be chairman of the Federal Reserve. The Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh on Wednesday, 54-45 — the slimmest margin for a Fed chair in history, with only one Democrat, John Fetterman, crossing party lines. Bipartisan support for Fed picks used to be the rule; Alan Greenspan won unanimous confirmation in 2000. Trump, asked on CNBC if he’d be disappointed if Warsh didn’t immediately cut rates, said, “I would.” Warsh vowed during his confirmation hearing that monetary policy would remain “strictly independent.” CME FedWatch gives a 1 percent chance rates come down this year. The market is betting on Warsh, not the president. Philippines The United States Senate can’t stop a war, but at least nobody’s shooting in the chamber. Chaos erupted Wednesday night in the Philippine Senate when gunfire rang out as authorities tried to arrest a senator who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for a charge of crime against humanity. Senator Ronald dela Rosa served as national police chief under President Rodrigo Duterte, leading anti-drug crackdowns that killed somewhere between 12,000 and 30,000. The ICC warrant accuses him of murdering “no less than 32 persons” between 2016 and 2018. Dela Rosa had barricaded himself in the chamber under the protection of allied senators and called on followers to gather and block his arrest. Princeton Honor Code Change For more than a century, Princeton prided itself on an honor code so revered that proctoring during exams was banned. A student’s pledge not to cheat was enough. Faculty voted to require proctors in all in-person exams starting this summer — reversing a policy set in 1893 — largely because of AI. The technology has made cheating both easier to commit and harder to detect. Students are afraid to report violations because they’ll get called out on social media, and anonymous reports are hard to investigate. Students will still sign the pledge. Now someone will be watching while they do. A for everyone - Harvard debates limiting A’s Harvard’s faculty began voting on whether to cap the number of A’s professors can give. The reason: in 2010, A’s accounted for a third of all grades. By 2025, that had doubled to over 60 percent. The proposal would limit solid A’s to 20 percent of a class. One Harvard faculty member, Joshua Greene, writing in the Atlantic, put it this way: grade inflation “perversely deters students from taking classes that could threaten” a perfect GPA. “It’s as if students start college with a shiny new car and hope to go four years without a scratch. Who would dare go off-road?” Murdaugh Killing I hate this story because it’s gothic and it encourages the worst kind of gawking in cable TV land, but this legal angle is interesting so here goes: South Carolina’s Supreme Court unanimously overturned Alex Murdaugh’s double murder convictions. The court found that the clerk overseeing jurors had told them not to be “fooled” by Murdaugh and to watch his body language — what the justices called “shocking jury interference.” The clerk later resigned and pleaded guilty to misusing public funds and promoting her book about the trial. Murdaugh stays in prison for stealing millions from clients. He’ll be retried for killing his wife and son. Thursday May 14 Pageantry in China, nothing to see here in Iran, Starmer’s cabinet gets thinner, Cuba is in the dark ages, which is where we’ll go to go long on Neanderthal teeth. Trump in China President Trump arrived in Beijing Thursday for his first China visit since 2017. The pageantry was identical — 21-gun salute, marching soldiers so precise they looked like they’d come out of a box, flag-waving schoolchildren. The circumstances have changed in the nine years. China is more powerful, the U.S. is at war with Iran, and Trump needs Xi’s help reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Trump says he doesn’t. Xi knows better. On Wednesday — the day Trump landed — a Chinese supertanker carrying two million barrels of Iraqi crude sailed through the strait, the third known Chinese passage since the war began. Iran’s state media confirmed an agreement to let Chinese ships pass. Iran is now running its own transit authority and collecting fees in Chinese yuan. So while the American economy chokes on four-dollar gas, Chinese tankers sail through. Leverage, demonstrated on the eve of the summit. Minutes into their meeting in the Great Hall of the People, Xi named his price: Taiwan. He called it “the most important issue” and warned that mishandling it would mean the two countries “will collide or even clash.” Then he invoked the Thucydides Trap — the theory that when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, war is the default outcome. Xi is telling Trump that China is the rising power, the U.S. is the incumbent, and avoiding conflict requires the incumbent to make room. Starting with Taiwan. Trump did not respond. According to a White House official, he moved to the next topic without acknowledging the comment. The White House readout mentioned trade, fentanyl, and Iran. It did not mention Taiwan. The administration has already postponed a $13 billion weapons package to avoid angering Xi. If Trump discusses the planned sales with Xi at all, he’d be violating one of the Six Assurances — Reagan-era commitments sent to Taiwan’s president in 1982, one of which says the U.S. will not consult with Beijing before selling arms to Taipei. Trump has said he’ll have the conversation. That pillar of U.S.-Taiwan policy, forty-four years old, may not survive the week. Washington framed the day as a trade reset. Trump brought an airport courtesy bus full of heavy hitters from American industry: Apple’s Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Goldman’s David Solomon, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman, and Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg on the red carpet. It was a sign of respect and a sign that the U.S. is ready to do business in China. The American wish list, per Montana Senator Steve Daines: “Boeing, beef, and beans.” U.S. soybean farmers and beef producers have been locked out of the Chinese market for a year. In an early signal, China renewed import licenses for hundreds of U.S. beef plants. Before China can buy American beef, each U.S. meatpacking plant has to be individually certified by Chinese regulators. China had let hundreds of those certifications lapse during the trade freeze. Renewing them doesn’t mean beef is flowing — it means the door is unlocked. China can open it whenever it wants, or leave it shut. And then there was Rubio. The Secretary of State was sanctioned by China in 2020 — banned from entering the country — for condemning Beijing’s internment of Uyghur Muslims and supporting sanctions over Hong Kong. Thursday he stood in the front row in the Great Hall of the People. How? Beijing changed the spelling of his name. Chinese state media swapped one character in the transliteration — “Rubio” became “Lu” — and declared that the ban applied to Senator Rubio, not Secretary Rubio. The sanctions remain technically in force. The man is technically someone else. Strategic ambiguity doesn’t just apply to the U.S. position on Taiwan. It works for names too. SCOTUS allows abortion by mail to continue The Supreme Court just issued a prescription for the entire country, but didn’t bother to sign the note. The Supreme Court ruled in an emergency order that abortion medication can continue to be prescribed by telehealth and shipped by mail, blocking restrictions imposed by the Fifth Circuit while litigation continues. The majority offered no reasoning — standard for emergency orders. Thomas and Alito dissented. Alito called the order “remarkable” and “unreasoned.” This is part of the shadow docket, which justices on both sides have complained about. When the Court decides the fate of medical access for millions in a single-page order, it leaves the law “in limbo” without a clear map for lower courts to follow. The case now goes back to the Fifth Circuit to be decided on the merits, which could take months, and will almost certainly end up back at the Supreme Court after that. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. abortions now use pills. A quarter involve telehealth. The FDA approved telehealth prescriptions of mifepristone in 2021 after reviewing data showing the drug was safe without an in-person visit. More than 100 studies back that finding. DOJ lawyers defended the FDA in lower courts but never said whether the administration actually supports mailing the pills. After losing at the Fifth Circuit, the administration made the unusual choice to file nothing at the Supreme Court — no brief, no position, no opinion. Silence as strategy: if the court protects access, the White House doesn’t have to. By filing nothing, the White House avoided a “lose-lose” political situation. If they supported the pill, they would anger the religious base; if they opposed it, they would alienate the moderate voters who have approved 14 of 17 abortion-rights ballot measures since 2022. Iran The Pentagon fired the people responsible for counting the dead, then told Congress they have a near-perfect record of not killing anyone. Admiral Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, told senators Thursday that the U.S. military has avoided civilian casualties in Iran and that there was “no way” to corroborate reports of damage to civilian sites. There is no way — because Defense Secretary Hegseth terminated dozens of Pentagon positions responsible for tracking civilian deaths, dismantling the Civilian Harm Mitigation Response office his predecessor created for exactly that purpose. The New York Times has verified destruction at 22 schools and 17 health care facilities. The Human Rights Activists News Agency estimates at least 1,700 Iranian civilians killed. The non-profit, U.S.