Stack the Week

John Dickerson
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Stack the Week is a weekly review of the news — what mattered, what's coming, and why it all connects. With occasional acts of wonder. John Dickerson reads the week, ranks it, and accounts for it. www.johndickerson.com

  1. Stack the Week Daily

    1h ago

    Stack the Week Daily

    Welcome to Stack the Week for July 7th. It’s still not Friday. We here at Stack the Whatever We’re Calling It have a grasp of the totally obvious, if nothing else. But we are pushing our Soap Box Derby car out of the shed and seeing how far it will go before the wheels come off and roll into the abandoned lot with the tires and discarded refrigerator. Thank you to Laura Doan for helping sous chef all of this into a format available to all humans. Thank you out there, as always, for your subscriptions, your comments, and your favorable reviews on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere. Our marketing department has let us know there might be some confusion about how you can listen to this offering. It is a podcast, and so it is available here as a podcast or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You don’t have to listen to the AI-generated voice that Substack provides. Today the world’s most important waterway caught fire again, a militant group gave up a government it held for nineteen years (maybe!), the Atlantic alliance renegotiated its founding bargain, and the Democratic Party spent the day trying to talk its own Senate nominee off the ballot in Maine. Also: a man who fought beside American soldiers in Afghanistan died in American custody, and almost nobody noticed. And in New York, engineers noticed a sagging skyscraper just in time. The Strait of Hormuz is hot again Before dawn, a mayday. A Qatari tanker carrying liquefied natural gas was struck by a drone. Its engine room caught fire. Reuters has the audio recording — the captain calling out his ship’s name, reporting the hit on the port side. Simultaneously, a Saudi supertanker was struck by a missile. By afternoon, the British military reported a third tanker hit by a drone; it remains damaged but sailing. All three used the southern route along Oman’s coast — the route Iran told the world last Thursday not to use. They are out there because the main northern lanes are heavily mined. No casualties reported on any of the three. Qatar’s foreign ministry called the strike a grave violation of international law. Brent crude rose on the news — climbing about two and a half percent to just under seventy-four dollars a barrel. A five-month high for global oil. In response, the U.S. revoked a license that had authorized the sale of Iranian oil. This ended economic life support granted Tehran just last month, effectively killing the interim ceasefire. Now, either the administration allows global energy prices to spiral by choking off Iranian crude, or it is forced to back up its economic penalties with direct military strikes to keep the strait open. The ten-year Treasury yield ticked up, one of those numbers you hear on the news but rarely understand. It means investors lending money to the government now want a bigger return. One reason is that they expect higher oil prices to push up inflation. When it costs more to move oil, it usually costs more to move almost everything else. I started this item with a little bit of theatricality because I was trying to locate the story in flesh and blood—the captains who must traverse the Strait and hope that nothing hits their vessel from above or below. With every strike, fewer captains are going to want to make the run, and fewer insurance companies will be willing to risk their cargo. When ships stop sailing, prices go up. That’s how all of this makes life more expensive for you. There is a theory that President Trump agreed to the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran because he wanted everything to cool down before November’s elections, planning to push Iran into greater concessions afterward. Today’s events expose the weakness in that theory. The Iranians push a couple of buttons, and the transmission line between those explosions and your wallet is short. They can keep doing it until November, making it impossible to guarantee the calm that agreement was supposed to buy. President Trump said Monday that Iran must make a deal or the United States would finish the job. Iran’s foreign minister answered this morning: no more talks while the threats continue. The death of an ally This story hasn’t gotten much pickup, but by our framework, a loss of life outranks a political scandal. Official medical examiner findings and death certificates released Tuesday reveal that Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, 41, died of acute anaphylaxis and severe asthma less than twenty-four hours after entering federal custody this March. Paktiawal was a combat ally who spent more than a decade fighting alongside U.S. Army Special Forces in Afghanistan before being evacuated to America in 2021. Paktiawal’s family alleges that arresting agents confiscated and withheld his necessary medical inhaler during the booking process. For more than ten years, this man bet his life on America’s word, walking patrols with Special Forces in a country where helping Americans was a death sentence. We flew him out in 2021 because we owed him. He survived a decade of the Taliban. He did not survive his first day in ICE custody. Fifty-two people have died in ICE custody since January of last year, according to Human Rights Watch. Thirty-three died in 2025—the most in more than two decades—and this year is on pace to break that record. The death rate in detention has more than doubled, rising faster than the detained population. Platner back on the farm This is the story you might have expected to be the lead story today. Nearly every American front page leads with it. Is that news judgment or rubbernecking? The campaign of the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, Graham Platner is in jeopardy. By the time you hear this, that campaign may be referred to in the past tense. But at noon Tuesday, the story was a credible Politico report featuring an on-the-record sexual assault allegation by a former partner, Jenny Racicot, which Platner denied. By 1:25 p.m., Senator Bernie Sanders publicly cut ties and told him to withdraw immediately. An elevator full of other prominent Democrats did too. The Senate runs through Maine. Democrats’ most plausible path to a majority requires beating Susan Collins, and their nominee’s collapse makes that path substantially harder. The story also matters because it sits inside a recurring national argument: what we owe accusers, what we owe the accused, and how a movement responds when one of its stars is accused of wrongdoing. That’s not gossip. It’s how parties demonstrate their values—and a model for how the rest of the culture handles abuse in the workplace and at home. Under Maine’s election statute, a nominee who withdraws by 5 p.m. on the second Monday in July—this coming Monday, July 13—can be replaced on the November ballot. The party then has until July 27 to name someone. Miss the deadline and Platner’s name stays, disowned by nearly everyone who put it there. Yesterday, we noted that Platner’s rise reflected what can happen when a political movement prizes raw, unvetted “authenticity” above all else. But as our community rightly noted—and I should have said—authenticity doesn’t inherently breed misconduct, nor are establishment candidates immune. NATO, renegotiated The postwar Atlantic bargain—America underwrites European security, Europe follows America’s lead—is being renegotiated in real time. The summit was convened in Turkey rather than Brussels, the de facto headquarters of NATO and the European Union. Alliance meetings are typically held there to signal unity and institutional continuity. Instead, leaders gathered in President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s palace compound, and Trump said that if Erdoğan weren’t hosting, he might not have come. Trump likes Erdoğan—a strongman who deals leader to leader, flatters generously, and skips the lectures Trump gets from Western Europe. The strategic reason is that the war in Iran has made Turkey’s geography indispensable. It fields NATO’s second-largest army, controls the straits connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, hosts pipelines carrying Caspian and Iraqi oil west, and remains the one NATO capital on speaking terms with Moscow, Kyiv, and Tehran at once. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it the most consequential gathering in the alliance’s history, and he meant it as a boast. In the administration’s telling, this is the summit where NATO rebuilds on American terms: Europe paying more, Europe supplying the troops and ships America pulls out. The Americans who distrust NATO and the Europeans who run it now agree on the basic facts: after this week, America does less and Europe does more. They only disagree about what to call it. The White House calls it fixing a bad deal. Much of Europe calls it being left on their own by the country that helped write the rules of the modern global order. Trump renewed his demand that the United States acquire Greenland—territory of Denmark, a NATO ally—and suggested that if Europe keeps resisting, the U.S. could pull every service member off the continent. The alliance came to Ankara carrying billions in new arms deals—much of it buying American—assembled less as strategy than as appeasement. Europe is arming to make itself less dependent on a partner it no longer fully trusts, while paying that partner in the meantime. The Thank you, sir, may I have another strategy. Sitting beside Erdoğan, Trump announced he’ll lift the sanctions imposed in 2020 after Turkey bought Russia’s S-400 air defense system—”We don’t want to sanction friends,” he said—and that he’ll consider selling Turkey the F-35, the stealth fighter Turkey was expelled from in 2019 for that same Russian purchase. Congress wrote the expulsion into law; Trump did not explain how he’d get around that law. Erdoğan says he’s been promised five jets. Israel’s prime minister spent Monday morning on television claiming the sale was a threat to its security and urgin

