Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for May 25th through the 29th. 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 war plays out in press releases, a Pope puts down a marker, January 6 records are unmarked, but the acting AG has tire marks thanks to his predecessor. Everything is bigger in Texas but the electorate, but CEO pay is bigger than the lone star state, one sign of a strong economy where more people go hungry, stay out of the car and break the piggy bank. Gen Z is tan and unemployed. The markets think Anthropic has a plan Tony Blair doesn’t think his party does. Sonny Rollins was the last man on the stoop and the beer that made Milwaukee famous, poured out for good. But time has not caught up with the Floppy disks holding the planes apart. We’ll spell it out like bromocriptine but with typos so you’ll believe us. Let’s take it day by day. Monday May 25 Monday’s stories all seemed to circle the idea of memory. The memory stored in institutions, the memory carried by experts, the memory that disappears when the last person in a photograph dies, and the hidden memory written into our own lives– by the worship of the sun or profit– by choices whose consequences may not arrive for decades. The future, as it turns out, spends a lot of time in conversation with the past. Iran: One Foot on the Gas and Break Graham Wallas, the British political thinker, wrote a book exactly a century ago called The Art of Thought. We here at Stack the Week go in for that kind of thing because, as I will detail in a longer note later, part of this experiment is not just to come up with a way to deliver the news but how to think about how we think about delivering the news. More on that later, but Wallas writes that mankind had increased its power over nature without increasing its control over that power through thought. Chemists and engineers could devise methods of destruction beyond anything previous generations imagined. Statesmen, meanwhile, still struggled to cooperate much as tribal leaders had in the stone age. This was on my mind Monday when President Trump described negotiations with Iran as proceeding in an “orderly and constructive manner.” The same day the U.S. military announced strikes on Iranian missile sites and boats laying mines. The weapons have changed. They are advanced in ways that would have seemed like sorcery in 1926, but the political problem has not. Modern militaries can strike targets hundreds of miles away with extraordinary precision. Their countries still depend, however, on negotiations conducted by fallible human beings carrying rival interests, fears and ambitions. K-shaped Gas Prices Impact Since the Iran war began driving up energy prices, the burden has fallen unevenly. For households earning roughly $40,000 a year or less, commuting fuel costs now consume about 4 percent of income, according to a Washington Post analysis, up from 3 percent last year. For households earning $100,000 or more, the figure remains below 1 percent. The difference is not simply income; it is flexibility. Lower-income workers are more likely to live farther from work after being priced out of expensive urban areas, more likely to have fixed schedules, and less likely to have alternatives to driving. Research from the New York Federal Reserve found that after the Strait of Hormuz closure pushed energy prices higher, households earning under $40,000 cut gasoline consumption by about 7 percent, while higher-income households changed little. But cutting gasoline consumption is not like cutting back on luxury purchases. It often means skipping a doctor’s appointment, delaying errands, seeing family less often, or missing church. The cost shows up not just in a household budget, but in the routines and relationships that hold a life together. Pope and AI Maybe it was the Pope who had us thinking this week about the pace of technology and the pokey pace of the human race. On Monday, Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas — “Magnificent Humanity” — his first encyclical, a roughly 42,300-word letter on how Christianity should guide the development of artificial intelligence. Its warning rested on two biblical images: the Tower of Babel, as a symbol of technological hubris, and Nehemiah’s rebuilding of Jerusalem, as a model of collective human restoration. Leo signed the document on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical by Leo XIII that became the foundation of modern Catholic social teaching on labor and industrial capitalism. That document met the upheaval of factories, child labor and urban squalor by calling on governments to “save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed.” Leo XIV is claiming the same moral jurisdiction over a transformation whose final shape no one can yet describe. (And he also reminded us that greed and its clash with the human condition is a permanent part of that condition, just as power and ego is a part of our politics today in a way that it was when America was founded. Both are an argument that old books and ideas can teach us new lessons.) The more unusual signal came from Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, one of the major artificial intelligence companies. Speaking at the Vatican presentation, Olah said, “We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.” That is an extraordinary concession from inside the industry: someone building the technology acknowledging that the market’s incentives alone will not produce moral outcomes. Leo called for government regulation of A.I. companies; protection and retraining for threatened workers; education that teaches students to think critically about the technology; stronger defenses for children against violent, sexualized and fake material online; and human responsibility over every decision involving weapons. That last point connects to the warning at the start of our stack this week. “The growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed makes war more ‘feasible’ and less subject to human control,” Leo wrote. The message was not anti-technology. Leo described A.I. as a “profoundly human reality” that could relieve dangerous work, improve medical diagnosis and expand personalized education. But only if it serves human agency rather than replacing it. At the core of the encyclical is the claim that work is not merely income but identity — “a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfillment.” The predictable question is whether Silicon Valley will listen. But encyclicals rarely work by converting the powerful on first reading. Rerum Novarum did not persuade factory owners to raise wages. It gave Catholic trade unionists, politicians and intellectuals a moral vocabulary for the labor fights that followed. The question is not whether anyone reads all 42,300 words. It is whether the document gives people already uneasy about A.I. a sturdier language to encourage everybody to slow down and think what they’re doing. Teen Summer Job Market During my high school summers, I worked at the concession stand of a semi-pro basketball league, kept the books for that league, and spent two summers in a computer store selling and repairing computers. The jobs taught me how to deal with adults, show up on time, handle criticism, and generally keep from wandering off into the street. Those jobs are becoming less common. The Wall Street Journal reports that teen summer hiring is on track for its worst season since 1948, when Americans were still celebrating victory in World War II. Inflation and fuel costs are squeezing the small businesses that traditionally hire young workers. Resorts, hotels, amusement parks and other leisure employers are cutting seasonal hiring. Many teenagers are choosing something else entirely: college preparation, sports, extracurricular activities or online ventures. More than half of American teenagers worked in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, only about 35% do. One exception stands out. Lifeguards remain in short supply. Job postings are up 78% from a year ago, according to Indeed. The work requires certification, however, and employers say low pay and difficult conditions make recruiting difficult. What disappears when you don’t have to steal your Dad’s tie and sweat at the bus stop to make it on time to your summer job? For generations, entry-level work taught punctuality, responsibility, customer service, workplace conflict management and the simple experience of earning a paycheck. A first job often introduced teenagers to people outside their families, schools and friend groups. At a moment when concerns about adolescent loneliness and isolation already run high—with a Washington University study finding that nearly 1 in 2 young adults aged 18 to 24 now report chronic loneliness—one of the ways of mixing in a community is withering.. Jan. 6 Memory Hole If the Capitol of the world’s most successful democracy is stormed by a mob and there isn’t a web page about it, did it even happen? The Department of Justice has removed webpages detailing charges, convictions and case information related to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. When the Washington Post reported that the department was quietly deleting information about the cases, the DOJ’s Rapid Response account replied that there was “nothing ‘quiet’ about it.” The department said it was “proud to reverse” what it called the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of justice. It described its own prosecution records as “partisan propaganda” and pledged to help make whole those it says were persecuted for political reasons. The records documented one of the largest criminal investigations in American history. More than 1,500 people were