-based agency relies on a network of activists inside Iran to confirm all reported fatalities. Cooper acknowledged one incident — a school in Minab where Iranian officials say 175 people died, which he conceded may have been caused by a U.S. bomb. That was the only civilian casualty event he knew of. 22 verified schools, 17 health facilities, an estimated 1,700 dead — and the head of Central Command is aware of one incident. Big gap. Cuba goes dark The refrigerators in Cuba aren’t working, so food is spoiling. Hospitals are cancelling surgeries. The air is thick with the smoke of wood and coal as households burn what they can find. Blackouts have left Cubans sleeping on rooftops to escape the heat. Others wake at odd hours when the power briefly returns to make coffee, charge phones. Havana is now dark 20 to 22 hours a day. Power comes back for as little as 90 minutes. The trigger is American. Cuba’s electrical grid has been failing for years — the infrastructure predates the current crisis. The U.S. actions accelerated a collapse that was already underway. On January 3, the U.S. intervention in Venezuela cut off 25 years of Venezuelan oil donations. On January 29, Trump signed an executive order blockading oil shipments to Cuba. Mexico paused its own shipments under U.S. pressure. Cuba produces 40,000 barrels a day but needs 100,000. Venezuela and Mexico had been making up the shortfall. By mid-May, Cuba’s energy minister announced the country had completely run out of fuel oil and diesel. The squeeze is producing contact. CIA Director John Ratcliffe visited Havana Thursday and met with Raúl Castro’s grandson, the interior minister, and the head of Cuban intelligence. According to reports, he told them to take a lesson from what happened to Maduro. Cuba was the first to announce the meeting — a government that has resisted Washington since 1959 publicly acknowledging it hosted the CIA director. It also released a political prisoner Thursday. Secretary of State Rubio has been running secret talks with Cuban leaders. A senior administration official’s assessment: “They have no fuel. They have no money. They have no one coming to rescue them.” The administration wants regime change but not a refugee crisis — officials say the goal is to ensure a “non-repressive security structure remains intact” to avoid unrest and mass migration to the U.S. A third of Cuban households now report that at least one family member went to bed hungry in the last 30 days — up from a quarter last year. On Wednesday evening, residents across Havana banged pots and pans and set fire to trash cans in the dark in protest. Starmer UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting resigned Thursday morning after a Wednesday meeting with Starmer that lasted sixteen minutes. In his letter, he said he’d lost confidence in the Prime Minister’s leadership and called the rise of the nationalist Reform UK an “existential threat to the future integrity” of the country. He wrote: “Where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift.” Streeting stopped short of formally triggering a leadership contest, but nobody read it as anything other than a starting gun. He’s the most prominent figure on Labour’s right. On the left, Angela Rayner — who resigned as deputy PM last year over a tax dispute — announced Thursday that tax authorities had cleared her of wrongdoing, removing the obstacle to her own candidacy. And in Manchester, Andy Burnham, the mayor who leads polls of who Labour voters actually want, was spotted boarding a train to London. Burnham’s problem: he isn’t a member of Parliament. Someone in a safe seat would have to step aside to let him run. The party has three plausible successors who appeal to three different factions, and no mechanism for choosing among them that doesn’t tear the coalition apart further. Starmer has not resigned. The formal challenge has not been triggered. But the government is now losing ministers so fast it’s going to start showing up in the unemployment figures. Retail sales Retail sales grew 0.5% in April, down from March’s 1.6%. Strip out gas stations and the number drops to 0.3% — which, adjusted for inflation, is a decline. The Iran war’s inflation tax is showing up in what Americans are no longer buying. Department stores: down 3.2%. Furniture: down 2%. Clothing: down 1.5%. Cars: down half a percent. Restaurant and bar spending rose 0.6% — Americans will still pay for a night out, but they’re stopping themselves from buying a new couch. The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index, tracked since 1952, hit 48.2 in early May — the lowest reading in its 74-year history. Lower than the 2008 financial crisis. Lower than the 1980 stagflation trough. About a third of respondents mentioned gas prices unprompted. And April’s numbers were artificially propped up: Trump’s tax cut legislation produced refunds $22 billion larger than last year, and most of that money landed between February and April. Tax refund season is now over. Gas prices are not. The Hundred-Slide Pitch During the Trump administration, one of the storylines has been about how the president has targeted law firms with lawyers who worked in any way associated with the many cases brought against him. There is another side of this story: law firms whose lawyers helped the president. One such firm is Sullivan & Cromwell. The firm’s co-chairman, Robert Giuffra, is one of Donald Trump’s personal attorneys — the same lawyer helping Trump overturn his felony conviction for falsifying business records. Earlier this year, Indian billionaire Gautam Adani quietly hired Giuffra to make a problem go away. The problem: fraud and bribery charges the Biden Justice Department brought in late 2024 over an alleged scheme tied to solar power contracts that affected U.S. investors. Giuffra’s team met with senior officials at Main Justice and clicked through a 100-slide presentation arguing the case was jurisdictionally weak and evidence-thin. The last slide was worth paying attention to. It promised that Adani would invest $10 billion in U.S. energy and infrastructure and create 15,000 jobs if the government walked away. DOJ officials told Giuffra the investment offer would “play no role” in their decision. The Trump Justice Department is now moving to drop the charges. Adani is reportedly in talks to settle the related SEC civil case for $15 to $20 million — a rounding error against both the scale of the alleged scheme and a net worth north of $60 billion. The pattern is legible enough to function as a manual: hire the president’s personal lawyer, offer a patriotic investment denominated in jobs, and let political gravity do the rest. Won’t you be my neighbor? Anne locked herself out on the porch Friday morning and had an incredibly busy day at the end of an incredibly busy week. She was at home alone without her usual hero to provide ready assistance. How did she solve the problem? She called a neighbor. Thank you to our hero Brian Allen. While her husband is less sociable, despite his chatty seatmate podcast persona, Anne is in a shrinking minority of people who are in touch with their neighbors. Only 40 percent of Americans talk to their neighbors regularly — down from 59 percent in 2012. Among young adults, the collapse is stunning: one in four, down from one in two. The American Enterprise Institute’s new neighbor survey finds the usual culprits — screens, remote work, the slow replacement of sidewalk life with app-mediated everything — but the sharper finding is about class. College-educated Americans are more likely to socialize with their neighbors, text them, trust them, and work with them to fix a problem on the block. They’re more comfortable asking a neighbor to watch their kid in an emergency. Among mothers without a degree, fewer than one in three would ask. It’s not that less-educated Americans are less friendly. They’re less likely to live near a coffee shop, a park, or a community center — the places where you bump into people often enough that they stop being strangers. Americans with six or more of these gathering spots nearby talk to their neighbors at nearly twice the rate of those with none. The other dividing line is the church door. Forty-nine percent of weekly churchgoers talk to their neighbors regularly. Among Americans who never attend services, it’s 31 percent. Among young adults, the gap doubles: weekly attendees are twice as likely to know the people next door. Religious Americans are also more likely to believe that being a good neighbor means offering help without being asked. Most Americans — two-thirds — believe the opposite: that being a good neighbor means not getting too involved. The default setting in American neighborhood life is now a polite mutual avoidance, and we’ve convinced ourselves it’s a virtue. College pay off A study tracking a million students through Texas public colleges finds that a bachelor’s degree still pays off — but the payoff is slower and more uneven than the brochure suggests. On average, graduates earned a cumulative $86,806 more than peers who skipped college, measured 15 years after enrollment. But it took nine years just to break even — factoring in tuition and the wages they didn’t earn while sitting in lecture halls. Architecture and engineering majors cleared $200,000 above their noncollege peers over that period. Liberal arts majors cleared about $35,000. An NBC News poll last fall found only one-third of Americans think a four-year degree is worth the cost, down from 53 percent in 2013. 59,000 Years Before Novocaine When the dentist asks, “Have you been flossing?” do you struggle with your conscience? Do you think Neanderthals did? They might have. Archaeologists think they’ve found the earliest known instance of dental cavity intervention in human evolutionary history. In a cave in southwestern Siberia where Neanderthals lived almost 59,000 years ago, researchers found a molar — according to a report published in the scientific journal PLOS One — with a deep hole bored through the biting surface all the way down to the pulp chamber — the inner cavity that holds nerves and blood vessels. … It’s a term that has always freaked me out. Pulp. I mean of all the weird names in science and medicine that bear no relationship to the thing it’s describing, suddenly the dentists rush into the room with the most gruesomely accurate description of something? No wonder people are nervous at the dentist. A study published last September in the Journal of the American Dental Association: nearly 73 percent of U.S. adults report being afraid of going to the dentist, with about 46 percent des

15 de may de 2026 - 1 h 25 min

Stack the Week