    24 min
  2. Stack the Week: Day Edition

    1d ago

    Stack the Week: Day Edition

    Welcome to Stack the Week for July 6th. Wait, it’s not Friday. No, it’s not. This is a new turn on the experiment. So, let’s give this Monday a nudge and see if it can walk on its halting legs out of the haybed in the barn and into the sunlight. Maybe this is the theme of every day, but if you look at today’s ledger, a repeated theme is that the old speed bumps built to keep the world stable are melting away. For generations, we counted on institutional rulebooks, legal processes, and treaties to slow raw power and keep things fair. Monday you see that changing: * A sixty-four-year-old soccer rule vanishes the moment a president makes a personal phone call. * A humanitarian law built to protect solo immigrant children is stripped down just to move bodies out of the country faster. * What happens when the National Guard is on the crime beat. * A president trying to redefine economic success. * A rising political star is forced out of a crucial Senate race because voters don’t want a peacemaker anymore—they want a street-fighter. When you tear out the joists that keep a society steady, you lose the protections against chaos. The world stops operating by tradition or fairness and collapses into a raw game of tug-of-war, where the only rule left is who has the muscle to pull the hardest. But at least the sun is weaker than we thought. Thank you to Laura Doan for helping with this iteration of the experiment. 1. Ukraine/Russia/NATO Every missile hit. Russia fired 29 ballistic missiles at Kyiv overnight and Ukraine intercepted none. Normally the Patriot missiles would have answered — the American-made system is the only thing Ukraine has that can stop a ballistic missile. But the Patriot missiles from the US that would have resupplied Kyiv were spent months ago defending Israel and American bases across the Middle East against Iran, and new ones can’t be built fast enough. Ukraine had been stretching what remained — one missile per incoming warhead when the manual says two to four. Sunday night the medicine cabinet was empty. The total Russian barrage — 419 weapons in all, 351 drones and 68 missiles — killed at least 12 and wounded 60, four days after a strike that killed 31. The strike was called in by Putin, whose other phone use this weekend was a nearly 90-minute call to Donald Trump — the Kremlin readout says Trump offered to help find a solution to the war, and Putin reminded him of his open invitation to Moscow. We are coming up on the one year anniversary of the Alaska summit that was heralded by the president and his men as a huge success. Nothing much came of it. The U.S. calls battlefield progress “frozen”; the more accurate assessment is asymmetric stalemate — Ukraine’s long-range strikes onto Russian territory are causing fuel shortages inside Russia while Russia empties ballistic inventory into a capital that can’t stop them as they once could. Tuesday, Trump meets Zelenskyy in Ankara, at a NATO summit with one question under every agenda item: Europe promised Trump it would pay for more of its own defense, but money takes years to become weapons and soldiers — can the allies show him enough, fast enough, to keep America in the alliance? They doubt it themselves: for months they’ve been meeting in secret to plan a NATO without the United States. 2. Iran mourns its leader The flag-draped casket of Ali Khamenei moved by truck through Tehran Monday morning. Organizers actually had to shorten the ten-kilometer route from Revolution Square to Freedom Square because the mourning crowds were simply too massive. The eighty-six-year-old Supreme Leader—who ruled for thirty-seven years—was killed alongside his family in a joint U.S.-Israeli strike. Behind his casket came four more coffins: his daughter, his son-in-law, his daughter-in-law, and his fourteen-month-old granddaughter. Along the route, the state prominently displayed a photograph of Khamenei holding the baby. It is a deliberate piece of propaganda—an attempt to reframe a ruler responsible for decades of massacres and state terror into a grieving grandfather. By spotlighting that one small coffin, the regime hopes the world will focus on the bloody imprecision of an American and Israeli strike, rather than the thousands of Iranians Khamenei sent to the gallows. Mourners chanted death to America, hanged a Trump effigy, chalked grief messages onto a black, concrete wall by the thousands. Organizers misted water over the crowd to fight the heat. Revolutionary Guard men, who never talk to reporters, talked to reporters: the war is not over until he’s avenged, they said. The late Henry Kissinger asked whether Iran wanted to be a country or a cause.The funeral asks Kissinger’s question all over again, and Iran has to answer fast. The new supreme leader is Khamenei’s son Mojtaba — badly burned in the same strike that killed his father, and he hasn’t appeared in public since. He takes over a country pulled two ways: the crowds in the street are demanding revenge on America, while his government is negotiating peace with America. Those talks are paused for the mourning. They will start again Thursday, once his father is buried. 