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for April 27th through May First. An assassination deconstructed. The Defense Secretary IDs the real enemy. The Fed can’t agree, but conservatives on the Supreme Court can. The Chancellor sees humiliation in Iran, the king brings the jokes to Congress, the FCC brings jokes to court and the DOJ meme police go after James Comey. Five million Americans 86 their health insurance. See what I did there? Well, the monks would have laughed. Let’s take it day by day. Monday, April 27 Assassination Attempt Monday, the details firmed up about the nearly four seconds in the Washington Hilton Concourse Level when a shooter rushed headlong down a hallway into a group of at least nine security officials one floor above where President Trump was having dinner. The assailant fired one shot from a 12-gauge shotgun in the direction of the staircase leading down to the ballroom, hitting a Secret Service officer in his bulletproof vest, which stopped the round. In 1.2 seconds the officers fired six rounds in return, according to the Washington Post. The assailant fell, though he was not hit. He was taken into custody unharmed. The clue that resolved who fired first came from the dust in the ceiling lights. A frame-by-frame analysis released by the FBI showed dust resting in two overhead lights had been disturbed and was drifting downward in the frame after the suspect raised his shotgun — and before any officer returned fire. The most likely explanation is the muzzle blast from his weapon. Prosecutors recovered one spent shell from the shotgun. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said there was “no evidence the shooting was the result of friendly fire.” The shooter’s public defenders argued the video shows no muzzle flash. The charges filed Monday included attempted assassination and firing a weapon, but not shooting a federal officer — a gap that may close as the forensic case develops. The system worked, but the threat was more deliberate than first reported. Surveillance footage from April 24, the day before the attack, shows the suspect casing the hotel corridors and entering the gym. The headlong rush wasn’t panic. It was a route he had practiced. He still helped the system along. He barreled down a hallway full of people strolling, many of whom were security, drawing attention to himself, then ran through the magnetometer instead of around it, slowing his progress. He put every ounce of momentum into reaching a choke point staffed by nearly a dozen armed officers. Even if he had made it past the staircase, he still had to get down a floor and through the ballroom doors to the most heavily protected human on the planet (probably), who had just been served a salad — a route that passed dozens of armed officers whose earpieces would already have been carrying his location. That no one died is a kind of miracle. The two thousand in attendance now join the 54% of Americans say that they or a family member have been impacted by gun violence [https://www.kff.org/other-health/americans-experiences-with-gun-related-violence-injuries-and-deaths/]. The shooter took the shotgun and the .38 he purchased legally in California in 2023 and 2025 on a train from Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington, arriving April 4. He booked his room at the Hilton on April 6 — three weeks before he used it. About twenty minutes before he stepped onto the elevator, he emailed a manifesto to family members and a former employer. He signed it “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen.” In the manifesto he called the president a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” and wrote that he was “no longer willing to permit” such men to “coat my hands with [their] crimes.” He declared it his “duty” to target administration officials. Federal authorities said his writings also railed against the U.S. military strikes on boats in the eastern Pacific suspected of smuggling drugs. It was the third attempt on Trump’s life — Butler in July 2024, West Palm in September 2024, the Hilton — and the first in which the gunman successfully discharged a round at security personnel. The Center for Strategic and International Studies tracks political violence. Their 2025 readout was the roughest in thirty years. For the first time in two decades, the left outpaced the right in sheer number of plots and attacks — mostly Molotov cocktails at immigration facilities and Republican offices. The right still accounts for more of the bodies: targeted assassinations of lawmakers, armed assaults on government headquarters. Security and Ballroom The president was never in danger from this shooter, though the event did raise questions about security unrelated to the facts of the case. “I’m the one that would complain,” Trump said Saturday night. “I’d be up here right now saying they didn’t do their job. Oh, believe me, because, you know, it’s my life.” But imagine a more competent shooter. Or a team of Iranians looking to cause mayhem. The Hilton has more than a thousand rooms; the Iranians, who spent a decade building a network of proxies, would not have sent a man with a shotgun and a training that consisted of being in the nerf club. The Secret Service runs the names of all event attendees through criminal databases, but not the names of every guest in the hotel’s 1,000-plus rooms. But it was in the context of security concerns that the subject of the White House ballroom was once again in the Washington swirl. The White House ballroom is a story you may have trained yourself to ignore. The project is an abomination of proportion, scale, taste and beauty — traditions Western Civilization has relied on for hundreds of years to cool the passions and enliven the senses. Up to this point, President Trump has brought up the ballroom willy-nilly. Often when more important matters are at stake. The fixation is as rooted in his bones as his fixation on crowd sizes. A Washington Post analysis on April 19 found he had mentioned the ballroom on about a third of the days this year — about as many days as health insurance and affordability. He brought it up with oil and gas executives, with foreign leaders, and at an Easter lunch. Invoking the Hilton attack to argue for the ballroom smacks of using a near tragedy to justify Trump’s vanity project. Still, the security argument is not nothing. Every time the president goes to the Hilton or a convention center, he moves through soft zones — hotel kitchens, service elevators, public hallways — where security is temporary and reactive. A dedicated ballroom on the White House grounds would eliminate the off-site trip, and with it the guest who books a room two floors up three weeks in advance. The cost is the fortress itself. It further encases the people’s representative, adding another wall to an already imperial presidency. And it turns every event into an away game for everyone else — stripping out the particular joy, cultural significance, and vibe (as the founders called it) of gatherings not held inside a bunker. A Washington Post poll this week found 56% of Americans oppose tearing down the White House’s East Wing to make way for the planned ballroom. Twenty-eight percent support it — roughly a two-to-one margin. A YouGov survey this week found opposition at 53% and support at 29%. Iran Last week one piece of Iran reporting wouldn’t fit. The Economist had it: when Vice President Vance met the Iranians in Islamabad two weeks ago, the Iranian delegation ran to more than eighty members — and the disputes among them were hotter than anything between the two governments. The Pakistani hosts spent most of their time pulling Iranians off other Iranians. The reason it didn’t make last week’s digest: late Friday, the White House announced Jared Kushner and lead negotiator Steve Witkoff were headed back to Islamabad for another round. But two days later the trip was called off — in part, the reporting suggested, because the Iranian side was still pulling itself apart. So Monday’s news arrived with that picture in mind. Tehran, mediated by Pakistan, offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the war if the United States lifts its naval blockade of Iranian ports. The catch? What wasn’t in the offer. The proposal pushes the nuclear question — enriched uranium, enrichment going forward, who inspects what — into a later phase. That has been, by the administration’s own framing, the entire point of the war. So the Iranian offer amounted to essentially giving up nothing but the leverage it had gained since the war started. But the clock is ticking for Iran. The blockade has forced Iran to store oil in makeshift containers and disused tanks for lack of buyers willing to run the gauntlet. Tehran’s oil infrastructure has essentially become a massive, clogged drain, forcing engineers to frantically stash crude in everything from rusty, decommissioned coastal tanks to the “zombie” hulls of 30-year-old tankers anchored like sitting ducks in the Gulf. With the U.S. blockade choking off 80% of exports, the regime is staring down a “storage doomsday” in mid-May. Now there’s the kind of term you can just drive right by without explaining. A “Storage Doomsday” represents the physical seizure of the entire Iranian energy sector, where the sheer lack of space forces a catastrophic choice between allowing an environmental disaster from overflowing tanks or permanently “killing” oil wells through forced shutdowns that could take decades to repair. Monday afternoon,The Atlantic published that Vice President Vance has been quietly questioning the Pentagon’s portrait of the war. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, have publicly described U.S. weapons stockpiles as robust and Iranian forces as devastated. Vance, according to senior administration officials, has been pressing Trump on whether either claim is true. Internal assessments suggest Iran retains two-thirds of its air force, the bulk of its missile-launching capability, and most of the small fast boats that can mine the strait. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated this week that the United States may have already burned through more than half its prewar supply of four key munitions — interceptors and standoff missiles that would also be needed to defend Taiwan, South Korea, or Europe. If Vance’s reading is closer to the truth than Hegseth’s, the Iranian offer reads differently. Tehran may not be giving up nothing because it has nothing. Tehran may be giving up nothing because it has noticed that the United States doesn’t have as much in the magazine as it has said it does. A negotiation is shaped by what each side believes the other can still afford. Iran appears to have done the math. Brent crude closed above $108 a barrel — up roughly 50% since the war began. A coalition of dozens of nations led by Bahrain issued a joint statement demanding the strait be reopened, citing the cost to global food and fertilizer supplies that move through it. And the Iranian Foreign Minister went to Moscow. He met with Vladimir Putin to ask for support — the same Putin who, according to Ukrainian intelligence, has been using Russian satellites to help Iran target U.S. forces. The Iranians have done a solid for Russia in return. The BBC reported Monday that one of Putin’s closest oligarchs was sailing a $500 million superyacht through the strait that no one else can use. The Nord, 465 feet long, registered to the wife of Russian steel billionaire Alexei Mordashov, slipped from Dubai to Muscat over the weekend along a route that requires Iranian permission. The boat has a swimming pool, a submarine, and a helipad. Hepatitis B Infection Risk This story starts in the recovery room of a hospital, where a new mother—exhausted, overwhelmed, and holding a 12-hour-old baby—is being asked to make a high-stakes medical decision. For decades, the “safety first” rule was simple: every baby gets a Hepatitis B shot before they even leave the hospital. But under a new policy from HHS, the government suggests skipping that birth dose and waiting until the baby is two months old. The problem: life happens. While about 80% of children eventually get their preventive visits, data shows that many families, especially those struggling with transportation or work schedules, find it hard to make it back to the doctor on time once they leave the hospital’s bubble of care. In fact, medical experts warn that when you delay the first shot, the chances of a child ever finishing the full three-dose series drop significantly. Data shows that while 97% of babies who get that first shot in the hospital go on to finish the full three-dose series, only about 55% of babies who skip the birth dose ever get fully protected. Even if a mom’s pregnancy test was negative, those tests can be wrong or the paperwork can get lost. Because Hepatitis B is a “silent” virus that can live in tiny amounts of fluid—like on a shared toothbrush or a caregiver’s nicked finger—an unprotected baby is at total risk. While an adult’s immune system can usually fight the virus off, a baby’s system is so new that 90% of those infected will have the virus for life, leading to liver cancer or even death. By moving the shot from the hospital (where the baby is already “right there”) to a later appointment that might be missed, new studies in JAMA Pediatrics published Monday, predict we will see hundreds of extra infections and at least $16 million in added healthcare costs just from the babies born this year. Teacher salaries Teacher salaries have grown 28.2% over the last decade. What your teacher will tell you is that figures can sometimes mean less than they do at first blush. When adjusted for inflation, the average teacher has actually seen a 4.6% pay decrease since 2017. Let’s all pause for a moment and remember the teachers in our lives: Mrs. Maziotta, Mr. Jewell, Mr. Tonken, Mr. Lang, Mr. LeSure, Dr. Duckham, Mr. Hill. The people who introduced you to wonders, set you back on course when you were lost, and who, as my friend and teacher Neal Tonken, sometimes provided you with a sympathetic ear because, as he used to say “kids need an adult they can tell their s**t to.” Those life-changing people are already undervalued. Now more so. Low pay limits the ability to attract and retain quality educators in the profession. Too many potential educators never enter the classroom, in part because of low starting salaries and a widening wage gap between teaching and other professions requiring similar education. Other talented, passionate educators leave the profession due to low wages. On average, teacher salaries are 27% lower than those of their similarly educated peers. Pope XIV and Archbishop of Canterbury Henry VIII wanted to split with a woman so he split with the Catholic church. In a reversal of all that, the first female Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally joined with the head of the Catholic church, Pope Leo XIV. The two prayed together Monday in the Vatican where the Pope vowed to keep working to overcome differences “no matter how intractable they may appear.” One difference would be that the Catholic Church does not let women into the ordained clergy and does not recognize or perform same‑sex marriages, even though it has recently allowed limited blessings for same‑sex couples. In related news, the current king of England– also known as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England – landed in the U.S. on Monday. Monks and Pot In other religious news, Sri Lankan customs officers at Bandaranaike International Airport in Colombo on Saturday arrested twenty-two Buddhist monks returning from Thailand. Their suitcases, packed with school supplies and candy on top, contained nearly 247 pounds of cannabis underneath — about eleven pounds per monk. Police called it one of the largest drug seizures in the airport’s history. Daily News, the state-owned newspaper, valued the haul at $3.45 million. Recreational cannabis is illegal in Sri Lanka, and trafficking convictions can carry the death penalty. The monks, many of them in their twenties, are unlikely to face the worst of those penalties. Extremely Fast Humans I went for a run yesterday and it was the metaphysical oposite of this story. Sebastian Sawe of Kenya ran the London Marathon Sunday in 1 hour, 59 minutes, and 30 seconds — the first time anyone has finished a 26.2-mile marathon under two hours in an officially sanctioned race. He beat the previous world record by 65 seconds. Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, running his first marathon, finished eleven seconds behind him, also under two hours. Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo came in third at 2:00:28. All three men ran faster than any human being had ever run that distance until that morning. The barrier had stood since the marathon was invented. Three people went through it on the same Sunday. Tuesday, April 28 Iran: Merz The German Chancellor Frederich Merz said the American President was getting played. “An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership,” he told students Monday. The Iranians, Merz said, are “very skilled at not negotiating, letting the Americans travel to Islamabad and then leave again without any result.” The Americans, he added, have “no truly convincing strategy.” Merz is a center-right CDU Chancellor who took office promising to repair the transatlantic relationship. Many leaders have chosen to coddle Trump. Merz went right at his sense of himself as the world’s great negotiator and used his favorite concept: humiliation. Humiliation matters because it’s the word the President’s political life has been built around. Never be humiliated, always come out on top, never let anyone catch you getting worked. In three weeks president Trump has declared total victory, threatened to destroy Iranian civilization by 8 p.m., called it off ninety minutes before the deadline, sent envoys to talks the Iranians wouldn’t attend, and returned to the same technical questions the Obama administration negotiated in 2015. The President has spent roughly $28 billion to reopen a conversation he spent years mocking Obama for closing. The response from the White House came on Truth Social, and it followed the script the administration has settled into for allies who decline to cheer. Merz, the President wrote, “thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.” But Merz wasn’t saying Iran’s military program should be allowed to continue. His claim was that Trump was losing. This was in contrast to the President’s response when asked over the weekend about what he thought about China helping Iran. “They’re helping, but not much,” he said on Fox News’ The Sunday Briefing. “They could help more. I’m not overly disappointed. We help people too… So I don’t consider them having been bad.” Merz said the war was going badly and was accused of wanting Iran to have the bomb. China is reportedly preparing to ship MANPADs to Iran and got a shrug. Assassination Attempt By Tuesday, the near tragedy at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner became a debate about the connection between speech and violence. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt argued that the assassination attempt was the “direct result” of years of what she described as systemic demonization of the President. There is some truth to this. Her core argument was that the language used by political opponents and media figures had effectively “legitimized” violence by painting the administration as an existential threat. That undoubtedly contributes to the situtation too — you can hear it in the ravings of two of the president’s would-be assassins. Butler is the cautionary footnote. Thomas Crooks’s motive was never established. No manifesto, no clear ideological frame, no rhetorical smoking gun. The man who came closest to killing Donald Trump did so for reasons no one has been able to name. Immediately, then, we’re faced with evidence that something other than words cause violence. (That didn’t stop JD Vance at the time of that shooting from blaming Democrats; for which there was no evidence, but which is evidence if you’re measuring whether Vance and others are acting in good faith.) The question is not whether the rhetorical climate contributes, but how much, exactly whose rhetoric we’re talking about, the relative weight of the speaker, and how much words contribute relative to other factors. If the White House is arguing that there is a link between speech and violence then an analysis of public speech — including all levels of the quote unquote media — must also include speech and actions by the most powerful person in the world, the president. Donald Trump has done more than any other president to degrade public dialogue and demonize opponents. Starting with his role as America’s chief advocate of the racist smear that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, he is directly responsible for promoting the most effective claim of presidential illegitimacy that, by Leavitt’s reasoning, contributes to violence. His consistent labeling of the January 6th defendants as “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots” directly challenges the legitimacy of the judicial process in a way that, by the Press Secretary’s own causal logic, “legitimizes” resistance to federal authority. That instinct continues from the president today. We see it in his repeated characterization of federal judges as “partisan hacks” and his description of the political opposition as “vermin” that must be “rooted out.” It is a part of his administration now. Last month, Trump administration officials publicly labeled two American citizens killed protesting immigration crackdowns as “domestic terrorists” — a designation easily falsifiable with the human eye. There is a difference though between when a user says it on Twitter and when a president says it. That’s determined not only by the obvious fact his megaphone is larger, but by the traditions that govern the person who uses it. A Twitter user is expected to pop off. A president is not. The breach of that tradition has a magnifying force that contributes to these conditions. We know about the power of President Trump’s voice by the testimony of the January 6th rioters who cited his encouragement and the Unite the Right protesters in Charlottesville who associated themselves with Trump’s views. Usually conservatives argue that responsibility begins and ends with the shooter. By opening the door to causal links outside the shooter himself, the president’s allies also put themselves in a new position in the gun debate. If a single tweet is a powerful enough “nudge” to propel a man toward a shotgun, why is a high-capacity magazine considered a neutral object? If crazy people can be inspired by Tweets then do gun laws play no role at all? Is it possible that the ease of access to the tool is as much a “condition” as the rhetoric that precedes its use? You cannot hold rhetoric responsible for animating a shooter and hold the shotgun blameless for arming him. Either the environment shapes the act, or it doesn’t. We should probably roll in some historians too as we’re trying to sort the proportions of causality. Ford was targeted twice in a month in 1975. There was no Twitter. Kennedy, obviously the same. Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley — three presidents killed in thirty-six years, in a country that had not yet invented the radio. History reminds us that there are other things that contribute to the unmistakably repugnant act of assassins. Furthermore, a culture that celebrates norm breaking as heroic — whether it is blowing up drug boats in the Atlantic or putting masked police in the streets — creates the conditions for blowback. It’s the kind of causation Trump has repeatedly argued for in the foreign policy context — about Iraq, about Libya, about the Middle East generally — that American intervention creates the conditions for the violence that follows. Why is that question not permissible on domestic affairs when the president is the one challenging the traditions of separation of powers and due process as he carries out his job? Asking these questions should leave you with the impression that the answers are necessarily against the administration’s interests. They are the kinds of questions we’re compelled to ask if the press secretary wants to go down this road. But evidence suggests that Karoline Leavitt wanted to keep the lane narrow as a balance beam. Her argument was that because the shooter was a crazy extremist, any words or sentiments he used when used by the press — say words like “authoritarian” — made them complicit in what led to the assassination attempt. The press secretary was joined by the acting Attorney General Todd Blanche who said to the Justice Department press corps: “Many people in this room, if we’re going to be honest about it, have done it as well. They’re just as guilty as a lot of people on X. When you have reporters, when you have media, media just being overly critical and calling the president horrible names for no reason and without evidence, without proof, it shouldn’t surprise us that this type of rhetoric takes place.” No, we shouldn’t be surprised. But what might surprise us is comparing Twitter users to credentialed members of the press corps. We don’t know who was in the room, but the people who cover the Justice Department for a living are correspondents from the wires, the Times, the Post, the television networks. The charge that they call the president “horrible names for no reason” does not describe their work; it describes someone else’s, ported over. That is the move. Not to draw a connection between speech and violence — but to redefine journalist down to the level of X user, so that the speech-violence connection lands on credentialed reporters who can be chilled from reporting critically about Trump administration policies. The chill is the policy. The argument about the shooter is the vehicle. Comey indicted again Speaking of which… Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted for a second time Tuesday, this time over a photo of seashells officials said threatened President Donald Trump. Comey posted a photo on social media of shells on a beach writing out the numbers “86 47,” which critics said referred to taking out or killing Trump. Comey removed the post the same day, writing on social media that he assumed the shells represented “a political message” but “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.” The Department of Justice previously brought a case against Comey suggesting he had lied to Congress, but it was thrown out after a federal judge found that the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, had been illegally appointed by the Justice department. This is a reminder that public figures shouldn’t meme. The case will hinge on whether the prosecutors can prove subjective intent. It isn’t enough for the DOJ to show that a “reasonable person” would find the seashells down by the sea shore threatening. They must prove that James Comey personally understood that there was a substantial risk his post would be viewed as a threat and that he proceeded anyway—a standard known as recklessness—or that he intended it as a “true threat.” The origins of “eighty-six” range from 1930s soda jerk shorthand for “out of stock” to the legend of Chumley’s speakeasy at 86 Bedford Street, where the address served as a code to exit before a police raid. Others point to Article 86 of the New York liquor code regarding refusing service to drunks, or naval engineering where the “number 86” valve was used to shut down a ship’s engine. More macabre theories suggest it refers to an “eighty-six inch” grave depth or the power of the Winchester Model 1886 rifle, while linguists argue it might just be rhyming slang for “nix,” meaning to cancel or veto. FCC To Review Disney Licenses The FCC has decided that what Jimmy Kimmel says on television is a question of character. That’s the legal frame Chairman Brendan Carr is reportedly preparing to use to open an early license review of the eight ABC stations Disney owns and operates. Broadcast licenses run on an eight-year cycle. The Communications Act lets the FCC pull one off the cycle if the licensee no longer serves “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” Since 1986, the agency has policed something called the “character factor” — a standard built for felony fraud and licensees lying to the Commission. Carr has spent the last year suggesting it can also cover DEI policies and “misleading” programming. [Make sure that is a fair characterization.] Just as the definition of “emergency,” and “war” have been stretched in other contexts in the administration, the category here is being stretched until it can hold whatever the chairman wants to put in it. The catalyst is Kimmel’s joke told two days before the WHCA dinner and in a different context in which he made fun of Donald Trump’s age and referred to his wife as an “expectant widow.” The administration’s argument is that the joke contributes to a climate of political violence. ABC has been here before — the network suspended Kimmel last fall over comments about Charlie Kirk. What Carr is signaling now is that the network’s own discipline isn’t sufficient. Carr’s stated theory is that broadcasters use public airwaves and owe the public something in return. The unstated theory is that broadcasters use public airwaves and owe the President something in return. The first is the one in the statute. The second is the one being applied. A license review costs Disney’s lawyers months and Disney’s stock several percentage points. Networks notice. Talent gets called in for conversations. Jokes don’t get written. For those of you keeping track of things on your Stack the Week notebook at home: Comey posts a meme and gets indicted. Germany’s Mertz says the war isn’t going well and gets accused of wanting Iran to have the bomb. Italy’s Meloni declines to send troops and gets called a coward. The Fed’s Powell won’t lower rates and gets a visit from DOJ prosecutors. The instrument changes — Truth Social, a criminal probe, an FCC review — but the operation is the same one. Find the regulatory or rhetorical lever closest to the critic or adversary and pull it. King Charles visit King Charles followed in his mother’s footsteps Tuesday, becoming only the second British monarch to address a joint session of Congress — his mother was the first, in 1991. He came with jokes: On the East Wing demolition: “I cannot help noticing readjustments to the East Wing. I’m sorry to say that we British, of course, made our own small attempt at real estate development in the White House in 1814.” (Also the only other time the US Capitol was attacked other than January 6, 2021). On the President’s frequent line that Europe would be speaking German without American help, the King offered an alternative timeline at the state dinner: “Dare I say that, if it wasn’t for us, you’d be speaking French.” The speech extolled “checks on executive power” – a direct descendant of George III reminding Americans in the age of “No Kings” protests. The King also referenced “defending democratic values,” and made a glancing reference to Saturday’s near-tragedy at the Hilton — the shared heritage of the two nations, the King said, provides a necessary check on the impulses of any single leader. Trump called the speech “fantastic,” then added: “He got the Democrats to stand. I’ve never been able to do that.” The King gave the President a framed facsimile of the 1879 plans for the Resolute Desk and a British World War II relic, the original bell from the HMS Trump, a T-class submarine launched in 1944 which sank one of the last ships to be destroyed by a British warship in World War . The special relationship itself was a relic, argued the UK Ambassador, Sir Christian Turner, though he didn’t’ mean for anyone to hear him. A Financial Times story (leaked no doubt by one of Turner’s adversaries) reported on a recording in February where Turner told sixth-form students– roughly eleventh or twelfth grade in the American system— that “special relationship” was a phrase he tried not to utter — “nostalgic,” “backwards-looking,” carrying “a lot of sort of baggage.” The country with an actual special relationship with the United States, Turner said, “is probably Israel.” He also called it “extraordinary” that the Epstein scandal had cost Britain a member of the Royal Family and an ambassador while in the United States it “really hasn’t touched anybody.” The Foreign Office called the comments “private, informal” and “not any reflection” of the government’s position, which is also a lesson to those sixth form students a diplomatic way of saying the ambassador meant every word and shouldn’t have said any of them out loud. UAE Leaves OPEC If I have to hear one more story about oil in the Strait of Hormuz I’m going to faint. Okay, what about a story about oil and OPEC? There is a massive break up in the world of oil that will make gasoline more expensive