3. The quickened pace of removing migrant children Migrant children were never guaranteed a place in America. They were guaranteed a process — a hearing, a lawyer’s help, a humane exit if the answer was no. ProPublica reported Monday that the administration has whittled that system down into a sliver of its former self in an energetic effort to get children out of the country as fast as possible. “Unaccompanied minor,” the designation for the children we’re talking about, means anyone under 18 with no legal status and no parent at the crossing. Most were sent alone toward a relative already in America. Their legal claims run from asylum from persecution in their home countries to visas for children abused, abandoned, or trafficked. Children with applications pending have lost the legal counsel and the shield from deportation that let them wait for an answer. Another new wrinkle: the kids are bait. To claim a child from federal custody, an adult must come forward — and the child-welfare agency now hands that adult’s name, address, and fingerprints to the deportation agency. A government document recovered in litigation this year warns children that an undocumented sponsor faces “arrest and removal.” The parent’s choice: step up and risk deportation, or stay hidden and leave the child in custody. Since the start of Trump’s second term, immigration courts have issued more than 10,000 removal orders against minors a month, nearly quadrupling the old pace. The vast majority removed last year had no criminal record. When federal legal services ended in March 2025, some 26,000 children lost their lawyers; children as young as two have since faced judges alone. What we’re talking about here is not whether children hear no, but the process for delivering that news. The door was never open to these migrant children. A 2008 statute, passed unanimously and signed by George W. Bush, accepted deportation as an outcome and civilized the path to it: a hearing, a screening for trafficking, placement with relatives while waiting, and — for the children who lose — a handoff to a named adult in the home country, not a minor deposited at a border crossing at night. Last fall, the administration pulled Guatemalan children from shelter beds and loaded them onto overnight deportation flights before a court order stopped the planes. The process used to take years, which itself became a magnet. Word traveled that a child who crossed alone got a long runway before any judge said no, and parents made rational decisions on that basis. The administration’s actions demagnetize the attraction. The article tells the story of Elder Chavez, 18, who wears braces. His parents abandoned him as a toddler in Honduras — a fact proven in family court, which earned him the legal status Congress built for children with no parent to return to. At 14 he crossed alone to reach his older sister in Alabama, who took him in and paid for the braces. Now, he sits awake most nights in an adult detention center in Louisiana, finally falling asleep near 4 a.m., the hour guards call detainees to breakfast. He was brought there after a traffic stop. Before last year, he’d have gotten a ticket and gone home to his sister. 4. National Guard Shooting Early Sunday morning in downtown Memphis, National Guard soldiers shot and killed Tyrin Johnson, 20. His is the third death tied to the federal task force Trump has deployed across six Democrat-run cities. Johnson lived in Nashville, worked construction, took university classes, and had his first child earlier this year. Police responding to shots-fired calls just before 4 a.m. say they spotted him carrying a handgun; he ran; Guard soldiers joined the foot chase. What happened next, the state investigators’ statement renders in the passive voice: “for reasons under investigation, the situation escalated.” Police say Johnson turned toward the soldiers with his weapon. His family says he was shot twice in the chest. “I just want to know, how they shot a 20-year-old twice in the chest, he hadn’t harmed anyone,” said his cousin, who called him “as good a boy as can be.” Two Guard medics knelt to treat the wounds. A Tennessee judge blocked this deployment as unconstitutional; an appeals court overturned the injunction in April, and the troops stayed. They patrol a city where crime was already falling before they arrived, part of an operation projected to cost taxpayers more than $1 billion this year. The shooting came during the most violent stretch of the American calendar. At least 52 people were shot in nine states over the holiday weekend, eight of them at Coney Island, four of those children. 5. China pops off While Russia was reminding NATO w