for everyone because the group that usually works together to keep the world’s oil flowing-- that’s OPEC-- is falling apart just as a major shipping route has been blocked. (Don’t you dare mention Hormuz) So now there is less oil available and more chaos in how it gets to us. The United Arab Emirates initiated the crack up. The world’s third biggest producer behind Saudi Arabia and Iraq, said that on May 1 they are officially quitting OPEC. To understand what this means, imagine a group of neighbors who all own lemonade stands. To keep the price of lemonade high, they all agree to only sell 10 cups a day. If they all flooded the street with lemonade, the price would crash, and nobody would make a profit. The UAE is sick of this arrangement. They spent billions building a massive lemonade factory that can produce 50 cups a day, but the club is still forcing them to only sell 34. They are tired of leaving their expensive equipment sitting idle while they watch other club members like Russia “cheat” by selling more than they allowed. Saudi Arabia, the leader of the club, is now losing its best partner, which means when it tries to set those prices for lemonade in the future, there’s going to be one big producer out there selling it whatever he wants to be selling it for, and that will affect what Saudi Arabia and the members of the club can do to set global prices. Implicit in the move by the UAE is that they want to grab as much oil money as they can right now before the world moves to electric cars and away from oil, which is where the world is moving despite what some people say. Jet Blue fuel costs JetBlue is the latest airline to tear up its previous expectations and run to the whiteboard to accommodate the mayhem created by a war the airline doesn’t fly anywhere near. On Tuesday, the company’s CEO said demand isn’t the problem. Revenue is up. Revenue per seat is up. The problem is fuel — twenty-six percent above what they were expecting. The second quarter is going to be an even longer ride in the middle seat: fuel prices seventy-five percent above last year. To accommodate this, the airline is going to raise fares, fly fewer planes, hire fewer people. Checked bag fees on domestic economy jumped to $39 to $49. You’ll remember from last week’s discussion of Spirit Airlines that low-cost carriers buy fuel at the price the day demands, while the Big Three — Delta, United, American — buy fuel forward. This makes JetBlue really sensitive to the daily swings. Gallup Affordability Survey 55 percent of Americans say their personal financial situation is getting worse, according to Gallup’s annual affordability survey released Tuesday. The highest figure Gallup has recorded since it started asking the question in 2001. The only previous period that came close was the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 during a period where the unemployment rate went from 5 to 10 percent. The cost of living remains the top concern at 31 percent, below the 41 percent peak in 2024 but still among the highest readings on record. Housing costs are tied for second at 13 percent. Healthcare is fourth at 8 percent. 60 percent of Americans say they are “very worried” about being able to pay for a serious illness. Speaking of affordability: The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Regal recently charged $50 a ticket for opening-night seats to Dune: Part Three in its best theaters. Premium-format screens — bigger picture, better sound. Movies, which were once a marginal stretch for the typical family so everyone could have a little fun, are becoming premium events. That drives profits but excises people out of behavior they associate with basic prosperity. Open AI trial Elon Musk’s lawsuit of OpenAI opened Tuesday. Musk co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 and he is trying to undo its shift to a for-profit company. He says CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman betrayed the original mission. OpenAI’s lawyers say Musk is a sore loser who sued only after he failed to take over the company himself, and that going for-profit was the only way to pay for the computing power the technology requires. Musk testified first. He told the jury the company wouldn’t exist without him. OpenAI’s lawyers then showed that his often-cited $100 million donation was actually closer to $40 million. Musk, who is frequently wrong on matters of verifiable fact, said he may have been mistaken on the number but his reputation was worth more than the cash. OpenAI is currently valued at around $852 billion and is planning a public stock offering later this year that could value it at a trillion. Musk is asking for $134 to $150 billion in damages, returned to the original nonprofit, and a court order removing Altman and Brockman from the board. A win for Musk would end the IPO. Talking Less Monk and Altman aren’t on speaking terms much and neither are the rest of us. Americans are talking to each other 28 percent less than they did a decade ago. Researchers at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Arizona counted. In 2005, the average American spoke about 16,632 words a day. By 2019, that number had fallen to 11,900. The researchers haven’t published post-pandemic data yet, but they suspect the gap has widened. Across a year, that’s roughly 120,000 words each of us no longer says out loud. The reasons aren’t mysterious — texts replace conversations, AirPods replace eye contact, the phone replaces the person across the table. I, however, am trying to accomplish 120,000 words in one episode of a podcast. Wednesday, April 29 Iran The Pentagon put a price tag on the war Wednesday: $25 billion so far. Most of it is munitions. The rest is operations and equipment replacement. This first official accounting since the conflict began came out in testimony to the House of Representatives — your shared-powers system– briefly–in action. The administration is asking Congress for a $1.5 trillion defense budget — a nearly 50 percent increase — to sustain what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described as an “existential fight.” Hegseth was the day’s main event Wednesday. He told lawmakers that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “obliterated,” then was pressed: if the threat has been eliminated, why is the blockade still in place? Hegseth answered that while the facilities are gone, the “nuclear ambitions” remain. What was the point of this war? Well, there have been many, but a consistent one was that Iran posed an imminent nuclear threat. That’s what justified the military action rather than diplomacy. The clock was ticking. That always grated against President Trump’s claim that the program was obliterated last summer. If obliterated, how imminent — as the poet said. Now the Secretary is using that term again, this time with respect to the success of recent military action. To slalom around the question of why the US needs to keep fighting if everything has been so successful, he changes the terms of the war. Now, it’s Iran’s “nuclear ambitions” that are the case for war. That’s the goalposts moving. Think back to the Iraq war twenty years ago. The failure was not finding a weapons of mass destruction program. Were there ambitions for WMD? Certainly. Would saying it was ambitions and not actual WMD have shielded Bush from withering criticism — criticism, from Donald Trump among others, that he should have been impeached? It would not have shielded him. Facilities can be bombed. Ambitions cannot. By saying that getting rid of Iran’s nuclear ambitions is the goal, and the reason for the war, makes for a lower bar for conflict. The most striking line of the day was directed not at Iran but at the room. “The biggest adversary we face at this point,” Hegseth told the committee, “are the reckless, feckless, and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans.” Asked about a strike that reportedly killed hundreds of Iranian schoolgirls, he said he had ordered “no stupid rules of engagement” that would put American troops at risk**.** The administration’s case continues to rest on deferred verification. The President says Iran is in collapse, the U.S. holds all the cards, the naval siege is working. The evidence will arrive eventually, in the form of a deal. Until then, supporters are asked to take it on faith and critics are asked to be patient — or, per the Defense Secretary, to keep quiet. Iranian economy We hear endless figures about the effects of the Iran war on the world and global economy, but not much about what’s happening in the country itself. Now, some data: The war has cost roughly two million Iranians their jobs — one million directly, another million indirectly — out of a workforce of about 25 million, according to an official at Iran’s Labor and Social Affairs Ministry. Annual inflation hit 67 percent in the month through mid-April. Subsidized red meat, most of it imported by sea before the blockade, now runs about $3.60 a pound in a country where the minimum wage is $130 a month. The Iranian government the President has said is in collapse is, by these numbers, collapsing on the people who live under it. Caribbean attacks The New York Times reported Wednesday that the U.S. military has carried out its 55th strike on a boat in the Caribbean or eastern Pacific — the seventh this month — killing three people on Sunday and bringing the confirmed death toll since September to 185. International monitoring groups put the figure closer to 220 once boats that sank without survivors are counted. The Pentagon has quietly added MQ-9 Reaper drones and fixed-wing attack aircraft, reportedly A-10 Warthogs, to bases in El Salvador and Puerto Rico, enough that strikes can now be launched in either ocean without moving planes between them. The administration calls the targets “narco-terrorists,” a designation that allows it to bypass the boarding-and-arrest protocols used by the Coast Guard in favor of what the Pentagon calls “lethal kinetic strikes.” The military has not produced public evidence — seized narcotics, manifest data — that any of the 55 vessels was actually carrying drugs. In an October strike off Trinidad, the families of the dead produced evidence that those killed were artisanal fishermen on a multi-day run. The first strike, on September 2, killed eleven people. The Times has reported that the aircraft used was classified and painted to look like a civilian plane, with its munitions hidden inside the fuselage. Two survivors of the initial blast climbed onto an overturned piece of the hull and waved at the plane. The military killed them with a follow-up strike. If one accepts the administration’s claim that this is a legal armed conflict, feigning civilian