    24 min
  3. Stack the Week

    Jun 26

    Stack the Week

    Intro Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for June 22 through June 26. 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. Measuring Iran, UK PM goes down, the pedestrian’s enemy, The Supreme Court closes doors, more drones than ever hit Russia, Vance says Watergate Shmatergate, Clive Davis could say more in three minutes than Alan Greenspan in a weekend and when this guy yells you’d better cover your ears. Let’s take it day by day. Monday June 22 Hammering out a deal after the bombs. Was the war in Iran worth it? As the U.S. and Iran work on a deal to end the war, each item in that deal should be seen in the light of that question. JD Vance departed Switzerland on Monday after talks that stretched past 1 a.m. He said Iran had agreed to let international nuclear inspectors back into the country. Iran’s foreign minister said inspections would “continue as usual.” In the word choices lies a key distinction. Iran has had inspectors in the country, on and off, for decades, including before the war. The question – as it has been going back to the Obama era agreement– is which sites the inspectors can visit, and on what terms. Under the 2015 nuclear deal — the one Trump called “one of the worst deals ever” and cancelled in 2018 — Iran agreed to give inspectors access to Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain, including uranium mines, centrifuge production facilities, and access to undeclared or military sites within 24 hours at declared facilities. Critics at the time — Trump-ally Senator Tom Cotton chief among them — said the inspections schedule wasn’t enough. Inspectors had to be allowed in anytime anywhere. After Trump cancelled the deal in 2018, Iran reduced the access it had given. Since last June, Iran has barred inspectors entirely from sites bombed by the U.S. and Israel — which include the facilities where Iran had been producing and storing highly-enriched uranium. What Vance announced Monday then, was a return to something like the 2015 baseline — the arrangement that wasn’t good enough for the hawks who cheered Trump’s decision to blow up the Obama-era deal. Iran’s president said his country’s frozen assets– $100 billion held in unpaid oil bills and decades-old military contracts.-- would be unfrozen and returned. Vance said Iran could use it only to buy American agricultural products — soy, corn, wheat– and only if Iran cooperated in negotiations. The Strait of Hormuz remains open to shipping, Vance said, though the main central route is still mined. Iran’s military said Saturday it had closed the strait in response to continued fighting in Lebanon; U.S. Central Command disputed that. By Monday, Vance said the strait was open. Before the war, 100 to 130 vessels passed through the strait each day. Over the weekend, there were 71 confirmed transits. Keir Starmer to exit Britain is now on its seventh prime minister in a decade. The position is the Spinal Tap drummer of global leadership. Keir Starmer announced his resignation Monday morning, two years and roughly two months into a term that began with Labour’s largest parliamentary majority this century. The majority was the misleading part. Labour won 34 percent of the vote in July 2024 because the conservative opposition was fractured, not because voters were enthusiastic. In fact, it was a record low for a party forming a government. Analysts called Starmer’s victory a “loveless landslide.” And the love did not arrive after the marriage. Starmer left office as the least popular prime minister in polling records. There’s been so much turnover in the office of the prime minister that Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group said, in the future, everyone will be prime minister of Great Britain for fifteen minutes. Starmer did not launch a failed war, mismanage a pandemic, or crash the economy. His missteps were more mundane. He cut the winter fuel payment — an annual heating subsidy worth £200 to £300, paid to nearly all British pensioners since 1997 — restricting it to only those on the lowest means-tested benefits. That took the payment away from roughly 10 million people. The stated rationale was filling a £22 billion hole in the public finances left by the Conservatives. He reversed course which the left called it callous, and financial markets called it indecisive. Starmer then proposed cutting the benefit that helps millions cover the extra daily costs of living with a long-term disability, such as help getting dressed, getting around, or managing medication. Over 100 Labour MPs threatened to vote it down. He backed off that too. The problem for Starmer and any British prime minister is structural. More than half of Britain’s annual government spending — roughly 600 billion pounds — goes to three line items: the National Health Service, the welfare state (disability payments, housing support, and pension benefits) and debt repayment. All three are growing. America faces a version of the same fiscal trap UK leaders face. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest on the national debt together consume more than half of all federal spending, and every one of those lines is growing. Touch any of them and you lose the next election. Touch other popular items to fix the problem and people revolt. There were non-policy problems as well. Under Starmer’s predecessors, Conservative lawmakers had thrown parties in Downing Street during the Covid lockdowns they themselves had imposed on the country. So when the labor party’s P.M. accepted tickets to Taylor Swift and Arsenal matches while he was calling for austerity measures, he was open to charges that he’d dropped his posture as an antidote to the Conservatives’ culture of entitlement. He also appointed Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to Washington despite Mandelson’s well-documented ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Starmer fired Mandelson in September once those ties became clearer. The question that followed him — what he knew, and when, about whether security officials had cleared Mandelson — was made sharper by the fact that the British royal family had already forced Prince Andrew out over his Epstein ties. The institution least associated with accountability had managed to show some. The prime minister hadn’t. You can see how he might have miscalculated though. The country he was sending Mandelson to, after all, was one whose president had been photographed with Epstein dozens of times, whose cabinet included officials who had maintained ties with Epstein after his conviction for sex trafficking. If Washington had set the bar that low, an ambassador with a special Epstein relationship might help with the special relationship, the term sometimes used to describe U.S./U.K. ties. Federal judges blocking President Trump has engaged in a multi-pronged effort to change American voting. In legislation, by executive order and rhetorically. His specific target – non-citizen voting– which is already illegal and fraud which is rare and has never been shown to remotely affect a national election. In the executive branch, the Trump administration took a database the government uses to check immigration status — a tool called SAVE that was built to cover the roughly 26.5 million noncitizens and naturalized citizens who had passed through the federal immigration system — and expanded it to cover nearly every American with a Social Security number, folding in citizenship data and biometric records. This allowed states to run their voter rolls through the tool to flag supposed noncitizens. Several Republican-led states used the system and removed people it had identified as noncitizens — some of whom were, in fact, U.S. citizens. Monday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the use of the overhauled SAVE tool. Her 75-page ruling found that federal agencies had been “scrambling to comply” with an executive order mandating its use in the creation of eligible voter lists for each state which caused sloppy results. She ruled the system violated three federal laws meant to protect private information: the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. The administration’s argument — that only a small number of records were inaccurate — she called a red herring. Disseminating false citizenship data, she wrote, is defamatory, because it implies the flagged voter committed a federal crime. The larger fight is about who controls elections. The Constitution assigns that authority to states, not the president — a deliberate choice by founders who explicitly sought to dilute concentrated federal power. The Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington D.C. to force them to hand over voter rolls — and is 0 for 9 so far in court. Minnesota mean A grand jury subpoena is one of the most powerful tools in federal law enforcement — a demand by prosecutors for testimony or evidence that is almost impossible to refuse and almost never blocked by a judge. On Monday, a judge blocked one. Or six of them, in fact, all aimed at Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and other state and local officials. The subpoenas arrived on January 20th, the same day Trump posted on social media promising a “Day of Reckoning & Retribution” for Minnesota’s leaders — one day before the Justice Department leaked word of a federal investigation into Walz. The DOJ’s stated justification was that Walz had obstructed federal immigration agents during Operation Metro Surge, an immigration sweep that left two Americans dead and resulted in roughly 4,000 arrests. Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz — a George W. Bush appointee — found that explanation “risible.” The connections between the information sought and any actual criminal violation– the standard required for th