status to attack adversaries is itself a war crime. In December, reporting surfaced that Secretary Hegseth had given a verbal order to “kill everyone” during a live-monitored strike in which two men were seen clinging to wreckage before a second strike was called in. Voting Rights Act Last week we talked about Virginia voters reversing their view on using the shape of districts to retain political power. This week, the Supreme Court reversed what was once settled. In a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the conservative majority removed the Voting Rights Act from American life. I mean, it’s still around. You can visit on Sundays if it’s not napping. But the champ couldn’t stir a ladybug. The case concerned a Louisiana map redrawn to include a second majority-Black district after a federal court found that the state’s previous map — which contained only one majority-Black district out of six — likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The state complied, drew the new map, and elected Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, in that second district in 2024. Then a group of voters who described themselves as “non-African American” sued, arguing the redrawn map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Supreme Court agreed. The key upshot of the ruling is that the burden of proof shifts. States no longer have to prove their maps aren’t racist. Advocates have to prove they are — and to do it, they must now show intent. It’s no longer enough to demonstrate that the outcome disadvantages one race. A state legislature can simply say: we’re not being racist, we’re just political hacks redrawing districts to stay in power. That second motivation — partisan gerrymandering — has been protected by the Court since 2019. The intent-versus-outcome distinction matters because legislators rarely write down that they meant to dilute the votes of Black or Hispanic citizens. The outcome test was the workaround — courts could look at the map, look at the demographics, and ask whether minority voters had been packed into one district or scattered across several to prevent them from electing a candidate of their choice. Without that test, the only path forward is a smoking gun. Smoking guns are rarely produced on purpose. This is complicated in the South by the fact that race and party affiliation track each other so closely. Black voters in Louisiana vote Democratic at rates above 90 percent. A legislature that wants to weaken Democrats and a legislature that wants to weaken Black voters will, in practice, draw the same map. The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, after Bloody Sunday in Selma, after a century in which Southern states used poll taxes, literacy tests, and redrawn district lines to keep Black citizens from translating their numbers into political power. Section 2 was rewritten by Congress in 1982 specifically to remove an intent requirement the Court had imposed two years earlier — a deliberate choice by the legislature that the burden should not fall on voters to read the legislator’s mind. Wednesday’s ruling restores that burden. This is the third major narrowing of the Voting Rights Act in twelve years. In 2013, Shelby County v. Holder gutted the requirement that states with a history of discrimination get federal approval before changing their voting laws. In 2021, Brnovich v. DNC made it harder to challenge voting restrictions. Wednesday completed the trilogy. On the same day, the Florida House approved a new congressional map proposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis designed to give Republicans four additional seats — a map whose authors explicitly cited the pending Supreme Court decision in their reasoning. Now that the ruling has come down it’s less likely that legal challenges will pause the new congressional map DeSantis has suggested. Here’s how that would go, a civil rights group would make a voting rights challenge, in the past a judge might say okay we’ll pause the DeSantis plan of a new gerrymander ‘till there’s a hearing. Now, the new standard means a judge would be apt to conclude the civil rights case would lose and therefore while not dismissing the case, would not pause the DeSantis plan. South Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri haven’t begun early voting, and could theoretically still draw new maps before the midterms. London antisemitic stabbing Two Jewish men, ages 34 and 76, were stabbed and hospitalized on a London street Wednesday in a terrorist attack. A 45-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. The attack happened in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in north London, and counterterrorism investigators are looking at whether it connects to a string of arson attacks on synagogues and Jewish sites in the city over the past six weeks — including four ambulances belonging to a Jewish volunteer service torched in March, attempted firebombings of synagogues in April, and an arson attack on a memorial wall in Golders Green honoring Iranian protesters two days before Wednesday’s stabbings. A Fed Divided The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady Wednesday — keeping the price of borrowing money roughly where it has been all year — in what may be Chair Jerome Powell’s final meeting before his term ends in May. The decision was expected — markets had priced in a 100 percent chance of no change. What was not expected was the split. Four members of the Federal Open Market Committee dissented, citing different reasons, the largest dissent at a Fed meeting since October 1992. The committee’s post-meeting statement cited persistent inflation, “in part reflecting the recent increase in global energy prices.” Some dissenters wanted to cut rates anyway, arguing that the inflation surge is being driven by the Iran war’s effect on energy prices — a one-time supply shock, not the kind of broad-based wage-and-demand inflation that rate hikes are designed to cool. Their view: keeping rates high punishes the economy for a temporary problem rate cuts can’t fix. You can’t cut the rates and open the Straits, as no one says. The rebuttal is that what might seem temporary can have long-term impacts in an economy. Others wanted the Fed to stop hinting that cuts are coming. Their worry: when prices are still rising, a Fed that talks about cuts looks like it’s stopped worrying about inflation. And once businesses and workers stop believing the Fed will hold the line, businesses raise their prices faster and workers demand bigger raises — both bracing for an inflation that the bracing itself helps create. That cycle is what the Fed exists to prevent. Powell, asked about the institution’s future, said: “The Fed can stay independent. But we’re going to have to fight for it.” Kevin Warsh, Powell’s successor, is expected to be confirmed by the full Senate next week. North Korea nuclear arsenal Remember all that talk about imminent nuclear threats? You thought there was just one of ‘em. A Bloomberg story on Thursday throws a cat amongst the pigeons. North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is approaching the size at which it could overwhelm the missile defense system the United States spent thirty years and roughly $65 billion to build. That defense system was designed for a small-scale attack — a handful of incoming warheads, knocked down by interceptors based in Alaska and California. North Korea is now producing enough weapons-grade material to build up to 20 nuclear weapons a year, according to South Korean President Lee Jae Myung. While the Pentagon asks Congress for $1.5 trillion to fight a war with Iran, the slower, larger danger continues to assemble itself in the country we are not at war with. In June of 2018 president Trump declared “There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future!” Thursday April 30 GDP The American household is starting to flinch. Consumer spending grew just 1.6 percent in the first quarter, down from 1.9 percent the quarter before, with the weakness concentrated in physical goods — the kind of purchases families pull back on first when the gas bill spikes. That’s the human story buried inside Thursday’s GDP report from the Commerce Department, which clocked overall growth at 2 percent, an acceleration from the stagnant 0.5 percent at the end of 2025. The headline number was held aloft by two things: federal government spending, which jumped 9.3 percent on the rebound from last fall’s 43-day shutdown and the war effort in Iran, and business investment, which surged 10.4 percent, almost entirely on AI data centers. Residential investment fell 8 percent — the fifth straight quarterly drop. The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the PCE price index, jumped to 4.5 percent from 2.9 percent. Inflation expectations for April rose from 3.8 to 4.7 percent, the biggest one-month jump in a year. The growth, in other words, is institutional: the government and the AI companies are still spending. The country’s families are starting to do the math. Administration officials once boasted about five or six percent growth. They are no longer doing that. Now they are making the case that it’s a marvel that there is growth at all during wartime. The fact that the country grew at all, the argument runs, is a credit to the administration’s deregulation of domestic energy production, which has kept American crude flowing while imports get squeezed. The 10.4 percent surge in business investment is offered as further proof: the AI boom, in their telling, is the dividend of a hands-off regulatory posture. Voters get a role in this debate. Reuters this poll this week showed the President’s approval rating on the economy was twenty seven percent. 22% on the cost of living. Debt Reaches 100% of GDP The national debt hit 100.2% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at the end of March, based on new economic data released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The amount the US owes is bigger than what it produces. Why does this matter: It is another way to demonstrate that leaders aren’t leading. This ratio usually only gets this high during emergencies like World War II. Now, the emergency is that Congress and the president can’t make wise and hard choices. Second, In 2026, the U.S. is on track to spend roughly $1 trillion just on interest payments. That is more than we spend on the entire U.S. Military— well, before this budget request. Every dollar spent on interest is a dollar that isn’t being spent on fixing roads, improving schools, or lowering your taxes. Third, When the government needs to borrow $31 trillion, it has to find people to lend it that money. If the government jumps in and takes almost all of it to pay for its old bills, there’s less left for everyone else to borrow to build things or get a loan. Fourth, no cushion. If there’s another emergency the US has less room to borrow. Iran Gasoline in California crossed $6 a gallon Thursday — $6.01 on average, per AAA, the highest in the country and the highest the state has seen since October 2023, a 30 percent jump since the war began in late February. The national average rose 27 cents in a week to $4.30. Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine voted Thursday to end the war — the first Republican to change her vote on the military campaign. The resolution failed 47-50, but the shift matters: Friday marks the 60-day deadline under the War Powers Act, after which the President is required to terminate operations unless Congress has authorized them. Rand Paul has been a consistent yes from the GOP side. John Fetterman remained the lone Democrat voting no. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters the deadline doesn’t apply because the ceasefire means there are no active hostilities — a reading that requires ignoring the 10,000 personnel still enforcing the blockade and the $25 billion Hegseth himself disclosed to Congress on Wednesday. The problem: The War Powers Act covers not just active combat but the introduction of forces into “situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated.” A naval blockade is, under international law, an act of war. Also, the statute has no pause button: once the 60-day clock starts, it runs. The law does provide a safety valve — the President can certify in writing that 30 additional days are needed for safe withdrawal — but the administration isn’t using it. It is instead arguing for a third, unwritten category of military action that exists outside congressional oversight. Janet Mills Maine In the contest to replace Susan Collins. Maine Governor Janet Mills dropped her Senate bid Thursday, citing a lack of campaign funds to compete in what has become one of the country’s most-watched races. Her exit hands the Democratic nomination, almost certainly, to Graham Platner, an oyster farmer who was unknown a year ago and who has spent the last several months answering for past online comments and a tattoo widely recognized as a Nazi symbol. Mills did not endorse him. If Democrats have any shot of retaking the Senate, which requires taking four seats away from Republicans, they will have to beat Collins in Maine. DHS funding The 76-day shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security ended Thursday — the longest in the agency’s history — when the House passed, unchanged, the Senate funding bill it had been refusing to take up for weeks. The trigger wasn’t bipartisanship. It was the calendar. Without action by Thursday, roughly 240,000 employees, including TSA agents and Coast Guard personnel, would have missed their first May paycheck during a war. The pay they had received up to that point came from emergency transfers between accounts — money moved around by the executive branch because Congress couldn’t do its job. Step back for a second. The reason these funding fights happen is structural. Major legislation in the Senate needs 60 votes, which forces the parties to work together — and when they refuse, the government runs out of money. Senate Democrats had blocked DHS funding since mid-February, after federal agents shot and killed a 37-year-old man named Alex Pretti during an immigration raid in Minneapolis. They demanded reforms to ICE and CBP use-of-force policies — body cameras during raids, de-escalation training, public reporting of shootings, independent review of fatal incidents — before they would vote to fund the agencies carrying out the administration’s deportation operations. The administration refused. That was the standoff. It is also why, in April, Republicans used budget reconciliation — a procedure that bypasses the 60-vote threshold — to fund ICE and Border Patrol with $70 billion through 2029. That means Democrats lose their leverage. They can’t withhold ICE funding to force changes again until the next presidential term, because the money is already approved and out the door. That left the rest of DHS — FEMA, the Coast Guard, TSA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — still unfunded. Republican Senator Susan Collins and Democratic Senator Patty Murray built a workaround: fund the non-enforcement agencies separately, with no policy riders attached. House Republican leaders felt cut out of the negotiation and sat on the bill. They floated amendments — additional border-wall funding, asylum restrictions, other enforcement language — and couldn’t pass any of them, because their own conference was split between hardliners who wanted to add more enforcement provisions to the bill and moderates who just wanted the agency open. When the deadline arrived, Speaker Mike Johnson brought the Senate bill to the floor unchanged and passed it with mostly Democratic votes. He had to. He didn’t have the Republican votes on his own. Speakers don’t like to do this. Passing a bill with the other party’s votes infuriates the majority’s hardliners — it was the move that cost Speaker Kevin McCarthy his job in 2023 — and it undercuts the leadership’s leverage in the next negotiation. It happens anyway because the alternative, in this case, was federal workers going hungry during a war. The healthier version of this would have been bipartisan negotiation upfront, on the front end of the 76 days rather than the back end. That is what Congress used to do. It is what the institution was built to do. What happened on Thursday isn’t bipartisanship. It’s collapse, with the votes counted at the last possible minute to keep the lights on. Eli Lilly earnings Eli Lilly stock jumped almost 10 percent Thursday after the company reported that its two GLP-1 drugs — Zepbound for weight loss and Mounjaro for diabetes — together brought in $12.8 billion in a single quarter. GLP-1s mimic a hormone the gut releases after a meal. They tell the brain you’re full, slow how fast the stomach empties, and prompt the pancreas to produce more insulin. The result, for many patients, is dramatic weight loss and better blood sugar control. Zepbound sales rose 80 percent year over year. Mounjaro rose 125 percent. The drugs now account for roughly two-thirds of Eli Lilly’s total revenue, which itself grew 56 percent to $19.7 billion. Even with lower U.S. prices, demand carried the quarter. A class of medication that didn’t exist as a meaningful business five years ago is now the engine of one of the most valuable pharmaceutical companies in the world. Friday, May 1 Iran Friday marks 60 days since the President sent his War Powers notification to Congress, the formal report required after the February 28 strikes against Iranian missile sites, mining capabilities, and air defenses. Under the War Powers Act, that’s the deadline by which the President must terminate operations unless Congress has authorized them. Congress hasn’t. The American public has reached its own conclusion. A Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll released Friday found 61 percent of Americans say using military force against Iran was a mistake. Fewer than 2 in 10 think the campaign has been successful. The disapproval has reached the levels Iraq hit in 2006 — three years into a war with thousands of American casualties — and the levels Vietnam hit in 1971, after more than 50,000 American deaths. Thirteen American service members have died in this war so far. The country has reached the same verdict in two months that took the previous wars years. The military picture is the part the administration would prefer not to discuss in front of Congress. The Times reported Friday that the war has drained munitions stockpiles deeply enough that the Pentagon is diverting weapons originally promised to allies. Last Monday, Hegseth told his Estonian counterpart the U.S. was suspending delivery of six HIMARS rocket launchers Estonia — a frontline NATO state on Russia’s border — had already paid for. Similar messages have gone to other European and Asian allies. “If we’re running low after a few weeks of fighting Iran,” said Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute, “we’re nowhere near where we need to be for Russia and China.” The Pentagon’s solution is to buy more. The President has announced ambitious agreements with Lockheed Martin and other contractors to scale up production — Patriot interceptors from 600 a year to 2,000, THAAD interceptors from 96 to 400. The trouble is that the agreements are tentative. Congress hasn’t appropriated the money. Lockheed told investors last week it would wait until the funding was secured before expanding production. And the man asking Congress for the money is the same Defense Secretary who told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that lawmakers were “the biggest adversary we face.” Republican Austin Scott of Georgia tried to flag the math for him: it takes 218 votes to pass anything in the House, the GOP doesn’t have 218 reliable votes, and the Pentagon is going to need Democratic ones. Hegseth doubled down before the Senate the next day. Trump on Thursday acknowledged the economic price for the first time and also tried a new line of spin. “When we hit 50,000 on the Dow and 7,000 on the S&P,” he told reporters in the Oval Office, “I said to myself, ‘We got to do something about Iran.’ And I hated to do it to my people… and the fire is taking place in the lovely country of Iran, and they want to have a nuclear weapon.” The idea here is that everything was jake before he made his presidential decision. Whether Iran was the kind of tough choice a president must make is up for debate. Iran wants a nuke. This is what stopping them looks like. Ignore execution, that’s the presidential level decision to be evaluated by all of us. But what’s not up for grabs is that the economy was doing really great. Trump cites the stock market but those affordability numbers are so low because people know what lives they lead. Wages are fluttering ahead of inflation. Inflation is up and particularly in the areas of housing, education and health care, items Americans associate with opportunity in this country. Growth in the last quarter was anemic and the manufacturing jobs are going to the robots. Sixty percent of Americans say the war has increased the risk of recession. Sixty-one percent say it has increased the risk of terrorism on American soil. Half think gas prices will be worse a year from now. Affordable Care Act flight The New York Times reported Friday that roughly 5 million

1 de may de 2026 - 1 h 9 min

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