    1h 12m
  4. Stack the Week

    Jun 19

    Stack the Week

    Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for June 15 through June 19. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player. Thank you for those who have reviewed it on Apple Podcasts. Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering. The MOU with not much U, a G-7 that crosses a low bar, the UK bans social media for growing brains and one of its mayors may get an upgrade, Growing brains on SNAP have it tougher, Claude sounds French but being American is its problem. In France the high schoolers earn their berets and cigarettes, they must have given a mouse a cookie in Australia, and a heavy week of mourning for trees. Let’s take it day by day. Monday, June 15th Memorandum of Misunderstanding For what purpose did this war in Iran take place? One of the goals of this here podcast has been to try to keep that question at the center of what we do, both with respect to the Iran war, but also in general. Trying to find the balance between keeping you updated on the latest developments while also keeping in mind the basic question: What is the point of this enterprise we are delivering you the latest news on? Don’t let the swarm of daily developments distract our focus from the key question. Events on Monday brought that question back to the center– that is, why this war had started– as the world evaluated the Sunday announcement by the president that a deal had been reached with Iran to end the war. What kind of deal was a secret on Sunday and Monday. But as the sun went down Monday night a few things were clear: The first was that the stated goals at the start of the war– regime change in Iran, unconditional surrender, verifiable destruction and ending of Iran’s nuclear program had all not happened. Sure, The regime had changed in the sense that the previous members of it were all dead, but the current members share the same ideological bent, and so for all practical reasons there has been no regime change. As to the details: The Strait of Hormuz will open—a critical waterway that only got a kink in it once the war started— and Iran will profit from oil sales in exchange for promising not to develop nuclear weapons. This core commitment echoes the famous line from the preamble of the 2015 JCPOA that President Trump cancelled in 2018. As Bloomberg noted of the new interim framework: “It seems the US president’s negotiators have solved only the problems Trump himself has created.” ‘Memorandum of misunderstanding.’ That’s what Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called it. Because on some key details, the two sides said were saying different things. Take the situation in Lebanon. Iranian state media announced that the deal secureds a permanent ceasefire on all fronts, interpreting the agreement as a U.S. obligation to force Israeli troops out of Lebanon and end the bombing. But the view from Washington and Jerusalem wasis entirely different: the U.S. frameds the deal as a mechanism to neutralize Iran’s regional proxy warfare, while Israeli officials hadve already publicly declared that Trump’s agreement doesn’t bind them and their troops aren’t leaving Lebanon. Then there is the issue of transit. The Trump administration touted a completely open, toll-free international waterway, but Tehran told its domestic audience that the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened exclusively “under Iranian arrangements.” As Axios first reported, intercepted communications show Iranian officials telling one another they have zero intention of agreeing to a final deal on U.S. terms or allowing the physical removal of their enriched uranium stockpile. Instead, Tehran’s private strategy is to treat the 60-day interim window as a mechanism to immediately break the U.S. naval blockade and pocket early economic lifelines—like legalized oil exports—while dragging out technical talks and resisting any enforcement that actually reduces their nuclear capabilities. During Operation Epic Fury, the name the administration gave to the operation while it was in its heavy bombing phase, Trump administration officials and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent maintained that Iran would receive no sanctions relief or access to its estimated $100 billion in frozen foreign assets prior to completing verified nuclear concessions. Bessent explicitly stated that paying transit tolls to Tehran was illegal and warned that any damages inflicted on Gulf allies would be compensated using funds confiscated from Iranian accounts. Hot talk. Under the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) the U.S. granted immediate sanctions waivers for Iranian oil and fuel sales—alongside necessary banking, insurance, and transport services. $100 billion in frozen assets will be available to Iran if they play ball during the 60 day negotiations. Additionally, the text of the MOU includes a framework for a $300 billion international reconstruction and economic development fund for Iran. This erupted into a spat over whether the United States was paying off Iran. The administration said no, the performance-based money would be funded by the Gulf Coast Coalition rather than U.S. investment. Two notes: The concern with paying off Iran has always been that they will use the money to just rebuild their capabilities and these structured payments look an awful lot like the kinds of payments that were once savaged by Trump and others when the Obama administration was also releasing Iranian money frozen by sanctions. Judging by the details of the accord Israel who was in on the take off of this war– some would say Israel was flying the plane.-- was not there for the landing. As of Monday, Israel had neither been a party to the talks or seen a copy of the Memorandum of Understanding. That’s in part because it deals with almost none of Israel’s concerns. G-7: a fragile balance President Trump landed in France Monday for a summit America’s allies had spent months engineering around him. The Group of Seven met this year in Évian-les-Bains, on the French shore of Lake Geneva, with a host who pushed the summit back a day — France originally scheduled it for June 14, Trump’s 80th birthday — and who rescinded an invitation to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa after administration aides warned Trump would boycott the summit if Ramaphosa attended. The two countries had been at war over South Africa’s genocide suit against Israel at the International Court of Justice and a land reform law Trump called persecution of white Afrikaners. France denied acting under U.S. pressure. And Macron also arranged for Trump a private dinner at Versailles — among the gilded halls built for Louis XIV — a bauble to keep the American president from leaving early. The G-7 — a gathering of the world’s seven advanced economies — was built in 1975 precisely to limit this kind of diplomatic rushing around. French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing wanted a small, informal room where the leaders of the major democracies could coordinate without the carbuncular bureaucracy in the way. That architecture assumes the participants want the same basic thing, which was easier to assume after the Second World War. European leaders have largely concluded they can no longer count on that with the United States. After the tariff wars, lukewarm support for Ukrainian democracy, footsie with Russia and hostility toward NATO, the Greenland episode — at one point some European governments believed Trump was preparing to send troops to seize the island from Denmark — and the U.S. strike on Iran without allied consultation. You can see why the calculation has shifted. European leaders are now trying to ride two horses: building a structure that functions without the U.S. and not irritating Trump. None of the leaders gathered in Évian want an open rupture with Washington. The U.S. still provides the nuclear umbrella, the intelligence architecture, and most of NATO’s logistical backbone. Oh and its markets, access to capitol, customers and more are part of the global economy. A summit like the G-7 is always a collision between the calendar and the crisis — between the long-range problems that demand collective attention and the immediate emergency that actually has everyone’s focus. This one was no different. The formal agenda that France had carefully assembled — AI cooperation; critical minerals, the lithium, cobalt, and rare earths that China controls and the West needs for defense hardware, semiconductors, and batteries; and development partnerships, the loans and infrastructure financing meant to counter China’s influence in the Global South — was pushed to the margins by the Iran war’s aftershocks. Energy prices are elevated. Supply chains are rattled. DOJ Newsom snoop In July 2019, Donald Trump pressed the Ukrainian president to announce an investigation into Joe Biden — who was likely to be his 2020 opponent — and find proof that Biden had done something– anything– illegal. The House impeached Trump for using his office for personal reasons and warping the obligations of national security. The Senate acquitted him, 52 to 48, with Mitt Romney the only Republican voting to convict. Two-term California Governor Gavin Newsom claimed Trump was running the same play on him. Newsom, who is widely believed to be running for president, announced Monday that the Trump Justice Department is investigating him and his wife. Federal agents have knocked on the doors of friends and former associates and subpoenaed documents spanning years, according to the governor’s office. Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, have not themselves received subpoenas. The scope is unclear. A person familiar with the matter — speaking anonymously to the Associated Press— confirmed multiple federal probes involving people around the governor, including

    1h 30m
  5. Stack the Week

    Jun 12

    Stack the Week

    Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for June 8 through June 12. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player. Thank you for those who have reviewed it on Apple Podcasts Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering. Declarations that the war is over aren’t over. Inflation isn’t over either. Xi shows even autocrats can be good neighbors. A semitrailer of bourbon vanishes in daylight. Epstein reaches the Situation Room. Ukraine outlasts the Great War. The cost of kicking it on the South Lawn, and solar power passes coal. The bears come down the mountain. Let’s take it day by day. Monday June 8 Iran and Israel Last week Donald Trump called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu crazy and swore at him. It was notable not only that he was swearing at America’s ally, but that so many people in the White House were anxious to tell reporters that this had taken place. This week started on a similar sour note. The two launched the Iran war together a hundred days ago, boasting of “unprecedented ‘shoulder to shoulder’ cooperation.” Monday they were fighting each other in public — Trump saying Netanyahu doesn’t get a vote on how the war ends, Netanyahu saying in an on camera rebuttal that he does. The spat was set off by a chain of events that went back a week. On June 3, the U.S. brokered an Israel–Lebanon ceasefire in Washington. The next day Hezbollah rejected it and fired rockets at Israel. Sunday Netanyahu ordered a strike on Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut. That same day, Iran fired ballistic missiles at northern Israel in support of Hezbollah — the first Iranian fire since the April 8 ceasefire. Enter Trump. On Sunday, he tried to stop Israel’s retaliation for the Iranian attack. He told Fox News he’d tell Netanyahu not to hit back, and urged Iran to the table: “You’ve shot your missiles, that’s enough. Get back to the table and make a deal.” He also told Fox he hadn’t known about Israel’s Beirut strikes and was angry about them. He then told Axios he would call Netanyahu “right now and tell him not to strike back,” and that the U.S. is “very close to a final deal with Iran… I don’t want it to blow up because of what is happening now.” In a phone interview with the Financial Times the same night — referring to Netanyahu’s say over any U.S.-Iran deal — Trump said: “He won’t have any choice. I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots.” At this point you need to evaluate whether people who say they call the shots really call the shots. Remember a few weeks ago when I said this entire war is taking place in real time and in public? I’m sticking to that. Israel ignored the U.S. president and approved its biggest wave of strikes on Iran since April at around 4:30 p.m. Sunday. Trump called Netanyahu shortly after and told him to halt it — Trump’s second call to Netanyahu in under 24 hours. Israel then struck Iran anyway. Trump posted on Truth Social that both sides should stop “immediately.” Netanyahu waited nearly a day, then posted a two-minute prerecorded video: “Israel has every right to self-defense, and we will exercise that right whenever necessary” — said “with appreciation and respect… to my friend President Trump.” Netanyahu is reading the battlefield and domestic politics. He’s trailing in the polls with a hard re-election ahead. A New York Times analysis suggests striking Hezbollah let him show his base he’d stand up to Trump, who’d just scolded him over Beirut. But the Times of Israel reports Netanyahu actually resisted far-right pressure to defy Trump on the Iran strikes — “Why should we pick a fight with him?” Hold this in your brain too. It could be all theater. The Financial Times separately reported Trump knew Israel’s plans all along — good cop talks, bad cop strikes, by design. A former official: if Israel does the dirty work the U.S. wants done, Trump’s “happy with that.” We’ve heard that before in this war. The U.S. let Israel kill all the Iranian leaders at the start of the war. Let is a funny word in that context because the U.S. lives with the consequences. Weaponization fund not dead When we ended Stack the Week last week, Anne correctly asked whether the fund was dead or not. I couldn’t give her a good answer. First, because it was unclear: the acting attorney general said the weaponization fund was dead, but since Todd Blanche has been actively carrying out the president’s wishes against the norms of the office and the legal profession, a discerning listener could be suspicious. And the president’s answer last week to Kaitlan Collins’ basic question about whether the fund was dead betrayed such irritation that it lined up with what we know: when the president is angry in public, he’s putting pressure on his aides to give him what he wants. I hadn’t conveyed that full picture. Sunday the picture got more color. Trump sat for an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and when Kristen Welker asked the same question—was he backing off the fund completely, as Blanche had said, or looking for another way to revive it—he didn’t answer it. He defended it. People had been destroyed by what he called a fake weaponization of government, he said; lives ruined, jobs and families lost, suicides. “If it was up to me, I’d pay them the kind of money that they deserve.” He called the fund a great idea, said other Republicans agreed, and allowed only that approval was someone else’s job: if it passes, great; if not, he’d be disappointed. So Blanche’s “dead” and the president’s “great idea” are not the same position. Then Welker asked whether anyone who attacked police on January 6th should get taxpayer money. Trump wouldn’t rule it out—he said he’d have to see it, then pivoted to the claim that 97 percent of those people were set up by dirty cops and a crooked FBI. Welker noted there’s no evidence the FBI ushered rioters inside or any of the other claims the president made. Which, I hate to be gauche, means that the president who raises his hand to protect the Constitution is lying with the wide sweep of his hand in order to pretend that people who tried to undermine that Constitution through force on his behalf had been tricked into it by the FBI which is in the executive branch he leads. I belabor this because if, in the middle of a tennis match, one of the players started eating the tennis balls, it would be worth noting. Is that analogy apt? It doesn’t track, but it might have caused you to pay attention to a development that might just seem like the way things go, given all that this president has done, so if I knocked you out of complacency then it did a useful journalistic thing, which is to put an event into context when the very idea of context is under assault. Now back to that Meet the Press interview. It went the way these things go. Trump called the 2020 election and last week’s California primary rigged—Welker said there was no evidence—and Trump provided none, attacked NBC, unclipped his microphone, and walked off. “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough.” The Ring of Fire The earth’s surface is a cracked eggshell — a dozen rigid pieces sliding slowly on hot rock underneath. All the action — earthquakes and volcanoes — happens at the cracks. It feels like the continental coastlines should line up with these cracks, but they usually don’t. The Atlantic seafloor and the Americas sit on the same piece, moving together like two cars side by side at 65 — no collision, nothing to rupture. The Pacific seafloor is the exception: its own separate plate, ringed by cracks that run exactly at the coastline. All the way around the edge, the Pacific plate is ramming into the plates carrying Japan, Alaska, California, Chile, Indonesia. And because ocean crust is denser than continental crust, the seafloor loses every one of those collisions: it bends and dives underneath the continent, like one car getting forced under another in a head-on crash. The plates stick, strain builds for decades, then slips all at once. Draw a line connecting every place this happens around the rim of the Pacific and you get a 25,000-mile horseshoe called not the horseshoe of fire but the ring of fire. This is not Johnny Cash’s fault. Nine of every ten earthquakes on Earth happen along it, and three of every four active volcanoes sit on it. The Philippines and its 7,000 islands sit on that horseshoe and on Monday were hit by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake offshore, at 7:37 a.m. — the hour children were arriving for the first day of school after summer break, fresh uniforms, waiting for the flag raising that starts the day. At least 35 people are dead and about a dozen still missing, with more than 200 injured, most of them in buildings that came down. In Glan, the shaking brought a mountainside down on the houses at its foot, killing 13 people at once. A meter-high tsunami came ashore. Ebola spread The Ebola outbreak could be the worst ever. And we’ll get to the mayhem in a second, but since we’re not in the business of freaking you out until you’re scratching at the liquor cabinet with an allen wrench to break the lock, there is some moderation in order. Some experts believe the strain of Ebola circulating might have a slightly lower mortality rate than other common variants. So far 12 patients have recovered from their Ebola cases. And the outbreak, of the Bundibugyo species of Ebola, has an estimated case-fatality rate of 17.4% so far according to the WHO—compared to an average of 50% during past outbreaks. The 2014-2016 outbreak was the worst in recorded history, with more than 28,000 reported cases and about 11,300 deaths. Right now there are over 515 cases and 100 deaths. Okay, but here’s the problem.

    1h 11m
  6. Stack the Week

    Jun 5

    Stack the Week

    Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for June 1 through June 5. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player. Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering. A chirping of hacks. A crazy partner in a war of moderate ceasefiring. A powers vote with no power. A slush fund still slushing. An enforcement bill that outlasts the revolt. A jobs number nobody saw coming. A Manhattan of bees underground, a ghost up on the mountain, and the screwworm is back thanks to the world’s first trillionaire. Let’s take it day by day. Monday June 1 Monday was about leverage and who actually has it — a president learning that more bombs don’t buy more obedience, neither does allyship with Israel, a slush fund his own party wouldn’t swallow, ten thousand government lawyers who decided the work wasn’t worth their names, and five and a half million bees who’ve held the same patch of cemetery since before any of them were born. Bored The president of the United States occupied many parts of the register Monday on the war he started in Iran. He told CNBC’s Eamon Javers he’d lost interest. “If they’re over, honestly, I don’t care,” he said, referring to peace talks. “I could care less. If they’re over, they’re over. If they’re not, you know — I think they took too much time. Frankly, I thought they started to get very boring.” (Isn’t that the metric you want for peace talks? Boring? War is exciting. Peace talks you want to be boring.) The president criticized Republican “hacks” for “chirping” about his handling of the war. Wait till he learns what happens to him at the hands of his own party later in the week! And on Truth Social he claimed credit for stopping something: that he’d personally kept the Israelis from striking the southern suburbs of Beirut. The public posture was boredom. The private posture, according to two U.S. officials and a third source briefed on the call, was rage. This is all Axios reporting. Summarizing the president’s remarks to Benjamin Netanyahu, one official said Trump told the Israeli leader: And you’ll want to cover the ears of young ones: “You’re f*****g crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.” A second Axios source said Trump at one point yelled, “What the f**k are you doing?” This does not sound like the transcript of a victory party. Remember, the public posture from the president is that the United States has “met and exceeded all military objectives” and achieved “total and complete victory” in the war in Iran. Netanyahu’s office disputes the personal remarks. The deal the president said was close last Friday wasn’t close. After a Situation Room meeting, he sent the preliminary framework — a 60-day extension of the April 7 ceasefire — back for changes. He wants tougher language and more promises from Tehran before any of its frozen funds are released. As a candidate, Trump hammered Barack Obama for unfreezing Iranian money under the 2015 nuclear deal. Now that he can launch the bombers and has, he is discovering what Obama discovered: bombs only get you so far. The Strait, slightly ajar Before the war, more than 100 commercial ships a day passed through the Strait of Hormuz. They carried everything from the fertilizer that helps feed corn crops to the helium that goes in MRI machines. These are container ships about 1,000 feet long — half the size of the reflecting pool in Washington, this week’s most popular unit of measurement. Over the last three weeks, the U.S. has guided about 70 through total. An average of three a day. To make the passage, most ships are turning off their Automatic Identification Systems and running dark. A Greek supertanker carrying two million barrels of crude crossed that way last week. So did a Chinese-owned vessel loaded with fertilizer. This pokey pace won’t refire the global economy. But it might mean that whatever is being learned moving these ships through can be scaled up later. The painstaking work reminds us how ridiculous it was for some — including the president — to suggest that countries who rely on the strait should just hop in and escort their own ships. They didn’t start the war, so it was a tough ask in the first place. And given how hard this has been even for the U.S. military, it puts the lie to the armchair pundits who said other countries could just snap their fingers and watch the traffic come roaring back. Cord cutters in the Strait. A few weeks back we wrote about Iran’s idea of charging a toll for the internet cables under the Strait of Hormuz. On Monday, DealBook reported that Silicon Valley has concerns about this. In early May an Iranian military spokesman said the country might demand license fees from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta to use the cables they operate under the strait — and hinted the cables could be cut. So the tech giants are running what one adviser called “intensive back-channel engagement” to protect their subsea networks. Usually we don’t go in for that kind of jargon here at Stack the Week. What the hell does “intensive back-channel engagement” mean anyway? But we’ve been unable to learn anything more. It sounds kinda weak. Iran’s own news agency puts the traffic at about $10 trillion a day. The cables carry roughly 99 percent of the world’s internet, according to the International Telecommunication Union. And there aren’t many people who can fix a cut. Four companies lay undersea cable. Maybe twenty repair ships exist, most of them weeks from the Middle East. In 2024, a single cut in the Red Sea took down a quarter of the region’s internet for weeks. It took months. But let’s not make this sound like a fella could dive in the water with a kitchen knife in his teeth. Combat divers, the most effective way to cut the fiber optic cables in the Strait, would have to use specialized equipment, because modern fiber-optic cables are protected by dense engineering armor comprising galvanized steel wires and insulating materials. The slush fund goeth This next story about the president’s slush fund is going to change by the end of the week. But here at Stack the Week, we have a theory: that walking through the news day by day adds context a Friday summary can’t. A story delivered all at once on Friday flattens things. It front-loads the latest and the loudest, and that can bruise your understanding. We might be wrong. So weigh in, if you have a view. Monday, the Trump administration said it would pause the $1.8 billion fund built to compensate the president’s allies. It was complying with a court order — and bowing to a revolt among Republicans. The fund would have paid people who said the federal government wrongly targeted them. In practice, that meant January 6th defendants and Trump associates. Majority Leader John Thune said Monday he hoped the White House would shut it down on its own. His words: “The best way to handle it is if the administration decides to shut it down themselves.” A pause is not a death. So this will likely go a few more rounds. But even if the fund disappears, don’t reach for the eraser to update your commemorative Stack the Week Destruction of Norms tracker. The norms are broken even if the fund never pays out a cent. Because in defending the fund the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and the acting attorney general would not rule out that the money might go to convicted defendants — people who assaulted police officers. Ten thousand lawyers One in five lawyers who worked for the federal government at the end of 2024 had left by March 2026. That’s an exodus of more than 10,000 attorneys, according to a New York Times analysis of federal employment data. Some retired. Some were cut. Some quit over the administration’s policies. The effect is the same: the federal government is no longer the place an ambitious public-interest lawyer wants on a résumé. Many are taking their experience to Democratic state attorneys general and the nonprofits suing the administration. George Washington University’s law school is a fifteen-minute walk from the White House. It’s now steering public-service students toward state legislatures and city councils instead. Scott Bourque, who just finished his first year at Georgetown Law, turned down a Justice Department internship. “A lot of people I’ve spoken to just in the last few months have said that they would look down on a person if they had a federal job on their résumé that they started during this administration,” he said. “Some people have explicitly said they would see a person willing to go to work at this D.O.J. as somebody they couldn’t trust.” Graham Platner’s accounting The Republican party transformed itself for Donald Trump, changing its once-ironclad views on personal morality, trade, and democracy abroad. Democrats, whose party did a smaller-bore version of morality-tailoring to defend Bill Clinton, now face the question again: what conduct is so inconsistent with party values that its worth risking the party gaining power? Graham Platner is a Marine veteran with no political experience who has surged ahead in Maine’s June 9 Senate primary, drawing big crowds and endorsements from Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego. He has also weathered, in order: a Reddit history denigrating women; a tattoo recognized as a Nazi symbol, which he has since covered; and now the texts. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal report that shortly after Platner launched his campaign last year, his wife, Amy Gertner, flagged to staff that he had exchanged sexual messages with other women. Gertner said Saturday she was “deeply hurt,” and accused a former campaign confidante of betraying her by

    1h 7m
  7. Stack the Week

    May 29

    Stack the Week

    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

    1h 19m
  8. Stack the Week

    May 23

    Stack the Week

    Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for May 18th through the 22nd. 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. The president settled a lawsuit with himself, and his party started to notice. The cycle of threats and pauses in Iran continued as did the decline in the mood in the US. AI showed up everywhere — in commencement boos, papal encyclicals, and mass layoffs at companies reporting record profits. And deep in the ocean, scientists kept finding creatures that have been quietly outlasting every catastrophe on Earth for 400 million years. But let’s see if they can handle Colbert leaving. Let’s take it day by day. Monday May 18 Strike out in Iran, Trump settles with himself, Musk is unsettled, rioters smell a payout, Iran mulls taxing the internet. Iran It has been hard to keep up with the strikes threatened and called off in the Iran war, so you could be forgiven the confusion. Monday night President Trump posted that he’d called off the strike against Iran scheduled for Tuesday. He credited Saudi and Qatari leaders — both facing economic pain from the Strait closure and exposed to Iranian reprisal if bombing starts again — with brokering last-minute talks. Despite the delay the president said “The clock is ticking.” The pattern is now familiar enough to chart. Announce escalation. Accept intervention. Claim the intervention proves leverage. Repeat. The question each cycle is whether the pause reflects a genuine diplomatic opening or just a longer fuse on the same bomb. In Tehran, the Iranian President did something Iranian leaders almost never do: he admitted the damage. Speaking at a public event, he acknowledged deep infrastructure destruction from U.S. and Israeli strikes, crippling fuel shortages — gasoline production has dropped to 100 million liters against 150 million liters of daily demand — and severe economic strain. He pushed back explicitly against hardliners who want to walk away from negotiations. “It is not logical to say we will not negotiate,” he said — a sentence that only needs saying when a significant faction believes the opposite. That faction answered immediately. Former IRGC commander Mohammad Ali Jafari said publicly that talks should stop unless the U.S. makes major concessions first. The internal fight Pezeshkian was describing — whether to negotiate from weakness or refuse from pride — is the same split that blew up the Iranian delegation in Islamabad weeks ago, when Pakistani hosts spent more time separating Iranians from each other than from the Americans. Meanwhile, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council launched a new body it calls the “Persian Gulf Strait Authority,” declaring that any vessel transiting the Strait of Hormuz without explicit permission will be treated as illegal. The move formalizes what has been happening in practice for weeks — Iran claiming sovereignty over the chokepoint. More quietly, and potentially more consequentially, Iranian lawmakers and state media floated plans to impose licensing fees on the undersea fiber-optic cables that cross the strait. Roughly a quarter of the internet traffic connecting Europe to Asia runs through those waters. Regulating the cables wouldn’t require a single missile — just a licensing regime and the implied threat that noncompliance could mean a cut line. On the water itself, the blockade grinds on. CENTCOM reported it has now redirected 85 commercial vessels and disabled four since enforcement began. Donald Trump won the presidency in part by saying that George W. Bush had made a mistake invading Iraq. Now voters think that of him. On the 73rd day of the war, a New York Times poll found nearly two-thirds of voters said going to war had been the wrong decision, including almost three-quarters of independents. Over the weekend, an Economist/YouGov poll showed only 28 percent of Americans support the war, down from the previous week. Trump’s approval rating in the NYT poll sat at 37 percent. Historically, when a president is below 50 percent, his party loses an average of 33 House seats. Trump drops IRS lawsuit One of Donald Trump’s first acts in his second term was to pardon the men and women who had been convicted by juries in connection with their effort to overturn the will of 81 million Americans by attacking the Capitol on January 6th. Since then, he has expanded his efforts to reward those involved, blending their grievances with his own legal battles. There are a lot of benefits to being in the January 6th club. The latest boon comes via a highly unusual legal settlement. Trump had filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the 2019 leak of his tax returns by contractor Charles Littlejohn, who was sentenced to five years in prison in 2024. Because Trump filed the lawsuit and controls the IRS, this was a settlement in the sense that shaking your own hand is an agreement. Career lawyers in the IRS’s chief counsel office prepared a 25-page memo recommending the DOJ move to dismiss the suit, identifying several flaws — including that Trump may have filed too late, since his personal lawyer Alina Habba attended the Littlejohn guilty plea in October 2023, more than two years before he sued. The DOJ never used the memo. Trump had reason to move fast. Federal Judge Kathleen Williams had already questioned whether the two sides were “sufficiently adverse” and scheduled a May 27 hearing on whether to toss the case entirely. In lieu of damages, the Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” — the figure a nod to the founding year — intended to compensate Trump allies, including January 6th defendants, who claim they were mistreated by the Biden-era DOJ. The money comes from the Judgment Fund, a permanent, uncapped appropriation the DOJ can tap to settle cases without congressional approval. Trump appoints the five-member commission that distributes the money and can fire any of them. The DOJ cited as precedent Obama’s Keepseagle settlement for Native American farmers, but that case dragged on for over a decade, went through a judge, and compensated documented claimants — not a dispute that started and ended in under four months without the government ever mounting a defense. Brian Morrissey, the Treasury Department’s own Trump-appointed general counsel, resigned the day the fund was announced. Peter Keisler, who served as acting attorney general under George W. Bush: “This is not an authentic settlement of the IRS case.” The original 2020 New York Times reporting on the leaked returns revealed that Trump paid just $750 in federal income tax the year he entered the White House, frequently wiping out his tax liability through chronic, colossal business losses. Writing in the National Review, Dan McLaughlin called the arrangement what it looks like: “a collusive operation to create a slush fund to pay off friends and political allies. And in doing so, it expends nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money that Congress never appropriated.” The fund fits a pattern. Trump has used the power of his office to extract $60 million total from Meta, Alphabet, and X; $16 million each from Paramount and ABC. He previously demanded $230 million from the DOJ itself for past investigations into his conduct. As The Atlantic noted, no modern president has monetized grievance at this scale. Musk loses in Open AI suit Elon Musk, a man who fired thousands of federal workers with zero concern for timing, lost his biggest lawsuit on Monday because he didn’t file on time. The jury deliberated for less than two hours. Due diligence and deadlines turn out to matter—whether you’re cleaning out someone else’s desk or trying to protect what was on yours. The federal jury and a judge ruled Musk waited too long to bring his claims against the AI startup and its top executives, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Because the jury found the case wasn’t filed on time, it didn’t weigh in on Musk’s three claims, including breach of charitable trust, unjust enrichment, and, against Microsoft, aiding and abetting. However, he still succeeded in wasting his competition’s time and during his cross-examination of Altman, Musk’s lawyer cited comments from eight witnesses, including Musk, who said Altman misled or lied to others. “This verdict removes the single largest legal threat to a public ⁠offering,” said James Rubinowitz, a trial lawyer and AI specialist quoted by Bloomberg. “Even in victory, OpenAI walks away with the worst documentary evidence about its governance now permanently in the public record. Every institutional investor reading this trial transcript is doing their own credibility analysis on Altman before they buy in.” According to Axios: Public trust in AI is nosediving. Public approval of AI now trails that of both the war in Iran and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 145,000 children separated Every parent who has lost sight of a child in a grocery store for 30 seconds knows the visceral panic. A new report suggests the American government is inflicting that exact trauma on a scale never before seen. Is that too dramatic a way to start this item? Does it load the scales against the kinds of tough eventualities that come from carrying out policies that people voted for? Or is it the kind of lede needed to shake us out of the mindless numb of numbers and news so that we are a little more attentive to what’s happening in our name—whether we cheer for it or find it abhorrent? You may remember the first Trump administration’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy in 2018, when about 5,500 children were separated from their parents immediately after crossing the southern border. This was an outrage because children were taken from their parents as a deliberate deterrent, and the gov

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Stack the Week is a weekly review of the news — what mattered, what's coming, and why it all connects. With occasional acts of wonder. John Dickerson reads the week, ranks it, and accounts for it. www.johndickerson.com

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